Not because you thought about the movie for longer and realized the title had untold depths and secret secondary interpretations. No, I'm talking about because, grammatically, you simply never understood it correctly.
I always thought the title of Ben Stiller's movie Reality Bites was a sentence unto itself. It was while listening to the Slate podcast Decoder Ring -- one of my favorite podcasts out there, by the way -- that I learned the error of my ways.
If you've never discovered it, Decoder Ring is hosted by Willa Paskin and it digs into cultural mysteries. Examples? Past shows have explored the rise in popularity of throw pillows, the Cabbage Patch Kid fad, and why we think we need to hydrate so much. Whatever the show concentrates on, it's always something good.
As a way in to the topic of selling out, and how it has gradually stopped feeling possible to do so, Willa (I call podcasters by their first names, even though I don't know them) talks about the movie Reality Bites, one of whose main focuses is the attempt by the characters to maintain their ideals and values -- to not sell out. As almost a throwaway comment, she mentions that the title is a variation on the common term "sound bites," and how instead of providing little snippets of audio, the script written by Helen Childress would provide its viewers little snippets of reality.
Um ... what?
Never in the 27 years that movie has existed did I, for a second, think the title meant anything other than the fact that reality is sometimes disappointing ... that it bites. Reality Sucks would have made an almost perfect replacement title.
It turns out that isn't what Helen Childress meant at all.
"Reality" was not a noun, but an adjective, and "bites" was not a verb, but a noun.
Who could have guessed?
Obviously, Childress would have recognized and benefitted from the title's secondary meaning, the one I -- and I suspect most people -- thought was the primary meaning. But did most people think that? Willa doesn't even mention this as part of her interrogation of cultural mysteries. Her explanation is straightforward and without any acknowledgement of this other meaning.
The funny thing is that this also means we've been pronouncing the title incorrectly.
It's the same two words no matter what they mean, but I would argue that they are not pronounced in the same way.
If you are saying them as a sentence, you say "Reality BITES," with an emphasis on the second word. However, if you know that "reality" is an adjective, it changes the inflection. Now you say "Re-AL-ity bites," with the emphasis on the second syllable rather than the fifth.
I guess I needed to read the Wikipedia page ages ago. Reinforcing what Willa Paskin told us, it states the following:
According to Childress, the title of the film isn't meant to be interpreted as "reality sucks." During the run-up to the 1992 United States presidential election, Childress kept hearing references to "sound bites," which made her think of Lelaina's recorded vignettes of her friends as "little bites of reality."
And the funny thing is, that's a lot less of a sell-outy title. "Reality bites," the comment on the quality of our reality, is a lot more like something Bart Simpson would say, a snappy slogan that would actually be sort of corporate in its attempt to commodify twentysomething disaffection. "Little bites of reality" is a lot more independent in spirit, less commercial. Which is certainly what Helen Childress felt at the time, as the podcast touches on how she was resistant to the very potential success of her own script.
I'll continue to say it as "Reality BITES," since that's what I've been doing for 27 years. In a way, though, the dual meaning of the title is sort of the perfect example of a viewer taking away what they are inclined to take away from a piece of art. The artist can tell us what it means, but if we took it some other way, it just speaks to the dimension of that object of art.
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