When a second, unrelated podcast also name-checked Singles -- a music podcast this time -- in the context of 1990s alternative music, I knew this was the universe telling me to rewatch this movie now.
Of course, when I think about Singles, I also think about Ben Stiller's Reality Bites, so I decided to make it a double feature.
Am I the only one from my generation who links these two movies? Definitely not, though I don't know whether it rises to the level of common knowledge that these movies go hand in hand. But let's consider what they have in common:
1) Both are about twentysomethings feeling jaded and unsure about their futures, though more so in Reality Bites than Singles.
2) Both heavily incorporate music, though more so in Singles than Reality Bites, and different types of music.
3) Both feature a rock band with a funny name where one of our main characters is the lead singer, the funny Citizen Dick in Singles and the funnier Hey That's My Bike in Reality Bites. (I especially like that the purported groupies of Hey That's My Bike are called Hey That's My Bikers.)
4) In both movies, that lead singer treated their love interest with contempt or indifference and came to regret this, crawling back for a second chance.
5) Both movies have one central plot and two subplots.
6) Both movies have sort of a Melrose Place thing going on. The apartment complex where most of the characters live in Singles is directly reminiscent of the one in Melrose Place, though obviously at a lower socioeconomic level, and Melrose Place is directly invoked in Reality Bites, where the character waiting for the results of her AIDS test, played by Jeanene Garofalo, says she's like the new character on Melrose Place with AIDS, and concludes by saying that Melrose Place is a really good show.
7) Both movies have a six degrees of Kevin Bacon connection with John Mahoney. Mahoney is actually in Reality Bites, and he was also in the movie Cameron Crowe directed before Singles, Say Anything.
Because Reality Bites came out two years after Singles, 1994 to 1992, if you want to accuse anyone of theft, it would be Stiller of Crowe. But there's enough of a difference between the two that it would be a baseless accusation. They are more like kissing cousins than a movie that owes a debt to another movie.
Reality Bites is the far more serious movie, as evidenced by the specter of AIDS, not to mention the character played by Steve Zahn being thrown out of his house after coming out to his parents (and no further word on that topic before the conclusion of the movie). Singles is far lighter on its feet, and yes, this does correspond to a preference of one over the other, which I will expand on as this piece continues.
I will say, though, that coming in, I did not know which of these movies would play better for me in 2025. I watched them in chronological order, starting the first in my office in the early evening before finishing it on the couch after 10 o'clock, and starting the second far too late, but finishing it within the same night anyway. They're both less than 100 minutes long, which helps. It was the first time I had seen either movie since I started keeping a list of the movies I rewatched back in 2006.
After the fact, I checked on Flickchart to see how I actually had them ranked. It's #648 for Singles and #957 for Reality Bites. That is definitely consistent with my preferences, but the gulf should be wider. Not necessarily because Singles should be higher, as I think it's ranked about right. But Reality Bites should not be in my top 1,000 movies. I wouldn't bust it down to 2,000+ or anything, but inside the top 1,000 is too high.
Okay let's get to my takeaways from each movie, starting with Singles.
1) I was surprised at how flat-out charmed I was by this movie. It's sweet and, as I said a moment ago, very light on its feet. It's not that I didn't remember this being the case about Singles, but I was surprised by the extent of it being the case.
2) I love the fact that the characters randomly talk to the camera. It's not part of some artificial construct like a faux documentary, though I promise that's not intended as a dig at Reality Bites. It's just that sometimes, the characters need to chat with the audience.
3) My affection for Bridget Fonda was fully reignited with this movie. I won't get into the fact that I think she has the perfect mouth, not only great dental work, but those teeth are ideally framed by the shape of her mouth as she does what I call a "frown smile" -- a slightly downturned look that you can tell is a smile anyway. Sharon Horgan also has this. Anyway, I guess I did get into it, but I'm trying not to be too much of a creep here.
No, the thing I really loved was how kind her reactions are to unrequited romantic intentions. Two different characters make overtures toward her in this movie, one her own doctor basically asking her out, another an ex-boyfriend going in for a kiss at a time of maximum vulnerability for him. She doesn't make either of these characters feel like they crossed a line, she just sweetly lets them down while also boosting them up. It's one of the more generous things I've seen in a movie in some time. That showcases an extraordinary amount of self-possession for this character, which is kind of a big deal given how little of it she has in her initial dealings with her boyfriend Cliff, whom she ultimately dumps. (Leading to him crawling back, as discussed earlier.)
