FALLING OUT OF THE CLOSET: KEVIN SMITH, QUEERNESS, AND
INDEPENDENT FILM
by
CARTER MICHAEL SOLES
A DISSERTATION
Presented to the Department of English
and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
September 2008
11
University of Oregon Graduate School
Confirmation of Approval and Acceptance of Dissertation prepared by:
Carter Soles
Title:
"Falling Out of the Closet: Kevin Smith, Queerness, and Independent Film"
This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for
the degree in the Department of English by:
Kathleen Karlyn, Chairperson, English
Jon Lewis, Member, Not from U of 0
Mary Wood, Member, English
Michael Aronson, Member, English
Janet Wasko, Outside Member, Journalism and Communication
and Richard Linton, Vice President for Research and Graduate StudieslDean of the Graduate
School for the University of Oregon.
September 6, 2008
Original approval signatures are on file with the Graduate School and the University of Oregon
Libraries.
© 2008 Carter Michael Soles
111
Carter Michael Soles
in the English Depmiment
An Abstract of the Dissertation of
for the degree of
to be taken
IV
Doctor of Philosophy
September 2008
Title: FALLING OUT OF THE CLOSET: KEVIN SMITH, QUEERNESS, AND
INDEPENDENT FILM
Approved:
Kathleen Rowe Karlyn
My dissertation argues that the film comedies of Kevin Smith, through their
willingness to depict and verbalize gender-bending, queer desire, and deviant sexual
practices, exemplify the role independent "slacker" cinema played in the 1990s explosion
of American queer media visibility. Couched in witty verbal comedy, Smith's films depict
the tensions and dangers Generation-X males face as they negotiate the culturally enforced
gap separating male homosociality (intense friendship, male bonding) fi"om explicit male-
male homoerotic desire in contemporary U.S. Clllture. The project takes Smith's career as a
metonym for independent slacker cinema (which includes films by Smith, Richard
Linklater, Jim Jallliusch, and Judd Apatow) and argues that Smith's films have been
successful because they tap into and exploit both the 1990s boom in independent queer
media production and the paliicular interests and needs of actual young white slackers,
including how these young men navigate tensions related not only to gender and sexuality
vbut also to race and class (all of which are evident in their taste for mainstream superhero
comics and the Star Wars films).
Chapter II argues that Smith's debut feature, Clerks (1994), exemplifies, through its
plot and fonnal elements, the homosocial buddy relation that suppresses male-male
homoerotic desire by channeling it into men's rivalries over women. The chapter exposes
the misogyny inherent to the slacker's homosocial group and discusses his fear/fascination
with masculine women such as domineering mothers, bossy girlfriends, and (in later Smith
films) lesbians. Chapter III argues that Mallrats (1995) shares key narrative propeliies and
subject matter with superhero comic books, thereby addressing the comic book fans who
largely constitute Smith's fan base. Chapter TV offers a bisexual reading of Smith's third
feature film, Chasing Amy (1997). Chapter V examines Smith's later films Dogma (1999),
and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001), arguing that they function genelically as queer
road movies. Chapter VI analyzes Smith's public persona as an indie cinema icon who
uses ironic, ambiguous modes of self-presentation to "have it both ways," maintaining an
appeal for both homophobic and queer-friendly audiences, thereby demonstrating Smith's
keen understanding of self-promotion and the economic structures of independent cinema.
VI
CURRICULUM VITAE
NAME OF AUTHOR: Carter Michael Soles
GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED:
University of Oregon, Eugene, OR
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
DEGREES AWARDED:
Doctor of Philosophy, English, Emphasis in Film Studies, 2008, University of
Oregon
Graduate Certificate in Women's and Gender Studies, 2008, University of Oregon
Master of Arts, English, 2004, University of Oregon
Bachelor of Arts, English, 1993, University of Southern California
AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST:
Film and Cultural Studies
Gender and Sexuality Studies
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:
Postdoctoral Instructor, Department of English, University of Oregon. 2008- 09.
Graduate Teaching Fellow, Department of English, University of Oregon. Fall
2003- Summer 2008.
Graduate Teaching Fellow, Women's and Gender Studies Program, University of
Oregon. Summer 2007.
GRANTS, AWARDS AND HONORS:
English Department Graduate Research Award, 2006-07
Center on Diversity and Community Graduate Research Grant, Summer 2006
Bruce M. Abrams Graduate Essay Award in LGBT Studies, 2005
Dan Kimble First Year Teaching Award, 2004
PUBLICATIONS:
Soles, Carter. "A Stalker's Odyssey: Arrested Development, Gay Desire, and
Queer Comedy in Chuck&Buck." Jump Cut 49, Spring 2007 (39 pps in
ms). <http://www.ejumpcut.org/home.html>
VB
V111
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter Page
1. INTRODUCTION: FALLIJ'JG OUT OF THE CLOSET 1
View Askew Productions Presents Dante 7
The Rise ofIndependent Slacker Cinema 15
Queering Slacker Cinema.............................................................................. 25
The Homosocial Continuum 29
Radical Incoherence....................................................................................... 31
Chapter Outlines 35
Notes 40
II. GENDER PLAY AND QUEER EROTICS: CLERKS (1994) 41
The Buddy Film: A Brief Queer History...................................................... 49
Erotic Triangles and Gender Play................................................................. 65
Masculine Women .. 71
Queer Male Sexuality 86
Dante and Randall: Syntax .. 96
Dante and Randal 2: Catharsis 101
Slackers and Dykes: Clerks, Queer Cinema, and Miramax in 1994............. 107
J'Jotes 117
III. FANBOYS AND CAPED CRUSADERS: MALLRATS (1995) 121
From Miramax to Universal 124
Genre, Gender, Queerness, and Race 127
Queer Affection and Rivalry................................................... 149
Intertextuality and Comic Book Culture 156
The Dynamic Duo: Batman and Robin 169
From Clerks to Mal/rats to Chasing Amy 181
Notes 184
Chapter
IV. UNSPOKEN BISEXUALITY: CHASING AMY (1997) .
Romantic Comedy: Chasing Amy and Annie Hall .
Male Melodrama .
J\Jew Triangulations .
Hooper X .
Unspoken Bisexuality .
The Comics Industry as Metonym for the Independent Cinema .
Notes .
V. RACING QUEERNESS ON THE ROAD: DOGMA (1999) AND JAY AND
SILENT BOB STmKE BACK (2001) .
Buddy Comedies and Road Movies ..
Superhero Comics, Queerness, and the Road ..
New Queer Road Movies .
Racing Queerness on the Road .
View Askew vs. Disney and Miramax .
Comedy, Controversy, and Queer Camp ..
Notes .
VI. "JUST ONE PLEASANTRY SHY OF A COCK IN THE MOUTH":
KEVIN SMITH'S QUEER STAR TEXT ..
Silent Bob Speaks .
Dueling Personas .
Real-Life Buddy Duos .
Marginalized Women .
Slacker versus Lesbian: "Chasing Amy Politics" ..
Snowball Effect: Working-class Hero versus Multimedia Mogul ..
J\Jotes .
IX
Page
188
198
206
216
223
237
248
257
259
265
268
284
291
302
312
321
324
333
350
355
369
374
390
402
Chapter
x
Page
405APPENDIX: SHOT LISTS .
REFERENCES 415
Xl
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure Page
1. Will Hunting Learns to Open Up Emotionally............................................. 3
2. The View Askew Transvestite Clown and Geeky Little Boy....................... 8
3. Dante Falls Out of the Closet 14
4. The Sang-Dante-Caitlin Erotic Triangle 69
5. A Queer Erotic Pyramid 70
6. Dante, Trapped Behind the Counter 73
7. Dante Is Rescued Just in Time by Super-Heroine Veronica 75
8. Veronica's Impressive "Package," Suggestive of Male Genitalia 77
9. Willam Black, aka "Snowball," Meets "Ronnie" and Her "Man," Dante.... 80
10. "I Love Women!" 88
11. Jay Plays a Visual Joke on Randal................................................................ 92
12. Choke-Hold and/or Fellatio? 102
13. Dante Admits That "The FDS Stings" 103
14. Mallrats Erotic Triangle #1 131
15. Mallrats Erotic Triangle #2 132
16. Jay and Silent Bob with Suzanne the Orangutan ,'................................ 136
17. T.S. and the First Stagehand Flank Mr. Svenning 144
18. Another, Stronger Visual Parallel 145
19. Shannon and Brodie Get Intimate During a Fight 154
20. Silent Bob as Batman the Voyeur 177
21. The Banky-Alyssa-Holden Erotic Triangle 218
22. Hooper X Shoots Banky 224
23. Hooper Kneels Down, Placing His Symbolic Phallus in Banky's Face 226
24. Alyssa Chases Hooper Out of a Three-Shot with Holden and Banky 228
25. The Swings, a Key Site for Holden and Alyssa's Relationship 241
26. Holden's Three-Way Proposal Schematized Via a Three-Shot 246
27. Jay and Silent Bob in Freeze-Frame 262
28. Morris Day and Jerome Benton Onstage 262
29. The Closing Freeze-Frame Shot of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid... 263
30. Jay's "Soapbox" Declaration in Chasing Dogma 280
XlI
Figure Page
31. "Ooh What A Lovely Tea Party" 289
32. Silent Bob's Knowing Look at the Camera Tells All 290
33. "Bodyguard" Silent Bob Bids on "Pimp" Jay's Behalf 295
34. Serendipity's Glasses and Thumb-Sucking 297
35. Jay and Silent Bob Look on as Kane's Gang Attacks the Poop Demon 299
36. Jay's Fantasy of Justice 308
37. Justice Wears Glasses, Rendering Her Geek-Friendly 311
38. Two View Askew Fans Dress Up as Silent Bob and Jay............................. 325
39. Kevin Smith Mimics Puppeteering / Fisting Jason Mewes 364
40. Lela, the Out Lesbian Audience Member 378
41. Smith Gets Defensive 379
Xlll
LIST OF TABLES
Table Page
1. Mallrats' Dual Address 127
2. Buddy Pairs in Clerks and Mallrats 129
3. Buddy Pairs in Clerks, Mallrats, and Chasing Amy..................................... 220
4. What Silent Bob Says 343
5. Buddy Pairs in Clerks, Mallrats, and Chasing Amy, Expanded 353
6. Commentary Track Participants on the First Five View Askew DVDs 370
1CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION: FALLING OUT OF THE CLOSET
"Indeed, much of what we call 'independent' film in this country has been queer, and the history of film
production outside of the studio system has everything to do with the development of a queer cinema"
(Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity 186).
White masculinity has been in crisis for some time. Of course, any identity
category that assumes a position of power and privilege over all others and attempts to
maintain that position by rendering its centrality invisible and "natural" accepts a very
daunting task indeed. Hence cinema and other popular forms of media have documented
and metaphorized the various failures of white masculinity to live up to its own projected
ideal of complete mastery over Wetem culture and its non-white-male subjects. In
Masked Men Steven Cohen analyzes 1950s Hollywood cinema's representations ofa
white masculinity always already in crisis, concluding in his opening chapters that "the
fifties' standard of normative masculinity was an incoherent portrait of the typical
American male, not fully aligned to the social interests it authorized. [...] [Fifties
cinema] calls into question whether masculinity can ever be assumed to be a coherent and
singular, not to say authentic, condition in culture" (xi, 33). In the 2002 documentary
2film Tough Guise, masculinity scholar Jackson Katz discusses the societal changes that
have impacted and modified the "tough" form of classical Western masculinity since the
1960s, most notably the increased recognition of the rights and humanity of non-whites,
women, and non-straights brought on by the Civil Rights, Women's, and Gay and
Lesbian movements of the 1960s and 70s. Beset by traditionally subordinate groups
clamoring for their rights and making steady legal and cultural headway in this area, the
American white male finds himself increasingly "outed" as a privileged power-monger
who sits (uncomfortably) at the top of a precarious and morally questionable
socioeconomic pyramid. And, as Katz's analysis reveals, that privileged white male
seems to have risen to his position via toughness, a willingness to violently dominate all
comers who stand in his way. This classical form of tough and violent white masculinity
is best exemplified by the onscreen cinematic image of actor John Wayne, and, in a form
of cultural backlash against the gains of the various liberation movements in the 1970s,
was revisited with a vengeance in the 1980s by conservative U.S. President and former
film actor Ronald Reagan.
This mask or "tough guise" of classic masculinity is of course an idealized fiction,
and while it still has a profound impact upon how most Western menfeel they ought to
live and behave, in fact it sits rather uncomfortably on most males in our culture. Katz
acknowledges this fact in Tough Guise and, interestingly, points to the 1998 film Good
Will Hunting as an example of a media representation of an alternate form of non-violent
and positive masculinity. Good Will Hunting depicts a mathematically brilliant young
man, Will Hunting (Matt Damon), who, with the help of a sensitive male therapist (Robin
3Williams), confronts his childhood abuse and learns to start opening up to other people
and to accept his great intellectual gifts (see Figure I). Katz claims that protagonist Will
Hunting'S struggle to release his inner pain and learn to connect with others metaphorizes
the plight of all men trapped behind the "tough guise" who must pretend not to be
vulnerable or have feelings, revealing their emotions only through antisocial violence and
rage.
Figure 1: Will Hunting learns to open up emotionally to his male therapist.
Indeed, Good Will Hunting provides an exemplary depiction of a more sensitive
and emotionally vulnerable form of contemporary masculinity, in part because it is the
product of a group of Generation X males invested in exploring classic masculinity's
failings and possible alternatives in the 1990s and the new millennium. The film was
4written by and stars real-life buddy duo Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and found
theatrical distribution through independent distributor Miramax largely due to the efforts
ofa third buddy of Affleck's and Damon's, New Jersey independent writer/director
Kevin Smith. Well-known for being generous toward his male friends, Smith lobbied
Miramax CEO Harvey Weinstein to finance Good Will Hunting after numerous studios
turned it down and initial distributor Castle Rock put the film's script in turnaround:
"Within a day of getting the [Hunting] script from Smith, [Miramax's] Weinstein offered
$1 million for it, with Damon and Affleck attached [as actors]" (Biskind 284,286).
Of course, part of the reason for Smith's generosity in this matter was his affinity
for the Hunting script itself, which is a slightly more dramatic and heterosexualized
version of many of his own films' screenplays. Both Good Will Hunting and Smith's
work feature male protagonists who are geeks: whiny, effeminate, yet intelligent and
creative young men who are somewhat tragically (in Good Will Hunting or Smith's
Chasing Amy) and/or comedically (in Smith's Clerks) trapped in a dead-end
neighborhoods and jobs. The implication is always that, due to his substantial yet largely
untapped intelligence and emotional sensitivity, this geek will one day escape his
suburban, lower-class origins and go to college or some other place where his gifts will
be recognized and cultivated. Will Hunting literally realizes this dream: at the end of
Good Will Hunting he drives away from his Boston neighborhood to the West Coast,
where college and a loving girlfriend (Minnie Driver) await him.
Smith's films, with the partial exception of Chasing Amy, tend to deny their
protagonists this "happy" outcome, leaving their geek protagonists in a state of suspended
5adolescence, forever joined to their slacker buddy sidekicks. For what Smith's offbeat
oeuvre emphasizes, and what Good Will Hunting, in its bid for mainstream recognition,
largely elides, is the extreme destabilization of the gender and sexual status of Gen X
males who embrace these new, more emotionally vulnerable forms of masculinity. A site
of particular danger in this regard is the male-male buddy relation at the heart of these
(and so many other) films: once one buddy (the geek) starts accepting his emotional
sensitivity and dispensing with the need to hide behind Katz's "tough guise," all manner
of feelings can potentially emerge, including male-male homoerotic desire between these
closely bonded buddy pairs. This sexual danger is amplified by the predilictions of the
geek's clownish slacker sidekick, who, in his need to cling more desperately to the tough
guise of classical Western masculinity, often presents himself as a hypersexualized
ladies' man or, in the films of Smith, an outright sexual pervert who simply cannot get
enough pornography and/or sexually explicit talk. Hence, the two buddies enable each
other in a homoerotic iflargely subconscious way. The geek refuses classical
masculinity in favor of increased emotional sensitivity, thereby feminizing himself. The
slacker sidekick clings to classic masculinity but queers this masculinity through his
over-obsession with sex: his sexuality is excessive and spills over the boundaries of the
heterosexual, into the "deviant" or queer. And vis-a-vis each other, the geek's femininity
makes him a more "legitimate" target for the queer slacker's homoerotic desires: ifhe is
queer, at least the slacker remains the more "male" of the two buddies and thus has an
easier time deflecting and disavowing his queerness in the eyes of the public. He can
(attempt to) mask his deep love for his geek buddy under the guise of "male bonding."
6In its head-on depiction of the queering and feminizing of Generation-X
masculinity, 1990s independent "slacker" cinema, of which Smith's work is a key
exemplar, documents the tensions and dangers Generation-X males face as they negotiate
the culturally enforced gap separating male homosociality (intense friendship, male
bonding) from explicit male-male homoerotic desire in contemporary U.S. culture.
My project takes its title, "Falling out of the Closet," from the opening scene of
Smith's debut film, Clerks (1994). The film is a low-budget, black-and-white comedy
about two under-achieving clerk buddies who spend a day engaging in all kind of illicit
and often sexually unusual hijinks while at work. The opening scene depicts geeky
protagonist Dante literally falling out of a closet in which he has just spent the night. Not
only is Dante's groggy slump halfway out the closet door emblematic of the strange,
semi-conscious nature of the Generation X male's engagement with his own
closetedness, Dante falls out of the closet in response to a phone call from his
convenience store boss. Economic concerns draw him out. This serves as a metaphor for
the trajectory of Kevin Smith's cinematic work, which trades on its half-closeted
queerness to stay edgy, funny, and financially viable in the independent feature film
marketplace of the 1990s and 2000s.
My dissertation analyzes the film comedies of Kevin Smith, arguing that their
willingness to depict and verbalize gender-bending, queer desire, and deviant sexual
practices is exemplary of the key role independent "slacker" cinema played in the general
increase of American queer media visibility over the 1990s. Through witty verbal
comedy, Smith's films depict the real tensions and dangers Generation-X male slackers
7face as they attempt to negotiate the culturally enforced gap that separates male
homosociality (intense friendship, male bonding) from explicit male-male homoerotic
desire and homosexuality in contemporary U.S. culture. The project takes Smith's career
as a metonym for independent slacker cinema (which includes films by Smith, Richard
Linklater, Jim Jarmusch, and Judd Apatow) and argues that Smith's films have been
successful because they tap into and exploit both the 1990s boom in independent queer
media production and the particular interests and needs of actual young white slackers,
including how these young men navigate tensions related not only to gender and
sexuality but also to race and class (all of which are evident in their taste for mainstream
superhero comics and the Star Wars films). The project analyzes Smith's savvy
marketing of his own persona in this queer media milieu and exposes his keen
understanding of the economic structures of independent cinema and, increasingly,
mainstream media as well.
View Askew Productions Presents ... Dante
The first few minutes ofKevin Smith's debut feature film, Clerks (1994), say a
great deal about how this important independent filmmaker and his body of work
negotiate male feminization and homoerotics in the 1990s.
The film opens with an animated pre-credits sequence that depicts a seated male
baby tossing a ball from hand to hand as an older adult male clown enters from the left
side of the frame and walks behind the baby to a privacy screen at the right of the frame
to change clothes. Once he changes out of his clown garb, he emerges from behind the
8screen in full drag, complete with a silly conical hat, garters, and a film clapper (see
Figure 2).
I,. f
\,;"./ ",
:...., -r
. '-. i J,R .
.~'.'
JU· - :.
Figure 2: The View Askew transvestite clown and geeky little boy.
The baby boy tossing the ball back and forth represents the polymorphous
perversity or inherent bisexuality of children, also standing in for the arrested
development male or boy who refuses to grow up. Further, this young boy wears glasses,
aligning him with our geek figure. The clown stands in for the geek's slackerish sidekick
and reinforces the arrested-development motif, for clowns occupy a strange, liminal
space between childhood and adulthood. Clowns are adults whose work requires them to
paint their faces, act foolishly and engage in games and play in order to entertain
children, which puts them in constant contact with kids and thereby casts potential
9aspersions upon their motives and sexuality. This taboo aspect of what clowns represent
vis-a-vis children is indicated in the downfall of fictional television character Pee-wee
Herman, which was predicated on the public revelation of the (perverse) sexuality of Pee-
wee creator Paul Reubens: "[O]nce Reubens queered the deal by being sexual in public,
his market value as Pee-wee was nil [...]. After the arrest [of Reubens for masturbating
in an adult theater], [...] kids + sex + Pee-wee equaled [...] a playground for
homophobic fantasies" (Doty, Making Things 97). Like Paul Reubens, clowns are
typically adults who (we can presume) have reached sexual maturity. Yet a fear-
generating stigma-why does this adult love to spend so much time with children?-
adheres to the clown performer's sexuality: he is easily suspected of erotically desiring
young children, and sexuality plus children equals something forbidden and abhorrent in
American culture, as Pee-Wee' s case illustrates. And as we shall see, the View Askew
clown plays upon that cultural fear of polymorphous child sexuality when he emerges
from behind the privacy screen dressed in full drag.
As for the image and cultural role of the clown, John H. Towsen links the modem
professional whiteface clown to the broader tradition of the fool, a figure who appears in
many non-European cultures and plays a central role in medieval European carnivals.
The fool or clown has proven to be a lasting cultural embodiment of unrestrained
playfulness and reversal of social hierarchies, as evinced by his prevalence in the plays of
Shakespeare (e.g., The Fool in King Lear, Feste in Twelfth Night, Falstaff in Henry IV,
and many others) and in cinematic comedies dating from the silent era (e.g., Chaplin's
Tramp). As Towsen writes:
10
The fool's characteristic traits are very much those of 'natural' man.
Lacking social graces and blissfully operating outside the laws of logic, he
is often seen as a child or even an animal, but only rarely as a mature
adult-his perceptions are too crudely structured, his use of language a
parody of normal speech. Unimpressed with sacred ceremonies or the
power ofrulers, he is liable to be openly blasphemous and defiant;
uninhibited in sexual matters, he often delights in obscene humor. (5)
This passage is a near-perfect description of Jay, who makes up for his buddy Silent
Bob's verbal reticence by being overly talkative, crude, fascinated with scatological and
sexual humor, and certainly quite childlike. Further, Jay speaks almost entirely in
language appropriated from black hip-hop culture, which loosely fits Towsen's
description of the fool as speaking in a "parody of normal speech" and reveals the cross-
racial appropriation the Generation X slacker clown frequently engages in in order to
ensure his hipness.
Towsen also distinguishes two separate types of fool that, as we shall see, offer
insight into how Smith's films construct their central slacker / geek buddy pairs: "A
formal distinction is [...] often made between 'natural' and 'artificial' fools. In the first
category is the legitimate idiot, in the second an entertainer who plays the role of the
fool" (Towsen 6). This division is helpful for delineating the two key (and interrelated)
figures that appear with remarkable ubiquity in 1990s independent cinema, particularly in
its slacker variant: the nerdy, creative geek and the disaffected, clownish slacker. In
Towsen's terms, the 1990s geek is an artificial fool: he is, in actuality, intelligent,
11
creative, and driven to organize his slacker friends into groups that can help him fulfill
his ambitious plans. He makes jokes, hangs out with slackers, and fantasizes about being
as carefree and rebellious as his slacker counterpart(s), but is ultimately driven to create
and succeed. Smith himself is such a geek, as are all his protagonists, including Clerks'
Dante, Chasing Amy's Holden, and Smith's own onscreen alter ego, Silent Bob. Never
far from the creative, artificially foolish geek is his clownish slacker buddy, a natural fool
who resists productivity and earnest emotional engagement for fear of appearing uncool
in the ironic, post-modem period in which he lives. Cynical, snarky, and comedic in the
extreme, the true slacker includes all of Smith's films' buddy sidekicks, such as Randal,
Banky, and most famously, Silent Bob's "heterosexual life mate" Jay.
The use of a clown and a very young child, then, in View Askew's opening
animated logo sequence plays upon the associations of clowns with arrested
development, possible queer sexuality, and the liminality of sexualized children and
clowns in general. For as Towsen notes, clowns, fools, and jesters occupy an "uncertain
social position" (27) that is meant to both entertain and yet discomfort other people
through direct confrontation of taboo subjects (27). Often fuctioning as a cultural "safety
valve" for the release of repressed libidinous energy, clowns are nevertheless relegated to
a subordinate position in hierarchical societies, dependent upon the leniency of more
politically powerful figures in the culture for their sustenance and survival (15, 27).
Furthermore, clowns, especially the whiteface clowns popular in our own period, often
inspire fear and terror in the very children they are meant to entertain. l
12
Yet the clown in the View Askew animated sequence seems relatively benign,
and the young boy with the ball takes little notice of him as he enters the scene and
crosses to behind the privacy screen to change, emerging seconds later in his drag outfit.
This is obviously some kind ofdressing room, yet it is unclear whether the older clown's
outfit and coy behavior-the sashaying walk and mischievous facial expression-after he
emerges from behind the screen indicates that this is what he wears privately at home or
ifhe is preparing for a public drag show or some other event. One clue to this may be
that part of the older man's drag costume includes the film clapper, which links imagery
of transvestitism, a form of gender deviance, to a key icon representing the practice of
cinema production. The overall implication is that there is something very queer indeed
about View Askew Productions, its personnel, and its cinematic output. 2
Further, the privacy screen at the right of frame hides the space wherein the older
man undergoes his transformation from clown to drag queen, and interestingly that space
is conflated with the View Askew Productions logo once the screen disappears. Hence,
"View Askew Pro. due. tions" literally occupies a space where clowns become drag
queens, suggesting that there is a gendered and sexualized dimension to clownishness and
comedy that View Askew's displacement of the privacy screen symbolically exposes to
us. In short, the disappearance of the protecting screen, which can be read here as a
stripping away of the boundary between the normatively "proper" (or visible) and the
deviant1y "improper" (usually kept invisible), suggests that "View Askew Pro. due. tions"
will use its comedic perfomance(s) to render visible-and performatively flaunt-what is
typically kept hidden out of a sense of propriety.
