Vulgar R-Rated Comedy Classic From Fan-Favorite Director Leaving Netflix

No one gives this movie the credit it deserves—even Smith himself. It’s easy to understand why. A 24-year-old Smith shot the film—his first—in only 21 days for a paltry $27,575.

As a result, the film is rough to look at. While the first-time director chose to film on black and white stock because it was cheaper, what truly makes the movie a dud visually is its lack of movement. Clerks is essentially 90 minutes of static camera shots and talking heads.

But oh what words that came out of those heads…

Clerks challenges the idea that film is a visual medium, as it relies almost solely on dialogue. You can almost draw a straight line from Clerks to the advent of the video podcast. Joe Rogan sitting in a chair shooting the breeze for two hours isn’t much different from what Smith did with his early films.

Still, it’s not the unskilled/lazy format that makes Clerks such an influential film; it’s the writing.

I’ve yet to summarize the plot of Clerks because there is none. It’s basically a day in the life of a convenience store register jockey. Sad sack Dante (Brian O’Halloran) gets called into work on his day off and spends his whole shift talking with his friend Randall (Jeff Anderson), who works at the next-door video store.

Not super exciting, but revolutionary nonetheless. Why? Because they talk about nerd crap.

Comedies before Clerks were about jokes with setups and punchlines. They were about visual gags and funny situations. Clerks didn’t just change the format, it demolished it.

Dante and Randall sit around quoting Jaws and discussing Star Wars and comic books. While they’re at it, the duo peppers their conversations with language that is so raunchy that the movie initially earned an NC-17 for dialogue alone. Prior to Clerks, no studio would finance a movie about grown children talking about geek stuff while constantly dropping F-bombs.

Post-Clerks, you have directors like Judd Apatow, who’ve made a whole career out of those movies.

Kevin Smith and fellow ’90s wunderkind Quentin Tarantino were the first filmmakers to re-create the conversations they heard in comic book shops and video stores. But where Quentin preferred to put those nerdy conversations in the mouths of hitmen, Kevin instead gave them to slacker convenience store clerks. The infamous scene where Dante and Randall debate how many innocent people were on the Death Star when it blew up might seem quaint now, but that’s only because every comedy made since 1994 has copied it.

Meanwhile, it’s also a movie in which a woman accidentally gets intimate with a corpse in an unlit bathroom. Yeah, I don’t want anyone to come away with the wrong idea. I may have described Clerks in a pretentious way, but the film itself is still a ridiculously low-brow comedy.

It’s still the movie where Dante and Randall ruin a funeral by accidentally knocking the casket over.

If you haven’t figured it out, Clerks is not a movie for the easily offended. However, I would posit that the movie’s dialogue wasn’t shocking for its level of vulgarity alone. Rather, viewers were flabbergasted to see a movie where people talked like they did in real life. Unless you grew up in a super religious household, then you know adults swear a lot.

Since Clerks, realistic dialogue has become commonplace in films and television, but in the ’90s it was still a trip to hear two dudes speaking so frankly. There’s a scene where Dante and Randal discuss the logistics of single-subject oration that I assume caused many heads to explode back in ’94. Even though everyone I know has had a similar conversation at some point in their life, those kinds of subjects just weren’t discussed in movies before Clerks.

GFR SCORE

The production of Clerks has become the stuff of legend. Kevin Smith quits film school, sells his comics, maxes out his credit cards, and makes a movie for under $30,000—a paltry budget even in 1994 dollars. Smith takes the film to Sundance, Miramax picks up distribution rights, and the rest is history. I may have glossed over a few bits, but essentially, that’s how it happened.

Now, 30 years later, the film is considered an Indie classic, and the comedy genre can be broken into two eras: BC—Before Clerks—and AD—After Dante.

You need to hurry up and watch it soon, though. Clerks is streaming on Netflix, but it leaves on September 30, so don’t dilly-dally.