Review: Clerks (1994)

Let’s talk about Kevin Smith flicks.

Smith, like certain types of directors such as Spike Lee or Tim Burton, has definitely seen big ups and downs in his career. He certainly lived the life of many an aspiring filmmaker—starting as a starving artist in a podunk corner of New Jersey, collecting comic books and scraping a living, to but a few years later, working on treatments for Superman movie and living an indie director’s high life. He put Ben Affleck on the map, and by coincidence, also has often chipped in to DC Batman comics, doing a better job than Snyder ever did by most reports. To say nothing of doing Stan Lee cameos before they were cool. He’s worked alongside Bruce Willis and Mark Hamill, done pot with Seth Rogen…and also overseen box office dudes and critical disasters.

But I want to go back to where it all began—a humble little film, barely above home movie status, about two slackers working retail. A quarter of a century later, it’s time to look back at Clerks.

It’s not hard to see why this film ended up defining much of the US indie scene in the 90s—it had a genuine feel to it, capturing the disgruntled voice of Generation X-ers while still having to work for itself. Filmed in an actual convenience store, using Smith’s actual friends and family for actors…sure, these days anyone can film their own flick on an iPhone, but the production story of Clerks is perhaps more emotionally hard-hitting than the film itself. Smith had to max out credit cards, auction off comics, most of it going to expensive equipment…and in some ways, this frustration and hard work goes for the film’s benefit. He wasn’t exactly living the high life, and that gives Clerks a down to earth feel that some of his later ones don’t quite have.

But the plot, you may ask? As I said, it’s two slackers working retail. And that’s it. There’s more to it—you have Smith regulars Brian O’Halloran and Jeff Anderson as Dante and Randall, getting involved in a surprisingly turbulent work day of love triangles, hockey games, and disastrous funerals. Interspersed with this is something you saw a lot of in the nineties—talking about pop culture, and lots and lots of sarcasm. Smith’s writing style was cemented here—a combination of geeky wordiness, and, as Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back would put it: Fuck, fuck, fuck, motherfuck, motherfuck motherfuck, smoking weed, doing coke, beers beers.

And indeed, it sure as hell spoke to the generation of the time that the aforementioned stoner ganja dealers Jay and Silent Bob, latter played by Smith himself, almost felt as prevalent as Beavis and Butthead through the 90s and early 2000s, appearing in Smith’s subsequent flicks and many other cameos to count. You can trace the exact source of many annoying weed comedies to this exact source, and it’s all because of a bit part in a New Jersey student film.

As for how it’s aged? In some ways, reasonably well—but the message probably comes off differently. A lot of it is about Dante needing to take control of his life, apparently too set into his retail worker existence—but in today’s age, with jobs ever harder to get and annoying retail perhaps just what’s available to many, he becomes a lot more relatable and sympathetic. Sure, in the nineties Dante perhaps needed to take control of his life, but now, well, who can say where he’d even go. As such, his friend Randall, your typical foul-mouthed loveable slacker of the Clinton years, might come off as (even) more of an asshole—but it all depends on how you want to look at it.

Still, a lot of it is still funny to me, and considering Smith was only in his early twenties at the time, there’s moments of actual cleverness here and there, like a nicotine gum salesman become ever more hysterical and judgemental while going on about Nazis. And then there’s a few moments of black comedy that go all the way around into awkward hilarity; it sure makes the fact that the film got real big after being picked up by studios all the more impressive. The one thing that hasn’t aged well at all, however, is the Weinstein name on it.

This marked the beginning of what Smith calls his Viewaskewinverse—and as I’ve mentioned, it’s gone up and down. It produced cult classics like Mallrats, divisive satires like Dogma (which I personally enjoyed, warts, caca demons, and all), and dumb stoner comedies like Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Eventually, we had Clerks II, which I found alright, but didn’t have that same genuine quality as the first.  

At some point, Smith also produced Clerks: The Animated Series, which I put alongside things like Spaceballs: The Animated Series, as pointless dumb things you don’t really need to look up.

Smith’s evolved in more recent years after some setbacks, and he focuses more on horror, which I’m all for; be it tearing into the Westboro Baptist Church in Red State, or bizarre body horror in Tusk. He’s still a favorite on fan Q&A sessions, always happy to talk about everything from filmmaking to that one time he had to deal with a spider fetishist producer over a Nicolas Cage Superman film. It’s quite a career, and it all started with a smart-assed low-budget film about retail work by retail workers—which, if nothing else, is something to inspire. And prompt weed jokes.