Clerks is Actually a Really Good Movie by Craig Hammill

Last week, Secret Movie Club team member Stephen Brownlee programmed Kevin Smith’s 1994 debut indie breakout hit Clerks as the A side of his birthday double feature.

It had been years since I had seen Clerks. Decades even. But curious to see how it held up, I plopped down in my favorite corner seat in the side of the theater and watched.

It was as good. . .maybe even better. . .as the first time I saw the movie as a revelation as a junior in high school way back in the innocent bygone Americana days of the early 1990’s.

What strikes one immediately while watching Clerks:

A) It is very true to the feelings, dilemmas, conflicts one has in their late teens and early twenties.

And

B) It manages to communicate and express those feelings in a very sincere, hilarious, irreverent, clever, yet ultimately meaningful way.

For anyone who has never seen Clerks, it is one of those mythical indie debut features made for tens of thousands of dollars (versus hundreds of thousands or millions) on credit cards, wild belief in oneself, and a burning passion to join the ranks of the great writer/directors that have come before.

It tells the story of one day in the lives of Quik-E-Mart clerk, Dante, a grumpy teddy bear of a New Jersey young man, torn between his current girlfriend and the one who got away, and his best friend Randall, an irreverent, foul mouthed, raconteur and observer of modern life, who also (poorly) clerks at the next door video store.

Shot on 16mm black and white, we see the whole day from Dante’s morning call to come in for an absent co-worker through a Rabelsian series of strange characters, f-ups, rooftop hockey games, dead men in bathrooms, romantic entanglements, and extended monologues by our two heroes on everything.

But let me get more to the point: Kevin Smith really accomplishes something here, cinematically, that needs to be acknowledged and celebrated. Much like one of his inspirations, Richard Linklater, and even earlier great moviemakers like Eric Rohmer and. . .dare I say it. . .Jean Renoir, Smith somehow manages to capture the always present inner poetry in just trying to get through the day and make the best choices one can.

At the same time, he offers a series of hilarious moments, side characters, and scenes (mostly in the Quick-E-Mart though there are a few choice bits in Randall’s video store as well) that accomplish that rare and beautiful literary miracle of both capturing how working class and suburban early 1990’s United States felt and the universal ebb and flow of a day in any era.

And Mr. Smith does it with heart, genuineness, and sincerity, the secret sauce ultimately of the entire movie.

For in a way, that’s the dirty little secret at the heart of foul-mouthed Clerks: Dante, its lead character, is ultimately a good hearted, responsible person who also comes to realize what a good thing he has in his girlfriend, his best friend, and his life. At least on that day.

It might not be a great thing forever (and Clerks II and III look into and mine this) but it’s truly good enough for that day and Dante comes to realize this with a sense of gratitude.

It’s also hard to overstate just how influential Clerks was to a whole generation of would be moviemakers including the Programmer writing this blog entry right now.  Movies like Richard Linklater’s Slacker and Kevin Smith’s Clerks really, more than almost any other debut features, proved that you could make a feature with very little money, in your own small town or backyard, and, if you had a point of view, talent at the basics of story, you might even start and/or have a career.

Times, of course, have since changed and it’s probably important to remember that even for breakouts like Linklater and Smith, the road to get the next movie made was, is, and always will be an incredible slog of years.

It’s tough when you love cinema and the movies so much to realize that even many of your favorite moviemakers need to supplement their feature work with teaching, commerical/music video/tv work, podcasting, becoming their own industry (as Kevin Smith did) to make sure the bills are paid, the heat stays on, the food is on the table for family.

Even when Dante got out of that Quick-E-Mart and became a kind of Rabelsian poet of the every person, it’s not really clear that life got all that much easier. 

But it’s also important to recognize and celebrate a truly good movie when one sees one. And Mr. Smith’s Clerks does what you hope for every movie that made an impact on you in key moments of your growing up-it holds up and ages like a bottomless glass of affordable fine wine. And you can pour it, toast, and share it with all your friends.

Thank you Mr. Smith. You made an impact on me in my teens. And an impact on me in my mid-forties.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.