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2007 Winners - Arts
Death of the dick joke, and other Kevin Smith nightmares
by Mike Hingston
Peak - 31-Jul-06 (Simon Fraser University)
Clerks II is currently playing in theaters across Canada.
To absolutely nobody’s surprise, Clerks II is an awful movie. It is poorly written, awkwardly acted, and a nightmarish labyrinth of inside jokes and artificial monologues about love and friendship. The one thing it does correctly is accidentally document every movie fan’s worst nightmare: the day you wake up and realise pop culture has passed you by. Overly vague references to early-‘90s fare like Silence of the Lambs were dated when the original Clerks was released in 1994 — now, 12 years later, you get the feeling a joke about the cotton gin would feel more topical. But writer/director Kevin Smith has always relished this slice of cinema history, and Clerks II is proof that he’ll devour even his own career highlights to squeeze out one more “Star Wars is the best and here’s why” anecdote.
As a punctuation stickler, I always imagined Clerks might be safe from sequel purgatory because of the telltale period in its full title: “Clerks.” As in the end, next topic, no returnsies. But Smith dispatches with laws of punctuation the same way he dismisses Lord of the Rings fans — that is, without a second thought, and often without logic. As Dante discovers his beloved Quick Stop burning to the ground during the film’s opening scene, the title appears as the full-stop disappears (and the nostalgic black-and-white fades into full colour), and suddenly “Clerks” becomes “Clerks II” before our eyes.
From the opening inferno, notorious slackers Dante and Randall are forced into new jobs at the fast-food chain Mooby Burger. Dante is getting ready to move to Florida with his new fiancée, Randall hates his Hobbit-loving coworker Elias, and Jay and Silent Bob (the former fresh out of rehab) return to their two specialties: loitering, and sing-rapping while dealing drugs to the unwashed masses. And on the periphery of the action, there’s an outside love interest in Dante’s boss, much talk of why “porch monkey” might not be a racist phrase, and a climactic scene involving a traveling duo called Kinky Kelly and the Sexy Stud. (One is a horse, and one is a hairy guy, but whoa! Which is which?! Whoops, I mean, spoiler alert.)
But while the above feels like the Kevin Smith universe we’re all familiar with, it’s the dialogue (which is a Smith staple, for better or worse) that really makes the film implode. The formerly playful gay jokes now feel strangely like fratboy homophobia, while Randall’s movie guru figure has completely shifted from everyman to just middle-aged man. All of the action inside the Mooby World microcosm feels so decrepit that when Jason Lee — who has found career-high success as of late on TV’s My Name is Earl — shows up for his obligatory cameo as a customer, you remember how bright Smith’s own star used to shine, and how far his respectability has fallen since then.
To be fair, Smith is at an unfortunate stage in his career right now. He’s simultaneously too famous to re-use indie staples, like shooting in black-and-white, without seeming condescending, and at the same time not famous enough to call in favours from his more-famous friends without looking desperate. And while part of me feels sorry for the toilet-humourist-all-grown-up, a bigger part of me wants him to cut his losses before he retroactively destroys his early work entirely.
The scariest thing is that he seems to have lost even his sense of irony, the humourist’s bread and butter. The last line of the movie is an entirely straight-faced, “This is the first day of the rest of our lives.” No smirk, no sarcasm, no dick jokes. Just a pan backwards, a fade back into black-and-white, and the collective sound of 300 fanboys in the audience grunting how they’re going to go home and blog about how bad it sucked. A typical reaction to a Kevin Smith movie, only this time they’re right.
