Kevin Smith
I’ve wanted to write something about Kevin Smith for a while. He used to be my favourite filmmaker back in Sixth Form (a dizzying 7 years ago!), but he’s fallen from grace to the point where I find the site of him, and the thought of most of his films, quite sickening.
It was quite a gradual process which started with indifference – I just stopped watching them – and then when I switched completely from VHS to DVD, I never bothered to replace his films with DVD versions. When Clerks X (a 10th anniversary edition of Smith’s debut film) was released, I went back and watched the film, and enjoyed the hell out of it. Having not seen any of his films for a good three years, I also had a look at Mallrats, Chasing Amy and Dogma… And that’s when it dawned on me: not only is this collection of work of quite poor quality, it is also remarkably strange oeuvre.
Clerks is undoubtedly the film that cut out a niche for Smith. It tells the story of two friends who work low-paid retail jobs in their hometown in small-town New Jersey. Filmed on a very small budget in the convenience store where Smith was working at the time, it’s a portrait of two young high school graduates who should have gone to university, but instead are happy loafing about, playing hockey, dealing with their love lives and harassing customers.
The film shows Smith’s lack of directorial style, though somewhat disguised beneath the restrictions of a low budget. But Smith has always been a writer more than a director and what stands out is the dialogue. Private contractors working on the Deathstar, Dante’s summing up of a woman’s role in sex, and, of course, the 36 dicks are all laugh-out-loud moments. The film seemed to be made to the gen-x, grunge generation of the early 90s: slackers, dick jokes, and general bad taste (including knocking over a coffin at a funeral and necrophilia), but even today there’s a lot to recommend the film. It has something of a naive charm and is genuinely very funny, something that later films would seem to forget.
Smith has claimed that Mallrats suffered from meddling producers and so he’s made himself bullet-proof to any criticism of that film. Chasing Amy, however, was much beloved and was a film that Smith very much wanted to make. Hailed on its release as Smith’s return to his indy roots after pissing about with $5,000,000 of studio money with his second film, it tells the story of a guy who falls in love with a lesbian and manages to convert her, only to find out that he wasn’t the first guy she was with and screw everything up. The most notable thing about the film is that Smith finally deals directly with the repressed, adolescent homoeroticism of the lead male characters which was clear in his two previous films. However, it reads as something of a meta-Kevin Smith film, and while Smith’s dialogue shines through on many occasions (“Hey, I always notice the far-away look in her eyes”), the plot is contrived, and the film just seems too self-conscious and too wrapped up in Smith’s real-life preoccupations to be good in its own right.
By the time Dogma came out, though, Kevin Smith had apparently forgotten how to be funny and decided to be morose (though morose with lots of swearing). Dogma, like Chasing Amy, was a deeply personal film for Smith, but for a filmmaker whose fan base was fuelled by the wide-eyed nihilism of gen-x slackers, the film was ill-advised. Sure, a new generation of 15-year-olds will love the swearing, dick jokes and shit demon, and the quasi-religious and spiritually confused will love the pious message, but Smith’s early fans, if they were still hanging around by this point – after distracting forays into studio production and self-referential homoeroticism – would certainly be turned off by a film that not only has a message, but one strongly anchored in Smith’s always-present Christian beliefs, very much in strong contrast to the ideas and lifestyles of the characters in his debut.
In this respect, Smith’s films can been seen as an odyssey from the nothingness of nihilism to the somethingness of faith; unfortunately, both the laughs and the fans deserted him along the way.
It was quite a gradual process which started with indifference – I just stopped watching them – and then when I switched completely from VHS to DVD, I never bothered to replace his films with DVD versions. When Clerks X (a 10th anniversary edition of Smith’s debut film) was released, I went back and watched the film, and enjoyed the hell out of it. Having not seen any of his films for a good three years, I also had a look at Mallrats, Chasing Amy and Dogma… And that’s when it dawned on me: not only is this collection of work of quite poor quality, it is also remarkably strange oeuvre.
Clerks is undoubtedly the film that cut out a niche for Smith. It tells the story of two friends who work low-paid retail jobs in their hometown in small-town New Jersey. Filmed on a very small budget in the convenience store where Smith was working at the time, it’s a portrait of two young high school graduates who should have gone to university, but instead are happy loafing about, playing hockey, dealing with their love lives and harassing customers.
The film shows Smith’s lack of directorial style, though somewhat disguised beneath the restrictions of a low budget. But Smith has always been a writer more than a director and what stands out is the dialogue. Private contractors working on the Deathstar, Dante’s summing up of a woman’s role in sex, and, of course, the 36 dicks are all laugh-out-loud moments. The film seemed to be made to the gen-x, grunge generation of the early 90s: slackers, dick jokes, and general bad taste (including knocking over a coffin at a funeral and necrophilia), but even today there’s a lot to recommend the film. It has something of a naive charm and is genuinely very funny, something that later films would seem to forget.
Smith has claimed that Mallrats suffered from meddling producers and so he’s made himself bullet-proof to any criticism of that film. Chasing Amy, however, was much beloved and was a film that Smith very much wanted to make. Hailed on its release as Smith’s return to his indy roots after pissing about with $5,000,000 of studio money with his second film, it tells the story of a guy who falls in love with a lesbian and manages to convert her, only to find out that he wasn’t the first guy she was with and screw everything up. The most notable thing about the film is that Smith finally deals directly with the repressed, adolescent homoeroticism of the lead male characters which was clear in his two previous films. However, it reads as something of a meta-Kevin Smith film, and while Smith’s dialogue shines through on many occasions (“Hey, I always notice the far-away look in her eyes”), the plot is contrived, and the film just seems too self-conscious and too wrapped up in Smith’s real-life preoccupations to be good in its own right.
By the time Dogma came out, though, Kevin Smith had apparently forgotten how to be funny and decided to be morose (though morose with lots of swearing). Dogma, like Chasing Amy, was a deeply personal film for Smith, but for a filmmaker whose fan base was fuelled by the wide-eyed nihilism of gen-x slackers, the film was ill-advised. Sure, a new generation of 15-year-olds will love the swearing, dick jokes and shit demon, and the quasi-religious and spiritually confused will love the pious message, but Smith’s early fans, if they were still hanging around by this point – after distracting forays into studio production and self-referential homoeroticism – would certainly be turned off by a film that not only has a message, but one strongly anchored in Smith’s always-present Christian beliefs, very much in strong contrast to the ideas and lifestyles of the characters in his debut.
In this respect, Smith’s films can been seen as an odyssey from the nothingness of nihilism to the somethingness of faith; unfortunately, both the laughs and the fans deserted him along the way.
posted by Ryan Stephens at 2:19 PM
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