13
Following this animated introduction, the second half of Clerks' opening
sequence depicts Dante, the film's geeky protagonist, falling out of his own closet in
response to a ringing phone (see Figure 3). His dog is on the bed, while he sleeps in the
closet - hence the dog is the alpha male, and Dante is feminized before we even see him
onscreen. What's more, Dante's whiny-ness during the phone call marks him as
femininely submissive, a trait that will stand out even more dramatically once his
counterpart, the traditionally masculine yet sexually queer Randal, shows up later in the
film.
As for the image of Dante falling out of the closet, queer literary critic Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick has famously noted that "[t]he closet is the defining structure for gay
oppression in this century" (Epistemology 71) and certainly Smith and his View Askew
team are counting upon the prevalence of the closet as an emblem of homosexual
existence in order for their visual joke to work. Interestingly, Dante falls out of the closet
as a result of the phone ringing: an economic summons to come out and "perform" in his
public role as an ostensibly straight clerk. The suggestion here is that for a feminized
geek like Dante, even getting up to go to work in the morning involves a complex
negotiation between in-ness and out-ness with respect to the closet he sleeps in.
This sequence is important not just because it begins and thus sets the tone for the
rest of the film. It is also given special emphasis due to the sequence of its intertitles, i.e.,
"View Askew Productions Presents" followed by "Dante": View Askew is presenting us
with Dante before it presents us Clerks, and I read Dante's arrival via the closet as being
particularly significant in this light. Even if we dismiss or laugh off the drag queen
14
clown in the animated logo sequence, Smith and View Askew have made sure we won't
miss the point here: that what View Askew is presenting is nothing less than the queering
of the' 90s slacker male, embodied here by Dante as he falls out of the closet.
Figure 3: Dante falls out of the closet.
True, Dante's fall is semi-conscious and constitutes a visual joke, and there is a
sense in the scene that Dante is barely aware of his surroundings or what he's doing.
However, this is the most common way male-male homoerotic behavior is depicted in
Western narrative cinema: as a result of drunkenness, bizarre circumstances, accidents,
and/or comic hijinks. Vito Russo notes that numerous male cinematic comedy duos have
played upon this trope, including Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, and Martin and
Lewis (The Celluloid Closet 73). "Temporary transvestite" comedies like Billy Wilder's
15
Some Like It Hot (1959) present practically the limit case of the "unconscious queer man"
gag, since male cross-dressing and its attendant queerness catalyze these films' entire
narrative. To take more contemporary examples, I think of the shirtless wrestling scene
between Jesse and Chester in Dude Where's My Car? wherein the two stoner buddies
play their homoerotic attraction to each other for laughs, or of the way Heath Ledger's
character, Ennis Del Mar, is drawn into erotic relations-by the significantly named Jack
Twist-in Brokeback Mountain: the two cowboys are drunk and trapped in isolated
conditions, as if to suggest that their shared sexual love would never have happened if
Del Mar were sober and in town. This suggests the role conscious repression plays in
negotiating the closet, highlighting the fact that the closet is primarily an internal psychic
space that defines the queer man even if or when he decides consciously to "come out."
It is Dante's unconscious that leads him to fall out of the closet, in a habitual response to
a ringing phone. Yet Dante remains consciously closeted, unaware of the possibility that
he might have desires that are not heteronormative or gender identifications that are not
typically masculine. In this sense he is exemplary of Smith's geeky slackers and of the
Generation X queer male slacker writ large.
The Rise of Independent Slacker Cinema
According to Geoff King, the boom in American independent film production in
the late 1980s and early 1990s came about due to "[t]he gradual establishment of an
industrial infrastructure, particularly in distribution" (King 9), an infrastructure that was
established and subsequently dominated by two key corporate players: the Sundance Film
16
Festival and the independent distributor Miramax Corporation. Hence, despite the
important and influential early contributions of 1980s indie filmmakers like David Lynch,
Jim Jarmusch, Hal Hartley, Spike Lee, and documentarian Michael Moore, many
scholars and journalists agree that the 1990s indie boom really began in earnest in 1989
with Miramax's first major mainstream hit, Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies, and videotape.
I will discuss the rise of Miramax and the significance of sex, lies at length in Chapter II,
but for now suffice to say that I accept 1989 as the general starting point for independent
cinema as I analyze it in this study.
Kevin Smith's career takes place within, and is in many ways emblematic of, the
American independent cinema movement of the 1990s. As Geoff King and others have
pointed out, the term "independent cinema" is always a dependent term that can only be
understood in relation to the larger Hollywood studio system: '''Independence' is a
relative rather than an absolute quality and can be defined as such at the industrial and
other levels" (9). I agree with King's definition for two main reasons: (1) It identifies
that there is always a relationship between the major studios and the independent sector,
that each needs the other against which to define itself, and (2) It establishes criteria for
independence that include both industrial factors-who produces, distributes, and
exhibits the film-and also "other levels" such as aesthetics, formal properties, thematic
content, and considerations of genre.
This latter distinction is key, for I agree with King that "[i]ndustrial factors are
important, but do not provide the only grounds for definition of the particular varieties of
filmmaking to which the label independent has most prominently been attached in recent
17
decades" (9). Such a multi-faceted definition of independence is important to my study
of Kevin Smith, for while Smith's early career could hardly be more exemplary of
economic / industrial independence-he made Clerks for $27,000 in personal funds with
an unpaid skeleton crew in suburban New Jersey-King's definition allows me to
consider Smith as an independent filmmaker throughout his subsequent rise to niche-
market popularity, even after he began working with $10 million budgets and A-list
actors. This is appropriate in this case since Smith's screenwriting style, fictional
universe, and core team of collaborators do not change significantly from the time of
Clerks (1994) through to the release of its sequel, Clerks 11, in 2006. Hence there is no
need to revoke Smith's independent status simply because his budgets, and dealings with
mainstream production companies and practices, increase after the cult success of Clerks.
His queer thematic concerns, extremely vulgar language, and many aspects of his low-
budget style remain intact throughout the duration of his oeuvre. Further, Smith himself
resolutely identifies as an independent filmmaker and has worked hard to maintain his
indie credibility in the face of View Askew's escalating budgets and increased
subcultural success.
Smith's career is thus indicative as one other possible definition of the term
"independent": that of indie film itself as a genre. As King writes:
'Independent cinema' is itself a term that asserts a distinction from the
Hollywood mainstream, [...J one that has sometimes, ifloosely, implied
the status of something like a genre [...J in its own right. Ifwe ask what
18
category Clerks and Slacker primarily belong to, [...] the answer might
be 'low-budget, first-feature indie production' [.. .]. (195)
King's use of "might" in the last sentence is suggestive: his designation of 'low-budget,
first-feature indie production' fits, yet these two key films also belong to the newly
emerging 1990s genre of the slacker film / slacker comedy. Indeed, King's misgivings
about low-budget indie-as-genre are reinforced by his next sentence: "Whether such a
category merits the term 'genre' is open to question" (195). I agree that it is hard to
establish a clear set of conventions that might distinguish the "indie film" as a bone/ide
genre, yet I ackowledge that in a market where independent and studio-produced fare is
increasingly difficult to differentiate, the idea of indie-as-genre can be a useful concept,
particularly when discussing a filmmaker like Smith.
In terms of more conventional genre classifications, American independent
cinema of the 1990s is characterized by a wide variety of films and genres, including
many works that defy or subvert easy generic classification. As King writes, producing
films within recognizable genres has been central to marketing contemporary
independent cinema:
Genre functions as a marketing device, a way of selling a package for
which the existence of an audience has already been demonstrated, [...]
[thus] [w]orking within existing genre frameworks, even if complicating
them, has always been an important way of making independent
productions possible, because of the greater likelihood of securing an
19
audience to ensure financial viability; or, at least, of convincing backers
that this is likely. (191-2)
Indeed, the low-budget independent film sector has been a key location for the production
of enduring low-budget genre fare since at least the late 1960s, when the horror genre in
particular saw some of its most enduring masterworks, such as Night ofthe Living Dead
(1968), Last House on the Left (1972), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), and Dawn
ofthe Dead (1978), produced on incredibly low budgets outside the studio system. It
makes sense that marginal and culturally "lower" genres like horror and comedy should
be produced at the margins of the Hollywood system, both for economic reasons and also
in terms of content: the graphic, grotesque, and often quite socially transgressive images
and themes of horror and comedy would be difficult to find support for in a studio
context. And while low-budget horror arguably had its boom period from 1968 to
roughly 1983, the more recent late-80s and 1990s boom of independent features include a
great number of works and filmmakers who primarily work in (often dark) comedy,
including David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, Richard Linklater, and, of course, Kevin Smith.
In part this tendency to produce traditionally "lower" genre fare like comedies
occurs because independent distributors market their films based upon the perceived
differences between independent and studio products. Since mainstream studios have the
market cornered on socially serious dramas and big-budget spectacle films, edgy content
and/or unusual stylistic approaches are aspects of independent productions that can be
used to attract a certain kind of filmgoing audience that eschews more mainstream fare.
20
However, despite its need to maintain the appearance of difference vis-a-vis
mainstream cinema, in the end, independent distributors, like their major studio
counterparts, are in business to sell films and make money. Thus, like the major studios,
independent producers and distributors attempt to figure out certain formulas or genres
that will consistently draw audiences and make money, and this can over time lead to a
few types of film dominating the indie sector and making it more difficult for more
controversial, experimental, or otherwise atypical films to find audiences or distribution.
So, for example, while the indie film movement played home to the highly influential
group of films that became known as the New Queer Cinema, and while those films
proved that there was at least a limited market for out queer cinema, Christina Lane
points out that in terms of market share and public profile, the 1990s indie scene is
dominated by two other main genres of film: "From development to reception, the male-
oriented gangster or thriller genres [exemplified by the work of Quentin Tarantino], and
the quirky 'loser' film [by the likes of Richard Linklater and Kevin Smith], have helped
to condition major independent studios' ideas about what makes money and what makes
film sense" (204). Lane concludes that this gender imbalance is due to structural sexism
within the industry, and that independent female writer/directors (not to mention directors
of color) have not fared nearly as well as their white male counterparts in the 1990s
independent film marketplace. Obviously, as a leading, iconic filmmaker in the "quirky
'loser' film" genre, Smith and his team have benefited from this structural inequity and
the industry's preference for 'loser' or slacker cinema.
21
Independent slacker cinema is a particularly Generation X phenomenon, in large
part because "slacker" is a term that came into parlance around 1990, around the time that
the greatest statistical number of Gen Xers were coming of age, and is the term most
commonly used to broadly describe this generation by its Baby Boomer predecessors.
Following William Strauss and Neil Howe, I define Generation X as that generation of
persons born between 1961 and 1981, inclusive (Ritchie 16). Unlike the Boomers, who
grew up defining themselves in terms of the Vietnam War, the Nixon White House, and
the various social protest movements of the 1960s, Gen-Xers have grown up in a United
States characterized by problems such as "crime, guns, drugs, or all three" and, thanks to
the advent and widespread dissemination of cable television and personal computers
during the late 1970s and 1980s, an increasingly digital media-saturated environment
(Ritchie 18, Hanson 18-19). As Peter Hanson argues in The Cinema ofGeneration X,
"Gen-X directors [...] seem more concerned with blending layers of fiction than with
pursuing realism, and this tendency to employ ironic storytelling has everything to do
with how Gen Xers have been bombarded with incessant information since their youth"
(14). In fact, according to Hanson, not only did the Gex-X phenomenon of "latchkey
kids" contribute to greater levels of exposure to television for Gen Xers, but the advent of
cable TV and "infotainment" programming substantially changed the Xer's relationship
to media: "The infotainment explosion is a crucial parallel to Gen Xers' television
addiction, because in addition to being exposed to nonstop junk culture, Gen Xers were
given countless opportunities to peer behind the curtain of said junk culture. These
opportunities helped produce unprecedented media-related savviness" (Hanson 19).
22
Incredibly media savvy yet not nearly as politically idealistic as the Boomers, the Gen
Xers were quickly labeled as apathetic by the preceding generation, and perhaps as an act
of defiance, took up the name "slacker" as a form of resistant self-identification.
For one look at perhaps the defining cinematic text of slackerism, Richard
Libnklater's Slacker (1991), reveals that Gen Xers may not in fact be as apathetic or
politically disengaged as Boomers might think. As one of the many anonymous
characters in Linklater's film puts it, "withdrawing in disgust is not the same thing as
apathy," thus framing slackerism as a potentially conscious act of protest against the
social and political world the Boomers created. And Bob Guccione Jr., editor and
publisher of Spin magazine, argues that the labeling of Generation X as apathetic is both
inaccurate and the result of Boomer propaganda:
[T]he personification of Generation X [as shiftless and indifferent] was a
deliberate propaganda campaign intended to make young people seem less
desirable to employers, thus preserving jobs and career options for the
Boomers, and slowing the next generation's succession to power. (qtd. in
Ritchie ix)
But unfair mislabeling or no, the "slacker" moniker has certainly stuck to Generation X,
and now the term describes a particular Gen-X (and now, additionally, Gen-Y) quality of
resisting traditional nine-to-five career-oriented work in favor of a lower-key lifestyle
that involves low-paying "McJobs" and/or unemployment, some degree of interest or
obsession with popular culture, and frequently, pot smoking and other unofficial or illegal
forms of entertainment. Slackerism could be seen as the delinquency of the 1990s,
23
inflected into a slightly older (twenty- to thirtysomething) arrested-development age
bracket.
Yet slackers are almost always accompanied by geeks, and indeed geek culture, in
the form of science fiction, computers, superhero comic books, video garnes, etc., is
deeply imbricated with the grunge music and pot smoking culture of 1990s slackers. In
fact, we can say that to some extent geeks are productive, conformist slackers or that
slackers are cynical, nonconformist geeks. Certainly in the films of Kevin Smith the line
between these two character types get a bit overlapped and blurry at times, yet key
characteristics distinguish the geek, who may be a type that predates Generation X, from
the Gen X slacker.
The main characteristic that differentiates the geek from his slacker counterpart is
that geeks can "sell out" and become students, nine-to-five workers, filmmakers, and/or
cultural taste-makers because they never resist the system in the first place. Geeks are
good workers and social conformists who respond to social marginalization by working
harder and becoming creative. As a prolific screenwriter and creator, Kevin Smith is
himself such a geek, as are most of his film's protagonists-the slight exception being
Clerks' Dante, who is a geek in all other particulars but who resists leaving his
convenience store job in order to get out to college and develop his talents.
Extrafilmically, geeks playa key role, perhaps the key role in the production of
the "rise of the slacker" phenomenon. For this is capitalism: if something "rises," it is
because it makes money, and the key filmmakers of slacker cinema-Smith, Linklater,
Jim Jannusch, and more recently Judd Apatow-all appear to be highly productive and
24
market-savvy geeks who surround themselves and fill their cinematic narratives with
groups of male slackers. In fact, there is often hero-worship or a wanna-be quality that
adheres to the geek's perception of the slacker: for example, in Clerks Randal (the
unapologetic slacker) tells Dante (the geeky underachiever) "you know I'm your hero"
and Dante never contradicts him. In fact, Dante obviously admires Randal's devil-may-
care quality even though it frequently gets him into trouble. William Miller (Patrick
Fugit) is in the same position in Gen-X director Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous
(2000): he is an underaged, geeky journalist who loves the band he is touring with, who
wants to hang out with the musicians and be considered "cool" like them, but he worries
too much about his domineering mom and his writing deadline, and therefore, as Lester
Bangs (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) puts it, "is not cool." But by the end of the film he
writes the article that resuscitates the band's flagging career.
In short, then, productive filmmaking geeks actively create slacker cinema?
Kevin Smith is an industrious geek who adores slackers like real-life buddies Bryan
Johnson and Jason Mewes, and his fictional creations like Randal, Banky, and Jay, and
all of his films center upon duos of one geek and one slacker. In fact, male geek/slacker
buddy duos dominate Smith's ouevre and much of the most popular independent cinema
writ large, including the work of Jarmusch, Linklater, Steven Soderbergh, and Quentin
Tarantino. Thus Smith is not alone in his preoccupation with male-male bonding and
love; much of the independent cinema of Generation X shares his concerns. And since to
some extent independent cinema functions as an early barometer of pop-cultural trends,
we should not be surprised to find that more recently, in 2007, geek- and slacker-centered
25
narratives have risen into the cinematic mainstream with the films of Judd Apatow
(Knocked Up and Superbad), the recent comedies of Adam Sandler (I Now Pronounce
You Chuck and Larry) and Will Ferrell (Blades o.fGlory), and even network television
programs such as "Reaper" (the pilot episode of which Smith directed).4
Queering Slacker Cinema
The specific genre that Kevin Smith operates in, independent slacker cinema,
emerged in the indie milieu during a period-the early 1990s-when queer cinema was
also experiencing a notable boom. Indeed, there was such an explosion of high-quality
new queer films released from 1990-92 that Village Voice critic B. Ruby Rich dubbed
this group of films the New Queer Cinema and stated that the NQC formed "the
beginnings of a new queer historiography, capable of transforming this decade, if only
the door stays open long enough" (22). And yet Rich, even in her moment of excitement
over the burgeoning NQC phenomenon, noted that there was a strong potential for the
post-NQC commodification of queer cinema, and also commented upon the seemingly
unexamined sexist and racist biases ofNQC exhibition and distribution practices: "[W]ill
lesbians ever get the attention for their work that men get for theirs? Will queers of
colour ever get equal time?" (22). These would prove to be prescient questions to ask in
1992, and Rich herself would offer a disappointed commentary on the dispersed, male-
centered, and mainstream-commodified state of queer cinema in a follow-up article in
2000.
26
Meanwhile, slacker cinema, most accurately delineated as a specifically
Generation X phenomenon (see above), was incepted during roughly the same period as
the NQC, its two most significant inaugural films being Richard Linklater's Slacker
(1991) and Smith's Clerks (1994). Hence, slacker cinema had to compete with queer
cinema for its share of the (then booming but still relatively limited) independent film
marketplace.s My project argues that filmmakers like Smith and distributors like
Miramax were well aware of the cultural climate of their times, that they knew what
would differentiate their product from the cinematic mainstream, what would titillate and
sell. And in the 1990s, what sold best in the independent milieu was queer sexuality.
So, whereas the independent gangster film a la Tarantino and his many imitators
uses tropes ofhypermasculinity and excessive violence to expunge homosexual panic, the
slacker film, with its focus on feminized white male geeks and queered white male
slackers, is able to more subtly depict the anxieties of closeted queer Generation X men.
Hence while slacker cinema is certainly homophobic, it is arguably less so (or more
subtly so) than the hypermasculine independent gangster cinema, which is only able to
imagine gay male sex as brutal, Deliverance-style rape, as in Taratino's Pulp Fiction
(1994), and gay male sexual identity as freakish and bizarre, as in queer cop Paul
Smecker (Willem Dafoe) in cult gangster favorite The Boondock Saints (1999).
Smith's films are ripe for queer readings because they so insistently maintain a
homosocial milieu wherein male-male bonding and abiding love between men can
flourish. Having been produced in the wake of the New Queer Cinema "boom" of 1990-
2, with pervasive if frequently homophobic queer components, Clerks and the rest of
27
Smith's 1990s oeuvre are not as reluctant to open themselves to queer interpretation as
are many Hollywood films, and become more explicitly queer the further along into
Smith's career we get. Therefore my queerly inflected analysis of Smith's work will not
depend upon seeking out what Alexander Doty calls the "silences and gaps" that open
space for queerness in more mainstream texts (Flaming Classics 3). In fact, I will
frequently be doing the opposite: looking for the places where the film's incessant
foregrounding of sexual issues and ambiguously sexualized and I or gendered characters
are complicated by potentially heterocentric or "normalizing" influences, both diegetic
and structural. While it is my ostensible aim to explore how the progressive aspects of
View Askew's queer politics are contained by their heterocentric elements and ellipses, it
is these very heterosexual/heterocentrist elements that open the way to a reading of
Smith's cinematic output that includes the greatest possible range of queer positionings:
the acknowledgement of sexual identities and cultural positions that refuse to be
delimited by the usual categories of (strictly) gay, lesbian, straight, and so forth. The
depiction of such undefined, fluid (and hence queer) sexualities in the View Askew
oeuvre perhaps reaches its zenith with Smith's 1997 bisexual romantic comedy Chasing
Amy, yet I will argue that Smith's film's preoccupation with male-male love and the
homoerotics of buddy duos continues right through to his 2006 sequel to Clerks. Indeed,
Clerks II, concludes with a pathos-laden scene in which slacker Randal openly declares
his love for geek pal Dante-with his usual telling disclaimer that he loves his buddy "in
a totally heterosexual way"-thereby rendering completely explicit the driving force
28
behind Smith's work: fascination with homosociallove and its dangerous proximity to
homosexual desire.
However, before discussing in greater theoretical depth the way in which homoerotic
desire between male buddies is frequently diffused or displaced in Western narratives
including the films of Smith, a word needs to be said about my use of the terms "queer"
and "queerness." Following Doty, I see queerness as an inclusive term having a
multivalence of possible meanings depending upon its specific context. In its broadest
sense, it denotes "a wide range of positions within culture that are' queer' or non-, anti-,
or contra-straight" which, in addition to encompassing the positions of explicitly gay,
lesbian, and other non-straight persons, "can be and [are] occupied in various ways by
otherwise heterosexual and straight-identifying people" (Making Things 3, 4). In other
words, as Doty constructs queerness and as I think the View Askew films exemplify,
everyone is potentially capable of inhabiting queer space or responding queerly to
cultural texts, and since "queer erotics are already part of culture's erotic center [...] as a
necessary construct by which to define the heterosexual and the straight" (3), cultural
products such as films cannot help but have queer erotics and thematics already
embedded within them, no matter how explicitly or vehemently they might disavow this
possibility. What interests me about Smith's work is the way it negotiates this slippery
slope: Smith's oeuvre consists of films about male buddies who love each other more
than they love any woman and who joke constantly about each other's (often deviant)
sexuality, yet who constantly disavow or distort their homoerotics, typically through
homophobic joking.
29
In the context of this project, I will be using queerness primarily to describe not-
exclusively-straight males, especially Smith's feminized geeks and queer slackers, and as
such my use of "queer" will align itself with Doty's description ofPsycho's Norman
Bates from Flaming Classics: "not clearly identified as homosexual, bisexual, or
heterosexual, while also, in certain, usually gender, particulars, not fitting into current
understandings of normative straightness" (157). As we shall see, this kind of ambiguous
description suits Smith's male buddy duos quite accurately.
The Homosocial Continuum
According to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a wedge or gap has been imposed upon the
homosocial continuum for males in Western culture. As Sedgwick notes in Epistemology
ofthe Closet, this gap or disjunct is constituative of the patriarchal order as it has
manifested in our culture and gives rise to the rigid homosexual/heterosexual binarism
that attempts to elide the actual fluidity of real people's sexual desires and identities and
maintains instead an unequal binary with one term-heterosexual-in the place of
privilege. On one level, then, these differences in power between the two members of
Smith's buddy duos help maintain that rupture or gap: the ostensibly more masculine of
the two buddies can (and does) use his buddy as a scapegoat for any queerness that
accrues to the homosocial duo. This pattern is enacted by all of Smith's duos: two
examples from Clerks include the aforementioned bait-and-switch routine that Randal
pulls on Dante during their car ride to Julie Dwyer's funeral, and Jay's opening speech to
Silent Bob, which I will analyze in Chapter II.
30
This disavowed male queer desire is most frequently channeled into rivalries over
women, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick observes (expanding on the work of French literary
critic / philosopher Rene Girard) in Between Men: English Literature and Male
Homosocial Desire. Sedgwick argues that in any erotic rivalry between male characters,
"the bond that links the two [male] rivals is as intense and potent as the bond that links
either of the rivals to the beloved: [...] the bonds of 'rivalry' and 'love,' differently as
they are experienced, are equally powerful and in many senses equivalent" (21).
Sedgwick goes on to describe the male "traffic in women" has been a longstanding social
structure that facilitates the disavowal of male same-sex desire and thus shores up the
power of a patriarchy founded upon the homophobic abjection of its constituitive "other,"
the not-exclusively-heterosexual man. The crystallization of the category of the
homosexual man and the attendant conflation of gender and sexual object choice that
supports it can be viewed as discursive structures that reinforce the arbitrary border that
separates the homosexual from the homosocial: if the "homosexual" now (since the
1950s) designates a specific type of person who can be easily identified through his
displaying certain stereotypical gender traits, then (the thinking goes) the threat of same-
sex desire between "heterosexual" men can be suppressed. This is not to say that there
are not actual heterosexual men out there and actual homosexual men, but merely to point
out that the division between these two is not so clean as the dominant ideology would
have us believe, and that there are countless intermediate positions along the homosocial
continuum for men that exist in practice but are suppressed or disguised in representation.
31
Radical Incoherence
Alexander Doty's approach to pop-cultural queerness aligns itself with what Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick would call the universalizing view of homosexuality, that is, the view
which posits that gay-ness is not strictly limited to an easily identifiable minority of
persons and that therefore any person is at least potentially homosexual. This
universalizing account is what Freud refers to as the polymorphous perversity of un- (or
under-) developed sexual subjects, and while Freud's work does not necessarily
pathologize homosexuality or seek to "cure" or eradicate it as such, it does nevertheless
posit same-sex object choice as being an intermediate stage on the way toward full sexual
development, i.e., heterosexuality.? This universalizing (what some have called
constructivist) account of same-sex object choice is contrasted with a minoritizing view
which states that homosexuality is indeed an essential or inborn quality of certain
identifiable and classifiable individuals (this has also been called the essentialist
position). As Sedgwick argues in The Epistemology o/the Closet, the often contradictory
relationship between the universalizing and minoritizing accounts of homosexuality
produces a radical incoherence in how homosexuality-or more broadly and accurately,
the entire homosocial continuum-is perceived, medicalized, legislated, and discursively
constructed in Western patriarchal culture.
