[image:185:l] Like many who are familiar with the Kevin Smith ouvre that started with Clerks, a primary appeal of his Jersey mileu is in inhabiting a world with characters we are familiar with. Smith’s people are like many of us who grew up pop culture junkies with a committed lack of connection to the normal expectations of society. We have rambling conversations about pop culture. We magnify minutiae until it becomes significant. We delight in both the arcane, in ourselves, and in each other. But we relate to the intelligence of Smith’s characters that conveys a hint of dissatisfaction with not only the world they don’t quite fit into, but with their own lives. They know enough to not be satisfied or blissfully ignorant. Like the lighthearted side of Pahlunik’s Fight Club, they represent a generation born to ennui that would rather crack wise than skulls. And they do so with all the painful awareness of just how obsolete they may be in the process of becoming.
Clerks II already has a built in appeal to those eager to visit old friends and celebrate that perhaps malformed sense of nostalgia that goes with reliving something from an earlier, and consequently younger and more hopeful time in our lives. Fortunately Smith gives us more than just a plodding retread of story. He advances the story while still keeping it grounded in the qualities that made it appealing 10 years ago. For me that 10 year gap adds another level of identification since it’s just about that amount of time since I moved to the area I live in now and have been working in the field I work in now. In fact one of the first movies I discovered after moving up here was Clerks. It’s one of the movies I most identify with two of my best friends in that time span who happen to be the other two hosts of this site. Smith’s entire career has spanned my existence in this new place that parallels both the bonds of friendships that sometimes are more important than sexual relationships or work that we see in Smith’s films, as well as mirroring the boredom and cynicism.
With all that in mind, and if you read my past reviews or know me at all, you realize I need more than dick and fart jokes to give my thumbs up to a movie, including the sequel to Clerks. And though there’s plenty of gutter language and borderline taste displayed in the movie it really offered me something to connect me further to the characters and subsequently connect them to myself. That connection to the lives of Dante and Randall in the previous film actually grew exponentially after seeing this one. Their situations mirror my own in just too many ways. That sense Randall has of the world moving on without him, passing him by, is one I have been grappling with. My own obsolescence along with the pop cultural icons that helped define me and that helped me define myself are slipping into nostalgic reminiscences on VH1 as they begin the inevitable descent into complete oblivion when 90′s and aughts nostalgia will feed a younger generations need to recapture youth and hope and my era will be as dead as Fonzies 50′s and your mom’s free loving 60′s.
Though Clerks II has some very funny moments, it is the emotional pull that connects these characters to a time and place, even an outlook, lifestyle, and future, that work to make this more than a silly comedy. Sure it’s fun to hear Randall riff on Transformers and echo my own largely ignored criticisms of The Lord Of The Rings. Jay’s interpretive dance homage to The Silence Of The Lambs is a thing of frightening beauty, the new light cast on porch monkeys is revelatory, and the concept of creatures called pillow trolls both hilarious and slightly upsetting.
But where a connection of lasting importance is formed is in moments like Rosario Dawson talking about why she doesn’t want to get married. There was a private satisfaction in her coolness and riffs on relationships that are the stuff of my vicarious girlfriend dreams.
The connections are formed for me when Randall lets the facade drop and says the things many of us would like to say to our friends. I felt it as The Smashing Pumplin’s “1979″ scores a montage of on the cusp life-altering changes and decisions facing our heros.
And the beauty of those decisions and where they lead in the films conclusion is that it does not pander nor go the route of the traditional expectation for Hollywood fare. I am not “normal,” and neither are the characters in Smith’s films. Sure they must at some point leave certain things behind, grow up a bit, and move on. But the way this is accomplished felt much more true to me and the characters than those out in the “real world,” would usually dictate. The standard desires for our lives have changed as the lie behind the old ones have been exposed over the last few decades. The more recent generation of young people are misfits who find their joys in different places. We wont grow old in quite the same ways with quite the same priorities and needs. Can you imagine your parents playing video games or reading comics? Your grandparents? Would their lives be altered significantly without Instant Messeging and Buddy Lists, or movie trilogies? Did they enter their 40′s still passionate about sitcom reruns from their youths or listening to music as far from the mainstream as Heavy Metal, Punk, or Rap?
Doesn’t seem so to me.
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I’ve often wondered when the moment will come when I start thinking like so called “adults.” When will I become as matter of fact, as disinterested in pop culture, as nuclear familied, or as distanced from the desire for friends and just hanging out, as my parents and the adults I grew up around were?
Well maybe the answer to that is never. I’ve tried to imagine a generation of people like me growing up without getting married, still playing silly games, still immersed in the worlds of fiction available through so many artforms and mediums, and just generally not fitting the normal idea of that word “adult.” It’s been hard at times but maybe that’s due to a failure of imagination on my part. Kevin Smith shares much in common with all the above expectations and characteristics, but when he revisits two icons of that world in Randal and Dante, Smith is able to imagine a future that pays all due costs to the necessities of maturing and change while offering a vision of how to do that without losing those things that matter to us, or becoming what we to some extent fear.
Whether this is all ultimately good for American civilization is an entirely other and very much debatable point. Maybe there is some denial and childishness in someone like me that is decidedly less than a robust and growing country needs to continue that growth. There are dictates of reality and biology we can’t control. Nature favors the fittest and strongest and I don’t know if the above traits lend themselves to those qualities. i don’t know that they don’t. Even within the culture I and Smith allude to there are many different types of many different levels of creativity and strength. What Clerks II offers is a glimpse of how some of those of a particular bent may find a happy medium in maturing and staying true to who they are and what makes them happy. And it makes it just a little bit more ok to to do so even if it denies certain truisms the movie itself brings up.
In particular I refer to Rosario Dawson’s views on relationships, that as I alluded to above are very much aligned with my own, and I think many others who get human nature and the legacy of our selfish genes. And yet she still makes decisions that do enter into the world of expected norms even as it takes place within that safer coccoon of her culture. I like to think it is the knowledge of what we are and have been that will help those like her and myself combat the pitfalls most have fallen into and allow us a different kind of maturity as we enter into relationships and professional choices. Armed with that knowledge maybe a more lasting happiness can be found and easier compromises made. Smith gave me a little reminder that it may be possible, as well as the inspiration to try and strike out in my own unique direction with no apoligies for it being less than what past generations expect. Misfits we may be; hell we may even be the ruin of Western civilization, but at least we’re not alone.
And the movies funny too.
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