I Can't Stop Thinking About the Ending of Clerks III
I have a complicated parasocial relationship with Kevin Smith. He seems like a great guy, and a supremely friendly dude but over the years he’s had a weirdly antagonistic relationship with critics, including some that I’ve worked with.
Smith seems like he’d be tremendous fun to hang out with but I can’t say I have enjoyed very many of his films. So when I saw that I’d have to write up four of Smith’s films for The Fractured Mirror, my mammoth upcoming tome about movies about the film industry (that includes porn but not snuff films, as I have to draw the line somewhere and my book is only going to be 600 pages or so) in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, Jay and Silent Bob Reboot and Clerks III I was filled with both dread and anticipation.
Of the quartet of motion pictures Smith has made about the film industry, Zack and Miri Make a Porno is the only one I have not written about for the book yet and it is a film I fuzzily remember liking.
Yesterday I finally caught up with Clerks III and if you don’t mind having the second sequel to Smith’s 1994 breakthrough film spoiled I would like to have what an old therapist girlfriend would call a “process moment” over its ending.
Kevin Smith had a heart attack in 2018 that caused him to take a step back and re-examine his life and ask himself some tough questions like, “Am I smoking enough weed?” I kid! Incidentally, Smith has stopped smoking marijuana, something he has made as public as his copious former consumption of the weed with roots in hell. Mazel tov, Mr. Smith! Now he can properly appreciate his life of wealth, fame, power, friends, family and popularity without needing to be in a fog of intoxication all the time. As for me, I still need something to blur the edges of an often cruel, even psychotic world.
While researching Clerks III I read that Smith was at peace with dying when he had his heart attack until he realized that meant that his final film would be Yoga Hosers. That is a funny anecdote that fortunately or unfortunately also illustrates that Smith is a very entertaining dude and also that his movies are sometimes almost comically terrible.
Smith is a big believer in the idea that you should write what you know. So after having a heart attack in 2018 and filming the movie Clerks in 1994 Smith decided that in Clerks III wisecracking former video store clerk Randall Graves (Jeff Anderson) should have a heart attack that inspires him to make a movie just like Clerks.
Actually, the film-within-a-film isn’t a movie like Clerks. It fundamentally is Clerks. The scenes are the same. The jokes are the same. The people are the same. Hell, even the budget and original ending are the same.
It is, as you might imagine, wildly self-indulgent, an extended exercise in self-cannibalization. Yet in keeping with the vibe of Smith’s post-Yoga Hosers work there’s a naked emotional element to it I find oddly moving.
In Clerks III the characters from Clerks essentially make Clerks but with characters who are roughly three decades older than the ones in Clerks.
One of the things that I find fascinating about Smiths late-period work is his willingness, even eagerness, to wade into surprisingly heavy dramatic territory on a fairly regular basis.
This is true even of Smith’s central supporting role in Madness in the Method, a Jason Mewes-directed Jason Mewes vehicle where Jason Mewes plays Jason Mewes that I wrote about for The Fractured Mirror.
Mewes and Smith have at least one Cassevettes-style blowout that reminds me of Dante’s big monologue late in Clerks III’s third act where he unleashes his fury at Randall for being a terrible friend and taking him for granted.
Not long after delivering this big speech Dante has a fatal heart attack himself.
Dante ends up watching the movie that Randall ostensibly made all the same only instead of starring people in their late 40s and 50s he’s flat out watching the 1994 version of Clerks that Smith wrote, directed and starred in.
It should be the single most self-indulgent moment in the history of film. A character in a Kevin Smith movie is watching clips from an actual Kevin Smith movie and being moved almost to tears by its beauty and truth.
At first the scene feels like a cheat before you realize that Dante may be dead and in heaven and the line separating the world where Kevin Smith made a fictional movie called Clerks that over-achieved to the point that it is now included in the National Film Registry alongside the greatest and most important movies ever made, and The Goonies and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off as well, and the fictional world of the Clerks franchise has been erased completely.
We know that Dante is in heaven because he’s reunited with the ghost of the character Rosario Dawson played in Clerks II and Clerks III.
Clerks III only really makes sense as a feature-length tribute to Clerks. The Gen-X nostalgia is never greater or more powerful than when the lead character of Clerks is watching Clerks as the climax of Clerks III.
There’s something about seeing these characters when they were barely old enough to drink legally, in the movie that got Kevin Smith the hell out of New Jersey, that’s deeply touching. Everybody is beautiful when they’re young, even people who are objectively not beautiful.
Smith famously wanted to kill off Dante at the end of Clerks. That would have felt like an empty, nihilistic gesture coming at the end of Smith’s first film but it’s surprisingly powerful in this context.
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the end of Clerks III since I saw it, which, to be fair, was less than twenty-four hours ago. Yet this weirdly meta, heavy dramatic ending worked for me and makes the movie feel more satisfying and less ragingly inessential.
Killing off Dante also prevents the possibility of a Clerks 4 sometime around 2035 although I would not be at all surprised if the franchise is rebooted with a younger cast.
Smith can’t seem to leave these characters and this world alone, even after the shockingly moving conclusion of what I very much hope is the concluding entry in the Clerks trilogy.
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