Part of how this incoherence comes about is related to contradictions inherent to
the homosexual/heterosexual binarism. Sedgwick claims, following Foucault, that the
practice of classifying persons according to the homosexual/heterosexual binary emerged
at the tum of the twentieth century and rapidly became the dominant "world-mapping"
32
structure by which present-day sexual, and to some extent gender, identities and existence
are conceptualized. She argues that this binarism serves as a "[site] that [is] peculiarly
densely charged with lasting potentials for powerful manipulation-through precisely the
mechanisms of self-contradictory definition or, more succinctly, the double bind" (2, 10).
As an illustration of this double bind Sedgwick describes a 1973 Maryland case in which
an eighth-grade science teacher was moved to a nonteaching position once the Board of
Education learned of his homosexuality. She continues:
When Acanfora [the teacher] spoke to news media [...] about his situation, he
was refused a new contract entirely. Acanfora sued. The federal district court
that first heard his case [...] [held] that Acanfora's recourse to the media had
brought undue attention to himself and his sexuality, to a degree that would be
deleterious to the educational process. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals
disagreed. [...J Although they overruled the lower court's rationale, however,
the appellate court affirmed its decision not to allow Acanfora to return to
teaching. Indeed, they denied his standing to bring the suit in the first place, on
the grounds that he had failed to note on his original employment application that
he had been, in college, an officer of a student homophile organization-a
notation that would, as school officials admitted in court, have prevented his ever
being hired. The rationale for keeping Acanfora out of his classroom was thus no
longer that he had disclosed too much about his homosexuality, but [...] that he
had not disclosed enough.. (69)
33
As Sedgwick puts it, this example shows that "the space for simply existing as a gay
person and a teacher is in fact bayonetted through and through, from both sides, by the
vectors of a disclosure at once compulsory and forbidden" (70) and in a broader sense
reveals the anxieties and contradictions that always inhere to attempts to keep the
homosexual/heterosexual border intact. What is most disturbing about this example and
the strange contradictory logics it exposes is the fact that real lives and real power
relations are at stake: that particularly around homosexuality "contests for discursive
power can be specified as competitions for the material or rhetorical leverage required to
set the terms of, and to profit in some way from, the operations of such an incoherence of
definition" (11).
Ultimately, Sedgwick deploys the figure of the closet as conceptual shorthand for
the radical incoherence she charts, stating that "[the] closet is the defining structure for
gay oppression in this century" (71). As the schoolteacher example illustrates, the issue
is not so much whether a specific queer individual is "in" or "out" of the closet, for
neither position guarantees that individual's rights or safety, but rather that the closet
itself is the overarching figure through which homosexual or queer existence of any kind
is rendered visible in our culture. It is this figure which gives rise to the phenomenon of
the "open secret" whereby it is possible for other people to "see" someone's queerness or
closetedness before the desiring subject himself does, his "in-ness" or "out-ness"
notwithstanding; it is this phenomenon that renders Dante's semi-conscious fall out ofthe
closet at the outset of Clerks meaningful and even funny (70). Dante's unconscious
relationship to the closet (he was sleeping) serves as beacon to all of us watching him fall
34
out of it (we know what this means), and this image ofa man who is closeted (or coming
out?) without knowing it carries through to all of Smith's feminized geek protagonists.
To sum up, as Suzanna Danuta Walters writes in her 2001 book All the Rage: The
Story o/Gay Visibility in America, gay life and identity in the 1990s "[have] now taken
on the dubious distinction of public spectacle" (9-10). And while Walters concedes that
this increase in gay visibility may be regarded as a positive step away from "the problems
of invisibility, subliminal coding, double entendres and double lives" that have plagued
queer existence throughout much of American history, she nevertheless expresses
concern over the concomitant dangers this phenomenon creates: "I believe there are ways
in which this new visibility creates new forms of homophobia (for example, the good,
marriage-loving, sexless gay vs. the bad, liberationist, promiscuous gay) and lends itself
to a false and dangerous substitution of cultural visibility for inclusive citizenship." In
short, she concludes, "this moment provides us with a picture of a society readily
embracing the images of gay life but still all too reluctant to embrace the realities of gay
identities and practices" (9-10). The specific cultural tension that Walters here
highlights-that American society as a whole is willing to embrace (and even, as I will
argue, exploit) queer images while refusing to accept queer individuals and practices in
real life-is replicated in the work and star text of Kevin Smith. While constantly
exposing his viewers to a multitude of queer discourses, ranging from the overtly and
usually comically homophobic (as in Clerks) to the surprisingly sympathetic and/or
revealing (as in the denoument of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back or his onstage reponses
to audience questions in An Evening With Kevin Smith), Smith rides a very fine line
35
between openly embracing and subtly disavowing the queerness of the texts he produces:
as he says of his films in An Evening With Kevin Smith, "I like to put a little gay content
in there." This statement, which admits to the queer influence in his work while safely
containing it within the parameters ofthe diminuitive phrase "a little gay content,"
effectively sums up the ambivalent stance toward queerness that pervades Smith's work
and his identity as an indie-film auteur. As my dissertation will show, not only is
Smith's coyness over queerness textually interesting, but in his line of work as an
independent 1990s filmmaker, it is quite profitable as well.
Chapter Outlines
In Chapter II, "Gender Play," I perform close readings of Clerks (1994), Smith's
debut feature, and argue that the film exemplifies, through its plot and formal elements,
the homosocial buddy relation that suppresses male-male homoerotic desire by
channeling it into men's rivalries over beloved women. The chapter contextualizes the
feminized Generation-X slacker within his principal social sphere, the male homosocial
duo or group, and shows how this frequently homoerotic yet homophobic buddy/group
structure aligns Clerks generically with the buddy road film. However, Clerks goes
further in its gender play than previous buddy comedies by refusing to align biologically
male characters with masculinity or female characters with femininity: in Clerks,
masculine females (Veronica and Caitlin) and queer males (Randal) compete with each
other for the attention of the feminized male protagonist, Dante. Thus the film shifts its
principal narrative erotic rivalries with respect to gender in such a way that same-sex
36
desire is depicted indirectly through its appearance in the register of gender but not
sexuality. In delineating this triangular structure, the chapter exposes the misogyny
inherent to the slacker's homosocial group and briefly discusses his fear/fascination with
masculine women such as domineering mothers, bossy girlfriends, and (in later Smith
films) lesbians. Since Clerks also marks Smith's industrial beginnings as an "indie"
poster child, Chapter II gestures toward my concluding discussion (in Chapter VI) of
Smith's star text and his role as a self-styled, industry promoted auteur.
Chapter III, "Fanboys and Caped Crusaders" focuses on Mallrats (1995), Smith's
second feature film and the first one to explicitly incorporate Batman iconography,
mapping it onto the figure of Silent Bob. This additional layer of signification enriches
the discussion of the queer/feminized buddy pairs begun in Chapter two, as Batman and
Robin have a long history of queer interpretations. However, and perhaps more
importantly, through this deployment of comic book iconography Mallrats explicitly
engages an audience that will be key in supporting Smith's ongoing film career: the white
male comic book fan. Thus Chapter III analyzes the narrative properties of comic books
and the politics of comic book culture, both of which play an important role in Mallrats's
narrative structure and diegesis. Chapter III also investigates the "teenpic" subgenre and
its ideological implications vis a-vis teen culture, since Smith and distributor Universal
Studios intended Mallrats as an homage to 1970s and 1980s teen sex comedies. The
chapter argues that the film's intended dual address-to comic-book insiders and a
broader teen sex comedy audience-was a central factor in causing Mallrats's notorious
37
failure at the box-office, yet also reinforced a trend (begun with Clerks) of Smith's films
finding their audiences and making profit in the home video market.
Kevin Smith's third feature film, Chasing Amy (1997), introduces the first two
explicitly gay-identifying characters into Smith's "View Askewniverse": the mainstream-
palatable femme lesbian Alyssa Jones and the flaming gay black man Hooper X. My
Chapter IV, "Unspoken Bisexuality," argues that these characters' presence in Amy
accomplishes two things: (1) It raises Smith's cultural capital and the marketability of
Chasing Amy by exploiting images of queer persons, and (2) It distracts the viewer from
the much more pervasive and fluid queerness of the film's white male protagonist,
Holden McNeil. In fact, it is Holden's bisexual fantasizing-that is, bisexual desire that
is connotatively depicted but never spoken or consummated-that drives the film's
narrative. In this context, Chapter IV responds to B. Ruby Rich's 2000 article "Queer
and Present Danger," which prominently references Chasing Amy and declares the death
by mainstreaming of queer cinema. I argue (against Rich) that the queer cinema
"moment" Rich defines was always already co-opted by the industrial and economic
forces of the studio system and the desire for broader audiences for queer cinema. The
chapter concludes by interrogating Chasing Amy's status as Smith's most "personal"
film, which is supported at the level of the text by Smith-alter-ego Silent Bob's climactic
pathos-laden speech, raising key issues about the function of stardom and the nature (and
marketing potential) of Smith's auteur-ship in a queer cinema context.
Chapter V, "Racing Queerness on the Road" argues that Dogma (1999) and Jay
and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001) function generically as queer road movies, bearing
38
many formal similarities to more "out" queer road films like My Own Private Idaho
(1991, dir. Van Sant) and The Living End (1992, dir. Araki). In the process of bringing
together the discourses and tropes of race, gender, (queer) sexuality and the road, Dogma
and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back finally make explicit what all previous View Askew
films have only hinted at: the queer attraction between Jay and Silent Bob, the production
company's most enduring and iconic male buddy duo. Dogma and JSBSB fully embrace
the superheroic, comic-book version of reality deployed to a lesser degree in the earlier
Mallrats, using it as a comedic fantasy milieu in which Jay and Bob, fuctioning as
comedic superheroes, can finally find ways to safely express their queerness without
ostensibly "queering the deal" of their longtime buddy relation. My discussion of both
films highlights the racial dimension of the queer masculinity that Jay and Bob embody,
looking at how the white slacker duo's encounters with black men on their cross-country
journey both shore up and render parodic their attempts to appropriate the tropes (love of
gangsta rap, hypermasculine posing) of a projected white fantasy of black manhood.
My sixth and final chapter, '" One Pleasantry Shy of a Cock in the Mouth1': Kevin
Smith's Queer Star Text," analyzes Kevin Smith's star text, by which I mean the
collection of filmic and extrafi1mic discourses that constitute what is known of Smith as a
cultural public figure, using the straight-to-DVD documentary of Smith's college Q & A
tour, An Evening With Kevin Smith (2002), as a primary textual referent. As I argue,
Smith deliberately "plays" with his own established star text when speaking or writing
for public consumption, using jokes to address questions about queerness and always
maintaining an ambiguity with respect to his own sexuality that is immensely interesting
39
when considered in light of queer readings of his key cinematic works. The subtitle of
the Evening With Kevin Smith DVD, "Silent Bob Speaks"-also the title of an essay
collection published by Smith-attests to the slipperiness that exists between the figures
of "Kevin Smith" and "Silent Bob," an ambiguity that has played a central role in helping
Smith achieve and maintain his multimedia popularity, allowing him to playfully "have it
both ways" with respect to the avowal/disavowal of the queerness of his work.
40
Notes
1. Whiteface clowning is historically linked to blackface minstrelsy, and in his article on
Elvis impersonators Eric LoU has even noted the racial significance of the ultimate "killer
clown," Batman arch-nemesis the Joker. LoU argues that the ethnic ambiguity the
Joker's whiteface performance generates "evokes a threatening racial subtext" for the
character, and adds that the Joker as portrayed by Jack Nicholson in the 1989 Batman
film plays up that threatening subtext by appropriating black cultural signifiers such as
the "Prince soundtrack" and the "rap-rhyming" quality of his speech ("All the King's
Men" 207). Indeed, the infantilized, playful, taboo-breaking behavior of clowns aligns
them culturally with stereotypes ofless restrained, more "animalistic" non-white races.
2. The View Askew produced film Vulgar (directed by Smith pal Bryan Johnson)
renders explicit the homophobic rage of clowns, when a clown named Flappy (Brian
O'Halloran) gets raped by a group of men and subsequently takes his murderous
vengeance upon them. Other examples of killer clowns include Pennywise in (boomer
geek) Stephen King's It (the film version of which features Tim Curry as Pennywise;
Curry also plays murderous camp transvestite Dr. Frankenfurter in TheRocky Horror
Picture Show), and real-life homophobic "killer clown" John Wayne Gacy.
3. See my unpublished work-in-progress, "Golden Geeks: Producing the Rise of the
Slacker," coauthored with Kom Kunyosying.
4. As of the new millenium even women are beginning to be represented as slackers,
albeit sparingly. Key examples of this trend include slacker / geek protagonists Enid and
Rebecca in Ghost World (2001), Sarah Silverman's slacker-inspired comedic persona
seen in Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic (2005) and The Sarah Silverman Program
(2006-present), and most recently, the titular character in the immensely popular Juno
(2007). It remains to be seen if this migration of geek / slacker characteristics onto
female characters will stick.
5. Clerks and Go Fish were released in same year, marketed similarly, and bear many
formal similarities to each other as well; see Chapter II.
41
CHAPTER II
GENDER PLAY AND QUEER EROTICS: CLERKS (1994)
I first saw Kevin Smith's Clerks in 1995 at the recommendation of an old college
friend. I knew this friend l from my college years, 1989-1993, which I had the good
fortune to spend in Los Angeles. Of course, Los Angeles is a hotbed of film exhibition,
and by being there during this pivotal time I was able to see such independent cinema
"hits" as Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies, and videotape (1989) and Richard Linklater's
Slacker (1991) when they first achieved limited national release. I particularly recall
seeing Slacker at a local multiplex (!) in 1991 and being absolutely blown away by its
disregard for typical Hollywood narrative form, and its ironically humorous look at
mostly college-age "slackers" who reminded me of myself and my friends at the time.
Like Linklater's disaffected dropouts and ne'er-do-wells, my social group were all
misfits, people who wore black clothing, smoked cigarettes, and attended screenings of
Slacker instead of attending the University's immensely popular football games. In
Slacker, and later Clerks, my friends and I found a cinematic representation of life as we
saw it, from the point of view of Generation X. Little did I know that on the opposite
side of the country at about that same time, another Gen Xer, Kevin Smith, saw Slacker
at the Angelika Theatre in New York, receiving the first catalyzing inspiration that would
42
lead him inexorably from that moment to eventually create Clerks and become a pivotal
independent filmmaker of the 1990s and beyond.
I was just out of college by the time Clerks debuted at the Sundance Film Festival
in 1994, but my college friend made sure I heard about it, repeatedly urging me to see
this small black-and-white movie that he claimed was the funniest film he had ever seen.
He laughed out loud as he tried to describe it for me: Dante Hicks (Brian O'Halloran)
reports for work on his day off at his boss's behest, and spends the day getting into minor
mischief with his buddy and fellow convenience store/video store clerk, Randal Graves
(Jeff Anderson). Dante's attempts to get back together with an old girlfriend, Caitlin
(Lisa Spoonauer), behind the back of his current girlfriend, Veronica (Marilyn
Ghigliotti), are foiled when Randal informs Veronica of Dante's intended infidelities with
Caitlin. As a result, Dante and Randal engage in a cathartic fight, and the day ends with
both Veronica and Caitlin rejecting Dante, as drug dealers Jay and Silent Bob, who have
lurked outside the store all day, provide snarky commentary on the outcome of Dante's
various struggles.
But that is merely the plot of Clerks, and as a foundational independent film ofthe
1990s, it is at least as concerned with its self-conscious style and low-budget, almost
documentary aesthetic as it is with developing its narrative. As Geoff King writes,
The patterning of events in Clerks is motivated through verisimilitude, up
to a point, the disparate structure of much of the material having its basis
in the random selection of customers visiting the store. It is also a stylized
43
pattern, however, designed to establish a particular aesthetic, an eccentric
impression courted by many indie features. (82)
Indeed, what my friend could not convey verbally, and what I could not grasp until I
rented a VHS copy and saw Clerks for myself, was the extent to which Clerks revels in
its no-budget origins and its strong allegiance to the concerns of Generation X.2
Described in the 1994 Sundance Film Festival Program as "the filmic equivalent of a
garage band" (Hawk n.p.), Clerks takes its budgetary and aesthetic limitations and turns
them into a kind of rallying cry for "keeping it real" Gen-X slackerism, featuring raw,
sexually explicit dialogue and self-conscious formal elements such as its frequently ironic
intertitles. Like Slacker or Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise (1984), which it also
emulates, Clerks eschews standard Hollywood narrative construction in favor of an
episodic structure consisting of a "loose accumulation of assorted comic scenes" and
divided up by "chapter-type titles" (King 81). Taken together, Clerks' use ofloosely
connected vignettes or "micro-narrative fragments" to build its plot (King 85), its grungy
black-and-white photography, and the raw and often esoteric subject matter discussed by
its disaffected protagonists combine to strongly differentiate the film from its mainstream
Hollywood counterparts. It is, quite simply, a film Hollywood could not and would not
have produced at that time (if ever). True to its marginal, hip, and postmodern origins,
Clerks defiantly declares: "If you're with us, if you get our pop-cultural references and
dirty jokes, enjoy! And if you aren't, who cares?" In sum, Clerks is a lowbrow, low-
budget Gen-X film comedy unabashedly aimed at white, male Gen-X slackers, and its
------ ----..._---_ ....._-------
44
creator, New Jersey writer-director Kevin Smith, would emerge in its wake as one ofthe
most significant and emblematic figures in 1990s independent cinema.
As I discussed in my Introduction, it is not possible to fully evaluate the
circumstances and after-effects of Clerks's production and Smith's subsequent film
career without considering the industrial and cultural climate in which the film and its
auteur emerged. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw the rise of a new industrial
infrastructure for independent film exhibition and distribution, spearheaded most notably
by Robert Redford's Sundance Institute and Bob and Harvey Weinstien's fledgling
distribution company, Miramax. These two entities were most directly responsible for
the independent cinema boom that would change the face of U.S. film production,
distribution, marketing and culture throughout the 1990s. In terms of content, I argue
that the success of this movement through the 1990s and beyond is largely premised upon
a smart engagement with queer (non-straight) sexuality. From sex, lies's voyeuristically
sexual slacker Graham (James Spader) to the explosion of the New Queer Cinema in the
early and mid-1990s (including, by many accounts, Smith's own Chasing Amy in 1997)
to the relative "mainstreaming" of queer sexuality in such late-1990s productions as Boys
Don't Cry and Being John Malkovich (both 1999), queerness was and is a primary means
by which the independent sector differentiates its product from the Hollywood
mainstream, and throughout this rich decade we see countless examples of independent
productions that represent and thematize queer sexuality in order to titillate, provoke, and
(of course) make money at the box office and on video. Kevin Smith and his distributor,
Miramax, were well aware of the cultural climate into which they were placing their
45
product, and as such Smith's debut film-and, as I will argue, his entire oeuvre-
demonstrates a persistent (and often contradictory) engagement with queer sexuality,
queer persons, and non-heterosexual desire and gendering. In short, Smith's films depict
the real tensions and dangers Generation-X male slackers face as they attempt to
negotiate the culturally enforced gap that separates male homosociality (intense
friendship, male bonding) from explicit male-male homoerotic desire and homosexuality
in contemporary U.S. culture.
Kevin Smith's debut film, Clerks (1994), exemplifies through its plot and formal
elements Eve Sedgwick's triangular formulation of displacement of masculine queer
desire through rivalries over "beloved" feminine characters. Sedgwick argues that in any
erotic rivalry between male characters, "the bond that links the two [maleJ rivals is as
intense and potent as the bond that links either of the rivals to the beloved: [...Jthe
bonds of 'rivalry' and 'love,' differently as they are experienced, are equally powerful
and in many senses equivalent" (21). Sedgwick thus argues that male "traffic in women"
is a longstanding social structure that facilitates the disavowal of male same-sex desire,
permitting straight-identifying men to displace their homoerotic tendencies into rivalries
involving women.
However, whereas in the texts Sedgwick analyzes these masculine and feminine
positions are occupied by biological men and women respectively, Clerks modifies the
triangular model by refusing to align biologically male characters with masculinity or
female characters with femininity: in Clerks, masculine females (Veronica and Caitlin)
and queer males (Randal) compete with each other for the attention of the feminized male
46
protagonist, Dante. Thus the film shifts its principal narrative erotic rivalries with respect
to gender in such a way that same-sex desire can be depicted indirectly through its
appearance in the register of gender but not sexuality. This has to do with the strange
reverse polarity of the geek-slacker duo: the geek is feminized but more conservatively
heterosexual, the slacker is more masculine than his geek buddy but is also more sexually
deviant or queer. Hence Dante may be feminized and the object of Randal's desire, but,
as he himself insists at the climax of episode three of the made-for-television Clerks
animated series, "Shut up, I'm not gay!,,3
And while there is reason to be suspicious of Dante's claim to exclusive
heterosexuality, in Clerks his potential queerness is depicted only through disruption of
his masculinity, not necessarily his sexuality. Dante is feminized but not necessarily
queered, at least not specifically in the realm of sexual identity or sexual object choice.
Dante whines, prefers the submissive role in relationships, and frequently cedes the
masculine sphere of direct action to his girlfriend Veronica, as we will see dramatically
demonstrated by my close reading of Veronica's first appearance at the Quick Stop.
However, despite his feminization, Dante does not appear to be all that sexually deviant:
he dates women, declines to watch hennaphroditic porn with Randal, and reacts
conservatively to Veronica's attitude toward fellatio in his first argument with her.
Hence, we can safely say that Dante's deviance from heteronormative masculinity, such
as it is, primarily occurs in the register ofgender (he is a feminine male) but not sexuality
(he has little interest in sexual deviancy).
47
Randal, on the other hand, is queered but not particularly feminized. He displays
most of the traits of the masculine male: ostensible homophobia (hence his bait-and-
switch games with Dante), emotional insensitivity, and preference for the dominant
position in his relationships. However, his sexuality is very ambiguous and rather queer:
he watches hermaphroditic porn, has no explicitly sexual relationships of any kind, and
claims near the end of the film that "I don't know thing one about chicks." In truth, along
with Willam Black and the duo of Jay and Silent Bob, Randal is an embodiment of the
queer man-child or clown figure discussed in the Introduction, a character whose queer
sexuality is stereotypically diffused or rendered illegible through its conflation with
extreme symptoms of arrested sexual development. Yet he is also more streetwise and
verbally "sharper" than Dante is, this because he is a rebellious slacker who eschews
formal education and the complicity with the system it implies in favor of an intuitive
street-wisdom that allows him to "keep it real." It also makes his queerness harder to see,
because Randal comes from a class position (lower middle class) where sexual
forwardness and brash talk are more acceptable yet where homosexual identities are
typically referred to and responded to in only the most homophobic ways-often quite
violently. In a constant state of defensive homophobia, Randal works tirelessly to deflect
queerness away from himself and onto others, usually onto his geeky best buddy Dante.
Hence, the most overt non-straight sexuality depicted in Clerks is that of its
secondary characters, particularly Willam the Idiot Manchild (his title is a giveaway) and
the queer buddy duo of Jay and Silent Bob. As we shall see, these characters serve a
crucial function in Clerks: like the explicitly homosexual characters that often appear in
48
1970s buddy films such as Midnight Cowboy and Scarecrow, Willam and Jay and Silent
Bob serve to shore up the alleged non-queerness of the principle male characters, Dante
and Randal, by being more queer than they are. As already noted, these secondary queer
characters all conform (in varying degrees) to the man-child stereotype, and while this
chapter will not focus on these characters or this stereotype in extensive detail, this is a
motif that will resurface in my discussion of Smith's later films, particularly Jay and
Silent Bob Strike Back (see Chapter V).
What follows may at times feel like a litany of "outing" fictional male characters
from Clerks as if to say: "Look how gay this film really is!" To some extent, that is true,
for one prevailing misconception my project seeks to eradicate is that Kevin Smith's
films are not queer, that they are perfectly straight male buddy comedies aimed solely at
straight audiences. This is certainly the preferred meaning of Clerks that Miramax and to
some extent Smith himself have supported over the years since its release. Yet, as we
shall see, not only is the male buddy comedy genre a fairly queer genre to begin with,
Smith's films in particular are pervasively queer-inflected, in a homophobically comedic
way that invites disavowal but that nonetheless colors the work and leaves it open to
queer interpretation.
In order to explicate how and to what ends Clerks plays with the gender and
sexual politics of its main characters and their relationships, this chapter will be divided
into four broad sections. The first of these discusses the film in its formal and generic
contexts, examining how the film represents a continuation of the buddy road movie
subgenre and looking in particular at how it alters and plays with the historically
49
established conventions of that cinematic fonn. The second section describes how the
erotic rivalries depicted in Clerks queer the gender roles and/or sexuality of all four of its
major characters: Dante, Randal, Veronica, and Caitlin. The third broad area of focus
consists of close readings of key sequences from Clerks and is subdivided into four parts:
"Masculine Women" (a focus on the gender play enacted by Veronica, Caitlin, and
Dante), "Queer Male Sexuality" (which discusses the queemess of Jay, Silent Bob, and
Randal) and two sections ("Syntax" and "Catharsis") dedicated to analyzing the
relationship between Dante and Randal, the film's central dynamic duo. The fourth and
last section looks at how Clerks was promoted and marketed by Miramax vis-a-vis its
queemess, serving as a closing point for the chapter and an opening gesture toward
Chapter VI's in-depth analysis of Kevin Smith as a self-styled, industry promoted
cinematic auteur.
The Buddy Film: A Brief Queer History 4
Clerks is a buddy film, specifically a buddy comedy. 5 No comprehensive critical
study of the male buddy film yet exists, though individual articles by the likes of Steven
Cohan, Robert Lang, Robin Wood, and Matthew Tinkcom analyze the subgenre from the
perspective of gender and sexuality studies. Cohan is also co-editor (with Ina Rae Hark)
of a collection of essays on the buddy road film, The Road Movie Book, which analyzes
road movies from a variety of critical perspectives, though this collection is not
specifically focused around the buddy comedy.
