90's Watch: Singles (1992)

movie tag lines are just kind of stupid, aren't they?

Watched:  02/08/2025

Format:  YouTube

Viewing:  First

Director:  Cameron Crowe

I am of two minds how I would have viewed this movie in 1992.  It is equal parts likely (1) I would have enjoyed it as a piece of media that seemed to be aiming itself at me and my generation, that had a happening soundtrack and Bridget Fonda.  It is just as likely that I (b) would have found it an older person's attempt to co-opt some of the music I listened to and what was happening with indie culture, and make a movie about romance that in no way seemed based in reality and was just people trying to say quippy things.

It largely would have depended on my mood going in.  I'm a monster that way.  Therefore, I can only go off of how I reacted to other movies aimed at me that came after Singles (1992) that I did see.  Reality Bites, Threesome, whatever that one was where Joe Pesci played a hobo at Harvard.  I didn't like two of them, and for someone who once thought Reality Bites was surprising and kinda okay, I now find it painful to watch.  It is, as the kids say, cringe.  I know if I'd waited and seen it just two years later, this movie would have driven me as much into a rage as the endless advertising of Surge soda.

I am aware that one is not to speak ill of Cameron Crowe, and I also like Say Anything and Almost Famous, but...  In it's way, Singles feels like Crowe tried to take some of the format of a Woody Allen movie, of romantic navel gazing, and remove it from Allen's very specific world, and sought to find another playground in which people sit around and talk about relationships, while saying things out loud, casually, in a way that would get your friends to tell you to shut the fuck up if you tried that after your sophomore year of college.  What's novel about the movie is the structure, complete with MTV-approved hand-written title cards for each segment.

As a time capsule of various things coming together in one spot, the movie is fascinating.  I mean, this movie has a baby-faced Paul Giamatti for one line, it has Chris Cornell and Eddie Vedder, it has Tim Burton in a single gag.  Alice in Chains plays.  It's what happens when you set up your film shoot as a good hang for the locals and your pals.  It's also Seattle right as "Grunge" is happening, and just before the tech industry pioneered how to ruin a city by jacking up cost of rent (see, also:  Slacker and Austin as of 2025).

It's a few storylines about young adults living in an apartment complex in their mid to late 20's.  Lots of vignettes.  The primary storyline is Campbell Scott and Kyra Sedgwick as a pair of well-meaning lefties who find each other despite previous bad luck.  Bridget Fonda and Matt Dillon play the annoying musician-guy and the girl who thinks he's great in a story that just kind of circles the drain and feels charmless in 2025 at age 49.  And there's a now so-dated-it-seems-surreal bit about a flighty type who seems like a supporting character from a Cathy comic strip who tries video dating.  This part feels as fresh as last century's twinkies.

It's also a reminder that as much as we think the acting we watch at any given time is completely natural, there are absolutely tics that can mark a movie as being of an era, and for some goddamn reason the 1990's wanted to make everyone kind of perky and stupid.*  And it is a mix of scripting and acting choices that were very much en vogue for about 8 years there.  And Dillon and Fonda's characters are examplars of this weird, specific trope.

I think my thing is - I didn't really care about any of these characters.  I liked Eric Stoltz as The Mime.  More of that guy.  Everyone is *fine* but not exactly amazing.

I assume what people liked at the time was seeing Seattle, seeing people not aimed at our parents, and hearing music that reflected the college rock or alternative charts just as Nirvana was breaking. And, yes, that's all kind of nice.

Here, 30+ years later, on a first view as a near-50-year-old-me, Singles feels like an artifact of mass media's attempts to appeal to Gen-X the same way it had managed to capture the Boomers, by holding up a mirror for them to look directly into (and which they were still doing when this movie dropped).  But I'm not sure we bit on that quite as hard as our forebears, and then we got our own mirrors with social media and YouTube.  Maybe.  I'm spit-balling.  I think the impacts of this movie, if any, were somewhat different.

I also felt my eyes pop realizing this was probably ground zero for what became MTV's The Real World, which would debut in summer of 1993 and usher in reality TV.  Maybe I'm wrong, but I can see how a discussion at MTV about this movie, which all but buzzes with "made for the MTV generation", could have easily led to "but what if we really followed young people".  

And, this movie breaks the 4th wall to talk directly to the audience from time-to-time, predicting reality TV as well as the prevalent sitcom format of the past 20 years.

I don't mean to dump on a movie that I know people loved in summer of 1992.  I was otherwise occupied and missed it.  And I think people who knew me at the time knew that I just wasn't going to be into it, and never put it in front of me.  But I do feel like I checked off a Gen-X box by finally seeing this one.

*I recently tried to watch Empire Records for the first time and it suffers from ALL of the characters falling into this trope, turned up to 11.  I made it ten minutes in and turned it off.