Classic Movie Review : Clerks (1994)
We demand a lot out of the artists we love. If they make us feel good, it’s never enough. They have to produce work that make us feel good over and over again, otherwise we’ll forget them and choose other artists to make us feel good. It’s a tragedy because sometimes an artist a finite amount of work to offer and should be canonized for that. Kevin Smith had like… six films in him? He was the voice of my generation for a decade or so and it suddenly stopped. His films became dumb.
Am I right to think of Kevin Smith as a tragic figure? Were his films always dumb? I went back and watched his first and best known movie Clerks in order to find answers.
For the uninitiated, Clerks tells the story of a twenty-two years old slacker named Dante Hicks (Brian O’Halloran) who accepts a morning shift at his convenience store job on his day off. Little does he know, he’s about to live the wildest fucking day of his sad existence. Along with his best friend Randal (Jeff Anderson) working next door and the two drug dealers in the parking lot, they’re going to lose patience, hope, people and a lot more in order to gain a tiny bit of wisdom.
Not supposed to be here today and nothingness
Let’s get one thing out of the way. I’m not going to address the homophobic and misogynistic humour in Clerks. It’s too easy, it’s been already discussed and at this point, it would be like shooting fishes in a barrel. It is not classy or woke, but it doesn’t pretend to be and I’m not going to condemn the film for what it isn’t. Clerks might offend people in 2021, so make of that what you will and don’t be a enlightened douche about it. If you can’t bear it, don’t watch it. End of story.
I do believe Clerks in an important movie despite how it aged. It’s one of the first generation X movies that challenged the post-war society logic. The whole : go to school - get a job - marry - have kids - ??? - die idea. Dante has been raised with such a philosophy, which lead him to an existential dead end. His identity and sense of self-worth is strongly correlated to the function he occupies in society and that bums him out because… well, he’s a fucking clerk in a convenience store.
That IS depressing.
His buddy Randal doesn’t feel bound by such logic. They had a great argument about it in Clerks, which climaxes with Randal spitting water in an unsuspecting client’s face. Function doesn’t dictate behaviour. That argument is the purest distillation of the idea, but the entire movie is a celebration of it. They close the store to play hockey, go to a wake in the middle of a work day, constantly steal food from the boss, Clerks is a movie that celebrates the radical freedom of rejecting the rules of society.
Of course, such rejection come with a youthful exuberance and existential questions that one can’t perpetually afford. These are resolved later in Clerks 2, which is Kevin Smith’s last good movie. You eventually have to figure out who you are, but you need to do it before you take a function in society. This was a revolutionary idea then and while it’s been making its way in education systems, its pertinence makes a film like Clerks still valuable today. It’s still kind of revolutionary.
Existential Metacommentary
The very existence and aesthetics of Clerks are another witness to its joyful, radical existentialism. It doesn’t look like any movie you’ve even seen. It’s in black and white, the lighting is minimal and sometimes nonexistent (the scene where Jay & Silent Bob dance near the ending), the actors are CLEARLY non-professionals and it has title cards like old school silent movies. These are impressionist sketches from Kevin Smith’s suburban New Jersey existence.
Sure, the lack of polish catches up to it sometimes. Brian O’Halloran (who has the longest monologues) sometimes delivers in stiff and robotic fashion sometimes, which is more apparent once you’ve watched the movie for the twelfth or thirteenth time like I did. It’s not a pretty film either, but none of the Kevin Smith’s View Askewniverse movies are conventionally pretty. They are just dudes and dudettes shooting the shit together, trying to feel alive in this oppressive world.
My point is: we need to appreciate Clerks for what it is: a filmmaking UFO that succeeded because it delivered new and liberating idea to a new generation of people who were ready to hear them and act on them. I haven’t talked about the female characters in this movie, but even they are awesome. They don’t let the latent misogyny of Dante and Randal ever control their lives. Even in his reactionary humour, Clerks expressed progressive ideas in its own convoluted way.
*
Did Clerks pass the test of time? Hell yeah, but we need to admit something to ourselves: this is nowhere near Kevin Smith’s best movie. Mallrats is a much better crafted and more iconic film that initially suffered form being less existential than its predecessor. But Clerks changed the game in its own way along with movies like Richard Linklater’s Slacker. It was a new way exist in the world. It was a new way to think about the world. You can’t harness that kind of creativity forever.
