Clerks (View Askew Productions, Miramax, 1994)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards my husband Charles and I ended up watching a film “streaming” from Amazon Prime: Kevin Smith’s directorial debut, Clerks (1994), set in Leonardo, New Jersey – a short distance from Asbury Park, Bruce Springsteen’s home town, which we learn because the protagonist steals a whole bunch of copies of the Asbury Park paper and stuffs him into his store’s newsstand. Clerks is a story of two 20-something slackers, convenience store clerk Dante Hicks (Brian O’Halloran, who got the part after auditioning for a minor role and then Smith decided to cast him in the lead) and video store clerk Randal Graves (Jeff Anderson as a last-minute replacement for Smith himself, who decided in mid-shoot that directing, writing and starring was too much work for him). The film was co-produced and co-edited by Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier, and this was the proverbial movie that launched the cliché of an unknown director financing his first film on an ultra-low budget – you could call it a shoestring budget except that would be an insult to shoestrings – by maxxing out his personal credit cards. He ultimately sold the film to Miramax at a time when Harvey Weinstein was still involved with it (the closing credits pay tribute to the Big Bad Harvey for providing “an unforgettable order of potato skins”) and launched a quirky directorial career that included at least two sequelae as well as a spinoff series featuring Jay (Jason Mewes), a drug dealer who hangs outside the Quick Stop Groceries where Dante works, and his partner Silent Bob (Kevin Smith himself). Clerks is a very disconnected movie but the disconnections are a major part of its charm; it’s the sort of film in which things just happen in a sequence of incidents separated by silent-film style intertitles that comment ironically on the action. Woody Allen used the technique to great effect in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), and decades earlier Alfred Hitchcock had used “commenting” intertitles equally well in one of his most underrated films, Rich and Strange (1931).

Clerks opens with a sequence in which a customer stands at the counter and starts yelling at the people there to buy cigarettes (which seem to be at least half the store’s business). He’s carrying a shoulder bag which contains a model of a diseased lung – at least that’s what he says it is; to me it looked like a turkey breast well past its sell-by date – and Polaroid snapshots of people in the last stages of lung cancer. He urges the people to buy Chewlies brand gum instead of cigarettes, and ultimately he gets the crowd so riled up at Dante they start literally pelting him with cigarettes. Later the mystery stranger turns out to be a sales representative for the Chewlies gum company. Dante has had a number of girlfriends, of whom he’s been crazy about two of them: Caitlin Bree (Lisa Spoonauer), whom he dated in high school until she went on to college and ultimately became engaged to a Chinese medical student named Sang; and Veronica Loughran (Marilyn Ghigliotti), who tells Dante she’s only had sex with three men in her life while he’s had sex with 12 women. Later it turns out that Veronica makes Bill Clinton’s distinction between giving blow jobs and having “sex”, and admits she’s gone down on at least 36 guys and sometimes “snowflaked” – i.e., given them open-mouthed kisses with their cum still in her mouth. Dante keeps complaining that he’s been called to work on his day off – “I’m not supposed to be here,” he whines – and he agreed to go in only on the assurance that the store’s owner would come in to relieve him by noon so he, Randal and their friends could get together for a street hockey game at 2 p.m.

Unfortunately, when Dante calls the boss he discovers that the boss drove to Vermont for the day and he’ll have to stay at the store until its 11 p.m. closing time. So Dante, Randal and their buddies decide to hold the hockey game on the roof of the store, which works O.K. until one of the neighbor guys demands to join the game and ultimately loses control of their only ball, which goes down a storm drain. Later Dante and Randal decide to crash the funeral of Julie Dwyer, another woman Dante once dated, only they get thrown out after five minutes because Randal tripped and caused the casket, with Julie’s body in it, to fall over and dump her remains on the floor. (We’re not shown any of this because of the expense it would have required to stage the scene, but I thought the film worked better and was funnier without it.) Veronica is carrying on an extended argument with Dante because she wants him to return to college, while he doesn’t want to apply himself to anything that difficult and he’s content being a slacker hanging out with his equally aimless friend Randal. Midway through the action Caitlin finally appears, having determined to break up with her Asian fiancé and return to Dante if he’ll have her, and in her excitement she goes into the store’s restroom and ends up having sex with someone she thinks is Dante. Only it’s really an older man who went into the restroom with a porn magazine he asked Dante to supply him, and he got so worked up over his jack-off session he literally had a heart attack and died. The woman from the local coroner’s office who picks up his body explains that dead men can sometimes hold a hard-on for a couple of hours after they expire, and that’s how the man was able to have sex with Caitlin even after he was dead (and she stressed that he was letting her take the lead and assumed that was Dante being a gentleman about it).

Caitlin ends up in a catatonic trance as she’s taken away from the store in the ambulance that’s also carrying the corpse, and Dante and Veronica seem headed for a reconciliation – only Randal blows his chances with her by telling Veronica that Dante is no longer interested in her. When Veronica explains to Dante that it was Randal who told her that Dante wanted them to break up, Dante is furious with Randal and the two end up in a bar-style fight that wrecks most of the Quick Stop store and then team up to clean the wreckage. There are also whimsical gags along the way, including a lot of jokes about the porn content stocked at Randal’s video store (a mom who came in to rent a kids’ movie for her daughter is predictably shocked at the litany of porn titles Randal reads off on the phone to his distributor) and a scene in which Dante is fined $500 for selling cigarettes to a four-year-old girl. It turns out it wasn’t Dante who did that; it was Randal, briefly staffing the Quick Stop counter, but Dante had to pay the fine anyway and the person who comes to collect it (Ken Clark) stresses that Dante has no option to appeal the case or fight the fine. According to Wikipedia, Kevin Smith’s original plan for Clerks was a nihilistic ending in which Dante would be shot and killed by a street criminal who comes in to rob the store, but after the film premiered at a festival Smith was urged to remove the downer ending and finish the film with the scene of Dante and Randal worn out after the task of cleaning the store.

Clerks is a surprisingly accomplished film – it’s shot in grainy black-and-white but that’s part of its appeal; it seems more realistic that way than it would have in color. It’s also surprisingly well acted; the people in the movie really seem believable as the kinds of people Smith’s script tells us they are. Clerks is a marvelously unpretentious film whose characters win our hearts almost in spite of themselves, and midway through it I asked Charles – who works as a grocery clerk, albeit at a major chain supermarket instead of a grungy little convenience store – if watching it was a busman’s holiday for him. Certainly some of the incidents in this movie reminded me of stories he’s told me over the years about real-life customers from hell!