Michael Grates is the hero of Reality Bites. Not the guy you were supposed to like. Not the guy anyone in 1994 liked, including the movie, including me. The movie spends 99 minutes rooting against him, and the movie is wrong, and I can prove it using almost nothing except the movie.
That is an overstatement. It is also the only accurate way to say it, and I have believed it for roughly fifteen years, which is longer than I believed the opposite, so mathematically this is now my real opinion.
Here is the context you need, and the context is me. I saw Reality Bites in the winter of my senior year of high school, at a multiplex a couple of towns closer to the city, because if you lived in a small town orbiting a big one in 1994, that is where movies happened: you drove toward the skyline until the theaters got bigger. The movie is about four people at 23. I was months from a graduation of my own, which means I was not watching a movie so much as reading a forecast. And the forecast, delivered by Winona Ryder’s face and Ethan Hawke’s cigarette, was extremely clear: there are two kinds of men waiting for you out there, one of them has a job, and the one with the job is the enemy.
I accepted this completely. Everyone in the theater accepted it. It would be another decade before it occurred to me that we had all just applauded a movie whose villain’s defining crime was employment, and we had done it in a building we drove to using gas money from jobs.
Let me lay out the triangle, because the triangle is the whole machine. Lelaina Pierce (Ryder) is the valedictorian of her Houston college, an aspiring documentarian shooting Hi-8 footage of her friends while working as a production assistant for a morning-show host she despises. Troy Dyer (Hawke) is her roommate, a philosophy-quoting musician who fronts a band called Hey That’s My Bike and who, when the movie opens, has just lost the latest of his minimum-wage jobs for stealing a candy bar. Michael Grates (Ben Stiller, who also directed) is an executive at a music-video channel called In Your Face TV, which is MTV with the serial numbers filed off. Lelaina meets him by flicking a cigarette into his convertible and causing a fender bender, which in 1994 was how people met, because there was no other mechanism. You could not swipe. You had to throw burning objects into traffic.
Now tally the actions. Michael asks Lelaina out, listens to her, watches her unfinished documentary, loves it, and gets it in front of his network. Troy mocks her ambitions at the dinner table, audits her failures like it is his job (it is his only job), sleeps with her, panics, avoids her the next morning, and leaves town. Michael’s great sin, the thing the movie never forgives, is that his channel recuts her documentary into an ironic jump-cut montage with commercial breaks, and he defends the recut to her face while her heart breaks in the seats. That is a real sin. I want to be fair about the sin. But notice its shape: Michael’s crime is that he got her work on television imperfectly. Troy’s crime is everything else in the movie.
And the era convicted Michael anyway, instantly, without deliberation. Rolling Stone’s review that February called Stiller’s character “a yuppie profiteer” in passing, the way you would identify a species of bird. Nobody had to argue it. In 1994, “he works at a cable channel and owns a convertible” was a complete moral indictment, the way “he is a Soviet agent” was in 1954. The word for it was sellout, and sellout was a capital charge that year. Kurt Cobain, who had spent two albums visibly suffering over the question, died that April, seven weeks after this movie opened. The one unforgivable act of the era was wanting something and admitting it. Troy’s entire personality is a firewall against being caught wanting anything. Michael wants things constantly, out loud, with his whole face. Watching it at the multiplex, months from needing a job, a car, and a plan, I knew exactly which of these men I was supposed to become, and it was the one with no plan. This is the kind of thing a 1994 education did to you for free.
The movie could not even imagine him
Here is the fact that unlocks the whole picture, and it comes from the production, not the screen. Helen Childress started writing this script around 1990, at roughly the age of her characters, and ground through an estimated 70 drafts across three years, basing Lelaina, Troy, Vickie, and Sammy on her actual friends. (This backfired legally: a real financial planner named Troy Dyer sued in 2005 because clients kept asking if he was the slacker, and the case only ended after Childress wrote him a letter confirming he was not. Imagine spending eleven years explaining to clients with retirement accounts that you are not the guy who got fired over a candy bar.) The producer, Michael Shamberg, had made The Big Chill and wanted the next generation’s version, on the theory that every ten to fifteen years the ensemble hangout movie molts and grows new flannel.
