Cheap, touching, and downright nasty, Kevin Smith’s first feature still remains the ultimate cinematic tribute to slackers.
Cheap, touching, and downright nasty, Kevin Smith’s first feature still remains the ultimate cinematic tribute to slackers—all apologies to Richard Linklater, though it should probably be said that he was trying to sum up a cultural non-movement as opposed to chronicling the mores of these post-high school wasters, who exist outside of time. When it was first released in 1994, Clerks was one of those epochal fringe movies that comes along one or two times a decade and just hits a nerve. Ten years later, it’s aged surprisingly well (though still not quite as funny as some would have it) and is actually much more palatable, given how it fits into Smith’s whole elaborate alternate Jerseyverse.
The story is basically a contrivance that allowed Smith to make a film where he was working at the time. Dante (Brian O’Halloran) gets called in at the crack of dawn on his day off to man the register at a crappy little convenience store and repeats to everybody who will listen, “I’m not even supposed to be here today!” As the day progresses, he deals with psychotic customers, a jealous girlfriend (Marilyn Ghigliotti), an alluring ex (Lisa Spoonauer), cigarette-buying kids, Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith), a stiff in the bathroom, and a running argument with his buddy Randall (Jeff Anderson), who works in the even-crappier video store next door.
These aren’t guys anybody would really want to emulate—Dante being essentially a self-martyring whiner and Randal an antagonistic boob—but Smith makes them into a fairly entertaining duo and easy enough company for 92 minutes. Even though a lot gets packed into this one day, you still get the feeling that nothing is really going to change with these guys. Dante and Randal seem to think they’re just killing time until something better comes along, but the knowledge that this bottom-rung wage-slave life is eventually going to swallow them whole lurks behind all the potty humor, Star Wars references, and unintentional necrophilia.