50
The connections between the buddy comedy subgenre and male homoerotics are
longstanding. For example, in The Celluloid Closet Vito Russo notes that many of the
earliest film comedy duos played upon the homoerotics between the two buddies for
comedic effect, and he singles out Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy as a particularly "sweet"
and "loving" buddy pair who had "the perfect sissy-buddy relationship throughout their
long career" from 1926-1951 (73, 72). While Russo valorizes Laurel and Hardy for the
"unconscious affection" in their relationship and faintly condemns other comedy duos
like Abbott and Costello and Martin and Lewis for being occasionally "really cruel to
each other," Russo's main point here is that male-male buddy teams, particularly ones
like Laurel and Hardy that revel in "adolescent behavior," are nearly always fraught with
the possibility of same-sex desire (73). Further, Russo's classification of Laurel and
Hardy as consisting of a feminized sissy (Laurel) coupled with a more masculinized
buddy (Hardy) correlates with the feminized geek (Dante) and queered slacker (Randal)
pairs found in Smith's work, pointing to the fact that despite historically and culturally
inflected shifts in nuance, the core structure-and homoerotics-of these buddy teams
has remained relatively stable since the earliest days of film comedy.
The queerness of the comedic male buddy pair found heightened expression in
the 1940s series of "Road to" films starring Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. As Steven
Cohan has shown, the "Road to" films were produced during a period when dominant
notions about male homosexuality were in flux. This instability was due in part to the
preva1e~ce of the wartime Army buddy relation, an institutionally sanctioned and
culturally legible homosocia1 relationship structure that, according to Cohan, could very
51
easily queer the male homosociality underlying American masculinity (24). Further, due
to the popularity of the gender-transgressive "fairy" stereotype, a figure whose
popularity and visibility "reached its high point in the so-called pansy craze of vaudeville,
nightclub, and live theater during the early thirties" with figures such as Gene (Jean)
Malin, Bruz Fletcher, and Ray (Rae) Bourbon, forties film audiences were accustomed to
seeing the "obviously queer sissy" on stage and screen (34). Unfortunately, with the
enactment of the Hollywood Production Code in the mid-thirties, queer cinematic
representation would undergo "a shift in register from a denotative encoding of queerness
(the well-known fairy character) to a more complex, because more covert, one of
connotation (sexual innuendo and camp)" (34); however, these attempts at repression
could not erase the legibility of the fairy stereotype, a legibility that Bob Hope (along
with contemporaries like Jack Benny) would draw upon to establish his popular comic
persona.
In his discussion of the fairy stereotype in relation to Bob Hope's immensely
popular comic persona, citing the work of historian George Chauncey in Gay New York,
Cohan writes that "until the 1950s the contemporary heterosexual-homosexual binarism,
which conflates gender and sexuality, was a middle-class ideology that did not dominate
the entire culture. In the first half of the century, the fairy was primarily a gender
position in working-class culture" that did not necessarily correlate to homosexual object
choice (Cohan 42). This lack of consensus in the culture about what constituted
gender/sexual deviance allowed the 1940s "Road To" films to deploy Hope's fairy-ness
in such a way as to "[play] upon intimations of homoeroticism" between Hope and
52
Crosby and queer their buddy relation (25). Hence, Cohan insists that the 1940s "Road
To" buddy films, progenitors of the later 1970s buddy cycle, can only be understood in
their historical context, that is, "in terms of the gender slippages occurring during the
forties, when, as institutionalized by the Army buddy relation, the homosociality
underlying American masculinity could all too easily 'queer the deal'" (24).
Interestingly, and in line with what Eve Sedgwick has theorized about relations
between men, the queerness of the Hope-Crosby duo also depends upon their rivalries
over women-or really woman, since in nearly every "Road To" film the female object
of desire is played by Dorothy Lamour. As Cohan observes, "[the] expectation that she
will inevitably tum up on the scene gives these two 'friends of Dorothy' more license that
usual for transgression" since her presence "legitimates their obvious pleasure-and
physical intimacy-as a pair of buddies who have sworn off women in order to be
together" (27). The "Road To" films thus fit neatly into the structure of the erotic
triangle and "traffic in women" discussed in the Introduction, here rendered "knowingly
and comically" overt by the Hope-Crosby team's explicitly stated "bonding [...] over
their rejection of women" that impels the "Road To" narratives (25). For example, in
Road to Singapore (1940), Ace (Hope) and Josh (Crosby), on the run from angry New
Yorkers whom they have swindled, head to Singapore to escape the troubles that come
from associating with women, and once there, initiate a new series of con-games
masterminded by Josh in order to scam what they need to survive. Enter Mirna
(Lamour), who first tries to con the buddies in a scheme of her own, then falls in love
with Josh and inevitably "sets up a good-natured rivalry between the two buddies that,
53
curiously enough, does not divide them or make them enemies but, on the contrary,
intensifies their close relation" as they attempt to evade local authorities once again and
escape Singapore without being killed or arrested (26). Hence the presence of Lamour' s
Mirna acts as a catalyst for increased rivalry-as-bonding between the central male buddy
pair, much as Clerks female characters Veronica and Caitlin serve a similar function for
Dante and Randal, as we shall see.
At the end of his article on the "Road to" films, Cohan suggests that "after the
'Road to' series effectively ran its course with Bali in 1952, it would be much harder for
movie buddies to queer the deal with either the innocence or audacity that Hope and
Crosby [...] so outrageously put on display" (44). Indeed, after the last "Road to" film
and the subsequent breakup of the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis buddy team in 1956, the
buddy film subgenre seems to have gone into remission for most of the late fifties and
early sixties, perhaps as a result of decreased movie attendance in general and the
increased popularity of romantic/sex comedies such as Pillow Talk (1959) during that
period. Additionally, postwar paranoia about homosexuality and its presumed
connections to American communism may have made the always-homoerotic buddy
comedy a harder sell to American mainstream audiences, and as Robert Lang and
Richard Dyer have noted, queer subtexts found rampant expression in the films noir of
this period, which are notable for their "explosive" and homophobic "sexual paranoia"
(Lang 33). This suggests a shift or oscillation in the representation of male-male
homoerotic desire from the register of comedy (as in the "Road to" films) to that of
excessive violence and moral depravity (the noirs).
54
Perhaps as a result of this temporary decline of the male buddy film during the
late 1950s and early 1960s, by which time even the (homophobic) noirs had run their
course, homoerotic buddy dynamics instead found their way into the mainstream
heterosexual sex comedies of the period. As Dennis Bingham argues in his discussion of
Rock Hudson-Doris Day films like Pillow Talk, the love between male buddies in these
films usually "far outweighs either man's regard for [women]" and in fact "heralds a new
emphasis in American film on male friendship that supersedes male-female relationships"
(20). So despite the ostensible foregrounding of heterosexual courtship and romance in
the Hudson-Day films, "[the] men's dealings with each other are the most convincing in
these films, while the desperate denouements that get the heterosexual couple together by
the final fade-out appear unmotivated and forced" (21). This latter statement could as
easily apply to Kevin Smith's Mallrats (1995) as Pillow Talk, and it is in this sense that
these early sixties sex comedies set the stage for the emphatic return of the central male
buddy pair in the cinema of the late 1960s and beyond.
Another noteworthy mid-sixties entry in the buddy comedy tradition is Neil
Simon's The Odd Couple, first a hit Broadway play debuting in 1965, then a 1968 film
and subsequent network TV series. It features Felix Ungar, the neurotic neat-freak, and
Oscar Madison, the fun-loving slob, as a dynamic buddy duo continually at odds with one
another yet ultimately bonded together by friendship (and shared living quarters). The
Broadway play featured Art Carney as Felix and Walter Matthau as Oscar, and the 1968
film retained Matthau as Oscar but featured Jack Lemmon as Felix. All versions of The
Odd Couple-stage, screen, and televised-were extremely popular and hence the term
55
"odd couple" has entered common parlance as any mismatched duo with one geeky
control freak and one clownish slob. In this sense it serves as an enduring template for
many of the comedic buddy duos that follow it, including Dante (uptight control freak)
and Randal (carefree clownish slob) of Clerks.
The male buddy film returned in a more serious register in the late sixties with the
appearance of such films as Easy Rider, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and
Midnight Cowboy (all 1969). Less comedic than their 1940s predecessors, these late-
1960s buddy films make many significant revisions to the conventions of the subgenre,
shifts that Cohan argues largely result from the influence of Jack Kerouac's immensely
popular existential buddy road novel, On The Road: "Previously male buddy teams had
taken to the road primarily in comedies [.. .]. Post-Kerouac buddy-road movies take the
male couple more seriously, while simultaneously problematizing it" (Road Movie Book
8). As we shall see, much of that post-Kerouac seriousness and problematization centers
upon the sexuality of and potential attraction between the two members of the male
buddy duo.
In Hollywood/rom Vietnam to Reagan Robin Wood analyzes the buddy film
subgenre during the New Hollywood period, from the late sixties through the decade of
the 1970s and into the 80s, correctly observing that "in all these films the emotional
center, the emotional charge, is in the male/male relationship, which is patently what the
films are about" (204). This assessment also applies to all the films of Kevin Smith but is
perhaps especially obvious in the case of Clerks. The whole film is organized around the
central relationship between Dante Hicks and Randal Graves. Further, as my discussion
56
of erotic triangles (shortly to follow) and subsequent close readings will show, the way in
which Clerks depicts its central male relationship(s) aligns it in may respects with the
1970s buddy film tradition and opens it up to queer readings of the kind Wood applies to
Scarecrow (1973) and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974).
This strong correlation between the New Hollywood buddy films and the later
Generation X buddy comedies of Kevin Smith should come as no surprise, given the
immense influence New Hollywood director/auteurs such as Steven Spielberg and
George Lucas exerted on the cinema of Generation X in general. As delineated in my
Introduction, the Baby Boomer directors who shaped New Hollywood were largely
white, male geeks who initiated the nerd-as-protagonist paradigm in mainstream cinema
of the 1970s and 80s. Prior to the 1970s, nerdy, bookish men were rarely lead characters
except in comedy (e.g., Woody Allen's protagonists), yet New Hollywood filmmakers
made white male geeks and misfits the focus of their work. The New Hollywood films
and their geeky-which is to say, thoughtful (even, as with Dreyfuss in Jaws,
intellectual), feminized, and not traditionally masculine) protagonists, such as Luke
Skywalker in Star Wars, Richard Dreyfuss's characters in Jaws and Close Encounters of
the Third Kind, and Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy, served as the cinematic precursors
to the geeks and slackers of 1990s cinema. Their impact can be seen explicitly in the
films of Kevin Smith: his films make frequent allusions to Star Wars and Jaws, and he
names the chief mall security guard in Mallrats after sheriff Joe LaFours, Butch and
Sundance's nemesis in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). Butch and Sundance
seems to be Smith's favorite buddy movie, perhaps because, as in his own films, it
57
preserves the homosocial buddy relation to the end: Butch and Sundance go out in a blaze
of glory together, visually frozen in mid-stride together the instant before their deaths.
The film's final shot is a freeze-frame of the two heroes as they rush to their certain
demise, implying that although they are about to physically die, their homosocial bond
will last forever, frozen in time and space along with their freeze-framed images. Smith
emulates this final shot at the end of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001).6
In addition to these specific influences and homages, Smith's films fit into the
generic mold of the New Hollywood buddy film by adhering to virtually all of the
subgenre's major conventions. Robin Wood delineates six major characteristics of the
1970s buddy film and describes how each supports his central contention that these films
are in effect male-male love stories (203-4). These six conventions are: (1) The Journey,
(2) The Marginalization Of Women, (3) The Absence of Home, (4) The Male Love
Story, (5) The Presence of an Explicitly Homosexual Character, and, lastly, (6) Death.
And while Smith's Clerks reworks some of these conventions and, in true Generation X
ironic fashion, reunites the form with its 1940s origins in tongue-in-cheek comedy,
Wood's template nevertheless offers an efficient inroad to grasping the major themes and
conventions of Clerks and its successors. Indeed, while Clerks modifies or refigures two
of these six conventions of the buddy subgenre-i.e., the road trip or journey and the
presence of an explicitly homosexual character-it quite literally adheres to the other four
principal conventions of the 1970s buddy film as Wood delineates them (203-4). I will
now briefly discuss Clerks in relation all six of these conventions before moving on to
describe the erotic triangles that structure the relations of the film's central characters.
58
First, the road trip or journey. The action of Clerks transpires almost exclusively
in and around the Quick Stop Convenience Store/RST Video building, and unlike its
1970s predecessors, the film is not structured on an extended journey. Interestingly,
however, the one time the two protagonists leave the store by car, to attend Julie Dwyer's
wake at Dante's insistence, Randal initiates a conversation that ends with Dante
admitting that he has tried to autofellate himself and Randal accusing him of being a
pervert: a game of homophobic bait-and-switch during which Randal is able to disavow
his own interest in deviant sexuality by deflecting it onto Dante. This is notable because
in a shorthand fashion this sequence encapsulates all the homosocial thematics of the
buddy road films that Wood describes, wherein one buddy is depicted as "unambiguously
masculine" or at least more masculine than his counterpart (e.g., Thunderbolt, Randal)
and the other is marked as feminine or queer in more overt ways (Lightfoot, Dante)
(208). So while this journey does not constitute the impetus of the film's narrative as it
might have in a 1970s buddy mm, or as it would in Smith's own Askewniverse films
post-Chasing Amy, it nevertheless serves a similar narrative function, that is, to queer one
of the buddies while shoring up the other one's less ambiguous, implicitly heterosexual
masculinity. Interestingly, however, in the case of Clerks, it is in fact the more feminized
member of the buddy duo, Dante, who seems less queer than Randal. This motif, of
making the more masculinized slacker more queer-seeming and -behaving than his
feminized geek counterpart, is prevalent throughout Smith's cinematic work.
Second, the marginalization of women. Although Clerks features two significant
female characters, Veronica and Caitlin, the film's diegesis transpires from Dante's point
59
of view and as such it is his relationship with Randal that is first and foremost the
concern of the film. The two male buddies (particularly Dante) spend much of their time
talking about these women, and the women in Clerks are certainly more narratively
central (and at least in Veronica's case, more visible) than their 1970s counterparts. To
his credit, Smith seems interested in female subjectivity and his films always feature
prevalent female characters, especially in Chasing Amy and Dogma where the women
function as central protagonists. However, even in those films the male buddy duos tend
to dominate the narrative, and a simple comparison of male/female screen time in Clerks
reveals that it is primarily about the relationship between Dante and Randal and, as with
the "Road to" films or the New Hollywood buddy films, the female characters in Clerks
are secondary-albeit crucial, as we will see-to the central homosocial buddy relation.7
Third, the absence of home. Although the pre-credits sequence of Clerks begins
in the physical space of Dante's house, the action quickly moves to the Quick Stop
Convenience store, in and around which most of the film's events take place. Like the
road in many buddy films, the convenience store is a place away from home where
transience and a kind of alienated ennui are the dominant motifs. The convenience store
setting is an iconic one for Generation X, particularly in its slacker cinema strain,
appearing in such visual texts as Slacker (1991), Mr. Show with Bob and David (1995-8),
Ghost World (2001), and Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (2004) as key emblem
of American consumerist culture overrun by late (global) capitalism. Indeed, Bob Hawk,
the Independent Feature Film Market (IFFM) consultant who brought Clerks to the
attention of film critics Peter Broderick and Amy Taubin in 1993, claims that
60
convenience stores are nothing less than "a metaphor for our society today"-a
postmodem society rendered impersonal, commodified and inauthentic, a "ghost world"
of strip-malls and badly managed convenience stores (Snowball Effect). In all these texts,
the convenience store is depicted as an impersonal second home for slackers, a place
where Gen Xers go to find low-pressure jobs and take refuge from the demands of a fast-
paced and corrupt consumer culture that pushes them to "grow up" and succeed on terms
they are not comfortable with.
Hence, by focusing on the site of the convenience store and the disaffected clerks
who work there, Clerks follows, in a particularly Gen-X way, the buddy film imperative
to demonstrate the impossibility of achieving anything like a home, which Wood argues
must "be understood not merely as a physical location but as both a state of mind and an
ideological construct, above all as ideological security" (203). In Western culture, the
security that is associated with the concept of home is bound up in "monogomous
heterosexual partnership and the conventional nuclear family," social constructs that
marginalize and/or elide the existence of those who refuse to participate in the Oedipal
drama of the nuclear family (Lang 332,344). As Robert Lang argues, the road movie
presents an ideal space for homosocially bonded characters who do not wish to grow up,
get married, etc., precisely because the ever-puerile and marginalized buddies of this
genre have "no place in the traditional family" and "must leave the spaces of home and
family" if they are to find fulfillment. Indeed, Katie Mills suppOlis this interpretation of
the road (and the buddy pairs that travel it) as being anathematic to traditional family
structures and thus fundamentally queer, writing that the "road story" of buddy films
61
"offers marginalized communities a ready narratological structure to represent rebellion
and collective transformation," often in response to ideological crisis or oppression taking
place in the wider culture (307).
Wood cites the Vietnam War and the Watergate crisis as being the major catalysts
for the ideological crises being worked through in the 1970s buddy cycle, and as I have
already suggested in my Introduction, Clerks and Smith's subsequent buddy films
constitute responses to the concerns and anxieties of Generation X, including the
queering of masculinity (embodied in nearly all his male characters) and the globalization
of consumer culture (reflected in the physical sites of the convenience store and
Mallrats's shopping mall). Smith's early films (Clerks through Chasing Amy) may not
include lengthy road trips but they are structured around the absence of an ideologically
secure "home" of the kind Wood describes. Furthermore, as I shall discuss in Chapter V,
Smith's two concluding films of the New Jersey cycle, Dogma and Jay and Silent Bob
Strike Back, adhere even more closely to the older buddy film formula by sending their
male buddy protagonists out on the road. 8
Fourth, the male love story. Clerks readily fits this conventional pattern: the
entire film is structured around the central homosocial relationship between Dante and
Randal. In fact, it is in this specific sense that Clerks stands as representative of Smith's
entire cinematic career: his oeuvre is emphatically concerned with the bonds of love and
intimacy that form between pairs (and sometimes groups) of pre-adult males. These male
love stories, usually about ostensibly straight males on the level of plot and dialogue
(Chasing Amy is a notable exception), express the underlying homoeroticism of their
62
central character's buddy bonds through mise en scene, editing, and subtle forms of
visual and cinematic coding.
In that connection, we move to Wood's fourth convention, the presence of an
explicitly homosexual character. Clerks does not technically feature an explicitly se1f-
identifying homosexual character, but it does include characters who are definitely more
queer than either of the central buddies, first among them being Willam the Idiot
Manchild, a. k. a. "Snowball." It is significant that Willam (played by producer Scott
Mosier) is first introduced into the narrative by his nickname, "Snowball," because he
likes to engage in snowballing, a practice wherein a partner who fellates him then kisses
him and spits his own ejaculate back into his mouth. The queer implications of this
sexual practice are clear: Willam likes the taste of semen. This not only indicates his
sexual interest in male ejaculate, but it is explicitly paired with a sexual practice
involving women, hence acting as an indicator of bisexuality and/or a queer sexuality that
transgresses, subverts, and/or just plain old ignores traditional gendered and sexual
binaries. Willam is not only not-straight, he is truly, fluidly queer. Willam is also
implicated in a number of other queerly interesting sequences in Clerks, a couple of
which I will analyze in detail in this chapter. Hence, even though Willarn is not
presented in the diegesis of Clerks as being explicitly or avowedly gay, he nevertheless
serves (in much queerer fashion) the same function that an openly homosexual character
would: as a "disclaimer-our boys are not like that" (Wood 204). His presence allows us
to see Dante and Randal as being at least more heterosexual than Willam. The queer duo
of Jay and Silent Bob also serve this function, though, as my close readings will show,
63
the boundary separating Willam or Jay and Silent Bob from Dante and/or Randal is not as
clear as it could be.
Wood's sixth and final buddy film convention is, simply, death. Wood observes
that in all the major buddy films of the 1970s, one (or sometimes both, as in Butch
Cassidy or the later Thelma and Louise) of its central buddies is either literally or
symbolically killed (he cites Francis's catatonia at the end of Scarecrow as an instance of
the latter). The reason for the prevalence of this motif is simple: "The male relationship
must never be consummated (indeed, must not be able to be consummated), and death is
the most effective impediment" (204). Having raised, however ambiguously, the specter
of male homosexuality, the buddy films must purge the possibility of a queer
consummation of the buddy relation by killing off one-and always the more effeminized
and thus queerly marked-of the buddy characters, such as Jeff Bridges' aptly named
Lightfoot in Thunderbolt and Ligh([oot or Dustin Hoffman's Ratso in Midnight Cowboy.
In this light it is extremely significant that as scripted and originally shot and edited,
Clerks (in the version now available on DVD as Clerks: The First Cut) concluded with
the apparently random shooting death of Dante, the feminized member of the
Dante/Randal duo. Smith was later persuaded to cut this ending from the film, those so
advising him claiming that the tone of the ending was way too grim for a comedy.9
However, the presence of this death scene in the original version of Clerks-it was even
included as a bonus feature in the orginal 1995 DVD release of the film-is completely
logical and would be conventionally expected if we read the film as a queer buddy movie
64
attempting to purge the possibility of a consummation between its main characters, Dante
and Randal.
That Clerks so neatly fits into the six most prevalent conventions of the 1970s
buddy film as identified by Wood is especially important given the author's comments
near the end of his discussion of the New Hollywood period:
[T]he ambiguity or evasiveness of the buddy movies [of the 1970s] can be read
positively in the context of the collapse of confidence in normality [...]: the men
are explicitly defined as heterosexual yet involved in what can only be called a
"male love story." (213)
Wood further notes that "[i]t is striking that, just before the sudden outcrop of explicitly
gay movies [such as Making Love in 1982], the buddy cycle virtually ends" (213), as if
the subgenre itself acknowledged its true thematic underpinnings and conceded the
spotlight to the new films that could deal with the same issues through direct denotation
rather than indirect connotation. What is interesting to me in this context is the way in
which strategies of queer representation in this subgenre shifted yet again with the tum of
a new decade, the 1990s. For while it is crucial to note that the films Cohan and Wood
discuss are Hollywood studio productions whereas Clerks is resolutely and emphatically
a product of the independent filmmaking sector, I would suggest that this migration of the
buddy film formula from the mainstream to the margins is itself significant, coming as it
does on the heels of a similar shift away from comedy and into the hypermasculinized
action/cop film genre during the 1980s. 10
65
Erotic Triangles and Gender Play
Virtually every extant Kevin Smith film features at least one duo of male
buddies-a feminized geek and a queered slacker-whose sexual desire for each other is
constantly called into view and into question, typically for comedic purposes, but just as
often as the central impetus of a more serious narrative arc (as in Chasing Amy). I call
these buddy pairs "dynamic duos," a term which refers to the hierarchical power
dynamics that exist between the two characters of each duo.
The twosomes falling under the dynamic duo rubric are hierarchical in nature and
as such exhibit power dynamics between the two unequally positioned participants. One
partner, our geek, is always presented as more submissive, feminized, and ambiguously
gendered; the other, our clown or slacker, is more aggressive, masculinized, and less
ambiguous in his gender traits though not sexual object choice. Hence the geek occupies
the conventional space of "the woman" in the duo, the more masculine slacker the space
of "the man." This hierarchization of the duo along gender lines correlates to traditional
heterosexual relationship structures which "involve people defined as social unequals (or
oppressor and oppressed, men and women)" (Dyer 33). By contrast, according to
Richard Dyer in his article on stereotyping, "homosexual relationships involve two
people who, in terms of sex caste, are equals" (33). However, this "sex caste" or gender
equality between homosexual (and by extension, homosocial) men is rarely depicted in
cinematic representations of same-sex couples precisely because the imperatives of
contemporary heterocentrist culture demand some kind of inequality between the partners
in order to make the relationship legible in the first place. I I Thus Dyer observes that in
66
depictions of explicitly gay couples, "other forms of social inequality" such as "age [...]
money and class" are often imposed in order to "[define] the nature of the gay
relationship" (34).
Insofar as the buddy pairs in the View Askewniverse signify as homoerotically
bonded, which they emphatically do, this social inequality between the two bonded
buddies is evident in Clerks, wherein Dante comes off as more socially refined, educated,
and therefore of slightly higher class status than the coarse and more traditionally
masculine Randal. Nonetheless, in Clerks, since the homoerotics between the central
male characters are not rendered as explicitly as in the more obvious gay couples Dyer
describes, the social inequality needed to make the erotic/romantic relationship between
the buddies visible is most fully reckoned in terms of their gendering: Dante is more
feminine than Randal. As we shall see, however, neither partner is completely free from
gender ambiguity or queer homosocial desire. The differences between the two buddies
are differences of degree rather than kind.
This fluidity or lack of boundaries around masculine gendering and the sexual
queerness it so frequently connotes is a result of a cultural disparity in how male
sexuality and gender roles are conceived in the first place. As discussed in the
Introduction, according to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a wedge or gap has been imposed
upon the homosocial continuum for males in Western culture. This gap exists to separate
abject or queer sexualities from the normative heterocentrist imperatives that privilege
white male Christian heterosexuality and undergird patriarchal power in the West. To
maintain these boundaries and this gap, certain powerful and radically incoherent
67
structures have been constructed, for example the homosexual/heterosexual binary as a
way of "world mapping" and classifying whole persons according to their perceived
sexual object choice-as if even that were stable or static for any given individual.
Through the encompassing figure of the closet, a structure rife with contradictions that
nevertheless functions as the "defining structure for gay oppression in this century"
(Epistemology 71), these gaps and incoherences in the male homosocial continuum reify
the power of a patriarchy founded upon the homophobic abjection of its constituitive
"other," the queer or not-exclusively-heterosexual man.
