Clare Greeman
Kevin Smith’s 1994 slacker comedy Clerks was an immediate cult favorite. The film, which was shot in 21 days and was made for just under $28,000, perfectly encapsulates the ennui and disillusionment of being an aimless 20-year-old stuck in a dead end job. At the time of first watching it, I was years away from both my aimless 20-year-old status and from my first soul-crushing job, but the humor and characters felt as relevant as they do now, and will undoubtedly continue to. The wry humor, relatable and charming characters, and the feeling of aimless young adulthood the film encapsulates manages to create an endlessly endearing watching experience. This all makes it unsurprising and depressing that the director would try to replicate this success, not once, but twice more.
Clerks saw Dante Hicks, a Canadian 20-something working at a local gas station through a mundane shift where he questions his future, cheats on his girlfriend, and plays a game of pickup hockey on the roof. He is accompanied by his best friend and coworker, Randal, the video clerk from next door, and garnished with local layabouts, Jay and Silent Bob. The end of the movie sees Dante out of a relationship, still without any decisions made about his future and seemingly unwilling to take any responsibility for his actions or make any big decisions about his life. This is why, coming into Clerks II, you are less enderared to the characters and less willing to follow them on another aimless journey. The actors, playing the same characters but aged a decade, are still working their same jobs and still not ready to take the next steps in life. This author is by no means saying that one cannot be fulfilled working at menial jobs, but seeing Dante and Randal still with big dreams and unable to make the changes necessary, but no longer on the prescipe of their 20’s is no longer endearing, it’s depressing.
By the time this movie came out, Smith, the director, was immersed in his own movie universe called the View Askewniverse. Clerks III, released in 2022, was the ninth installment of the universe, and each film features established characters from past films as well as in-universe franchises, the most recognizable of which is Jay and Silent Bob.
Since the 90’s and early-2000’s and the release of Clerks, Smith’s movies have carried a type of cult prestige. Mallrats followed a year after Clerks, casting a young Ben Affleck, who was a friend of Smith’s. Chasing Amy followed a story of a woman who was “turned” straight after finding the right guy (Ben Affleck, again), then followed Dogma in 1999. I am not going to pretend to have the objective take on the quality of these movies, though I will say that by the time we get to Dogma, much of the movie is being bogged down with tired jokes from familiar faces and the story is confused within its own in-universe commodities. Dogma additionally features much of the director’s own beliefs about religion and capitalism, delivered in somehow both confusing and heavy-handed fashion, which are both themes present in a lot of his work (and are often delivered in the same fashion as they are in Dogma).
In 2001, preceding Dogma, we got the first Jay and Silent Bob standalone movie, starring the side-characters in a wacky Bill-and-Ted style adventure. By starring relegated side characters and setting the nonentities in another heavy-handed landscaped capitalistic hell, along with the same tired universe staples, the story loses the small amount of newness and ingenuity it might have had. Ironically for an anti-capitalist movie, by featuring both of his most recognizable characters in a formulaic set-up that hadn’t been popular for a while, this was essentially Smith’s first sell-out.
Halfway through his own cinematic universe, it is clear that Smith got caught up in his own lore and was unable to either imagine more creative characters or to write them in interesting and compelling ways. This has been hammered home in his other revivals: two more Jay and Silent Bob movies, the squeakquel and threequel of Clerks, and a dead Mallrats revival.
2022’s Clerks III is, unlike its siblings, not bogged down by its own universe. Instead it drowns in it. Every lame gag is attributed to the same tired franchises or a cringey reference to current culture like the rise of NFTs. Not only has the movie seen no progression from the male leads after 30 years, but they actually tread over old territory as the plot of this movie revolves around them creating a movie about their time at the store– get it? If that wasn’t depressing enough, heart attacks and major character deaths both occur twice in the film and Smith is still addressing the same themes he has been since the 90’s. The movie’s ending is a definitive goodbye to the characters after their most unremarkable and sad installment yet, though that means nothing for the View Askewniverse as a whole.
While I believe that it is time to “silence Bob”, I do not think it’s time to silence Kevin Smith. The man clearly has staying power in the industry as two View Askewniverse were made within the past 4 years, not to mention his other projects: Tusk (2014), a A24 movie directed and written by Smith and one of the funniest, wildest, and horrific movies I’ve had the pleasure of seeing. Additionally his run on Green Arrow was critically acclaimed and one of the best portrayals of the character in recent memory. Smith proves himself to be a great writer and director when he is brave enough to venture out of his own zone, and while he has become more active in recent years and nostalgia is bigger than ever, I hope he does not continue to be his own undoing and can finally put his long-beaten franchises to rest.