I was rewatching Clerks II this week and I realized that the plot paralleled parts of Kevin Smith’s own life. Like Dante, he met a girl who wanted him to grow up, get married and have kids, leave his hometown, put his childhood buddies behind him, and become a financial success. In the movie, Dante backs out at the last minute and decides to instead stay with a woman who will let him remain the same way he always has been. And this is portrayed as a happy ending.
But in real life, Smith didn’t back out at the last minute. He married Jennifer Schwalbach (whom he cast as the rejected Emma in the movie), left New Jersey, and moved to Los Angeles to become a successful filmmaker. In real life, this seemed to have been the happy ending.
So was the ending of Clerks II supposed to be ironic? Were we supposed to realize that, while Dante may be happy, he had settled for too little? Or was Smith instead expressing his regrets over what he gave up along the way? Or am I putting too much into this?
No, he didn’t. He directed Clerks and was a huge success long before he met his wife. They met when she came to interview him for USA Today. And he’s never really grown up and left his childhood buddies behind.
That’s not to say there’s nothing to your theory. I think Dante and Randal represented something about how he saw his life in 1994, and how he saw it in 2006. I think Smith has said as much. And I see Dante’s choices differently: instead of trying to change who he is, settling for something he doesn’t like - it’s a new job and a new place, but it’s not like he was on the road to huge success - he was going to manage a car wash - he decides to be with the woman he wants to be with and takes ownership of his life. That’s the big symbolic gesture, to me: he buys the store. It’s where he belongs and it’s what has always made him happy, so he makes it his.
Smith isn’t a huge success now, much less back in 1994 (as he himself would admit). Clerks, at best, made Smith a minor cult figure and he’s since established himself as a moderate cult success. And Smith has grown up and he has left his childhood friends behind - do you think he hangs out with his old buddies every day in New Jersey and then flys home to California at night?
In another universe, Smith might have experienced the failure of Mallrats (which he has said was devastating) and decided to retire on a one hit and one miss and not try a third time. He could be living in living in Red Bank today running a comic book or video store, with occasional fans dropping in to tell him they loved his movie and asking him why he quit the business.
Don’t turn the man into some kind of myth. The whole point of Clerks II was Smith saying he has changed since 1994 - everybody’s life changes in twelve years. My question is whether he wonders if his life has changed for the better.
He’s not Spielberg, obviously, but it’s a question of scale: He was working in a convenience store when he made Clerks; now he’s a movie director and comic book writer. It’s absolutely true that he’s got a niche audience, but he’s a multimillionaire and can basically do what he wants for the rest of his life.
Except for the couple who have appeared in his movies, I’ll grant that he’s probably left them behind.
I’m not mythologizing. I like him, but I think I’m fairly objective about it. Objectively, I would say he’s come pretty far and is, as far as I can tell, making a living doing the things he always wanted to do.
I just don’t think that’s what he’s wondering. Everybody has regrets, but I don’t think Kevin Smith has many regrets about his choice of career. At the end of the movie, Smith has Dante do what Smith had done, years earlier, with his own life. He grows up a bit and takes charge of things. The Clerks become the owners of the Quik Stop, which in its own way is a little like the ex-clerk becoming a movie director.
Kevin Smith IS running a comic book store in Red Bank. Well, he’s the owner and shows up pretty often; Walt Flanagan actually runs the day-to-day operations.
As for “hanging out with his childhood friends,” Mewes lives with him, Flanagan I mentioned, Bryan “Steve-Dave” Johnson runs the West Coast Stash and Scott Mosier runs View Askew.
(What was the name of the girl in Dante’s Inferno triple feature? She appears in the last volume ‘Paradise’ in a transfigured form. Was the name Dante chosen for this reason?)
We’ve been watching Dante Hicks for over a decade now. He’s been a character in movies, TV shows, and comic books. And one of his defining characteristics was that he was always saying he wanted more out of life - he wanted to go to college, get a job with a future, move on, etc. Then, when he was right on the verge of doing this, he suddenly changed his mind and decided to stay right where he had been all his life - working behind the counter at Quick Stop and hanging out with Randal every day.
Now, I can see this as a happy ending. Like Dorothy Gale, Dante might have finally realized that happiness was right in front of him all along. But coming from Kevin Smith, the idea that the key to happiness is “don’t marry Jennifer Schwalback and leave New Jersey” does raise other obvious questions.
Except running off to California to manage a car wash isn’t exactly the equivalent of becoming a famous movie director. In Dante’s world, it’s a lateral move - maybe a bit of a step up. Owning the Kwik-Stop? Now that’s a step up, as he becomes his own boss (which Smith more or less has become). It’s not realistic to expect Dante’s life to exactly parallel Smith’s. He hit the 1 in a million shot.