Clerks emerges in an historical period when the rise of queer media visibility, and
an increased public awareness of-if not sympathy with-the existence and rights of
queer persons, is well underway. Along with increasing social and economic gains by
women and people of color, the rise of queer cultural visibility further destabilizes white
masculinity's hold upon the privileged position of centrality and symbolic normalcy
within U.S. culture. Hence, white male media forms like independent slacker cinema and
Clerks are increasingly compelled to police the borders between various sexual and
gender choices for men, contributing to the maintenance of the incoherent gap in the
homosocial continuum heretofore discussed. In light of this cultural situation, it is
particularly interesting how the type of film I am analyzing, the independent buddy
comedy exemplified by Clerks, delights in playing on and around the forbidden
borderline between the rigidly heterolhomosexual and the liminal region described by the
term queer. Of course, this is a form of play that simultaneously works to solve particular
social dilemmas of this historical moment, in this case the fears, disavowals, and
68
abjection strategies of a white masculinity perpetually in crisis. Because the buddy film
is the comedic subgenre that most insistently plays with and points to this rupture in the
male homosocial continuum that Sedgwick describes, it depends heavily on the triangular
structure of male homoerotic disavowal and the "traffic in women" that so often
accompanies the maintenance of that rupture.
This triangular structure plays out somewhat differently in Clerks, where it is used
to facilitate gender and object-choice slippages amongst the principal characters. For
there are really two overlapping erotic triangles-the second of which is better described
as a triangle with an extra leg, or a pyramid-that schematize the rivalries and
homo/heterosocial bonds played out between the characters in the film. And since, in
contrast to the classic erotic rivalries described by Sedgwick in Between Men, the
principal male characters Dante and Randal do not overtly compete for any of the women
Dante is involved with, the narratives of rivalry and desire in Clerks set themselves up
along some rather startling cross-gender and intra-gender lines.
As Figure 4 shows, the first of Clerks's erotic triangles maps out Dante's rivalry
with the Asian Design Major Sang for the romantic affections of Caitlin Bree. This is a
classic erotic triangle featuring two men in competition for one woman, but there are
some interesting twists: for one, Sang never appears onscreen and we never hear his
voice. He is an invisible character, a structuring absence. What's more, Sang is the ideal
rival for Dante because from what little we do know about him he is similar/analogous to
Dante in many key respects: Caitlin calls him "very traditional" with respect to gender
roles, a conservatism we will see replicated in Dante concerning sexual practices later in
69
this chapter; he is ethnically marked as Asian, much as Dante's first name and dark
features mark him as Italian-American; and, like Dante, he ultimately seems to be
subordinate to Caitlin when it comes to determining the fate of their relationship. So
ultimately, this is an erotic triangle where the masculine power and privilege belongs to
the female object of desire: Caitlin may be the "object" when it comes to the sexual
object choice of the two rivals, but it is she who wields the masculine power. Thus our
first triangle reveals that some kind of divestment of masculine gendering, and its
attendant privilege of action with respect to patriarchal power structures, from
heterosexual object choice is taking place in Clerks. In sum, the Dante-Sang-Caitlin
triangle upholds the rivalry over male-female sexual object choice but reverses the
traditional gender positions of its participants: feminine men compete over a masculine
woman.
Caitlin
Sang (rivals) Dante
Figure 4: The Sang-Dante-Caitlin Erotic Triangle
70
The second triangle~or really pyramid~thatwe can use to map out the more
central erotic rivalry that drives the narrative of Clerks delineates a three-way rivalry
between Caitlin, Veronica, and Randal for the attentions of Dante (see Figure 5). This
pyramid restores the more traditional gendering of its participants~as I will discuss in
detail below, Caitlin, Veronica, and Randal are all gendered masculine~butqueers these
interrelations by (1) including two masculine females in the active, desiring (that is,
desire-er rather than desire-ee) positions traditionally reserved for males, (2) exposing the
potentially homoerotic nature of Randal's desire for Dante, and (3) queering the structure
of the triangle itselfby setting up a three-way rivalry along its base.
Dante
Randal (rivals)
Caitlin
(rivals)
Veronica
Figure 5: A Queer Erotic Pyramid
It is this unusual pyramid structure and the queer gender and object-choice
crossings it schematizes that impels most of the key diegetic developments in Clerks.
71
In looking more closely at the film, I will refer to two versions of Clerks: the
theatrical cut that was distributed by Miramax in 1994, and The First Cut which first
became commercially available on the Clerks Tenth Anniversary DVD (2004, usually
called Clerks X), accompanied by a making-of-Clerks documentary called The Snowball
EfJect. 12
In order to serve as a kind of slice-of-film-history and to avoid digital remastering
costs, Clerks: The First Cut as it appears on the Clerks XDVD is dubbed directly from
the same Super VHS tape version of Clerks that first showed at the Independent Feature
Film Market (IFFM) screening in New York in 1993. As Smith himself puts it in his
video introduction to The First Cut, this is the "the tape that started it all," the very
version that early supporters Amy Taubin, Peter Broderick, and John Pierson saw before
the film even hit Sundance in 1994. This is also the cut that screened at Sundance 1994,
minus the final scene involving the death of Dante. Once Miramax bought the film in
1994, they cleaned it up for national distribution: new music was added to the soundtrack,
the entire soundtrack was remixed, and additional editing trims were made to bring
Clerks from its original 105 minutes to the 92 minutes of the theatrical cut. While most
of these trims are quite small, the most significant ones serve to tone down the queer /
subversive content of The First Cut.
Masculine Women
Clerks depicts its key female characters, Veronica and Caitlin, as being gendered
masculine. As is suggested by their positions at the base of the erotic pyramid described
72
above, the function of both Veronica and Caitlin in Clerks is to emphasize Dante's
femininity, thus ultimately rendering him legible as an object ofRandal's queer desire.
Veronica's first appearance in Clerks is significant because it sets her up right
away as more masculine, take-charge, and powerful than Dante. All the shot numbers in
the following analysis refer to the "Veronica Rescue" shot list found in the Appendix.
Just prior to the beginning of this sequence, Dante looks on as a Quick Stop customer
asks a second customer questions about his smoking habits and, in an attempt to convince
him to quit smoking, shows him a picture of a cancer-ridden lung. The second man buys
gum instead ofcigarettes, and after he leaves Dante tries to get the anti-smoking activist
to leave, or at least to "not bother the customers," to no avail. The man proceeds to
verbally abuse Dante, blaming him for being a "source" for cigarettes in the area and
equating his work as a clerk to Nazism. As Dante protests in vain, the agitator rallies a
crowd of Quick Stop customers to tum against this "cancer merchant" and pelt him with
unlit cigarettes, until Dante's girlfriend, Veronica, arrives to save him (see Figure 6).
Veronica's arrival and actions thereafter are formally structured to emulate a
superhero comic book action sequence. Dante is literally framed (as ifby a comic book
panel) as a feminized victim that needs rescuing; just prior to and during Veronica's
entrance, Dante is verbally attacked by a mob and is internally framed by the cigarette
rack and shot at a distance, making him appear small and entrapped (shot 2-see Figure
6). As for Veronica, we first glimpse her as she enters the Quick Stop in shot I, then she
is withheld from our view for a few shots, as the angry mob's pelting of Dante with
cigarettes continues. It is not until shot 6 that we realize what Veronica is doing, i.e.,
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discharging a fire extinguisher in order to break up the mob, and it is not until shot 7 of
this sequence that visual confirmation of her responsibility for this deed is obtained.
These shots emulate a superhero's arrival at a crime-in-progress: the hero arrives,
observes a misdeed taking place (shot 1), then there are five shots depicting Dante and
the mob in a shot/reverse shot sequence, all of them apparently unaware of the arrival of
the superheroine who is about to enter the fray. The cuts throughout these first six shots
happen fairly rapidly; each shot lasts about 1-2 seconds. These short shots, conveying
scant visual information about the scene, are somewhat reminiscent of comic book
panels, and the withholding ofVeronica's/the superhero's whereabouts once she has
arrived but before she discharges the fire extinguisher is a common suspense-building
device used when unveiling heroes or villains in comics and mainstream action films.
Figure 6: Dante, trapped behind the counter and assaulted by a cigarette-throwing mob.
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Then shot 7 happens, and we are shown our mysterious, heroic interlocutor at last
(see Figure 7). In this shot, the usually diminuitive Veronica stands atop a freezer case
and is shot from a low angle; in fact, the camera starts by framing only her lower legs
then tilts upward to take in Veronica's whole body, ending with a medium shot of
Veronica from the waist up, still aiming the fire extinguisher nozzle. Not only does the
low angle of the shot suggest Veronica's superheroic power as she towers over the now
neutralized mob, but the motion of the camera tilt increases the effect, making Veronica
appear taller still and "scoping" her outfit in a fashion typical of the initial revelation of
costumed heroes. Between the spouting fire extinguisher nozzle and the low camera
angle, this shot also visually phallicizes Veronica, a motif that is appropriate to her
masculine role as rescuer of the passive, victimized Dante.
Further, on the level of sound design, the shot depicting Veronica's superheroic
appearance is accompanied by a single dramatic electric-guitar chord, her superhero
theme song if you will. This is especially notable because this guitar chord exists in The
First Cut and is preserved into the theatrical release version of Clerks. By contrast, in
The First Cut neither Jay and Silent Bob nor even Randal have theme music, a treatment
apparently reserved only for active, masculine, heroic figures of Veronica's stripe. (Of
course, the theatrical release version adds soundtrack music to Randal's and Jay and
Bob's appearances-part of the film's marketing by Miramax.)
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Figure 7: Dante is rescued just in time by super-heroine Veronica, a masculine woman
who wields phallic power.
These gestures toward superhero comics form are not necessarily as important to
Clerks as they will be to some of the later View Askewniverse films, especially Dogma
and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. However, I mention them in this context to show (1)
that the influence of superhero comics can already be seen in Smith's filmic work, and
(2) that Veronica's positioning as the phallicized superhero figure is yet one more way
that Clerks accentuates her female masculinity,
In contrast to Veronica's phallic power, Dante's feminized victim status is
reemphasized in shot 13, where, in the wake of the cigarette-throwing crisis, he looks
dejectedly at a single cigarette that he twirls slowly around between his fingers.
Conventionally-and just moments earlier in the Jay and Silent Bob scene analyzed
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below-a cigarette connotes sexual satisfaction, but here the cigarette symbolizes
Dante's phallic failure and his need to be rescued by his more-masculine girlfriend.
Once Veronica steps down from the freezer and orders the rabble-rousing
Chewlies Gum Representative out of the Quick Stop, her overt phallicization continues,
at least in the film's original cut (Clerks: The First Cut). In shot 14 of C:TFC, Dante sits
on the floor to one side of the counter and Veronica walks up to him from the right side
of the frame, depicted from the waist down and holding the fire extinguisher in front of
her crotch (see Figure 8). This visual pun on the size of her "package," and Dante's
position relative to it-seated on the floor with the nozzle next to his headlface/mouth-
says it all about the sexual power dynamics between these two characters: Veronica is the
dominant, active masculine figure and Dante the submissive feminine one, positioned
here to give her a blowjob. However, Veronica attempts to cover this power relation by
playing (at least superficially) a more traditional gender role in relation to Dante, shoring
up Dante's fragile ego by calling him "champ" (in TFC only) and "my man" (shot 21).
However, the Theatrical Cut omits the fire-extinguisher-as-testic1es portion of the
sequence, thereby avoiding phallicizing Veronica, and moves more quickly to the shot of
the sign (shot 15), to indicate a passage of time, and then on to the lengthy and revealing
conversation between Dante and Veronica behind the Quick Stop counter in shot 16.
This conversation bears looking at in detail.
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Figure 8: Veronica's impressive "package," suggestive of male genitalia. This shot was
omitted from Clerks's theatrical release but was seen at Sundance 1994 and on the 2004
Clerks XDVD.
First off, the seating arrangement of the couple at the outset of the conversation
(shot 16) bears noting: Veronica sits behind Dante, and he slouches down so that as he
leans back against her his head is against her chest. I have often felt once the film cuts to
this shot that I am witnessing a postcoital moment: the two of them sit together, one
behind the other, Dante painting Veronica's nails. This action also feminizes Dante-
nail-painting is a traditionally feminine activity-and perhaps recalls a similar sequence
from Stanley Kubrick's Lolita (1960) wherein Humbert (James Mason) paints Lolita's
(Sue Lyon's) toenails as they argue about her desire to associate with other boys: in this
context nail-painting by a man is coded as sexually deviant. In Clerks, the passage of
time implied by the shot of the "Please leave money on the counter" sign (shot 15)
indicates that there could have been time for a sexual act to occur between Dante and
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Veronica behind the counter. And while subsequent dialogue plays with yet ultimately
negates this interpretation, the visual composition of the shot is nonetheless so suggestive
of this possibility that the two characters are impelled to raise it explicitly themselves:
VERONICA: You think anybody can see us down here?
DANTE: Why, you wanna have sex or something?
VERONICA: Can we?
DANTE: Really?
VERONICA: I was kidding.
This exchange once again places Veronica in the more assertive role, which,
given their relative positions, with Veronica seated behind Dante, would also be the
symbolically (if not physically) insertive one had they actually had sex, with Dante in the
more passive position. In short, the temptation to read this shot as post/pre-coital further
suggests a reading where Veronica has taken/will take Dante from behind, further
emphasizing their role reversal along gender lines. Further, Dante's incredulous response
of "Really?" rather than simply saying "Yes" highlights his anxiety in the face of
aggressive female sexuality and his lack of masculine sexual assertiveness and prowess.
Interestingly, though Veronica and Dante decide not to physically have sex, their
verbal intercourse in this sequence centers completely on the subject of sex: they talk
about how many partners each of them has slept with in the past. Not only is this a trope
that Smith's films will return to again and again, but it also confirms my reading of this
behind-the-counter scene as being sexually suggestive, if only in the verbally explicit and
visually connotative registers.
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Eventually the couple stands up and Veronica prepares to leave for class (shot
19). However, upon rising, the two discover that they are not alone in the store: Willam
Black, the Idiot Manchild, stands in front of the counter, staring blankly into space. A
conversation ensues between Veronica and Willam wherein three key facts, all having to
do with names, are revealed (see Figure 9).
The first of these is that Veronica is known to some of her associates as Ronnie,
the name Willam calls her at the outset of their talk. This masculinization of her given
name filmly places Veronica in the category of the masculine woman or butch. As Judith
Halberstam argues, this masculine woman "prowls the film set as an emblem of social
upheaval and as a marker of sexual disorder. She [...J expresses aberrant desires, and is
very often associated with clear markers of a distinctly phallic power" (186). We have
already seen how Veronica is associated with phallic power, especially in her dealings
with Dante; we shall soon see that, at least from Dante's perspective, she expresses
aberrant sexual desires as well.
The second interesting point raised during this dialogue between Ronnie and
Willam also concerns naming: Willam's last name is Black. Hence the character known
and depicted as a queer "idiot manchild" also carries the surname Black, a conflation that
refers to the concomitant sexualization and infantilization of non-whites in the white
cultural imagination. In Clerks, Willam's penchant for unusual sex (snowballing),
combined with his spaced-out manchild status, marks him as a symbolic substitute for a
black character, positioning him as an object of sexual anxiety (and fantasy) for white
men, in this case Dante. This racialized conflation will take on heightened significance in
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my discussion of Jay and in the context of Chasing Amy and the View Askew films that
follow it.
Figure 9: Willam Black, aka "Snowball," meets "Ronnie" and her "man," Dante.
Lastly, it is revealed (in shot 28) that Willam is nicknamed Snowball, a reference
to his enjoyment of having his own semen spat back into his mouth while kissing.
However, after Willam leaves, Veronica admits that she snowballed Willam at some
point in the past, and in the ensuing argument a critical difference between Dante's and
Veronica's ideas about sexuality is exposed: for Veronica, performing fellatio does not
constitute having sex with a person, but for Dante it does. As Dante himself yells
exasperatedly at Veronica in shot 30, "Why did you have to suck their dick, I mean, why
couldn't you sleep with them like any other decent person?" Here Dante constructs
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normative, missionary style sexual intercourse ("sleep[ing] with them") as being "decent"
and thereby implies that Veronica's willingness to give blowjobs to her dates is indecent
or deviant in some way. And indeed, the fact that Veronica has had oral sex with thirty-
six guys implies that she is more sexually open than Dante, and her predilection for
giving fellatio-an oral form of sexuality conventionally viewed as less developmentally
mature than missionary style sex-queers her to an extent. Most importantly, and despite
Veronica's reassurances, Dante sees this indecent / queer behavior of Veronica's as being
a threat to his own position: "Every time I kiss you I'm going to taste thirty-six other
guys." The depth of Dante's insecurity in the face of Veronica's sexual experience is
revealed in the final shot of this sequence (shot 31), when he dashes out the door after her
and shouts: "Hey, try not to suck any dick on the way through the parking 10t!"-a
hypermasculine attempt to contain her through a derisive command, which backfires
when a male bystander starts walking after her and Dante is forced to admonish this
incidental embodiment of his fears: "Hey, get back here!"
This sequence is also reflective of the liminal status of fellatio in U.S. culture in
the early 1990s. Is fellatio a full-blown sex act (as for Dante), or just a casual activity
that can occur on a first or second date (as for Veronica)? As Christopher Hitchens
writes in a 2006 Vanity Fair article, "For a considerable time, the humble blowjob was
considered something rather abject," a deed associated with prostitutes and gay men,
hence "too queer" for a respectable person to either give or receive (Hitchens 52). But
starting in the late 1960s, Hitchens notes, "there must have been a crossover in which a
largely forbidden act of slightly gay character was imported into the heterosexual
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mainstream" (Hitchens 53). Indeed, according to Hitchens, a fairly complete reversal in
fellatio's fortunes occurred in the 1960s and by 1969 receiving a blowjob was considered
much more "manly" and desirable than participating in missionary style sex, which by
then was considered somewhat passe and conservative. This is precisely how the deed is
framed in Dante and Veronica's argument in Clerks: for Dante, the blowjob counts as
sex, and a deviant and suspicious form of sex to boot, whereas for Veronica, it does not
even count as "real" sex but is much more casual. Though released three years before the
Bill Clinton "Monicagate" scandal came to public light, Clerks anticipates the widely
publicized debates over the meaning of fellatio that would arise in the midst of President
Clinton's impeachment proceedings in 1997-8. In an attempt to clear his name of the
charges of sexual misconduct with White House aide Monica Lewinsky, President
Clinton would famously testify under oath that fellatio did not count as sexual relations in
his case, largely on the grounds that he was a passive recipient of the act. However, more
important than the Clinton hearings themselves is the fact that this form of sexuality was
under much consideration and debate during this period, its exact status in the panoply of
sexually intimate behaviors uncertain. 13
In Clerks this one relatively short sequence exposes the extreme fragility of
Dante's masculinity/security, giving the lie to the masculine bravado he displays early in
their conversation (shot 16) with lines like "You can't get enough of me" and his
misogynistic claims about the lack of women's sexual prowess in general. This fear of
the sexuality of women is a theme that Smith's films will return to again and again.
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The other interesting thing about this last exchange between Dante and Veronica
before she exits the store is its exposure of the confusion and conflation that often results
from discussions of gender and sexuality. Dante is threatened by Veronica's perceived
sexual aberrations but not, apparently, her gender-transgressive masculinity. Conversely,
Veronica does not care so much about Dante's sexual proclivities-she jokingly calls him
a "pig" when he reveals how many women he has slept with but ultimately does not
perseverate on the matter-but is seemingly quite invested in helping him to overcome
his feminine passivity as emblematized by his refusal to quit his clerking job and go back
to school. The two are at cross-purposes here, one preoccupied with issues of sexual
behavior (Dante), the other with issues of gender role (Veronica). The fact that they both
appear to be arguing about the same thing and that thing is sexuality clearly demonstrates
the extent to which gender and sexuality are incoherently conflated in Western patriarchal
culture. 14 As Eve Sedgwick notes, the conflation between gender and sexuality is one of
the main mechanisms by which mainstream U.S. culture maintains its denial of /
ignorance about matters of queer sexuality, for example, mistakenly assuming that
effeminate behavior in men indicates homosexuality, and that therefore any non-
effeminate man must be straight as opposed to bisexual or passing. In this sequence
Clerks uses this same foml of misunderstanding-does a willingness to give blowjobs
constitute deviant or promiscuous sexuality in a woman?-to drive a rift between its two
most straight-identifying characters. 15
Randal wastes no time in using the argument between Dante and Veronica as a
means to reassert his own verbally and physically intimate relationship with Dante. By
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the time Veronica returns to the Quick Stop Convenience store a bit later in the film's
narrative, Dante and Randal have talked over Dante's female troubles (see Syntax close
reading below) and Dante has calmed down. Veronica brings him lasagna for lunch-the
lasagna and the deed emphasizing her (decidedly unmasculine) Italian ethnicized .
traditionality-and the two of them make Up.16 However, at two points during their
reconciliatory conversation, Randal can be heard in the background making slurping
faux-fellatio noises. Ostensibly meant to "razz" Dante in front of his girlfriend, these
audio interjections also foreshadow Randal's later attempt to break Veronica and Dante
up by exposing the latter's plans vis-a-vis Caitlin to the former. They also help to end
this heterosexual making-up sequence on a particularly queer note: the moment after
Veronica leaves the store, Randal steps in close to Dante, occupying the space Veronica
just vacated, and repeats the slurping noise one final time. Ajoke indeed, but also
another case where, as with his bait-and-switch game during their car ride and many
other instances, Randal finds a way to be close to Dante and make sexually suggestive
vocalizations and/or conversation.
In contrast to Veronica, Caitlin is an offscreen presence until rather late in the
film, and as a result we know little about her, except through Dante, up to that point.
However, once she appears, a few very interesting facts emerge. For one, she has come
to Leonardo (the New Jersey town in which Clerks is set) to escape a traditional wedding
arrangement to the Asian Design Major, Sang, and to reunite with Dante. During the
conversation in which she discusses her engagement to Sang with Dante, she
emphatically states that she is not ready for marriage and that she intends to pursue a
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career first. Although the viewer never learns what she is studying or what that career
might be, it nevertheless stands that Caitlin is a self-proclaimed career woman and has no
use for traditional wedding (read: gender) arrangements. This fact, combined with her
known history of sexual assertiveness and promiscuity that torments and feminizes Dante
throughout the film, makes clear that Caitlin is a take-charge sort who will no doubt be
the dominant partner should she and the passive, femininely loyal Dante actually get back
together.
Furthermore, once Caitlin accidentally has sex with the dead man in the darkened
Quick Stop bathroom, she expresses extreme satisfaction at having the man (who she
mistakenly presumes to be Dante) "just lie perfectly still and let me do everything": in
fact, she says that "it has never been like that before" and reports that her legs are still
shaking from the experience. Of course, this all gets turned into a misogynistic joke once
she realizes that it wasn't Dante and that she mistakenly had intercourse with a dead
stranger, a situation the misogynistic Randal finds quite hilarious, but Caitlin's initial
reaction reinforces her status as an active, take-charge, and hence masculinized sexual
actor. Further, even as this scenario takes its misogynistic turn, it remains a joke that cuts
both ways, for according to Caitlin, sex is better with a dead guy than it is with the living,
breathing Dante. Hence, by assuming the active sexual role in this sequence, Caitlin
places Dante (or here, his dead-dead!-proxy) in the same feminized, passive position
we saw him in earlier with respect to his relationship with Veronica. Both of these
masculinized female characters reveal Kevin Smith's preoccupation with strong,
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empowered women who threaten, disrupt, and/or usurp white male societal privilege, and
figures like them reappear in all subsequent View Askew films.
Queer Male Sexuality
It is not only masculinized women who disrupt heterocentrist constructions of
masculinity in Clerks, but also secondary male characters who appear more queer than
our central buddy protagonists. Our main focus here will be on Jay and Silent Bob,
whose interactions from the outset of Clerks mark them as queer, and who eventually
draw Randal into a homophobic bait-and-switch game similar to the ones Randal
frequently plays on Dante, thereby exposing the ways in which Randal himself is deeply
implicated in the queerness that he attempts to deflect onto others.
Jay's opening monologue, which takes place seven and a half minutes into the
film just after the "Jay And Silent Bob" intertitle, provides a super-condensed model of
duo dynamics at work, demonstrating the strange slippages that accrue around the
radically incoherent gap in the male homosocial continuum. Jay and Bob have just
arrived at the outside wall of the Quick Stop, where they will lurk around all day selling
drugs (see Figure 10). The camera work here, as it does through much of Clerks, evokes
a feeling of documentary realism, with the slight camera wobble of handheld shooting.
There are few cuts, most shots taken as long takes that increase the sense of
documentary-like immediacy. Further heightening the sense of realism in the Jay and
Silent Bob sequences is the naturalistic way Jay delivers his lines, very quickly and as if
they are spewing forth from his subconscious:
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JAY: I feel good today, Silent Bob. We're gonna make some money, then you
know what we're going to do? We're gonna go to that party, we're gonna get
some pussy, and I'm gonna fuck this bitch, gonna fuck this bitch... [yelling] I'll
fuck anything that moves!
This first declaration is worth pausing over for a moment, as Jay's announcement
that <41'11 fuck anything that moves!" alerts us to the fact that Jay is at least potentially
queer: his sexual object choice is not confined to anyone sex (or even species), but is
about a fluid as such a thing can get, excluding perhaps only inanimate objects that
cannot move. Although Jay delivers the bulk of this monologue to Silent Bob, he shouts
this last statement out toward the street with his arms raised defiantly: a coming-out
gesture? Perhaps, but if so, it is of a particularly psychotic bent, for this phrase is also an
exact quotation from David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986): disturbed kidnapper and rapist
Frank (Dennis Hopper) shouts <41'11 fuck anything that moves!" when preparing to depart
for a harrowing car ride that ends in an explosion of homoerotic violence between
himself and entrapped college kid Jeffery (Kyle MacLachlan). In the context ofBlue
Velvet it is not clear what Frank means by the verb "fuck" in this declaration: it is both
sexual and violent, could as easily mean "kill" as "have sex with." And Jay's
reappropriation of the line in Clerks, while not likely referring to actual violence or
murder as with Frank, nevertheless carries a symbolically violent charge originating in
Jay's defensive homophobia.
