Selling Out

Decoder Ring

Slate Podcasts

Documentary, History, Society & Culture

4.6 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 6 August 2021

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ 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! If you love the show and want to support us, consider joining Slate Plus. With Slate Plus you can binge the whole season of Decoder Ring right now, plus ad free podcasts, bonus episodes, and much more. For a behind-the-scenes look into some of the articles we read when we create the show, check out our Pocket collection at http://getpocket.com/slate . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	In 1992, Helen Childress, a screenwriter, was watching one of the presidential debates
0:10.5	on TV.
0:11.5	Everyone was talking about soundbites.
0:13.2	They were like, this is a campaign reduced to soundbites.
0:16.7	We can't vote for anyone based off soundbites.
0:19.0	Helen was just 22 years old, but she'd been hired to write a screenplay about her generation.
0:25.6	X, the famously ironic, skeptical media-savvy cohort that had come up in the shadow of the
0:31.7	baby boomers.
0:33.5	In her script, the main character, Lilana, is working on a documentary, constantly
0:38.4	filming all her friends with a video camera.
0:40.9	And so off of that, I had Lilana call her documentary reality bites as if these are
0:47.4	little kind of bites of reality.
0:50.7	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
1:00.4	Hawk.
1:03.4	The movie concerns itself with a number of timeless questions.
1:16.4	How to grow up, what kind of work to do, who to love.
1:20.1	But it is also very much a time capsule, full of period specific details and situations,
1:26.6	entry-level jobs at the gap, AIDS tests as a right of passage, greasy hair, at least
1:32.2	a lobesong.
1:33.8	And then there's the movie's Paramount Concern, which is also a deeply dated one.
1:40.4	I think the words that's selling out, I don't think they're in the movie.
	...

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