Selling Out
Decoder Ring
Slate Podcasts
4.6 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 6 August 2021
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 2001, Oprah Winfrey invited Jonathan Franzen to come on her show to discuss his new novel The Corrections. A month later she withdrew the invitation, kicking off a media firestorm. The Oprah-Franzen Book Club Dust-Up of 2001 was a moment when two ways of thinking about selling out smashed into each other, and one of them—the one that was on its way out already— crashed and burned in public, barely to be seen again. So today on Decoder Ring, what happened to selling out? This is the last episode of our current season. See you in a few months!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In 1992, Helen Childress, a screenwriter, was watching one of the presidential debates on TV. |
| 0:11.4 | Everyone was talking about sound bites. |
| 0:13.6 | They were like, this is a campaign reduced to sound bites. |
| 0:16.7 | We can't vote for anyone based off sound bites. |
| 0:19.0 | Helen was just 22 years old, but she'd been hired to write a screenplay about her generation, |
| 0:25.1 | Generation X, the famously ironic, skeptical, media-savvy cohort that had come up in the shadow |
| 0:31.4 | of the baby boomers. In her script, the main character, Lelena, is working on a documentary, constantly filming all her friends with a video camera. |
| 0:40.6 | And so off of that, I had Lelina call her documentary Reality Bites, as if these are little kind of bites of reality. |
| 0:50.2 | Reality Bites would become the name of the movie Helen was writing. |
| 0:54.7 | It was released in 1994, directed by Ben Stiller and co-starring Winona Ryder and Ethan Hawk. |
| 1:01.1 | He stole Snickers bar. |
| 1:03.2 | Yeah. |
| 1:05.2 | Somehow he can rationalize it. |
| 1:07.7 | Like the establishment owes some snickers. |
| 1:12.3 | The movie concerns itself with a number of timeless questions. |
| 1:16.3 | How to grow up, what kind of work to do, who to love. |
| 1:19.9 | But it is also very much a time capsule full of period-specific details and situations, |
| 1:26.5 | entry-level jobs at the gap, AIDS tests as a right |
| 1:29.6 | of passage, greasy hair, a Lisa Loeb song. And then there's the movie's Paramount |
| 1:35.8 | Concern, which is also a deeply dated one, selling out. I don't think the words selling out. |
| 1:48.7 | I don't think the words selling out, I don't think they're in the movie. |
| 1:53.4 | I think it's something that was kind of, in a way, maybe just baked in. |
... |
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