Clerks (1994)

3 months ago

Clerks (1994)

I’M NOT EVEN SUPPOSED TO BE HERE TODAY

by Christopher F.

Clerks is a film about my best friend Joe.

When I first saw Kevin Smith’s debut feature, to say it didn’t grab me would be an understatement. Calling me a kid of the nineties is a bit like saying that people born in the sixties were the free love generation - I might have been alive for the vast majority of those years, but I couldn’t exactly comprehend what was going on. And if one fails to grasp the central relationship at the heart of Clerks, the only thing remaining, besides a series of ethically dubious comedy sketches, is a quaint 90s sensibility that - and there we are - I was bound to fail to get.

The first time I watched it, I was 12. (That was the other reason I didn’t get it - Clerks is profane, and thankfully my naïve little ears just failed to understand.) I had met Joe a couple of months earlier. My first words to this poor, shy, asthmatic kid were “please: stop breathing.” When I think about it in retrospect, that set the tone for the next ten years to come.

Clerks follows a day in the life of Dante Hicks, a convenience store clerk (hence the title) who gets called into work on his day off. The film charts its course by visiting a series of personal hells on Dante (I promise that wasn’t deliberate), often caused or exacerbated by his friend and fellow clerk, Randal Graves. These range from the banal (a fine imposed on Dante after Randal absent-mindedly gives a six-year-old a pack of cigarettes) to the horrific (Dante’s ex-girlfriend accidentally committing an act of necrophilia in a darkened bathroom). Consistently, they’re funny, but only as an observer - Dante exists in a state of perpetual annoyance, occasionally rising to hysteria.

This was me in my mid-teens - always on edge, desperately trying to keep everything in check, a big bundle of anxiety and nerves with no chance of carefully unravelling. The second time I watched Clerks, the whiny, funny-looking man who couldn’t get anything done became someone I completely identified with.

A lot of those anxieties were thanks to Joe, who on his thirteenth birthday had inexplicably come out of his shell and made the transition from calm and studious to anarchic and totally lacking in a moral compass. In short, Joe became fun. Joe also became a gigantic pain in the ass. Joe became Randal Graves.

I’m hyper-aware of this by now. Male friends with a dual framework have a tendency to insert themselves into the host of films that cater to that exact audience. There are a lot of them (think about it: we live in an age where if I say “buddy cop movie” you know exactly what I’m talking about). Joe was always Withnail, I was always Marwood. In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I was Raoul Duke, Joe was Dr. Gonzo. I was the unnamed narrator of Fight Club, he was Tyler Durden. Always one person to spiral into trouble, and one to make a haphazard go of getting out of it. But these were all tenuous - by the age of 18, neither of us had gone on an ether binge in Las Vegas, started an underground fighting ring, or enjoyed a delightful weekend in the country. What we had done was hold down night jobs as clerks.

Clerks makes use of its environment. Aside from a couple of detours - one to the roof, another to a wake - the film exclusively takes place at the Quick Stop convenience store (the location of Kevin Smith’s actual job at the time) and the adjacent video rental store. Aficionados know that the film was largely edited and produced on-location. It feels personal, small, familiar. By the end, you get the impression that you’ve been watching people at work; there are indie flourishes (the white-on-black intertitles, the questionable music choices, the fact that the entire film was shot in black and white), but somehow these don’t get in the way. Clerks is about livening up an otherwise boring day job, whether you want to or not.

Joe and I worked in a tiny cinema, and he made my life a living hell. Usually, he worked on the ticket counter, and I was on the refreshments stand, so I always had to deal with whatever confusion he’d created. He would be rude to customers, affect a stupid (and terrible) Russian accent, and purposefully fuck things up at every opportunity. There was always a golden window when we weren’t supervised - in Clerks, this happens to be the entirety of the film - and during it, Joe would find every way to test my patience. He never sent my ex-girlfriend to a darkened bathroom holding a dead guy, but had the opportunity arisen I wouldn’t have trusted him.

To say that Clerks is just a film that attempts to make the mundane zany is unfair, though. This is a film that thrives on feeling. It’s what makes Dante compelling rather than infuriating. His anxiety and colossal sense of injustice (“I’m not even supposed to be here today” practically becomes a catchphrase, and his reaction to learning that his girlfriend has given blowjobs to 37 different guys before him is tragicomedy defined) are counterbalanced by moments of happiness - his girlfriend bringing him lasagna, an impromptu hockey match on the roof of the store - we see these things through Dante’s imperfect vision. He isn’t a character that inspires total sympathy - but as the film progresses, it becomes increasingly hard to hate him.

The same goes for Randal. In the opening scenes of Clerks, Randal is a pure comedy character. He exists to screw things up. But as the film unfolds, he provides his own coarse (and questionable) wisdom, and while never becoming too emotionally invested, reveals himself to have depth behind the fascination with hermaphroditic porn and salsa sharks.

Not many films provide you with two loathsome characters with the intention of teaching you to love them. It’s a difficult thing to pull off. Fixed characterisation is simple. There are a thousand films with friendly leads who end up nowhere, but do well based on the initial compelling nature of the character. There are a thousand more that start with assholes, end with assholes, and do well thanks to critics branding the overall result morally bankrupt. There are far fewer films that start with what seem like bad people, and plot their transformation at close quarters, with no grand narrative of redemption or self-improvement.

And here’s the thing: over the ten years I’ve known Joe, he’s become the brother I never had. Insufferable, annoying as hell, and incredibly good at fucking things up - like Randal, he is every single one of these. In Clerks, Randal takes this to extremes - he more or less guarantees that Dante will lose his job, his girlfriend and his hopes for a decent future - and if one hasn’t inhabited the weird de facto pseudo-parasitic friendship of the Buddy Movie, then it makes no sense. You wonder why Dante puts up with such an asshole. But ten years on, it seems blindingly obvious: they love each other. That, to me, is the power of Clerks - not the sick humour, not the fact that it’s a cultural product of its time, but the central unshakeable friendship between the two leads.