4) While we're on the topic of the female leads, I was also very charmed by Kyra Sedgwick. It's not that I am anti-Sedgwick, but as her career went on, she did less and less for me. My wife and I have a joke where she yells "Confess! Con-FEY-OO-essss!", emphasizing her southern accent, from when she was on that show The Closer. (I think the bit actually came from a Saturday Night Live sketch.) Here, though, I was reminded how sympathetic she is in the right role, so sympathetic that I wanted to pat her on the head. You can see the vulnerability in her eyes, her awkwardness, her uncertainty that it will all work out.
5) As it has now been 30 years (!) since the height of grunge -- even more, I guess, as grunge was already starting to fade by 30 years ago -- I was surprised at how nostalgic I felt for the bands that play here, like Alice in Chains and Soundgarden. The musicians don't themselves play an essential role in the story, I wouldn't say, though some acting is required of the members of Pearl Jam, who serve as Cliff's backup band in Citizen Dick. (Using their real names, which I thought was even more charming.) That's another similarity with Reality Bites, as the Lemonheads' Evan Dando has a very small role in that movie.
6) It's all about the Campbell Scott-Kyra Sedgwick love story, with the Matt Dillon-Bridget Fonda plot and the dating scene desperation of Sheila Kelley's character clearly serving as B plots. And though the B plots are more lightweight, they aren't inconsequential. They are lightweight in a warm and friendly way.
The thing I like so much about the Scott-Sedgwick courtship -- Steve and Linda by their character names -- is how everyday it is, how grounded in the real world. They don't meet cute. They don't instantly realize the other person is for them. They are suspiciously lacking in grand romantic gestures, leaving anguished voicemails rather than running through airports, proposing marriage casually while one of them is eating a corn dog, which she does not want to become a "historic corn dog." I'm just thinking how a movie made today would not be allowed to languish so much in the apparently pedestrian, whose very relatability is key to its impact on us.
7) Speaking of the way this movie is "friendly," I like the bit where Steve and Linda believe they are going their separate ways and they shake hands. "Let's be the first people to say they'll stay friends and truly mean it," says Steve. I don't know if it's an inconsistency in Crowe's writing, but I prefer to think of it as intentional, as Steve not realizing what's right under his nose: Each of these two have examples in their own lives of exes with whom they are "truly" friends. While it's clear that there is something unresolved, romantically, in Linda's relationship with her ex Andy (James Le Gros) and Steve's relationship with his ex Janet (Fonda), since she gets back together with Andy and he tries to kiss Janet (leading to one of her generous light rebuffings), until this point they are actually carrying on well enough as just that: friends. And while we don't see enough of the relationship between Linda and Andy to judge it, we know things seem quite comfortable between Steve and Janet, affection without longing.
Overall, I like how this film does not feel like it has life or death stakes, even with a lost pregnancy, the losses of jobs, etc. Crowe manages to keep an upbeat tone throughout, which I suppose was a unique gift of his movies, one he didn't really step away from until Vanilla Sky in 2001. And then he went scrambling right back to it, but was never able to make another movie that felt as easy as Say Anything, Singles, Jerry Maguire or Almost Famous.
Okay, on to Reality Bites, which was not so charming.
1) I had forgotten about how many lines of dialogue there are from this movie that I either say or think of. For some reason Garofalo's line "Don't bogart that can ... man" is something I think of a lot, even though I am usually not bogarting anything myself or asking someone else not to bogart something, least of all a can. Then there's Garofalo's line where she calls out Ethan Hawke's and Winona Ryder's characters for the sexual tension of their bickering and squabbling, where she says "Oh why don't you guys just do it already and get it over with."
2) I had also forgotten how much of a prick everyone is in this movie. Even when/if they are ultimately good characters, and that's debatable, they are prone to treating each other monstrously. Having told a friend of mine about the double feature, as I was watching it, I wrote him the following message: "Everyone's really mean to everyone else in Reality Bites." And this is definitely true.
