Kevin Smith is back. The film is Clerks II. And this time, as the saying goes, it’s personal. Of course, the New Jersey-based director has returned to our screens before. Every couple of years, in fact, he produces a lowbudget movie starring mid-budget actors that seems to shadow, in both tone and texture, the tough-talking, scatological spirit of his original era-defining Generation X comedy Clerks (1994). Mallrats was one such movie. As was Chasing Amy. And Dogma too. They are all Smith flicks spanning vastly different narrative terrains that were nonetheless built around the conceptual kernel, so says the director himself, of wisecracking guys “hanging out, and telling d*** and fart jokes.”
But this time it’s different. This time Smith has dropped any aspirational pretence, abandoned all arguments to the contrary, and gone straight for the self-referential jugular with an old-fashioned unapologetic sequel. Clerks II, in which Smith also co-stars as the loveable dope-dealer Silent Bob, opens in multiplexes across North America tomorrow. It describes the continuing adventures of the original shop jockeys Dante Hicks (Brian O’Halloran) and Randal Graves (Jeff Anderson) as they negotiate the perils of impending matrimony and parenthood. The “d*** and fart jokes” here become a convoluted dialogue about comparative male and female sex organs that has already achieved cultish notoriety among the internet cognoscenti.
Elsewhere, glowing reviews in trade publications and heavyweight endorsements from directors such as Quentin Tarantino (“It’s so cool!”) and Robert Rodriguez (“Clerks II rules!”) have added to the unanimously positive industry buzz surrounding the movie. Smith showed the film at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, which earned him an eight-minute ovation, now referred to, by the Smith faithful, simply as “The Big O” .
And yet, what’s really behind Clerks II? Is it cosy Gen X nostalgia gone mad? Is it Kevin Smith at the irreverent peak of his directorial powers? Or is it actually the reductio ad absurdum of the director’s own slipshod method — a parody of a parody of a longforgotten ideal?
This is what Smith said five years ago: “Everyone’s really p***** off, especially the fans. They’re like, ‘Oh come on, you gotta do one more!’ They are like, ‘Give it five more years, and you will!’ But, dude, in five years I’ll be 36! Dressing up as Silent Bob at 36? Forget it!” Now here’s Smith today, aged 36. Sitting, smoking feverishly, at a polished wooden meeting table in his New Jersey production office, the director discussed at length his earlier decision, announced on his beloved company website viewaskew.com, to leave for ever the comedic universe created in Clerks. At the time he was adamant: Clerks was finished. “I’m removing the net, so to speak. All my other movies refer back to Clerks, or to each other. But now I want them to rise and fall on their own merits.”
Even then, though, it was a tough call. Clerks had been the making of Smith. It wasn’t just his debut movie, it was industry lore. It spoke of the no-hoper New Jersey wage slave with six months of an abandoned film course behind him, who drained $27,000 (£14,770) from maxed-out credit cards and shot a rough-looking home-town comedy. Clerks had enough charm and sharp dialogue to storm simultaneously the Sundance Film Festival, the offices of Miramax Films and the wallets of curious filmgoers (the movie’s initial $3 million box office returns made it one of the most profitable films of 1994). The film became an even bigger hit on video. Miramax signed up for more Clerks-related movies. And Smith quickly became, alongside fellow film-makers such as Richard Linklater (Slacker) and Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs), a poster-boy for Gen X derring-do.
It was, of course, all happening against his better instincts. The director once told me that he was mystified by his status as a Gen X icon. “Clerks shows a little bit of talent,” he said, “but it looks like s*** and it’s not that original — it’s a buddy comedy. But we just said the right thing at the right time. If we made the movie a year earlier it wouldn’t have gone anywhere. It was right at the moment when people were talking about Gen X, and here was a movie that could be pigeon-holed into it.”
Nonetheless, Smith’s empire grew. His website became a portal for a merchandising phenomenon that shifted everything from action figures to signed posters. “Anyone stupid enough to spend $20 on a Silent Bob action figure,” he observed at the time, “deserves to watch a Kevin Smith movie.” His fans were obsessive. They debated his work, often with him, for hours on the message boards, praising his latest movie, or insulting him in equal measure.
“There’s an identification there,” he confessed. “They’re not that far removed from me. I am one of them.”
Meanwhile the movies emerged, consistent in their inconsistency. Mallrats, a glossy swipe at John Hughes teen comedy, had its moments, but was a misfire. Chasing Amy, a sweetly obscene contemporary romance, was inspired. The religious satire Dogma was ambitious, entertaining, and almost mature. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back was simply Smith on autopilot. Then came Jersey Girl, a saccharine romantic comedy with a relatively massive (in Smithian terms, anyway) $35 million budget. It starred the off-screen paramours Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, then being blitzed by negative publicity over their increasingly soured relationship. The film tanked, and “Bennifer” was duly blamed.
Even today, Smith has suggested that this damaging experience influenced his desire to go back to Clerks. And that during the shooting of the movie the thought that kept running through his head was: “Man, next time I don’t want to work with famous people. I don’t want to work with celebrities.”
But, typically, there’s more to it than that. Clerks II is not just some haphazard retreat from failure. It is, instead, a bold and essential move for Smith’s career. Other Gen X tyros such as Linklater and Tarantino have diversified wildly. Yet Smith has always been defiant about staying true to his own slacker roots. Clerks II is thus the purest expression of this defiance so far. It’s popular, yes, because it is truthful. And it is truthful because it is a return to the source of Smith’s own legend. It is a return, in short, in the paraphrased words of W. B. Yeats, to the soft “d*** and fart jokes” of the heart. Clerks II will be shown at the Edinburgh Film Festival on Aug 18 and 20 (www.edfilmfest.org.uk)
Here’s some cool slacker films, dude
Dazed and Confused
Last day in a Seventies high school. Hazing, drugs and alcohol.
My Own Private Idaho
Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix in a druggy look at a hustler’s life.
Slacker
Richard Linklater’s film named the genre.
The Big Lebowski
Jeff Bridges’s “Dude” provided the missing link between the Sixties and the Nineties.