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Figure 10: "I love women!" Jay declares, a comedically exaggerated gesture of
hypermasculine posing with which he disavows his homoerotic impulses toward Silent
Bob.
Furthermore, Jay's hypermasculine talk here emulates the imagined street talk of
young African-American males. As Eric Lott argues, white masculinity depends upon
proximity to / mimicry of black masculinity in order to constitute itself as masculinity:
"the assumption of dominant [white] codes of masculinity in the United States is partly
negotiated through an imaginary black interlocutor [...] [and depends] upon the
momentary return [... ] to a state of arrested adolescence" (246). Black manhood is thus
imagined by whites to be an adolescent, immature fonn of manhood that all white males
must pass through on their way to becoming full-fledged white adults. It is assumed that
white adolescents, after they have "sown their oats" and acted in an immature fashion for
a certain finite period, will then leave behind their "white Negro" phase and ascend to
mature white adulthood. (The term "white Negro" is taken from Norman Mailer's
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famous 1957 essay of the same name that describes the racial appropriation perpetrated
by white "hipsters" of the 1930s and 40s.) Arrested development males like Jay, who
seemingly refuse to progress into mature adulthood, are suspended in a constant (if
imaginary and projected) relationship to black masculinity and its (imagined) signifiers.
Jay's slang-laden speech and drug-dealing lifestyle is his way of ethnically marking
himself as culturally black, hence rendering him cooler and more "hip" than the geeky,
day-job holding clerks (Dante and Randal) he enjoys berating. Jay has "street cred" due
to his economically disadvantaged and racially marked position in the social order, and
his obsession with appropriating black culture, increasingly prevalent in each subsequent
View Askew film, is emblematic of the racialized logic of slackerism writ large: slackers
slack in order to repudiate white privilege and to mark themselves with a (performed and
appropriated) "racial" identity.
Jay's speech continues:
JAY: [...] [to unseen passersby in the street] Yo, what's up baby? What's up,
sluts? Shit. [turns to Bob] Silent Bob, you're a rude motherfucker, you know
that? But you're cute as hell. I'd like to go down on you, suck you, then line up
three other guys and make like a circus seal. [mimics fellating multiple men]
[stands up suddenly, cocking his fist back] [to Bob] Oooh, you fuckin' faggot!
[yelling into street] I hate guys, I love women!
Perhaps this sequence needs little explanation, but three specific details
particularly stand out. First, it is notable that Jay's enactment of a sexual fantasy in
which he sucks off Silent Bob and three other guys is bookended by two instances of
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hypermasculine posturing: his lascivious yelling of "What's up, sluts?" at (presumably)
female passersby, and his post-fantasy shouted declaration that "I love women!"-the
latter rendered comically ironic by the appearance of Willam the Idiot Manchild onscreen
as Jay yells the word "women."
In fact, and this is my second point, this sudden appearance ofWillam, who,
recall, is "more homosexual" than Dante or Randal and thus serves as a proxy for an
explicitly gay man in the narrative, is significant here because his status as a feminized or
queered man combined with Jay's timely self-disclosure about what he will or will not
fuck is certainly sexually suggestive. Even if Jay is serious about hating guys and loving
women-a claim that contradicts his "I'll fuck anything that moves!" statement and is
definitively disproven by the time we reach the fourth View Askew film, Dogma-
Willam's sexual and gender status, rendered questionable by his love of snowballing
(suggestive of deviant/queer object choice) and this verbal/visual joke (Jay yells
"Women!" as Willam appears in the frame), certainly places within the realm of
possibility the idea that Jay and Willam might "hook up" sexually.17 We have previously
discussed the significance of Willam's last name, Black, and here it takes on additional
valence, for as a white Negro, Jay loves to hang out with and emulate black speech and
behavior, and at the core of his cross-racial appropriation is sexual desire. His desire to
be like a (here only symbolic) "Black" man is impossible to extricate from his desire to
be with a black man-a figure whose racial identity has long been conflated with hyper-
sexuality in the white imagination.
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The third significant detail to be noted in this brief sequence is the shot of Silent
Bob smoking a cigarette, quickly cut away to as Jay says "I'll suck you" to his verbally
reticent buddy. Not only is this a funny visual pun-Silent Bob sucking on a cigarette as
Jay emulates sucking him off-but it also invokes the classical Hollywood trope of
cigarette smoking standing in for sexual desires and/or acts that cannot be depicted
explicitly onscreen. In this sense, intentional or not, this shot is both funny, a
traditionally prudish trope rendered ridiculous by the explicit content of Jay's monologue,
but it also suggests that the feeling is mutual, i.e., that Silent Bob, despite his silence,
might well be thinking the same thing. While Clerks does not answer this question
explicitly-the last scene in which the duo appears features Jay dry-humping Silent Bob
to illustrate a point but Bob, as usual, is non-responsive-the queerness of Jay and Silent
Bob is an issue that will be developed, played with, and elaborated upon with increasing
insistence over the course of all subsequent View Askewniverse films.
The film's central queer male character is Randal, who, throughout most of
Clerks, interacts exclusively with other narratively central characters-Dante, Veronica,
Caitlin-and with unnamed customers of the convenience and video stores. He is never
seen onscreen with Willam, Olaf, or other recurring secondary characters except on the
few occasions he has brief interactions with Jay and Silent Bob. Perhaps the most
interesting ofthese is the sequence, an hour and twelve minutes into the film, where Jay
tapes a sign in the shape of a comics dialogue bubble to the glass front door of the Quick
Stop and then pounds on the door and flips Randal the finger. Randal comes out and,
from where he stands behind the glass door, appears as a comic book figure, framed by
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the doorframe and "saying" (via his dialogue bubble) "I eat cock!!!" Jay points and
laughs, his practical joke a success (see Figure 11).
Figure 11: Jay plays a visual joke on Randal, queering them both and evoking the formal
structure of a cornie book panel.
The queer implications of the visual image generated by Jay's joke reflect upon
both Randal and Jay. As Sigmund Freud argues in Jokes and their Relation to the
Unconscious, jokes arise out of the unconscious thought-processes of the joke-maker and
"make possible the satisfaction of an instinct (whether lustful or hostile) in the face of an
obstacle that stands in its way" (169, 101). In this case, Jay's homophobic joke is both
lustful and hostile toward Randal and is an expression of his homoerotic lust for men that
is blocked by societal taboos against non-straight sexuality.
The shot of Randal framed in the doorframe with his incriminating speech bubble
constitutes the very last shot of the section of the film called "Paradigm." Of course, as
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Geoff King points out, many of Clerks' vignette titles are meant to be taken ironically,
indicating the film's "self-conscious" attempt to highlight its own "indie" status (82).
However, King also acknowledges that many elements of Clerks are "heartfelt in some
respects and not entirely ironic," and I wonder if we are meant to read the "Paradigm"
intertitle and its subsequent content as ironic, heartfelt, or, most likely in a film like
Clerks that delights in having it both ways, some combination of the two? To wit, does
this last shot of the "Paradigm" vignette function as a paradigm for male queerness in the
film, a queerness that is not avowed directly but is made explicit through practical jokes
like this one and the one Randal plays on Dante during their car ride? It is notable that
Randal, normally a very verbose character, does not speak in this shot and never responds
to Jay in the aftermath of this joke. In fact, the very next shot (following the next
intertitle) shows Randal sitting in the store, looking thoughtfully at the "I eat cock!!!"
speech bubble sign: has Jay gotten through to Randal? As I have noted elsewhere, there
is indeed a slippage in Clerks between Randal's presumed heterosexuality and his queer
behavior, and nowhere is this incoherent disjuncture more clearly articulated than it is by
Randal himself in the section that precedes "Paradigm," called, appropriately,
"Perspicacity."
John Kenneth Muir's guide to the films of Kevin Smith, An Askew View,
summarizes the "Perspicacity" section thus: "This word means 'clarity of understanding,'
and it is here that Randal explains to Dante how title does not dictate behavior, but
actions do. To prove his point, Randal spits water on a customer. Dante immediately
gets the point" (206-7, emphasis added). Of course, Muir's account interprets Randal's
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axiom that "title does not dictate behavior" in one register only, that of his and Dante's
roles as clerks and his (very funny) spitting of water on a customer. I8 However, this
concept that one's title or identity does not necessarily correlate to one's acts or behavior
also applies to sexual identities and gender roles. In fact, coming from Randal, it is hard
not to understand it in this way, and the film bears out the validity of this interpretation:
for example, the most feminized male character, Dante, also commits the "ballsiest"
move that Randal has ever been privy to by suggesting they play hockey on the roof of
the Quick Stop. This not only reinforces the interdependence and role-reversal inherent
to dynamic slacker-geek duos, it is also right in line with the fluid gender and sexuality
play that dominates Clerks. Similarly, most of Veronica's deeds throughout the film,
which mark her as masculine and more sexually open than Dante, run counter to her
narrative positioning as the loyal, subservient, ethnicized girlfriend.
In terms of sexuality, it is Randal himself who most embodies this titlelbehavior
disjuncture: although he is relatively unmarked with respect to both gender and sexual
object choice, the imperatives ofheterocentrist culture lead us to assume (in the absence
of such markers) that he is ostensibly or by default heterosexual. 19 However, this title of
"heterosexual male," which Randal is permitted to assume implicitly due to his privileged
position as a white male in the heterocentrist patriarchal order, does not correlate with his
behavior throughout Clerks. To cite three examples: (l) Randal never expresses any
sexual desire for any specific persons of any gender, in a film that turns narratively on
romantic entanglements, (2) he claims during his conversation with Veronica late in the
film that "I don't know thing one about chicks," despite his apparently extensive
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knowledge of matters sexual, and (3) he rents and watches a pornographic film featuring
hennaphrodites, which he later claims to have rented in order to watch "together" with
Dante.
These three behaviors taken together can only be described as queer. In fact, if
we add to this profile Randal's keen interest in discussing subjects relating to sexual
deviancy-male autofellatio (as performed by his cousin Walter), sex workers (the jizz-
moppers), and hermaphrodites ("chicks with dicks!" he announces gleefully), to name a
few-we might be tempted to see Randal as a kind of unconscious, vernacular queer
theorist/practitioner. Of course, he is protected from direct connections to queer sexuality
by his aforementioned male privilege and by his status (verified by behavior number one)
as an asexual manchild.
In other words, for all his prurient talk, interest in queer sexuality, and belief that
identities and actions are not contiguous-a very queer position indeed-Randal is
rendered harmless by his ambiguous and seemingly asexual state of arrested
development. The film avoids explicitly marking Randal as queer by denying him any
expression of sexual object choice: even if we count his watching of the hermaphrodite
video as such an expression, its subject matter ("chicks with dicks") leaves Randal's true
sexual preferences opaque. Clerks is hedging its bets, playing it both ways, and in this
sense it is a microcosm of Kevin Smith's independent filmmaking career writ large. As a
geeky male slacker in the age of queer cinema, Smith has little choice but to engage with
queer sexuality but to do so in a way that alienates neither queer-friendly nor homophobic
audiences. And, as previously discussed, these simultaneously heartfelt and ironic
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approaches to male queerness are also an accurate reflection of the fluctuating and
precarious state of 1990s Gen-X male gendering and sexuality, themes that will recur
even more strikingly in Smith's third film, Chasing Amy.
Dante and Randall: Syntax
Dante and Randal's onscreen interactions in Clerks articulate, in highly coded
fashion that allows the film to "play it both ways," the sexual desire implicit in their close
homosocia1 bond. This section will analyze events that take place in the "Syntax"
vignette, identified (as are all the segments of the film) by a white-on-b1ack intertitle
bearing its name (shot numbers are from the Syntax shot list in the Appendix). The
opening "Syntax" intertitle is accompanied by silence on the theatrical feature (TF)
version though is accompanied by a single strum of a banjo on Clerks: The First Cut (C:
TFC), which suggests the sinister strumming of the banjo from Deliverance and its pop-
cultural association with compromised masculinity, ma1e-on-ma1e sexuality, and the
conflation of queer sexuality and violence. Further, the OED defines "syntax" as
"Orderly or systematic arrangement of parts or elements; constitution (of body); a
connected order or system of things." but also lists an obsolete meaning for the word,
"Physical connexion, junction," which is interesting in light of its reference to Dante and
Randal's relationship here.
For the "Syntax" segment sets up all the dynamic relations between our central
male buddy duo and the women who serve as outlets for their diverted homosexual
desire. In essence, this vignette gives us the syntax with which to comprehend the
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network of relationships that surrounds Dante and explains the clues we have already
been given about his character earlier in the film. The sequence begins shortly after
Randal arrives a half an hour late for work at RST Video and, after getting into a verbal
conflict with one of his first customers of the day, walks next door to commiserate with
best buddy Dante.
Shot 2 shows Dante in his usual position behind the Quick Stop counter,
internally framed by the cigarette racks that hang overhead. True to form, Randal enters
but rather than occupying space behind the counter, he leans against the front of it at the
right side of the frame. Hence Randal is not trapped by the same boxed-in internal frame
that Dante is, and Randal's relative freedom is emphasized by his action of picking up a
snack from the counter without paying for it. Further, the story he tells Dante about
tearing up a disagreeable customer's video membership, and Dante's labeling of that
action as a "shocking abuse of authority," further highlight the differences between them:
Randal is masculine, active, and free while Dante is feminine, passive, and trapped
behind the counter on his supposed day off. Randal's position is emblematic of a past
fantasy of "frontier" masculinity that is unfettered from social obligation, such as that of
the classic "loner" heroes of westerns and detective film and fiction, which finds its late
20th century expression in Randal-like delinquents, rebels, and lower-middle-class
slackers. Dante, on the other hand, represents the feminized "company man" of late
capitalist culture, the social-conformist middle-class geek who does not wish to rock the
boat or get into trouble with his boss, but who wants to whine and complain about his
position constantly.
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One of the most interesting and revealing images in this sequence occurs in shot
3: a small sign advertising Dave's fruit pies revolves atop its post for the three-second
duration of the shot. The pies advertised are for two different flavors, apple and cherry,
but their position on opposite sides of the same sign, and the location of this shot in the
broader narrative are, i.e., just before our principal duo, Dante and Randal, get into their
first substantive discussion, is significant. I read the sign, which emphasizes the "Real
Fruit Filling" of the pies it advertises, as an emblem for Dante and Randal, two
differently flavored products with real fruit filling and inexorably bonded together, two
sides of the same sign. Especially interesting in this regard is the deployment of the fruit
pie sign later in the narrative, which only occurs in the First Cut version of the film: it
reappears just before the stranger enters the Quick Stop and shoots Dante dead. The fruit
pie sign thus placed is the key to understanding Smith's original ending: the fruit pie,
Dante, must die.
The same homophobic anxiety that motivates the dominant duo member, here
Randal, to bait and humiliate the more sensitive geek or "sad young man," Dante,
throughout the film, reaches its apex (in the FC version) in this depiction of apparently
random but narratively logical violence. The 'Sad Young Man' stereotype is delineated
by Richard Dyer in an essay of the same name. It describes a popular stereotype used
across a wide range of media to denote a male homosexual. The sad young man had its
heyday in the 1950s and its best-known cinematic exemplars are James Dean and Sal
Mineo. I think the character of Dante bears traces of the type, and hence, like Sal Mineo
in Rebel Without A Cause (1955), he must be expunged from the narrative through death
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in order to restore an ostensibly heterosexual closure for the film. In Clerks, the
"motivation" for the shooting, ostensibly part of a robbery, is visually and formally
"explained" by the reappearance of the fruit pie sign in the instant before the anonymous
shooter enters the store. Of course, once Clerks was purchased by Miramax and Smith
was convinced by John Pierson and others to abbreviate the ending, the second
appearance ofthe fruit pie sign was eliminated along with the shooting itself since, as I
argue, they are linked.2o
Another sequence cut from the Theatrical Feature version of Clerks but preserved
in the FC version takes place just after Randal comes into the store in shot 2: in fact, it
replaces the fruit pie sign shot altogether. It is a sequence in which Randal, after
delivering his "Especially because I rule" line, asks Dante if "the pelican is flying" and
proceeds to climb a ladder and disconnect a security camera that sits above the store's
beverage coolers. This camera is trained on the front counter; Dante and Randal discuss
Randal's deed thus:
RANDAL: Is the pelican flying?
DANTE: Don't screw with it, it makes us look suspicious.
RANDAL: (shakes his head) I can't stand a voyeur. I'll be back.
Not only is Randal's negative proclamation about voyeurism funny in light of what a
cinephile and pornophile he is, but one also wonders what kind of suspiciousness Dante
is most worried about-especially since he does not make any serious effort to stop
Randal from disconnecting the camera. Perhaps Dante himself enjoys having the camera
unplugged as well, and Randal is not entirely unjustified in claiming later in the film that
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"You know I'm your hero." In any case, it is clear that this has happened before and that
Dante is not particularly concerned about this infraction-strange given how much fuss
he raises over other violations of policy throughout the film.
So what in the Fe version signaled Dante's impending murder becomes in the TF
version the symbol of Dante and Randal's homosocial bond, standing in for the original
(as scripted and shot) emblems of their possible queerness: the banjo strum in shot 1 and
Randal's dismantling of the means of their surveillance by an external authority in the
security camera sequence.
One other detail from this sequence is worthy of note: Randal asking Dante ifhe
can borrow his car in shot 4. This is one of the few concrete indicators in the film that
Randal may be of slightly lower economic status than Dante. Certainly his disregard for
social conventions and contentedness in his clerking job code him as being of a lower
class position than Dante, but his lack of car (in the face of Dante's converse privilege)
shows explicitly that despite their current similarity in employment, Randal may come
from a background of slightly less means than Dante. Typically, Smith's films position
the feminized geek character (Dante) as being more educated, socially refined, and thus
of higher class status than his queered slacker sidekick (Randal), creating an inequality
between the two that helps render, alongside their contrasting gendered status, their
homoerotic bond legible. This subtle class difference also emphasizes the slacker's
disavowal of his own white privilege, for he embraces his socially and economically
marginalized position, reveling in the social transgressions it permits him-which are
also expressions of class-based rage at the hapless customers he abuses. Meanwhile the
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more dutiful geek feels uneasy with his slacker-esque transgressions and feels more
bound by white middle-class expectations, a positioning that feminizes him and places
him more firmly within the grasp of the Oedipal narrative the slacker rejects.
Dante and Randal 2: Catharsis
The cathartic fight between Dante and Randal, which takes place in the
"Catharsis" segment of the film (see shot list in the Appendix), can be read as a
euphemism for sexual contact between these two characters. It takes place immediately
after Randal tells Veronica about Dante's attempts to patch things up with Caitlin.
Veronica breaks up with Dante and leaves, and then when Randal next appears in the
store, Dante attacks him.
Like the play-fighting of would-be lovers, all of Dante and Randal's combat in
"Catharsis" involves wrestling and attempts at strangulation: Randal is grabbed and
dragged out of frame by the throat in shot 3, then shot 4 depicts Dante strangling a
kneeling Randal in a tableau that looks suspiciously like Dante forcing Randal to fellate
him (see Figure 12). Next, in shots 5 and 6, Dante tackles Randal and wrestles atop him
behind the counter-the same location where Dante and Veronica had a suggestive and
potentially postcoital scene early in the film. In the present circumstance, Randal escapes
Dante's clutches by striking him ineffectually with a Pringles can, an object imbued with
phallic and homoerotic connotations in the earlier sequence with the customer who gets
his hand stuck in it. Here it is reinvoked in the context of Dante and Randal's
relationship as they wrestle on the floor out of sight of any customers.
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Figure 12: Choke-hold and/or fellatio?
Next Randal grabs a phallic-looking baguette loaf (shot 7) which he then hits
Dante in the face with (shot 8), suggesting a reversal of the duo's dynamics from shot 4:
now Randal is forcing his penis into Dante's face, whipping him across the face with it.
Interestingly, the very next shot (shot 9) depicts the store's black cat sitting on the
counter, presumably watching this encounter. This is a visual reminder of the animalistic
aspects of the duo's behavior, and remember that the cat featured in the original Pringles
can sequence, albeit only in audio form. In fact, the cat's placidity in the present
sequence may indicate that the cat sees Randal as a more fitting mate for Dante than the
doofus-y Pringles can customer from the earlier sequence, whose hijinks disturbed the
cat.
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Figure 13: Dante admits that "the FDS stings."
Most notably, the "Cartharsis" ends with the two combatants in two-shot, nursing
their wounds and talking (see Figure 13). When Randal asks Dante "How's your eye?"
in shot 13, Dante replies: "The swelling's not that bad. The FDS stings," indicating that
he has been sprayed in the eye with Feminine Deodorizing Spray, a product intended for
use on a woman's pubic area/genitals, thus literally placing Dante in the position of a
"pussy." However, as their concern for one another indicates, this fight was not about
actually harming the other person or ending the relationship, but constitutes a nonverbal
expression of intense feeling between the two characters that ends in a sequence of shots
of the two of them lying around and talking that could be read as postcoital. The
outcome of this scene also squares with the cinematic tradition of male fighting-as-
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intimate bonding found in such films as Fight Club (1999), the films of Quentin
Tarantino, the shirtless, tattoo-identifying wrestling sequence in Dude, Where's My Car?
(2000), and many others. It should also be noted that even heterosexual men and women
who are attracted to each other frequently find ways to wrestle, physically tease, and / or
"play-fight" each other in this same way and for the same reason.
The OED defines catharsis in three ways, any of which might apply here. The
first is as "purgation of the excrements of the body; especially evacuation ofthe bowels."
The second includes "purification of the emotions by vicarious experience, especially
through [...] drama" And the third, originating in psychotherapy, refers to "the process
of relieving an abnormal excitement by re-establishing the association of the emotion
with the memory or idea of the event which was the first cause of it, and of eliminating it
by abreaction."
The first definition is interesting due to its connection with the bowels and anality.
The second, referring to vicarious experience and drama, suggests the dramatic or make-
believe aspects of this encounter, i.e., that Dante initiates this encounter on the pretense
that he is angry with Randal for ruining his relationship with Veronica when it is "really"
about his desire to be close to Randal. In that sense, the entire "fight" sequence can be
viewed as a kind of heterocentrist drama or show through which Dante and Randal
vicariously experience physical intimacy with each other. Of course, the last definition is
particularly interesting in that it explicitly supports my reading of this sequence,
indicating that catharsis for Dante involves going to the root cause of his "abnormal
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excitement" and associating his emotions about his sexuality and sexual relationships
with the originary memory or event which precipitated them, in this case, his connection
to Randal. And while the film's diegesis would have us believe that the cathartic fight is
over issues of control over Veronica (and to a lesser extent, Caitlin), Sedgwick tells us
that the more prevalent erotic and narrative charge is between these two men, and indeed
it is significant that this catharsis occurs after all the women in the film have departed,
not to be seen onscreen again.
Further, the OED notes that the original German term for this process,
abreagiren, has different shades of meaning, from defense reaction to emotional
catharsis, and I think the concept of the defense reaction is especially relevant here, as
Dante is essentially staging a hypermasculinized display over the loss of Veronica that is
no doubt meant to conceal/disavow/defend against his homoerotic desire for Randal. It is
also worth noting that Randal provokes this conflict deliberately-the First Cut version
of the film even shows him expressing doubts as to his motives for intervening with
Veronica-and thus the defense reaction and the homoerotic desire it attempts to cover is
at least equally, ifnot more so, Randal's. The "Catharsis" fight could even be read as the
culmination of Randal's most daring and invasive game of homophobic bait-and-switch.
Finally, there is Randal's concluding line of this whole segment, delivered in shot
22: "If we're so fuckin' advanced, what are we doing working here?" This line suggests
that the two of them are somehow underdeveloped-he calls their work at the
convenience store "a monkey's job"-and thereby equates them with animals,
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adolescents, and, in Judith Halberstam's formulation, people who live in what she calls
queer time:
[I] use the concept of queer time to make clear how respectability, and
notions ofthe normal on which it depends, may be upheld by a middle-
class logic of reproductive temporality. [...] [nn Western cultures, we
chart the emergence of the adult from the dangerous and unruly period of
adolescence as a desired process of maturation; and we [...] applaud the
pursuit of long life (under any circumstances) and pathologize modes of
living that show little or no concern for longevity. [...] [P]eop1e who live
in rapid bursts (drug addicts, for example) are characterized as immature
and even dangerous. (In a Queer Time and Place 4-5)
All of Kevin Smith's films center upon male characters caught up in "the dangerous and
unruly period of adolescence" that Halberstam suggests operates in queer time, hence
they appear "immature and even dangerous" to subjects who conform to the dictates of
"normal," reproductive time. In Clerks, we see the clashing of these two temporalities
most clearly in the behind-the-counter argument between Veronica and Dante: she thinks
he "should be in school anyway" and wants him to quit the Quick Stop and get on with
his life-in short, to mature, enter a respectable profession, and (presumably) marry her
and live forever after in middle-class, reproductive time. Dante, on the other hand, wants
to remain at his "monkey's job," consort with drug dealers (Jay and Bob), and prolong
his adolescence with his clownish slacker buddy, Randal. These two temporalities and
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the way they intersect are also characteristic of independent cinema writ large, which
constantly rides a line between mainstream-palatable narrative techniques and aesthetics
and the more radically queer practices of the cinematic avant-garde. Hence, American
independent cinema of the 1990s, shot through with queer thematics and in a constant
state of needing to differentiate its output from the conventions and production practices
of the mainstream, occupies a sort of queer time and space with respect to Hollywood and
mainstream popular culture.
