Clerks (1994)

Every now and again I find myself curious about Kevin Smith. He was a kind of totemic figure to me as a young movie enthusiast, someone whose humor I liked and agreed with in the stupid way you agree with disaffected sarcasm as a teenager, and he was one of those dudes who managed to make a movie out of nothing, which was the dream. Part of this, I think, has to do with the fact that Smith’s work — this movie in particular — feels like an unspoken influence to a lot of low-budget, DIY stuff bubbling up from the transgender cinephile underground. There’s Jackass and Tom Green and Bound and creepypasta and a bunch of flash cartoons I haven’t seen and webcomics I haven’t read, and then there’s Smith’s overly-verbose, sad sack ass, at once a self-pitying dweeb and a hero who actually made the thing he wanted. And also anime and Sonic the Hedgehog.

Part of it is that I had a copy of Clerks on LaserDisc.

About a year ago, I bought an amazing LaserDisc collection from a retired professor of film in Mebane, along with three LaserDisc players. I took them back to the house I lived in, unpacked them, tested the players, then repacked them so I could move in with my partner — I have somewhere like 300 movies on LaserDisc, five collections of Looney Tunes cartoons, a Dire Straits music video, and some anime, I just haven’t had time to set everything back up and actually watch a movie. Today, on a lark, I set it up and pulled Clerks out of the stack.

The experience of watching a movie on LaserDisc is wonderful. I hate to be a “tactile experience” dweeb, but holding an optical disc the size of an LP record is, in fact, an incredible tactile experience, and I kind of love that only roughly half a movie fits on each side of the disc. You have to get up, open the machine, and flip the disc. You get a little intermission that way. It’s cute.

Clerks is less cute. Don’t get me wrong, it’s something I hold a great deal of nostalgia for, some of the jokes are still good, but it’s a rough and somewhat alarmingly libertarian movie. Smith knows that Dante and Randall are pathetic characters and finds a way to present both as such despite our desire to side with them against society, but the portrayals of the customers, which seemed like bone-deep observations of boomers and popular kids and the world which we are doomed to labor in until we perish feel like strawmen now. Dante and Randall are kind of monstrous, Dante maybe the most selfish film hero of the 90s and Randall a sociopath. If they’re in hell, No Exit style, they deserve it.

The film’s two stars are the Berserker guy and Jay of Jay and Silent Bob fame. I can only imagine the amount of restraint Kevin Smith has had to exercise over the last 30-plus years to not write Berserker guy into all of his movies. Jay is a beautiful, blonde egg that is too stupid to hatch, stoned beyond stoned because it keeps him from thinking about how hot he’d look with a pair of boobs. There are dozens of trans girls who acted like Jay before they still transitioned. Some probably still do. A fucking icon. A queen.