But there was a hole in the script, and the hole was Michael. Childress and producer Stacey Sher had Lelaina and Troy fully alive on the page and could not come up with a credible third point for the triangle. The producers had seen the pilot of Stiller’s short-lived Fox sketch show and approached him to direct the movie, specifically not to act in it. Stiller solved the problem by volunteering his own body: he suggested he could play the third man, and the character was rewritten from a 35-year-old advertising executive marketing Japanese candy bars into a twentysomething TV exec. Sit with that. The movie’s writer, working from life, could invent every slacker in Houston, but the rival had to be donated by management. The generation that made this movie could render its own kind in perfect detail and could not imagine, as a human being, a person their age who had a business card. The film’s imagination has the exact same blind spot as its heroine. That is not a flaw in the movie. That is the most accurate thing in it.
(Also, and I refuse to let this go: the character was originally a candy bar man, and Troy gets fired for stealing a candy bar. The first draft of this movie understood something the final draft forgot, which is that these two men are in the same economy. One of them sells the candy bar, one of them steals it, and only one of them gets to be the romantic lead for it.)
Meanwhile the movie’s own paperwork was busy proving Michael’s worldview correct. RCA Records sat down with Stiller and the music supervisor three weeks into filming to structure the soundtrack deal, before the movie about the evils of packaging youth culture had even finished shooting itself. The label put five of its tracks into rotation on radio and MTV. The album came out on February 8, ten days ahead of the film, like a trailer you had to pay for. And the album won. The movie opened in fifth place with $6 million on 1,149 screens and finished around $20 million domestic on an $11.5 million budget, a shrug. The soundtrack hit number 13 on the Billboard 200, moved 1.2 million units by September, and was eventually certified double platinum. Two million CDs at roughly sixteen dollars each is real math; the album out-earned the American gross of the movie it came from. And the crown jewel of that album is the purest In Your Face TV product of the decade: “Stay (I Missed You),” a song Lisa Loeb originally wrote hoping to sell to Daryl Hall, handed to her neighbor Ethan Hawke, who gave it to Stiller and then directed the one-take apartment video himself, after which it went to number one on the Hot 100 in August 1994 and made Loeb the first artist ever to top that chart without a record deal. Everyone I knew loved that song. We dubbed it onto tapes for people we liked. We loved it because it was everywhere, and it was everywhere because a label with a marketing plan put it everywhere. The most beloved artifact of Reality Bites is a Michael Grates production from start to finish, and nobody has ever held it against the song.
So who actually defends Troy? Thirty-two years of arguing about this at parties has taught me that everyone who takes his side is making one of four arguments, usually without knowing which one.
The Honesty Argument. Troy tells the truth and Michael performs. Except Troy’s truth-telling is exclusively aimed downward, at people who love him, about their dreams. He is honest the way callers to 1994 talk radio were honest: loudly, safely, and about other people. The one time honesty costs something, the morning after, he is out the door before breakfast.
The Face Argument. Nobody says this one out loud, but it is doing at least 40 percent of the work. Ethan Hawke’s face in 1994 was a philosophical position. If Michael had the goatee and Troy had the blazer, this movie is a cautionary tale about musicians and we all know it.
The Chemistry Argument. Lelaina and Troy have history, tension, the whole charged-roommate thing, and Winona Ryder, in a thrift-store cardigan, can make longing look like an argument. Granted. But chemistry is a fact about a scene, not a case for a life, and the movie keeps quietly billing the first as the second.
The Edit Argument. Michael’s channel butchered her documentary; therefore Michael is what is wrong with everything. This is the strongest one, and it is still a shell game, because Michael is the only person in the movie who moved her work anywhere at all. Troy’s contribution to Lelaina’s career is a series of reviews.
All four arguments share one hidden premise: that wanting things, saying so, and doing something about it is corrupt, and that refusing to want is a form of integrity. That premise was the official religion of 1994, and it was a religion you could only practice in a room someone else was paying for. Lelaina spends the movie broke, scamming her dad’s gas card by pumping fuel into strangers’ tanks for cash and running up a psychic-hotline phone bill on a phone with a cord, and the movie treats the man offering her a career as the threat. Universal’s own marketing department could not get anyone to see it straight either; the studio’s marketing VP insisted it was a comedy with broad appeal while the press filed it under Generation X, and Stiller avoided saying the phrase in interviews, since every studio in town had already passed on the script once for smelling too much like Singles, which had also failed to turn a generation’s self-image into ticket sales. The whole apparatus around this movie was men in offices trying to sell the idea that men in offices are the problem. Michael is not a character. He is a confession.