Slackers and Dykes: Clerks, Queer Cinema, and Miramax in 1994
The rise of American independent film through the decade of the 1990s has a
great deal to do with major industrial shifts that occurred in and around the Hollywood
studio system at the time: as Geoff King writes in American Independent Cinema, "[t]he
gradual establishment of an industrial infrastructure, particularly in distribution, was a
key factor in the emergence of the type of indie scene that came to fruition in the 1980s
and 1990s" (9). As the big Hollywood studios were taken over by multinational
corporations in the 80s and 90s, thence becoming even more attentive to issues of the
"bottom line" and less inclined to take risks on fringe films, smaller film distributors such
as Miramax and New Line moved in and, with an eye for marketable independent work
and innovative and aggressive promotion techniques, created and filled a niche in
cinematic consumer culture.
The sudden expansion of the home video market via the advent ofthe now-
ubiquitous DVD format also initially created a huge new market for the smaller
------------- -- -------------------_._-
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independent distributors (Wyatt 74-5). However, while the independent companies
originally gained a foothold in the larger cinematic marketplace by responding to
demands the larger studios could not meet, in time it became clear that even the lucrative
home video market was being increasingly dominated by the Hollywood majors, due in
part to the fact that "[t]heatrical successes drive the push at every additional market
window so that'A' titles are most likely to translate to video and cable successes" (Wyatt
75). Hence, as Justin Wyatt argues, the most successful and long-lasting independent
distributors, such as New Line and especially Miramax, have lasted because they quickly
realized the need to "consistently [develop] movies with the potential to cross over
beyond the art house market" (76). Indeed, what I argue here is that by the time Miramax
bought Clerks at the Sundance Festival in 1994, it had already so completely organized
its business strategies around the imperative to cross over into mainstream markets that it
was perfectly positioned to acquire "fringe" product like Smith's and market it
successfully to a wide audience. I further argue that the Miramax Corporation of the
early 90s-in fact, 1994 was a turning-point year in this respect-was particularly well
versed at selling queerness to mainstream moviegoers, which it had done with enormous
success in 1992 with Neil Jordan's transvestite drama The Crying Game.
The Miramax Corporation was founded in 1979 and from the start demonstrated
many of the features that would eventually rocket the distributor to national success ten
years later. Harvey Weinstein, the company's co-founder with his brother Bob, was a
failed filmmaker and successful concert promoter who decided to put his ruthless,
exploitative promotional tactics to good use in the independent film business.
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Throughout the 80s, Miramax developed a system whereby they would cheaply acquire a
fringe film, usually foreign in those days, and promote it in any way possible to gain a
wide audience-usually by playing up the illicit sexuality that such foreign fare had a
reputation for depicting. One example of this would be Miramax's marketing ofPelle
the Conqueror, a "grim and gritty" Swedish-language film about a young boy attempting
to escape his repressive father, set in the nineteenth century (Biskind 57). Despite the
film's "bleak and uncompromising" content and lack of explicit sex scenes, Miramax's
promotional ads for Pelle the Conqueror featured a still image of a "nearly topless
peasant girl" who "appeared for a nanosecond" in the actual film, an attempt to capitalize
on American audiences' assumptions about the explicit sexual content of foreign films
(Biskind 57-8). In addition to exploitative (and sometimes downright misrepresentative)
marketing and promotional practices such as the Pelle ads, the brothers Weinstein,
particularly Harvey, also gained a reputation for meddling with the actual edits of the
films they distributed, demanding cuts and overdubs and even hiring their own editors to
make them (Biskind 62,65, 87). While this practice, along with a tendency to short-
change its clients financially, earned the Miramax Corp. a longstanding reputation as
being hostile to artists, the company nevertheless successfully survived the 1980s by
buying cheap and selling wide. This strategy finally paid off big in 1989 with Miramax's
first major mainstream hit, Steven Soderbergh's debut feature, sex, lies, and videotape.
With the enormous success of sex, lies-the inclusion of the word "sex" in its title
being a major selling point for Miramax as well as the moviegoing pUblic-Miramax had
tasted blood and was eager to duplicate its lucrative crossover into the cinematic
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mainstream. And while it experienced some minor success with Quentin Tarantino's
Reservoir Dogs in 1992, that film's excessive violence and primary appeal to a young,
male audience prevented it from becoming the major hit Miramax was looking for.
Instead, that repeat perfonnance Miramax had thirsted for since 1989 would come from a
seemingly unlikely source indeed, the British-produced IRA film, The Crying Game.
The Crying Game bore all the markings of a small, niche-market, art-house film:
its plot about political violence and the IRA, its use oflittle-known actors (with the
exception of Forest Whitaker), and of course its big "surprise," the fact that the female
lead, Dil, is really a transvestite or transgendered male played by black drag queen Jaye
Davidson. What Miramax did with it was to downplay the film's inflammatory politics
and to develop a promotional campaign based upon the idea that Dil's maleness must be
kept a secret at all costs. Hence the campaign was premised not so much on a
suppression of the film's queerness but a refiguring of it: what could have been an
incidental part of the film's diegesis now became the secret that everyone was (not)
talking about and therefore the impetus for increasing numbers of moviegoers to see the
film. By distributing the film to the multiplexes and pushing the "big secret" angle, the
Weinsteins created a runaway word-of-mouth hit, eventually parlaying the film's box
office success and art-house credibility into a fairly successful Oscar campaign.21
To be sure, Miramax's job was made easier by The Crying Game's extremely
homophobic stance toward its own material. The film's narrative structure encourages
the ruse of the "surprise" since Dil's biological sex is kept secret from the protagonist,
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Fergus, as well as the audience, until two-thirds of the way through the film. Further,
when Di1's unexpected penis is revealed, it is a moment of shock, disgust and horror for
Fergus, and while he is later reconciled with Di1, the construction of the reveal sequence
all but begs for the kind of titillating and ultimately homophobic promotion that the
Weinsteins concocted.22
The overwhelming success of the Crying Game campaign demonstrated once and
for all to the Weinsteins that there was money to be made in certain forms of mainstream-
friendly queer cinema. For while they had always thrived on controversy and the
publicity it generates, The Crying Game showed that one of the most controversial and
therefore lucrative topics that a film could engage with was gender and sexual
transgression. Further, the years of 1991 and 1992 saw the explosion of a group of films
dubbed the "New Queer Cinema" (see my Introduction), and while Miramax had no
direct hand in distributing any of those films, by 1992 the Weinsteins were celiain1y
aware of the cultural cache and potential profitability that queer cinema carried with it,
especially-as the Crying Game example illustrates-if that queerness could be
suppressed, elided, or framed in such a way as to meet the expectations of the largest
possible (read: heterocentrist) audience segment.
So Miramax's penchant for controversy (so long as it can be turned to profitable
ends), its recognition of the profitability of (properly framed) queer subject matter, and its
status as the biggest of the indie distributors by 1994 all primed it to acquire and
distribute Kevin Smith's Clerks. Indeed, the financial success of The Crying Game led
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quickly to Miramax's acquisition by the Disney corporation in 1993, a deal that
(supposedly) preserved the smaller company's autonomy with respect to film acquisitions
while giving it a much greater pool of financial resources (Disney's) from which to draw.
So with much of the risk factor removed, Miramax came to the 1994 Sundance Film
Festival ready to buy and buy big. This was the same year that Clerks screened at
Sundance.
As we have seen, the queerness of Clerks, while fairly obvious and often verbally
explicit, is visually connotative rather than denotative, which means that the text opens
itself easily to purely heterocentrist readings. Further, there is a streak of misogyny in the
film that makes it particularly appealing to more traditional (homophobic) males of
virtually any age group. This misogyny and lack of interest in women manifests in
several key details in Clerks: first, that a whining, unmotivated "loser" like Dante is
pursued by no less than two appealing women in the film; second, that the film's funniest
characters, Randal and Jay, are openly misogynist; and third, that Caitlin Bree has sex
with an anonymous dead guy as the film's ultimate joke. Besides its general male-
centeredness, another feature that would have attracted Miramax to the picture was its
built-in audience: the film is practically the definitive example (alongside Slacker,
Reservoir Dogs, and, perhaps, Reality Bites) of Generation X cinema, reflecting as it does
that Generation's interest in witty, raw, and pop-culturally savvy dialogue and low-
budget films made by young, white, male auteurs working "outside the system" of
mainstream Hollywood. In fact, it was the younger staff members at Miramax,
particularly Mark Tusk, who brought Clerks to Harvey Weinstein's attention and
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eventually convinced him to buy it. Finally and perhaps most importantly, Kevin Smith
himself-his back story, his public persona, his concerns-made him very appealing to a
company whose standard practice at the time was to bring new talent into the Miramax
"family" and "by so doing [.. ] control[led] their careers-at least in the beginning-and
[kept] their salaries low" (Biskind 311). Smith, having maxed out his credit cards to
make Clerks and with no firm distribution prospects beyond what might occur at
Sundance, was primed to accept any offer that might come his way.
Once Miramax acquired Clerks at Sundance 1994, they marketed the film by very
carefully negotiating the highly coded queerness of the text. It is worthy of note that
another similar film was screened at Sundance that same year, Rose Troche's low-budget
black-and-white lesbian romantic-comedy, Go Fish. Not only is Go Fish aesthetically
and generically similar to Clerks, it was represented by the same producer's
representative, the legendary John Pierson, and was sold to a distributor at that year's
Sundance festival, a previously unheard-ofpractice that Pierson inaugurated. Go Fish
was an early front runner in the bidding wars that Pierson encouraged between the
various distributors at the 1994 festival, and by the end of the festival and its
overwhelmingly successful three screenings, Clerks would be one of primary
beneficiaries of this new approach.23
What I find so interesting about the connection between Go Fish and Clerks is
how frequently historians and reviewers of this period discuss them together. It is as if,
in the context of Sundance 1994, each film renders the other legible. Perhaps the most
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obvious example of this is Pierson's own chapter on these films in his book Spike, Mike,
Slackers and Dykes: he calls that chapter "The Odd Couple: Sundance 1994." Of course,
what seems most odd to me is that Pierson considers these two films and their filmmakers
an "odd couple" at all, for while Troche is a lesbian filmmaker and her film is explicitly
about lesbians, it is actually a very conventional and sweetly rendered love story that
unquestioningly accepts the consummation of a conventional monogamous relationship
structure-albeit between two women-as its narrative raison d'etre. Comparatively,
Clerks is actually a much more queer text than Go Fish in that it depicts and discusses all
sorts of sexually nonconventional acts and does not ultimately privilege one relationship
structure over another, unless it is the homosocial buddy relation: after all, both of
Dante's heterosexual relationships fail, leaving him a bachelor at the end of the film, once
again alone with Randal, in an ambiguous relationship.
However, as you might guess, the queerness of Clerks was not highlighted in the
Miramax marketing campaign, and in fact, as with Pierson's chapter title, some pains
were taken to differentiate Clerks from its out-lesbian counterpart. Smith's own avowed
heterosexuality was a part of this. Another differentiating factor is Clerks's cleverness in
negotiating its own queerness, always suggesting and playing around the homoerotic
possibilities of its characters and situations but never quite avowing them. This is the
source of much of the film's humor but also makes Clerks much more easily marketable
to the heterocentrist or homophobic segment of the filmgoing public. Indeed, the entire
campaign to promote Clerks centered on playing up its light, comedic elements and
framing it as a heterosexual Gen X film focused upon the socioeconomic difficulties of
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its central characters. The trailer for Clerks almost makes the film look like a kind of
revamped Animal House or Porky's for the 1990s, full of heterosexual hijinks and spunky
characters who delight in committing youthful (and therefore temporary and forgivable)
transgressions against the older generation's standards of good taste.24 And while this
description may well at least superficially suit Randal and Jay and Silent Bob, the
trailer's exclusive focus on the light comedy aspects of the piece elides the more radical
and progressive potential of its queer and gender-disruptive elements.
In this context it is worthwhile to once more discuss the film's original ending.
As I mentioned earlier, by 1994 Harvey Weinstein had quite a reputation for cutting
elements from films he did not think would sell well, and while the decision to cut the
original violent ending from Clerks originated with Bob Hawk, Pierson, and others who
were closer to the production than Weinstein, it is certain that the Miramax mogul agreed
with it (Biskind 223). Why? Well, firstly, the Miramax advertising campaign shows that
the company wanted to push the comedy aspects of Clerks, depicting the film as light
entertainment for Gen X'ers, so the sudden seriousness of the ending would have been
deeply incongruous with how the Miramax Corporation perceived the picture. Secondly,
as I have suggested earlier, the original ending raises serious questions about why Dante
needs to die, questions that might lead back to the film's structural queerness and queer-
suggestive gender play. And while the removal of the ending could be read as a
willingness to leave open some of the queerness of the text, to allow the effeminate and
therefore sexually questionable Dante to live, as this chapter has shown, it is not really
Dante who displays the most overt signs of queer sexual tendencies or non-heterosexual
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object choice-it is Randal. So, by removing the dark ending and keeping the film light
and comedic, the Miramax team actually opened the text to a much wider range of
readings, one that of course includes the queer, but also embraces heteronormative and
even homophobic and misogynistic ones. For while comedy permits a great deal of play
and transgression, its very status as a lower genre and its strategies of narrative
distanciation to achieve comic effects are the very things that allow a text like Clerks to
deny the seriousness of the issues it raises and to subtly disavow the radicality of its own
queerness.
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Notes
1. Interestingly, that friend was RafRicci, brother to then-upcoming film star Christina
Ricci (she had been in Mermaids and The Addams Family at the time I met Rat);
however, for all the years I knew RafI never met his famous (and incredibly busy) sister.
2. I am something of a typical Kevin Smith fan, having come to my first Smith film,
Clerks, via home video at the word-of-mouth recommendation of another white, male
Gen-X friend. I will discuss Smith's audience demographic in Chapter VI.
3. Dante is yelling, of course, at Randal, who even in an animated format plays
homophobic bait-and-switch games with Dante-a tradition begun in Clerks that I will
discuss in this chapter. But perhaps Dante doth protest too much: he is publicly outed as
gay at the end of the animated episode in question.
4. This history of the buddy film is, due to space limitations, inadequately briefby
design. A thoroughgoing queer geneaology of the buddy film would take a full book-
length study.
5. To my knowledge the buddy film subgenre has been most prevalent in the comedy and
action genres, though as my brief history shows, certain classic buddy films of the New
Hollywood period, such as Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy, and Butch Cassidy and The
Sundance Kid, all have a more melodramatic feel to them-part of generating sympathy
for losers, geeks, and outsiders. The bona fide buddy comedies are exemplified by films
such as the Hope and Crosby "Road To" films, the Dean Martin / Jerry Lewis comedies
of the 1950s, the 1970s buddy films mentioned in my overview, the films of Cheech and
Chong, and a great number ofmore recent offerings including the Bill and Ted films
(1989, 1991), the Wayne's World films (1992, 1993), the American Pie trilogy (1999-
2003), Dude, Where's My Car?(2000), Road Trip (2000), etc. The buddy action films
include buddy cop and buddy action-comedy films such as the Lethal Weapon series
(1987-98), Midnight Run (1988), Tango & Cash (1989), Red Heat (1988), etc.
6. Smith goes on to reference Butch and Sundance again in 2006 by playing "Raindrops
Keep Fallin' On My Head" over a scene of male-male bonding between Dante and
Randal in Clerks II, effectively queering a scenario that previously involved Butch
Cassidy (Paul Newman) and Sundance's girlfriend Etta Place (Katherine Ross). I will
discuss Clerks II in my forthcoming book Chapter VI.
7. This emphasis on the male characters is reinforced on the formal level in Clerks
through the distribution of intertitles that introduce each segment of the film: the only
three of Clerks' seventeen total intertitles that carry proper names are those of male
characters, i.e., (1) Dante, (2) Randal, and (3) Jay and Silent Bob.
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8. Sometimes called the fourth and fifth films of the New Jersey Trilogy, Dogma and Jay
and Silent Bob Strike Back are no longer the last two films set in the View Askewniverse:
Clerks II was released in July 2006.
9. Regarding the excision of the original "Dante's death" ending of Clerks, John Pierson
claims that he was simply the person who "happened to say it first" but that many early
viewers, including Larry Kardish of the Museum ofModern Art, responded negatively to
the sequence (Muir 44). Smith himself acknowledges that the original ending was his
"Do The Right Thing ending" and that it may not have matched the tone of the rest of
Clerks (Muir 44). For while Spike Lee's 1989 film is ostensibly a comedy, throughout its
running time it is focused upon racially-motivated conflicts arising between groups in an
enclosed community. Thus the violent ending of Do The Right Thing is an earned
conclusion, anticipated by the conflicts introduced in the plot. Smith's use of a violent
ending for Clerks, on the other hand, is somewhat random and existential. His
deployment of such an ending and his acknowledgment of its original source, Do The
Right Thing, is interesting given the general elision of race in Smith's work and the
overwhelming whiteness of the View Askewniverse: it reads as a kind of cross-racial
appropriation similar to that practiced by Jay and Silent Bob (see Chapter V).
10. Even the more comedic of the 1980s buddy cop films, including interracial action
comedies like 48 Hrs. (1982), Running Scared (1986), and, later, Rush Hour (1998), are
more action-oriented than the outright buddy comedies of earlier and later periods. See
also note 5.
11. In How to Do the History ofHomosexuality, David Halperin discusses the historical
inheritance of male-male Greek relationships and their relevance to this hierarchical
model of gender relations.
12 Clerks X is a three-DVD set released by Miramax in 2004. It features two versions of
Clerks, the 1994 theatrical release and, on its second disc, Clerks: The First Cut. Its third
disc contains a feature length making-of documentary, Snowball Effect. In general,
Clerks X is chock full of special features, including many video introductions depicting
Kevin Smith talking about himself and his work, usually in dialogue with real-life buddy
and Clerks producer Scott Mosier. I will discuss this DVD and its content in further
detail in Chapter VI.
13. Will Ferrell's February 7, 1998 "Randy Graves" sketch on SNL's Weekend Update
brings together Clinton, blowjobs, and white male homosocial slackerism in a highly
condensed way. Ferrell plays a college frat boy, Randy Graves, who comments that
Clinton "went for a kick-ass hummer on the sly, and this bitch, Linda Tripp, totally cock-
blocked him!" He goes on to defend "Slick Willie" for his desire for extramarital
blowjobs and calls Hilary Clinton a "bitch" as well. Not only is the content of this sketch
relevant to the "37" sequence in Clerks, Ferrell's character's name, Randy Graves, is
identical to that of the Clerks protagonist played by Jeff Anderson.
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14. Dante and Veronica's talk about what defines sexual boundaries (particularly around
fellatio and Dante's phrase "sleep with them like any other decent person") aligns with
Sedgwick's discussion of Axiom 1: People are different from each other, wherein she
states that "even identical genital acts mean very different things to different people"
(Epistemology 22, 25).
15. Caitlin's extreme sexual promiscuity queers her, as does her bond to out lesbian
Alyssa Jones, hinted at in the Clerks weight trainer scene and concretized in Amy when
Alyssa reveals that she had sex with the promiscuous Caitlin during her own sexually
experimental high school years.
16. Also worthy of note here is the fact that Veronica moved back to Leonardo from
Seton Hall University in South Orange, NJ, to be closer to Dante, telling Willam that she
was "tired of missing him [Dante]." In some ways this behavior runs counter to her
masculine, independent persona, instead suggesting a more conservative, more Italian set
of values that might be characterized by the phrase "stand by your man." Yet we also see
that Veronica has an investment in getting Dante to change his ways and go back to
school, which might suggest that the masculine side of her wants to goad Dante out of his
passivity.
17. This intersection of the character of Willam with suggestions of man-on-man desire
and sexuality recurs, most notably in his encounter with Olaf Oleeson, the Russian metal
singer who croons to Willam during the Pringles can sequence. As discussed herein,
Willam is framed as working class, scruffy, strangely sexualized, and ultimately
functions as a racially "Black" stand-in.
18. If Muir's book does not explicitly call attention to the queer connotations of Randal's
axiom, it nevertheless raises an interesting and related point. Randal calls Jay a "junkie"
and in his closing speech of the film also refers to himself and Dante (the clerks) as
subhuman, i.e., monkeys. This frames all of the denizens of the Quick Stop-Dante,
Randal, Jay, and Bob-as not adult, as refusing to live in middle-class "reproductive
time" that assumes marriage and childbearing as a mark of social maturation and
adulthood. These characters instead live in what Judith Halberstam calls queer time, a
temporality that privileges intensity over longevity and does not pathologize behaviors
(like drug using) that disregard the imperative to longevity and respectability (In A Queer
Time and Place 4-5) As Muir notes, Randal's comment and his shared penchant for
resisting respectability highlights the similarities between Dante and Randal and Jay and
Bob. In their drug dealing, Jay and Bob are clerks. I will discuss Jay's drug dealing and
the concept of queer time further in Chapter V.
19. In this context it is interesting to note that a very early working title for the film, when
Smith was still writing the earliest first draft of the screenplay, was Ostensibly (as seen
almost 26 minutes into The Snowball Effect). And while this title was quickly discarded
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for its "official" working title, In Convenience, the implications of the Ostensibly title vis-
a-vis Randal's presumed heterosexuality and actual queerness are wonderfully funny and
quite eye-opening.
20. Regarding Clerks' "twist" ending and its homage to / appropriation of Spike Lee's Do
The Right Thing (1989), see note 9.
21. The Crying Game earned nominations in the Leading Actor, Supporting Actor,
Director, Editing, and Best Picture categories, and won the Best Original Screenplay
Oscar that year. For an amusing story about Harvey Weinstein's efforts to get Jaye
Davidson nominated in the Best Supporting Actress category (thereby preserving the The
Crying Game's big secret), see Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures pp. 147-8.
22. For further discussion of The Crying Game's homophobia and marketing, see Lola
Young, "Re-Viewing The Crying Game" and Judith Halberstam's discussion of the film
in In a Queer Time and Place pp. 79-82.
23. For a thoroughgoing account of Pierson's central role in the rise of 1980s and 90s
independent cinema, see his excellent book Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes.
24. While the comparison to Porkys here is my own, this is a parallel that would come
back to haunt Smith during the production and promotion of his second feature, Mallrats
(1995)-see Chapter III.
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CHAPTER III
FANBOYS AND CAPED CRUSADERS: MALLRA TS (1995)
Chapter II discussed how Kevin Smith's debut film, Clerks, put him on the map
as an up-and-coming indie filmmaker and a key voice of Generation X cultural
production. Clerks was a hit at Sundance 1994, became a cult classic after it hit the home
video market on VHS in 1995, and made Smith and his onscreen alter-ego, Silent Bob,
into cult media icons. Clerks was also a critical favorite: to cite one key example, Amy
Taubin of the Village Voice declared that Clerks was "the standout film of the 1993
market" and called its "absence of style [referring to its amateurish acting and low
production values] a virtue" (Miller 19). Yet, as Matthew Miller notes, while Clerks set
up critics and audiences to view Smith as a "[John] Waters-esque subculture iconoclast,"
Smith's second feature, Mallrats, "clashed with the [...] preconceptions with which
critics were primed to approach his work" (25-6). If Clerks was a critically lauded bid
for indie-sector recognition, Mallrats moved away from that paradigm in two opposite
and-at least initially-commercially disastrous directions.
Mallrats centers on the exploits of two buddies, T.S. Quint (Jeremy London) and
his slacker sidekick Brodie Bruce (Jason Lee), as they hang out at a local mall over the
course of one day after they both get dumped by their respective girlfriends. Brodie
spends most of his time talking about comics, attempting to purchase comics, and getting
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into fights with Shannon Hamilton (Ben Affleck), a local store manager who moves in on
Brodie's ex-girlfreind Rene (Shannen Doherty). Meanwhile, T.S. tries to prevent his own
ex-, Brandi Svenning (Claire Forlani), from appearing on her father's dating game show,
which is broadcasting from a stage in the mall where our two protagonists are loitering.
The two buddies' attempts to win back their girlfriends are interspersed with more
broadly fantastical comedic episodes involving Jay and Silent Bob (Jason Mewes and
Kevin Smith) who are constantly on the run from dreaded security guard La Fours (Sven
Thorsen). The film climaxes with a showdown on the set of Mr. Svenning's "Truth or
Date" game show, during which T.S. proposes marriage to-and is accepted by-Brandi
in the show-within-a-show's denouement. In many ways, the film is structurally similar
to Clerks, although for reasons I will discuss shortly Mal/rats does "tack on" a romantic
conclusion where both male buddies win back their female partners.
Hence, on the one hand, Mal/rats was intended by Smith to be a more polished
version of Clerks, a kind of "Clerks redux" as he put it in a 2004 interview. Certainly this
is also how Universal Studios, who financed and distributed the picture, wanted it to turn
out: they saw Mal/rats as Clerks "cleaned up" for consumption by a wider audience, a
"smart Porky's" that would appeal to Gen-Xers who liked Clerks as well as the average
multiplex moviegoer who liked teen comedies. Universal's optimism about its ability to
break Smith's Askewniverse into the mainstream held right up until Mal/rats's theatrical
release, as both the filmmakers at View Askew and the studio personnel close to the film
believed they had a big hit on their hands, the biggest R-rated comedy since Animal
House (1979).
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However, when it came to actually developing the marketing campaign for
Mallrats, Universal and its affiliate Gramercy Pictures were at a loss for how to present
Smith's sophomore effort to the movie-going public. In fact, as Smith himself relates it,
Gramercy "came to us" and asked the filmmakers themselves how they would promote
the film. Of course, Smith and company are artists, not promoters, and as we have seen,
it was largely due to the efforts of seasoned indie-film business minds like Jon Pierson
and Harvey Weinstein that Smith's first feature, Clerks, reached the audiences that it did.
Thus, when asked how they would promote Mallrats, the View Askew team responded
with a suggested campaign based on their perception that the primary fan base for the
film would share one of Smith's great personal passions: superhero comic books and
comic book fandom.
