Clerks

365 Films

Entry #33

Clerks (1994)

Directed by Kevin Smith

What tickles me most about Kevin Smith’s slacker opus Clerks is not so much the content of the film, but its legacy.  It goes without saying that the film is hysterically funny, but the fact that even the most ardent Smith antagonists can’t deny the place the film holds in the annals of American independent cinema just fills me with a weird, perverse sense of justice.  The film holds a very near and dear place in my heart because its advancement into my periphery was the direct result of the television program, Siskel & Ebert.  Clerks was a Sundance sensation back in the days when the festival had even the faintest shred of integrity.  Made by a lot of nobodies for a measly pittance, the film was bought by Miramax and became something of a cause célèbre amongst a small, dedicated contingent of New York film critics.  The point being that films like this weren’t exactly headed on a bullet train for Wilmington, Delaware.  The main outlet for exposure to these kinds of films came from a dedicated habit of Siskel and Ebert watching.  For all the shit those two took over the years for their simplified and commercialized approach to film criticism, the fact remains that they championed a lot of small films that wouldn’t have otherwise received the exposure.  I really hate to start bemoaning the loss of the good old days but film culture as it exists today makes it nigh on impossible to make a genuine discovery out of something like Clerks.  Don’t get me wrong it’s possible, it simply requires a drastic lifestyle alteration that I’m not quite prepared to make just yet.  With all that being said, how does the film hold up today?  It’s hard to gauge the veracity of an assessment such as this because to borrow a clichéd expression: comedy is subjective.  The reason I know Clerks remains funny to me is because some of the bits and exchanges of dialogue have taken up Simpsonic levels of memorization and recitation in my mind.  If I was a little more dedicated, I could probably have the entirety of the Clerks screenplay memorized.  It would stand to reason that the film might fail to retain any ability to surprise, but I am here today to say with the utmost emphasis: that is most certainly not the case.  For one reason or another, Clerks still makes me laugh.  If anything, it’s accidental lo-fi/DIY aesthetic remains its most valuable charm and the uneven acting abilities of a few cast members only make Jeff Anderson’s performance of Randall shine even more.  In a telling behind the scenes story, the film’s original ending had the hero, Dante getting blown away in an late night robbery.  Smith’s intention was to try to give the film some of that early nineties’ sheen of bleak significance.  He had no legitimate artistic vision for the ending; it just seemed like something movies of this sort did.  In almost rhyming symmetry with Robert Rodriguez’s decision to make El Mariachi in Spanish because he concluded art-house audiences took foreign language films more seriously, this anecdote succinctly summarizes what makes the film so special.  Clerks needs no tragic obfuscation to high light its reason for existing, the film’s sly quality of mining uproarious humor out of the ordinary is reason enough.