It's particularly difficult to like Hawke's Troy, whose intellectual narcissism -- which Stiller's character has such a hard time defining in one of his tongue-tied rants -- goes beyond the level of toxicity usually required of a character primed to reform himself and factor into a happy ending. Which is why I always found the ending of this movie disappointing. The thing is, I didn't really want Lelaina to end up with Stiller's Michael either, even though I must admit I am probably more of a Michael than I am a Troy. He's also not great. (My friend called him "insufferable.") Hawke has moments here where his philosophizing reminds one of the sort he would go on to do with Richard Linklater, as Before Sunset was set to come out the following year.
3) Of the two films, Reality Bites appears to have aged significantly less well. Although I liked how much characters smoke cigarettes in this movie -- an accurate depiction of these people specifically and many people in general, even today -- that made it no less shocking to see how much smoking there is, since smoking has almost totally dropped out of the modern movie. (Yes, Hollywood has taken on the informal role of being a role model to young people.) Then there's the use of the "R" word, and I can put both of these things together into one scene, where Lelaina is sitting at the kitchen table, smoking, talking to her mother (Swoosie Kurtz) and her stepfather (Harry O'Reilly), who is also smoking. In this scene, both Lelaina and her mother use the word "retarded," and they don't mean it as "to slow the growth of."
4) A movie called Reality Bites is obviously in conversation with the concept of reality TV, but it feels a bit ahead of its time in that regard. One of the core conflicts is whether Lelaina is going to give up the documentary footage she's shooting of her friends to a TV network called In Your Face TV, where Michael works. (Would have been a stand-in for MTV at the time.) Now granted, it's not as ahead-of-its-time as you might initially guess, since MTV's The Real World had already been around for two years at that point, enough time for Stiller and company to poke fun at it. (Her footage is repurposed into a crass Real World clone, which includes, as one example, images of one rhinoceros mounting another, scored to the song "Let's Talk About Sex.") In introducing a test screening of the show -- called, appropriately, Reality Bites -- Michael refers to it has their foray into "real programming." The internet tells me the term "reality TV" was first used in the early 1990s, but can find no concrete examples of its actual origin. It's possible that it was not really used in 1994, since there were so few examples of reality TV that there would not yet need to be a name for it. I think of the debut of Survivor in 2000 as around the time the term really would have taken off.
5) This movie was shot by Emmanuel Lubezki! Who would have guessed. Yes, he was just a regular working professional before he became the preferred director of photography for prestige directors making ambitious films. Movies from this period you might also not have guessed he shot: A Walk in the Clouds, The Birdcage and Meet Joe Black. (He was working with Alfonso Cuaron too, but those don't come as a surprise given the Cuaron works later associated with his name, such as Children of Men.)
6) Rodrigo Garcia was one of Lubezki's camera operators! And this I didn't even get in the opening credits, I had to wait and happened to catch it in the closing credits. If that name is not familiar to you, he would go on to direct films like Mother and Child, Albert Nobbs, Last Days in the Desert and Raymond & Ray. (I also see he directed episodes of a TV series I was not aware existed, a reimagining of Party of Five, but about the five children of parents who get deported to Mexico. That show was made in 2020 but it feels very relevant to 2025.)
7) It's interesting how these films reflect the persona of their director. I talked about how cool and easy Singles felt, in matching what we know to be Cameron Crowe's persona. Well, Reality Bites is tightly wound and anxious, matching the mode we most often see from Stiller on screen, as he's often whinging (to use the Australian term) or arguing with someone. Don't get me wrong, I love Ben Stiller -- he directed all-time favorite The Cable Guy as his very next film -- but I don't think he could have made a movie that was relaxed and slower paced like Singles, though it should be said he did not write Reality Bites, only directed and starred in it.
But let's go with our original premise that Singles was in some way a text for Stiller when making Reality Bites. If so, it's easy to envision how there could be a parallel in the relationships between his character, Michael, and Hawke's character Troy, and Stiller and Crowe extra-textually. In a way, Crowe is like a Troy, only much nicer -- cool, with even the long hair, and with even looking a bit like Ethan Hawke. I can't honestly imagine that Crowe would have truly been a figure of frustration, resentment and of course aspiration for Stiller, since they might not even know each other unless they happened to meet sometime at an industry event. But you can easily see Stiller stammering out some sort of frustration at Crowe about how Stiller doesn't meet the cool threshold necessary to speak to him, just as his character does toward Troy.
Okay that's honestly a lot more than I imagined I would delve into these movies when I launched my double feature Friday on a lark.
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