And of course, you could argue that Kevin Smith is a filmmaker and Holden McNeil was a comic book writer, so clearly they are completely different characters who have nothing in common. Except that Smith has said that he created McNeil as an autobiographical character and based him on events from his own life.
It’s called creativity. You take some real things, make up some new things, and tell a story.
I’m not saying that for the comparison to be there, Dante had to become a Hollywood filmmaker. For one thing, no one would believe it. But you’re the one making the case that moving to California was Dante’s big shot. It wasn’t. It was the same rut he had been in for the last ten years, just in a new location. Dante did break out of his rut, by becoming his own boss.
I think that’s what he realized. But I don’t see the ambiguity that you’re seeing. The events that happen to Dante are pure movie magic[sup]TM[/sup]: the perfect girl falls in love with him, and Jay and Silent Bob just float him the money to buy the Quik Stop. The movie isn’t Smith’s musings about what would have happened if he’d stayed in New Jersey. He’s grown up, so he’s letting his character grow up. And Dante does the same thing Smith did: he realizes who and what makes him happy in life and decides to do it, no matter what people think about it.
Oh, and I meant to add something about Schwalbach. She’s cast as a bitch; Dante doesn’t love her, she doesn’t understand him and doesn’t like his friends. That’d complicate any analysis of the movie, and I remember thinking during the movie “Uh, did this bother her at all?” But ultimately… eh. I think Smith wanted to cast his wife in the movie, just like he wanted to put their daughter in the movie - which he’s done in his last couple of movies. He wrote the part to require no acting ability, and she’s not an actress.
Overall, I think it would have been an unrealistic ending if Dante suddenly ended up a wealthy superstar with a perfect 10 on his arm and flocks of fans following him around. Realistically in life, the moves we make aren’t so drastic…they happen a little at a time.
And Dante really did end up better. Not with a shrill bitch that he was with and doing everything she said “because it’s the right thing to do at my age” and ending up running a crappy car wash in a place he hates. Instead, he met a woman that he truly loves and cares about (and does the same for him), stayed in the home he knows, with his best friend who really thinks the world of him. Furthermore, he moved up a stage by owning the Quik Stop. Overall, instead of growing up the way he “should have”, by following his own way, he grew up anyway, only much more satisfied.
Besides, I don’t think the story would end there. Maybe there won’t be a Clerks III (“We’re fucking 40, man…we’re on the way down!!”), but I could see Dante going even further away from loser burger jockey.
Clerks II just opened in Bangkok. One little art-house theater just started showing it on Thursday. We watched it today (Saturday), and the audience consisted of the wife and I plus one other farang (Westerner). That was the noon showing, though, so I hope it does better. As we were sitting in the Starbucks across the street afterward, we saw a group of farangs heading in the direction of the theater, and as there would be no other reason for farangs to be heading in that direction, we hope they were going to see it.
We loved the first *Clerks * and are glad this one cinema is playing the sequel. (The first one never showed here; saw it on videotape). The wife is quite possibly the only Thai to be at all familiar with Clerks. She’d heard of donkey shows before, thanks to my regaling her with the tale of my own wanderings around Juarez in a fruitless search thereof back in my wasted youth. But I thought she was going to pee in her pants during the donkey-show scene, she was laughing so hard.
For what it is worth, Kevin Smith said long ago that Randal was more based on him than Dante. I don’t think he ever saw Dante as being him, just an interesting character that he finally decided to revisit.
I think too much is being read into the story as being about Kevin Smith himself.
As others have mentioned, he has had Mewes living with him quite often over the last 10 years. It has taken Mewes a long time to get his life together. Kevin still hangs out with Mosier apparently. They met in film school. That is at least two friends that Kevin has continued to hang with since before Clerks.
Funny anecdote about this. When Clerks II came out, I explained to my family (conservative, Christian, suit-and-tie Baby Boomer types) about the generation gap and how slacker movies like Clerks applied to my generation. They claim movies like this “undermine the values of society.” I told them, it’s not like that at all. Yes, movies like Clerks contain material that is shocking, disgusting, and sometimes downright offensive. That’s the whole point! If you allow young people to view such material, eventually they become accustomed to it and can decide for themselves whether it’s immoral or not. If you forbid young people from seeing such movies, then we’ll be drawn to them anyway, much more so than if they didn’t forbid them in the first place.
They listened to my words, and said, “Well…I guess that’s okay, as long as they don’t show people having sex with animals or something.”
Ben Affleck is also never considered in discussions like this. Sure, he’s a big star now, but when they met in 1995, Affleck was a schlub who was best known as having a small role in Dazed and Confused and nothing else. In fact, his stardom can partially be credited to Smith (he helped bring Good Will Hunting to Miramax).
But Kevin Smith and Ben Affleck are also close friends and Smith is always mentioning in his writing how much they hang out.