Kevin Smith Is Unwell.

I’m worried abut Kevin Smith, you guys. I think he might be making the same film over and over again – and it wasn’t even that good in the first place. Correct me if I’m wrong, but here’s the formula: take one charmless no-hoper (who may well also be fat to create added autobiographical symmetry), give him a trite or predictable existential crisis (his wife has died – Jersey Girl; he hasn’t got enough money – Clerks 1, Clerks 2 and Zack and Miri Make A Porno; he loves a lesbian who doesn’t love him – Chasing Amy) and then get him together with a conveniently located, unfeasibly attractive girl who for some catastrophically inexplicable reason isn’t put off by his physical shortcomings and exhaustingly relentless talk of eating out her ass. This outcome represents both the resolution and ‘message’ of the film, because love, miraculous and painlessly obtained, enables the main guy to see that his shitty existence really isn’t so shitty after all.

It’s a weird message for a number of reasons. First and foremost the idea of this love-match coming into being, and then lasting, tests our credulity beyond breaking-point. Second, the inference that such a love match could ever exist in the real world will do no good and indeed potentially distort the outlook of the 14-25 year old males who comprise Smith’s target audience. If they believe even a tenth of what Smith’s films suggest about the ease with which love is attained, then it’s going to come as a bit of a shock when they discover that: a) smart, beautiful women don’t spend their thirties in shitty jobs in dead-end towns waiting for short, fat losers to get their shit together; b) women do not fall in love with men on the basis of them constantly talking about where and how they would like to fuck them; c) Smith’s self-serving, imaginatively foreclosed narcissism only works for him because he tapped, rather haplessly, into the lo-fi zeitgeist of the nineties.

But that’s not all. Smith’s films also say something fairly prescriptive and ultimately restrictive about men - namely that we’re all weak, priapic assholes who need women to redeem us. This is no doubt true on occasions, but not always – and it ignores the fact that, in the real world, the flow of redemption flows both ways and is called a relationship 

Then there’s the increasingly icky postulation of love as a redemptive force. In Clerks, the triumph of love at the end felt at least nominally earned through conflict between realistic (i.e. abysmally self-absorbed) characters and because its half-baked aesthetic imbued it with an ambiguity which seemed potentially meaningful (do we care if these people end up happy? Are we meant to?). Now, however, we can be under no illusions: the protagonist is our hero and the love which saves him is the only outcome which delivers any meaning. Hence we must now sit through the obligatory deus ex machina speech from the protagonist’s buddy (Randall, Jason Lee) about how you sometimes experience a moment which transforms everything, when some force comes along and changes your whole world, and which finally compels the sad sack to act.

Now, the overt analogy in these speeches is to romantic love, which the character is enjoined to accept from the smoking babe. But the miraculous, wholly implausible manifestation of secular love in Smith’s films is perhaps not merely an attempt to rationalise just how massively the director has lucked out in terms of his career: the miraculous appearance of redemptive love is also, I suspect, a clumsy metaphor for Smith’s own Catholicism. The director believes, I fear, that these sentimental denouements enable his films to work on two levels, overtly talking to the kids in a language they can understand (boobies! fellatio!) while subtextually placating his own conscience by spreading the word about the life-changing effect which REAL love (nudge, nudge, Jesus) can have.

Now, whether or not this is in fact true, I must point out here that I have no objection to the presence of Christian ideology in any film or art work. Done intelligently, with an assumed equality of intellect on the part of the audience, I love it (yay, Fellini!). What I object to is the way that Smith’s idea of love, whether romantic or divine, has completely supplanted the subversive appetite for questions and meaning which seemed to be present in Clerks and which endeared him to his fans. Of course, there is always a character arc of some kind for the protagonist, but it’s pretty token. We can tell the character doesn’t change or learn not just because in Clerks 2 we revisit Dante Hicks eleven years later and he hasn’t changed, but because this is the case in more or less all Smith’s films: we meet the same individual, more or less, in the same situation, more or less. Therefore, the ultimate message in Smith’s films is that love – which is neither earned nor understood, and which insinuates its way into one’s life like so many tears of Christ’s infinite mercy – is all you need wait for. This is a plastic and hollow pretence of meaning which actively undermines the genuine pursuit of truth or understanding, and if this is all that Smith’s philosophy has to offer – the redemption without the question, the subordination of free will to the immovable force – then it does not offer us very much.

Finally, this limitation of meaning is made all the more infuriating by the hypocrisy with which Smith seeks to conceal his mawkish sentimentality beneath a cloud of dick jokes. These gags are meant to persuade us that Smith is still one of us, rebellious and alternative. But, despite the fact that the jokes are often very good, the desperate distortion of the surface cannot help but draw our eye towards the yawning emptiness which lies beneath these characters and their paper-thin struggles. This is perhaps why my favourite Smith film is still Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back – because it’s entirely free from subtext.

There are, however, signs that things are changing and that Smith may finally be moving beyond his New Jersey comfort zone: the director recently released a buddy caper Cop Out and is currently filming a Gothic horror about Midwestern Fundamentalism gone wrong (Red State). Perhaps the demise of Miramax has something to do with it. Without the prop of the infamous fratboy studio and his heavyweight cronies (Tarentino, Rodriguez et al), Smith may finally be embarking on a new direction – and we wish him both a safe journey and a speedy recovery.  

Comments

[AKA]

I have a problem with CLERKS II, not only because I think it is his worst movie, but because it betrays the supposed epiphany that we are led to believe that Dante has at the end of CLERKS. Also: it's just not funny. How many conversations piddling around with the minutiae of STAR WARS do we need to endure? And he falls hard into the Woody Allen Suspension of Disbelief Detonator trap of having the shlubby loser doted upon by the smart, sassy, beautiful ambitious girl. I don't buy it...And, of course, he's ploughing the same turf over and over again to lesser effect.

Which isn't quite as depressing as COP OUT, which is a perfectly serviceable mediocre entertainment, but just staggeringly anonymous and forgettable. Even at his worst, at least there was the stamp of an author and you knew that you were watching "Un Film De Kevin Smith". But not with COP OUT.

I still hope that there is more to come from The Artist Formerly Known As Silent Bob than lazy dick jokes and STAR WARS references, and despite the disappointments of his last few films, I'm looking forward to RED STATE.

[Matt Phipps]

I still hope he does something different/surprising/worthwhile - but I grow increasingly sceptical as to its possibility. I did hear a lot of the negative things about Cop Out (including Smith's own impossibly juvenile and petulant rant in the comments section at the author of the Entertainment Weekly review: http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20346557,00.html), but didn't want to comment on it as I haven't seen it (and probably won't). The thought that his new direction will be a descent into anonymous banality is pretty chilling.

Anyway, I never really got over how arrogant and vile he was at that Q&A thing of his which we went to, although I think you missed the worst of his vitriol by heading off early. Then, seeing Zack and Miri relatively soon after Clerks 2 was just an abject no-brainer, and I felt so insulted I wrote lots of rude things down, nearly of which I've expunged from this piece. I completely agree with the auteur aspect of his work, btw - this was at the very least something to hang onto. I also really like the suspension of disbelief detonator idea - it is just right here. Finally, I'm secretly relieved you didn't disagree, as I fear invoking thine ire on film criticizmz. Cheers for commenting.