Clerks: 20 Years On
With the benefit of two decades worth of hindsight it’s almost hard to believe that Kevin Smith’s Clerks really did make such a big impact on the world of independent film. Back in 1994, Clerks was merely the low-no budget day-in-the-life-of story about an apathetic convenience store clerk whose director bankrupted himself making it. It was distributed among a few cinemas in the New Jersey area and nowhere else and in all likelihood should have vanished into the ether as Smith returned to work at the Quickstop where he had made it. Ironically the film was saved from oblivion by the very people Smith would later come to chastise, film critics.
That story neatly encapsulates the ability of Clerks, and by extension Smith, to succeed in spite of itself. It’s not a terribly well-made film, even excusing the limitations of its production. It’s funny but never the collapsing in stitches hilarity of Blazing Saddles (1974) or The Big Lebowski (1998). And while it does save money to cast a handful of friends and unknown actors the performances do end up feeling stilted and hard to believe. Yet in spite of all that if you are of a certain age the film still resonates just by being about something that wasn’t seen in films at the time.
On the surface the story Clerks is just a series of unfortunate events wrought on hapless protagonist Dante Hicks (Brian O’Halloran) on the day he is called into work at the Quickstop. He suffers the return of an engaged ex-girlfriend, a botched hockey game on the store roof and an endless series of idiotic customers all of which is exacerbated by his lazier co-worker Randal (Jeff Anderson). But over the course of the day we see minor frustrations are merely the fuel to Dante’s existential angst. Dante wants more than to be a clerk at the Quickstop but doesn’t have the faintest idea what that ‘more’ is or even how to pursue it. He’s trapped in minimum wage mediocrity by his own fears and lack of direction. Just about the only thing that drives Dante is sex (though not in the Shame kind of way) so he mourns the failure of past sexual encounters unable to see the value of the relationship he does have.
Clerks was a microcosm of the experience of the teenage and twenty-something members of Generation X. Like Dante the generation of the nineties found themselves staring down the long, painful barrel of a lifetime with low expectations, limited opportunities and only the temporary release of sex to distract from it all.
Yes one of the few critics who attended one of the few screenings was impressed enough to support Clerks’ entry into the Sundance Film Festival. There it screened in front of Harvey Weinstein who along with his brother Robert, ran Miramax studios. In the nineties Miramax was the name in distribution for struggling independent films like Clerks and the Weinstein’s were the people who could make Smith’s efforts worthwhile. There was just one problem, Harvey was determined smoker and took huge issue with an extended scene involving a gum rep proselytising on the dangers of cigarettes rubbed him the wrong way. Rumour has it that a friend who had seen the full film told him to think of the number ‘thirty-seven’ and he’d be able to get through it. For you see in Clerks, thirty-seven is the number of guys the protagonist’s girlfriend has performed oral sex on. The story goes that Weinstein burst out laughing at this reveal and Miramax picked up Clerks for $3 million.
With such circumstances only worsening for millennials it’s hardly surprising how well the film has sustained its notoriety. Add to that all of the references to Star Wars (1977) and comic books and you have a film not only about young people, a rarity in those days, but coming from a young person with a genuine understand of his generation’s issues. Essentially the nineties, male version of Lena Dunham.
For all its faults, and believe me there are many, there really wasn’t anything like Clerks at the time. On that alone the film propelled Kevin Smith into indie scene stardom and managed to maintain it long enough to create a miniature empire. By setting his subsequent films in the same universe as Clerks, Smith was able to build a sizable following to consume the merchandise from his ‘View Askewniverse’ until it was brought to a close in Clerks II (2006). Nowadays Smith is probably less known for his films, which seem to be of increasingly declining quality, but for his weekly podcasts on his own Smodcast network (named for frequent collaborator Scott Mosier).
The Smodcast is probably the last place where the legacy of Clerks can still be seen in independent filmmaking. Sure there have been a handful of filmmakers who cite it as inspiration; Rob McKittrick and Jason Reitman have admitted as much. Not to mention that, even if unintentionally, the films of Judd Apatow feel very much the work of the older, wiser comedy filmmaker Smith never became. Twenty-years on though Clerks now stands as a tribute to the promise that the voice of Generation X once had. However I’d argue that the success Smith continues to enjoy from it should be taken with optimism. Young filmmakers should continue to watch Clerks and know just how much one can gain from grabbing a camera and risking everything as Smith did all those years ago.
by Liam Macloed