Here is a game you can play. Suppose Lelaina takes the deal. It is March 1994, her documentary has aired as a mangled montage, and instead of throwing the drink she goes into the building. Step one: she is inside In Your Face TV, the only person there who has actually lived the footage they are strip-mining. Step two: she learns the edit bay, because she is the valedictorian, and being the valedictorian was the first thing the movie told us about her. Step three: by 1997 she is producing, and her segments are better than everyone else’s, because contempt for the form is a design skill if you point it at the form. Step four: by 2000 she is greenlighting shows about photogenic 23-year-olds in apartments, and doing it with taste, and hating a third of it, which is the standard employed-adult ratio. The hypothetical is supposed to prove she would have become Michael, and it does, and then it proves something worse: the movie was right that the machine eats you. It just chose the wrong thing to be afraid of. The machine was never the job. The machine was the guy on the couch narrating your compromise while contributing nothing to the rent.
I have one problem, and I am going to leave it in the essay, because taking it out would be a Michael move. Late in the movie Troy’s father dies. Troy, who has spent 90 minutes armored in quotation marks, comes back from the funeral in Chicago and stands in front of Lelaina and says the sincere thing, plainly, with nothing ironic left on him, and Hawke plays it so well that the theater I was in went silent the way rooms did before phones, totally, involuntarily. It is the bravest act in the film and Michael has nothing like it. A man who can only be honest after a death is still capable of honesty, and the movie found it, and I felt it at the multiplex months before my own graduation, and I felt it again last year. I do not have a theory that dissolves this. The wrong guy gets the best scene. I just think it should be noticed that one scene of earned sincerity was enough to beat a whole movie of decency, and in 1994 it was not even close.
Because the movie itself knew. That is the part almost everyone forgets, since it happens after most audiences stood up. Midway through the credits, the film cuts to a fake TV show starring “Elaina” and “Roy,” lookalikes bickering in an apartment, and when that show’s credits roll, the creator’s name is Michael Grates. The last authored image of Reality Bites is Michael converting Troy and Lelaina’s love story into content, two years after The Real World premiered on MTV and started teaching America that a camcorder pointed at roommates was a business model. The movie plays it as a final dig at the sellout. Read it again from here: it is a prophecy, and it came true so hard that describing it now sounds redundant. Everyone eventually chose Michael’s world. We narrate our relationships to an audience for money and exposure, and we do not even get the exposure. Even Hawke has come around; asked about the character in 2025, he noted the endless who-should-she-choose debate and allowed that “Troy is not such a great guy.” Winona Ryder, who took this part because after three corset pictures she told an interviewer “I really wanted to wear blue jeans for a change,” and who was at the Oscars a month after this movie opened as a nominee for The Age of Innocence, is now beloved by an entire second generation for playing the frazzled mom on a streaming show about the 1980s, a fact that still startles people who met her as Veronica in Heathers. Time flattened everybody in this movie into content. Michael was just early.
Roger Ebert, unimpressed on opening day, spent his opening paragraphs complaining that Lelaina’s documentary footage looked like it “might have been obtained by the Monkeycam on the Letterman program,” which is the most February 1994 sentence ever printed, and he meant it as the movie’s flaw. He was half right. The footage is bad. The movie thinks the badness is proof of purity. Michael thinks the badness is fixable. There is a word for a person who watches your rough, sincere, unwatchable thing and says: I can help you get this in front of people. In 1994 the word was sellout.
Lelaina says she was really going to be somebody by the time she was 23. Troy’s answer became the movie’s bumper sticker: “Honey, all you have to be by the time you’re 23 is yourself.” It is a beautiful line. Screenwriter Helen Childress was 23 when the movie came out, and she had spent three years and 70 drafts becoming somebody, which is to say she took Lelaina’s position, did the work, sold the script, and let Troy keep the applause. Sixty percent of this essay is that sentence.
Michael would have called her back the next morning. In 1994, that was the entire case against him.
