It has been exactly six months and one day since the last Late to the Party. This time, I'm 24 years late to the party...
Last night I watched Clerks. A lot of people have been flabbergasted that I had not seen Clerks.
There will be spoilers so beware. On the other hand, the way Clerks's story is organized, almost every scene after the first half hour is kind of a spoiler I guess.
Movie release: 1994
Interest in the movie: Everyone from friends to total strangers to family have been saying "you haven't seen Clerks?" for at least a decade now. Turns out, no shit I haven't seen Clerks. I wasn't even two years old when it came out. Peoples' descriptions of the movie and even reasons for watching it were pretty damn vague. That made me more interested in watching it.
Clerks felt very unsatisfying in many ways and very clever in others. It also seemed to fight my expectations without completely subverting them. Every time I felt like I was just watching another American-Pie-esque bro comedy, a philosophical argument between characters would show up or a character would do something fairly unpredictable. I guess we should start at the beginning since this isn't a review of Pulp Fiction.
Clerks starts off really slow for a comedy, or so I felt. Usually, something bombastic happens that grips a more general audience. That event shows off one or more main characters and many of their traits either during said event or immediately after. Clerks depicts Dante as a whiney twenty-something in the very first scene. That said, Dante is still, in many ways, a very relatable character in the beginning but Clerks is set in such a "real-world" scenario in the first act that it seems a bit easy. In Extract, another pretty dry comedy, Jason Bateman's character is another guy with a fairly high status at a grind job but I feel like it introduces more absurd characters that actually matter right away. Clerks takes about a half hour to set up that Dante works at a crappy convenience store, is typically accustomed to a horrible customer base, dates girls, and has a quirky best friend named Randal in a similar situation next door. Being in a normal situation does not make it bad but it feels a bit shoe-horned in when you give it that long to develop something that almost every Western-civilization human being has been through.
In fact, I noticed many scenes where things felt a bit more force-fed than the rest of the movie. Jay and Silent Bob's entire characters felt a little pointless to me. As much as Victoria's character introduction was sort of fun and serves a purpose to how she watches over Dante, the fire extinguisher seemed a bit much. Even if it wasn't over-the-top, the fire extinguisher is still on the wall during the scene where she uses it to scare off the mob. The mob scene was similarly over-the-top but I ultimately enjoyed it and thought it was a well-executed way to show that a lot of cartoonish characters come in and out of Dante's store. It really does set the tone for the rest of the movie and uses its slow joke build-up to its advantage.
Towards the middle, its sense of humor shines through a lot more. Personally, I still only got along well with a little more than half of it. Scenes where Randal is going Bugs Bunny on people and the one scene where Dante and Randal are exchanging stories about stupid customers were the ones that stick out the most for me and the ones I felt were the most cleverly-executed. A lot of scenes that even fans of the movie have recited to me just feel like characters ribbing each other a-la Uncharted. Snark versus snark works in scenarios where there is something bigger at play but this is a movie about two twenty-somethings selling people things.
Clerks's dramatic angle was one of my favorite parts of the movie, despite the fact that it's a comedy. At first, it feels forced in because Dante just shoves it into scenes that seem like they should have nothing to do with Caitlin, and they don't, but Dante is obsessed with the thought of days gone by. This works really well to show that Dante's shitty present is a byproduct of his fixation with the past. Caitlin is an obvious representation of that. In typical fashion of the relationship between Dante and Randal they don't talk about it for too long, and when they do, Randal tries to show Dante how toxic it is. This is even more potent when Caitlin finally appears in the flesh and immediately seems to hypnotize Dante. This leads me to one of my favorite and least-favorite things about the film though:
the ending.
Caitlin is shown to still be a toxic influence to Dante and loose cannon all-around. Dante still wants her to some extent and is trying to think of ways to make it work with Veronica. Dante realizes that Veronica is the girl he should be dating immediately after Caitlin becomes medically unavailable. Veronica comes out of damn near nowhere and Randal tells her that Dante has been talking to Caitlin for weeks behind her back. Despite that conversation not making much sense to me, the rest of it plays out well, to a point. Veronica's best scene is probably the one where she comes down on Dante and holds a proverbial mirror to his face. The fight scene between Dante and Randal was kind of fun but the low-budget really shows here. That was strange to me because the hockey scene and the wake scene made really good use of their limited camera capabilities. In the end, Randal tells Dante why he's so fucked up and that it's his fault for not trying to fix it himself. Dante looks at him wide-eyed in the realization that he might be right. They clean up the shop and are still friends at the end. The store closes and that's just the end of the movie. This ending isn't inherently bad. Actually, I found most of it to be entertaining to one degree or another. I just can't help but feel it was incredibly anti-climactic.
The store closing may have been a more fitting or conceptually necessary ending if the entire film took place in just the convenience store or just the convenience store, the video store, and the street that both of them are on. This isn't the case though and it makes it feel like one of those movies that is fairly competent but is also just a movie where things kind of just happen to no greater purpose. Maybe Jay and Silent Bob dance in that one scene as a metaphor to this. Is it that self-aware? In fact, the opening scene, though it sets up a personality for Dante before anything even happens, is only called back to when reminding the audience that Dante "wasn't even supposed to be here today". So what does the store closing being the end of the movie mean? Life is shitty and then it goes on? Dante is inexplicably satisfied with life despite it being mostly ruined within a day? All of the stuff that makes Clerks have a climax happens before the end of the movie. The ending may not have been pointless but I think it is unnecessarily abrupt. To be fair, there aren't too many other directions to go with the concept... despite a direct sequel and an animated series following...
Well, there are most of my points. I want to talk about some more stuff that is striking in the movie since I feel like I've been mostly shitting on it and I don't want to give off the wrong impression that Clerks totally sucks or anything. The title headers for certain segments didn't really do much for me. I have seen these done well in movies, especially Quentin Tarantino ones, but in this movie, I felt like they were just kind of there. Their titles also stopped making immediate sense halfway through the film. I also don't think the monochromatic color scheme adds anything to the movie but since most of Clerks's charm comes from its unique brand of dialogue anyways, it doesn't really take too much away either. I was waiting for there to be a reason for it being in black and white but a reason never came to me. I like pretty much every character except for Jay and Silent Bob. I don't necessarily hate Jay and Silent Bob but I felt from the very beginning that they would be annoying druggie character archetypes and they were to their very last scene. Putting in comic relief characters in a comedy where the main cast and minor characters already provide plenty of jokes just made Jay and Silent Bob annoying. Everyone else, even characters that don't have very much dialogue were all very effective in supporting both the dramatic and comedic stylings of the movie. Love it or hate it, Clerks never loses personality and it never gets too big for its britches. I don't know why I use that term. It makes me uncomfortable...
In conclusion: Clerks is a unique film in many ways and a college kid movie filled with low-brow humor and slapstick at others. I enjoy Clerks for what it is but I think it's a bit overrated... I think? Come to think of it, the weirdest thing about Clerks outside of the movie itself was that everyone who recommended it to me never said that it was amazing or anything. They would just quote it, act surprised that I didn't know what they were talking about, and then recommend it to me. It is a very low-budget film that, for the most part, makes you forget that it's low-budget without being overly pretentious. At least two-thirds of the movie are pretty entertaining. I would say that it is worth a watch, especially if you are going into film or writing. If you're looking for a gut-busting comedy, Clerks has solid delivery and may work better for you than it did for me but I think there are other pure epic lolzers movies out there that serve that purpose better than Clerks.