And that is exactly how Mallrats was promoted: its poster designed to replicate a
comic book cover, its first wildly successful test screening at the 1995 San Francisco
Comic-Con International, its opening title sequence depicting the main characters as
comic-book superheroes (Muir 72). It was even accompanied by an 80+ page Mallrats
Companion guidebook in comic book format. While this may now, in light ofthe recent
domination of Hollywood by comic book-based properties such as the extremely
lucrative Spider-Man andX-Men franchises, seem a prescient move on the part of View
Askew and Universal, it was an idea far ahead of its time: Mallrats flopped on its
opening weekend and was considered an unmitigated failure by the studio and by View
Askew.! That the film would redeem itself by becoming a cult hit in the home video
market is no surprise, for the film itself is wonderfully funny, smartly intertextual, and a
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more than worthy follow-up to Clerks. Indeed, like its critically favored predecessor,
Mallrats recently went to a Tenth-Anniversary Extended DVD Edition and is altemate1y
referred to by Smith as a "gateway flick" and "the access film" to his other films, many
newer (and often younger) viewers coming to his work via his accessible and funny
second effort.
How did Smith, View Askew, and Universal work together to create such a
contradictory product, that is, a film intended to reach a larger audience than Clerks yet
specifically addressed and marketed to an even smaller one, comic book fans? How do
the discourses of comic book fandom, centering on the figure of the so-called "fanboy"
but also including explicit superhero iconography and references, inform how the film's
producers and promoters made and marketed the film? And what does the film's
simultaneous shift to embrace both comic book fandom and the demands of a wider
teenpic/comedy film audience have to do with queemess? These questions will guide our
inquiry into the rich and contradictory world of Mallrats.
From Miramax to Universal
Kevin Smith is fond of acknowledging his cinematic precursors, and none more
so than Austin, Texas independent writer/director Richard Link1ater. That Linklater's
first wide-release feature film, Slacker (1991), served as the catalyst for Smith's entry
into the film business is well known; however, as Smith confesses in Jon Pierson's
memoir Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes, Link1ater and his work were a model for
Smith's intended career trajectory well into the production of Mallrats: "One would
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almost think I sold my soul to the devil just to get Richard's life. First I want to make my
small independent [Clerks] [...] then I want to make a comedy with Jim Jacks and Sean
Daniel at Universal" (Pierson 182). Indeed, over time the two independent directors'
sophomore films, Dazed and Confused (1993) and Mallrats, would come to occupy
similar cultural spaces as enduring teen cult films that found their audiences in the home
video market. However, as Smith himself is quick to point out, there are also significant
differences between the two films, not least of which are their budgets-$27,000 for
Clerks and $6.1 million for Mallrats-and Smith's perception of Mallrats as "bigger
[than Dazed and Confused] in terms of scope and who I want this movie to get to. [...] I
want this to be like every comedy I saw as a kid and was wowed by. John Landis when
he was good, Ivan Reitman when he was really funny" (182). Smith's invocation of
directors Landis (Animal House, The Blues Brothers) and Reitman (Meatballs,
Ghostbusters), and his mention of Landis and 80's teenpic guru John Hughes (Sixteen
Candles, The Brealifast Club) in Mallrats's closing credits, demonstrate the extent to
which Smith and his View Askew comrades really conceived of their second feature as a
possible mainstream comedy hit in the making. In sum, Smith, thrilled to be following in
indie icon Linklater's footsteps, nevertheless saw his own teaming with Gramercy
Pictures and producers James Jacks and Sean Daniels as an opportunity to reach an even
wider audience with an accessible teen comedy in the tradition ofHughes et. al.
In some ways this interest in paying tribute to-and hopefully capturing the box
office success of-his 1970s and 80s predecessors fits in with Smith's status as a
Generation Xer and the kinds of pop-cultural in-jokes already fairly abundant in Clerks.
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For example, in that film, Dante and Randal talk at length about the original Star Wars
trilogy (1977-83), a defining cultural event in the childhood of many Gen Xers. And any
Gen Xer who grew up with Star Wars would have just entered his or her teenage years
when John Hughes's epoch-defining The Breakfast Club came out in 1985.
However, the inclusion of explicit superhero comic book references is new to the
View Askewniverse as of Mallrats, and claims to Smith's cultural prescience aside, this
is arguably an odd choice for a film intending to reach a vastly larger audience than his
black-and-white debut feature. For while Clerks never pretended to be anything other
than a "wail of ennui" capturing something of the zeitgeist of Generation X, Mallrats, as
both a bigger-budgeted studio film with mainstream aspirations and a follow-up to the
resolutely independent Clerks, was in the difficult position of having to simultaneously
address two very different (though at points overlapping) audiences: the mainstream
comedy moviegoer and the Clerks fan. Interestingly, despite the tallness of this order and
the film's initial box-office failure, I maintain that the film in fact succeeds at this feat of
dual address-at least within the Gen-X demographic that constitutes its core audience-
through two interrelated textual and intertextual strategies: first, an appeal to audience
nostalgia for the 1970s and 80s films it pays tribute to and emulates, and second, an
embracing of elaborate fantasy elements and sequences that are both consistent with the
teen comedies just mentioned but also incorporate superhero comic book tropes and
iconography, aspects that reach out to the core fans of Smith's previous and future work:
comic book fans.
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Genre/Content 1970s-80s teen comedies Comics
Type of Appeal for Nostalgia Fantasy
Gen X/Comic Fans
Intended Audience teen film/gross-out comedy Clerks fans (comics fans)
audience
Textual Examples heterosexual humor, happy Brodie as fanboy, Batman
ending, romance, ensemble parodies, Stan Lee, intertextuality,
cast, mall setting View Askew "continuity"
Table 1: Mallrats' Dual Address
Genre, Gender, Queerness, and Race
Insofar as Mallrats can be read as "Clerks redux" we would expect it to follow the
conventions of the buddy comedy, and to some extent this is so: the film's action centers
on a male buddy pair, T.S. Quint (Jeremy London) and Brodie Bruce (Jason Lee), who,
upon losing their girlfriends, venture to the local mall to hang out and commiserate.
Like Clerks and the other buddy comedies that precede it, then, Mallrats
constructs a diegetic world from which women are largely excluded. For although at
least one of the two Mallrats girlfriends, Rene (Shannen Doherty), is onscreen more than
her Clerks counterparts, and though two of Mallrats's female characters, Brandi (Claire
Forlani) and Gwen (Joey Lauren Adams) even get one male-free scene together,
nevertheless these women all play roles subordinate in the narrative to the two male
protagonists and even the secondary male buddy duo, Jay and Silent Bob. Indeed, Brandi
is hardly in the movie at all, appearing only in an introductory scene, her scene with
Gwen, and in the final game show sequence. And the two more minor female characters,
Gwen and Tricia (Renee Humphrey) have only two short scenes each and are primarily
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depicted as objects of sexual interest or desire for the male characters. Thus in Mal/rats
as in many of the View Askewniverse films, women function as a kind of structuring
absence: they are needed in order to guarantee the heterosexuality of our male heroes,
and are present at the outset to catalyze the narrative, yet are shunted aside throughout
most of the run time of the picture.
This marginalization of women in Mal/rats can be understood in terms of genre,
for the film is a male-centered buddy comedy that keeps its focus on its male duos (T.S.
and Brodie, Jay and Silent Bob) even as it expands to include more secondary characters
than did Clerks. Culturally speaking, however, this focus on (white) men instead of
women is linked to anxieties over women and heterosexual pairing, both of which tend to
spell doom for the ever-peuri1e homosocia1 antics that View Askew protagonists valorize.
From the point of view of adolesecent male geeks and slackers who do not wish to grow
up, women, who are linked to maturity, adulthood, and romantic commitment, are
frightening indeed, and have little place in the world of comic book collecting and male
bonding that Mal/rats's heroes (wish to) inhabit. Hence Mal/rats maintains the
masculinist leanings of the buddy comedy subgenre even as it expands to incorporate
generic features of other comedic subgenres.2
Further, there are strong parallels between the central male buddy pairs in Clerks
and Mal/rats-see Table 2. T.S. is essentially an updated version of Dante: his primary
focus is his girl trouble, in this case his separation from Brandi Svenning, and he is
feminized through his pining for Brandi, his self-defeating attitude, and his discomfort
with his buddy's more puerile and homosocia1 behaviors such as comic book collecting
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and stage-trashing. Similarly, T.S. 's "sidekick" Brodie is cut from the same cloth as
Clerks's Randal, a snarky "bad boy" who evinces an interest in deviant sexuality-in
Brodie's case, an obsession with "superhero sex organs" and a willingness to engage in at
least one public sex act-and an overt indifference to relationships with women. The
Brodie/Randal connection is further emphasized by the film's opening voice-over
monologue, a story involving Brodie's cousin Walter-the same cousin Walter
mentioned by Randal in Clerks, a fact which makes Brodie and Randal related by virtue
of their shared cousin (Muir 80).
Buddy #1 : Geek Buddy #2 : Slacker
Characters Dante (Clerks), T.S. (Mallrats), Randal (Clerks), Brodie (Mallrats),
Silent Bob Jay
Gender feminized - whiny, passive, gets masculinized - snarky, rebellious,
dumped and/or manipulated by cares more about pop culture, video
masculinized women and is games, and/or comics than
troubled by it relationships
Sexuality seemingly straight queer - into deviant sexuality and is
frequently asexulized vis-a-vis
women
Role romantic protagonist/superhero comedic "sidekick" I
Table 2: Buddy Pairs in Clerks and Mallrats
Brodie's Randal-ness reaches its peak during the "Truth or Date" game show,
where he is placed in a very Randal-like relation to newly introduced character Gill
Hicks, who is Dante's brother and is played by Brian O'Halloran, the same actor who
played Dante in Clerks. Throughout the game show, under the auspices of "running
interference" for T.S., Brodie homophobically baits Gill and, through an elaborate game
ofbait-and-switch, eventually accuses Gill of being a "textbook closet case self-Ioather
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[who] can't be comfortable with his own sexuality" on live television. Mallrats visually
emphasizes the Brodie-Gill relation in an interesting way when the game show ends.
Throughout "Truth or Date," T.S. and Brodie are usually seen in two-shot, emphasizing
Brodie's role as "Second Suitor" to T.S.'s "Suitor Number One": Brodie is literally
situated as T.S.'s sidekick and is genuinely helping T.S. to achieve his aim vis-a-vis
Brandi. However, once Brandi accepts T.S.'s marriage proposal and T.S. gets up to kiss
her center stage, the film cuts to a two-shot of Brodie cheering and shaking Gill in a
celebratory way-as if even in a heterosexually resolved romantic plot, Smith and
company cannot resist leaving a Clerks-reminiscent male buddy pair visually intact.
Brodie's case differs from Randal's in that the former actually has an onscreen
(ex-)girlfriend, Rene, and by the end of the film he seems to accept the importance of that
relationship to some extent. However, as we shall see, Rene's primary function in the
film, aside from feeding an apparently insatiable appetite for clothes shopping, is to serve
as a conduit through which Brodie may play out his rivalry with the proprietor of
Fashionable Male, testosterone-driven metrosexual Shannon Hamilton (Ben Affleck).
And, tellingly, T.S. spends much more screen time in Mallrats fighting it out with
Brandi's overprotective father, Jared Svenning (Michael Rooker), than he does talking
with Brandi or actively trying to win her back. In these senses, Mallrats adheres to the
buddy film formula of marginalizing female characters in order to foreground male
friendships and rivalries.
That these rivalries all emanate outward from the central buddy duo, rather than
manifesting between the two buddies, is a principal dynamic which differentiates
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Mallrats from Clerks and to some extent de-queers the central buddy pair relative to their
predecessors in the latter film (see Figures 14 and 15 below). For example, unlike
Randal, Brodie does not seem to take delight in making his buddy the butt ofhomophobic
joking, although he does question T.S.'s geek authenticity when T.S. perseverates on his
relationship issues rather than engaging in talk about comic books. However, by the end
of the film-again in contrast to the Randal-Dante dynamic-Brodie accepts the primacy
of heterosexual romantic relationships, and his intervention in T.S.'s affairs at the film's
climax-i.e., running interference against Suitor Number Three during the "Truth or
Date" game show-is at T.S.'s request and ultimately helps T.S. to reunite with Brandi.
Brandi
Mr. Svenning (rivals) T.S.
Figure 14: Mal/rats Erotic Triangle #1
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Rene
Shannon (rivals) Brodie
Figure 15: Mallrats Erotic Triangle #2
Generically, the slightly increased presence of women in Mallrats and the marked
expansion of Jay and Bob's roles since Clerks are indicative of Mallrats's slight shift
away from the buddy duo formula and toward the teenpic or what William Paul calls the
"animal comedy," a subgenre (akin to but not identical with the teenpic) that features
ensemble casts, multiple plotlines, an emphasis on sex over love, and a tendency toward
lower-stratum or "gross-out" humor.
According to Paul, animal comedy is a subgenre that emerged out of the late
1970s and dominated Hollywood box office into the early 1980s: its progenitors were the
male-centered ensemble films American Graffiti (1973) and MASH (1970) and its
definitive (and most successful) examples include Animal House (1978), Porky's (1982),
Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), and Bachelor Party (1984) (91). Central features
of the animal comedy subgenre include characters who are "defined chiefly in terms of
their sexual desires" and who "are generally aligned to an institution" such as a school,
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country club, summer camp, or in the case of Mallrats, a mall (110, 111). Like many
teen films, these comedies focus on (mainly male) groups of characters rather than
individuals and thus their narrative structure "reflects the focus on a social group by
being episodic, contingent, always retaining the possibility of veering offwith a character
who might have previously seemed minor" (111). This last occurs frequently in
Mallrats, as when Jay and Silent Bob engage in their stage-trashing escapades or when
even more minor characters like Trish and Willam play key roles in abetting the final
takeover of the "Truth or Date" game show and the exposure of Shannon Hamilton as a
paedophile. Indeed, in animal comedy the combined efforts of the whole ensemble are
deployed in resolving the "revenge motif" of one of the plot strands-in this case, the
dual revenge ofT.S. against Mr. Svenning and Brodie against Shannon-and the
resolution of the revenge plot "marked by the triumph of the group of animals) signals
the end of the plot for the entire film" (111), as it does in Mallrats.
The "animal" in animal comedy indicates the subgenre's interest less in specific
age groups-though "kids on the borderline between adolescence and adulthood"
frequently constitute animal comedy casts (172)-than in the liberating potential of
unfettered sexual desire and out-of-control behavior, that is, animality. Indeed, as Paul
writes, "[a]nimals are never far from these films-at least metaphorically, and
occasionally literally" and this "insistent emphasis on animality" not only leads to
increased carnality but also grants physical comedy "pride of place over verbal comedy"
in animal comedies (86). Of course, in Kevin Smith's films, verbal comedy always holds
pride of place and so physical comedy, where present, does not necessarily trump verbal
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wit. This no doubt stems from Smith's strong self-identification as a writer above all else
and has the effect oflending the View Askew films (including Mallrats) a certain ironic
sophistication. In fact, Smith's verbally dense and highly stylized dialogue has provoked
comparisons to the "fast-talking 1930s comedies, like His Girl Friday" as well as to the
iambic pentameter of William Shakepeare, and no doubt helps lend credence to the
criticism that his films are not particularly cinematic (Muir 38, 76-7).
Regardless of its trademark verbal wit, Mallrats is distinct from Clerks in
demonstrating many of the central features of animal comedy, including increased
physical humor (mostly involving Jay and Silent Bob but also including Brodie's being
struck in the head with a girder and Gwen's downing ofT.S. with a crotch shot) and, of
course, the increased presence of animals: Brodie's opening voice-over describes his
cousin's sexual exploits with a cat, Jay and Silent Bob open the film standing in front of a
pet store with a prominent sign reading "Gerbils! Gerbils! Gerbils!" and they end the film
in the company of an orangutan.
In fact, Jay and Silent Bob's concluding moment with the orangutan links
Mallrats to the broader slapstick comedy tradition of which animal comedies are a
relatively recent variant. During the film's closing "where are they now?" montage,
where we learn what each of the principal characters does following the events of the
film, Jay and Silent Bob are shown walking away from the camera down a long stretch of
road in the company of an orangutan named Susanne (see Figure 16). They slowly walk
into the distance as the end credits roll, eventually obscured by an iris-fade to black. This
scene is an explicit homage to the closing shot of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times
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(1936), wherein Chaplin's Tramp, in what would be his final screen appearance, sets off
down a similar road with his partner-in-crime the Gamin (Paulette Goddard). This is a
resonant intertextual moment that serves both to queer Jay and Bob, likening them to the
heterosexually bonded Tramp-Gamin duo, and to self-reflexively place Mal/rats in the
physical comedy/slapstick tradition that Chaplin and his films represent. It also suggests
a specific parallel between the films of Chaplin and Smith, both of which use the
conventions of romantic love mainly for narrative purposes while consistently preserving
the childlike and polymorphously sexual male clown figures (the Tramp, Jay and Bob)
that occupy the true center of their films. Hence, while in Mal/rats T.S. and Brodie
reconcile with their respective girlfriends, thus ostensibly concluding the film's narrative,
the Modern Times-esque ending signifies that Jay and Silent Bob's story, like that of
Chaplin's Tramp, is never truly over, that these are figures who will remain marginalized
and preserved in an endless pseudo-childhood from film to film to film. This connection
between Jay and Silent Bob, arrested development, and the slapstick comedy tradition
will recur in Smith's later films Dogma and especially Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
As a subgenre grounded in physical comedy, animal comedy revels in lower-
stratum bodily humor, and hence there is prevalent carnality, nudity (and its correlate,
voyeurism), and grotesquery in animal comedy. Mal/rats incorporates all these features,
from Brodie and Rene's public sex act on the elevator to a scene depicting Gwen's
exposed breasts (complete with Silent Bob as voyeur) to the ultimate grotesque moment
in the film (and arguably in Smith's entire ouvre), Brodie's stink-palming of Mr.
Svenning. This last not only foreshadows the culmination of all of Mal/rats's plot
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strands, acting as a precursor to the "elaborate prank [...J usually motivated by the
revenge plot" that unites all the characters, but also exemplifies Paul's point that
"derisive use of the grotesque is made for figures of authority and power" at the hands of
the animal comedy's animalistic (and usually younger) protagonists (112, Ill). If the
trashing ofMr. Svenning's game show is the plot-ending prank of Mallrats, his stink-
palming and subsequent illness is its grotesque and personally derisive counterpart.
Figure 16: Jay and Silent Bob with Suzanne the orangutan, in a shot that mimics the
closing shot of Chaplin's Modern Times (1936).
If, in animal comedy, it is "often the activity or location that provides the film's
coherence rather than tightly structured plots or complexly defined characters" (Paul 89)
then a few words should be said about the role of the shopping mall in Mallrats. Just as .
Clerks used one central location-the convenience store-to unify its somewhat non-
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linear comedic vignettes and to emblematize the plight of the underemployed 1990s Gen-
X slacker, Mallrats's shopping mall, along with the school and the summer camp, stands
as the central site of many 1980s teen films and Animal comedies that Mallrats hopes to
emulate, most notably Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Valley Girl (1983). In part this
is because in the 1980s, malls were literal sites where teen culture flourished. Originally
incepted as places where women could move about and shop "without the stigma or
threat of the street" (Fiske 23), by the 1980s shopping malls had become a primary teen
hangout space, both for shopping but also as a work space, a social space, indeed the
primary space from which to approach teen culture. As Michael V. Montgomery writes,
discussing Valley Girl and Fast Times, "there is clearly an effort [...] to comment upon
the teenagers' comprehensive use of mall space in the 'mall montages' following the
opening shots of both films. Both sequences suggest that the mall is the proper
environment in which to study kids of the' 80s" (96-7). Mallrats follows in this tradition
by opening with a mall montage accompanied by Brodie telling a story in voiceover,
formally establishing him as the film's expert mallrat who waxes philosophically about
the status of mid-mall food stands and expresses extreme consternation over the
possibility of child escalator accidents. Indeed, in this regard Brodie is an exemplary
representative of Gen-X youths who grew up thinking of malls as social spaces: "[T]he
Gen Xer [...] was of the first generation for whom the mall stood for freedom from
parental control. He was in the first wave of mall rats" (Underhill 132).
This gendering of the Gen-X mallrat as male is significant. Formerly considered
a space dominated by women shoppers, Generation X's rise into teendom in the 1980s
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transformed the shopping mall into a key site for inter-gender teen socializing and male
slackerism. Hence, since the 1980s, malls have been reconceptualized as a transitional
space "in which the social identities of youth find articulation" (Bailey and Hay 218).
Indeed, Steve Bailey and James Hay claim that the social space of the shopping mall
"reflects a recognition that shopping-for meals in the food court, for films in the
multiplex, for a 'lifestyle' and an identity in the larger space of the mall-is an absolutely
critical task in human development" (227). Thus the shopping mall is a site for the
socialization of youth, a space where teens (or in the case of Malirats , twentysomethings)
are trained to be good consumers and to develop into full-blown, consumerist adults.
Indeed, according to Bailey and Hay, the shopping mall is nothing less than "the
metaphorical location for the assumption of a mature lifestyle" in Western consumerist
culture (227). Yet Brodie resists this maturation process by hanging around the mall
without a specific "shopping agenda": he is a participant in mall youth culture but, with
the exception of briefly visiting his comics store and at one point buying a cookie, he
refuses to engage with the largely heterosexualized socialization and maturation
processes associated with "the organising structure of shopping" (227). Brodie's
disinterest in shopping activities that would help him mature into adulthood, such as
accompanying Rene to the stores she wants to shop at, is a chronic failing of his that
Rene explicitly cites as a contributing factor to their break-up.
So, while Mallrats uses troubled romantic relationships as the initial catalyst and
final resolution of its narrative, the action is not so much about those relationships as it is
about "two guys hanging out in a mall," wreaking havoc with the stage, getting into
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fights with their male antagonists, and engaging in various forms of gross-out humor.
This is similar in structure to many 1980s John Hughes films such as Sixteen Candles and
The Breakfast Club as well as non-Hughes animal comedies like Animal House and
Porky's: heterosexual romance is present but not typically the narrative focus. This may
be due in part to the adolescence of these films' main characters, who struggle through
the liminal period between childhood and adulthood, as yet unsure about their place in
the adult heterosexual order. It may also have to do with the male-centeredness of the
animal comedy subgenre. For even in an ostensibly female-centered film like Sixteen
Candles, which stars Molly Ringwald as a sixteen year old girl seeking the attention of a
popular boy she has a crush on, much of the film's screen time is given over to the over-
the-top exploits of male geeks like Farmer Ted (Anthony Michael Hall) and exchange
student Long Duk Dong (Gedde Watanabe). In short, gross-out and male-driven sexual
antics trump romantic concerns every time.
William Paul notes the box-office dominance ofmale-centered, ensemble-based
animal comedies in the early 1980s, and Mal/rats producer Jim Jacks is aware of the
subgenre as well, noting during Mal/rats's production that "nobody's done an R-rated
youth comedy in awhile, [though] it used to be one of the staples of the business" (View
Askew's Look Back at Mal/rats). Yet not only is Mal/rats's status as an animal comedy
(or R-rated youth comedy) a reference to the earlier films that its creators grew up with
and that it consciously tries to emulate, it is also, in retrospect, a harbinger of changes in
the teen comedy film genre in the years following its release. Citing the glut of highly
profitable teen gross-out comedies that studios would produce in the wake of There's
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Something About Mary (1998), John Kenneth Muir, author ofAn Askew View: The Films
ofKevin Smith, calls Mallrats "a film that was really ahead of its time" and wonders if
"Mallrats's perceived critical failure might simply be a result of nothing more significant
than timing" (75). Of course, Muir is a fan writing a book intended for fans and so is
invested in valorizing Mallrats and emphasizing its importance. Nevertheless, his
surmise rings true, especially in light of Smith's claim that the original screenplay for
Mallrats included a scene in which Jay and Silent Bob, masturbating in a dressing room
in the "Popular Girl" store, ejaculate into Gwen's hair without her knowing it-a nearly
identical forerunner of the scenario which would later help propel There's Something
About Mary to huge box-office success (Mallrats DVD commentary).
Interestingly, although Mallrats emulates a teen comedy in tone, setting, and
many plot particulars, its characters are nevertheless explicitly not teenagers, but rather
the same twentysomething types who inhabit the Quick Stop convenience store in Clerks.
They literally inhabit the same fictional world and know the same characters that the
Clerks protagonists do, and their language, knowledge of relationships and sex, and
economic autonomy place them as aged-twenty-plus Gen Xers rather than high-school-
aged teens. Hence the Mallrats cast consists of Gen X slackers masquerading as teens,
inhabiting a teen film plot and setting while retaining their identities as Clerks-like
characters aimed at Gen X audiences.
This juxtaposition of Gen-X characters with teenpic situations is itself
postmodem, generating multiple layers of signification in the characters that render their
placement in a teen setting comically ironic. Smith's Gen X geek/slacker characters,
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even as they appear in Mallrats, have more in common with drunken 40-year-old Miles
(Paul Giamatti) in Alexander Payne's Sideways (2004) than they do the actual teen
protagonists of the 1980s John Hughes films. Like the older male characters in Payne's
work-Election (1999), About Schmidt (2002), and Sideways-who undergo various
forms of mid-life crisis in response to their malaise as privileged white men, Smith's
slackers respond to the concerns of extended adolescence and the pressure to mature as
twenty-somethings would, not as young adolescents experiencing dating and sexuality for
the first time. For example, many of the characters in Mallrats speak of their past
relationships and sexual exploits, and even refer to problems (such as Julie Dwyer's
phobias about her weight) that they dealt with "back in school." This stands in stark
contrast to the plight of "real" onscreen teen protagonists like Mark Ratner (Brian
Backer) in Fast Times At Ridgemont High or Samantha Baker (Molly Ringwald) in
Sixteen Candles, who are just entering puberty and have only the fuzziest ideas about
dating and sexuality.
Of course, the most notable commonality across most of the teen films just
mentioned, and Smith's own Generation X-targeted films, is the overwhelming whiteness
of their casts. These films share a focus on white characters to the exclusion and/or
marginalization of non-whites. As Richard Dyer notes, this exclusion of non-whites can
make the specificity of whiteness as a racial category difficult to see, since whiteness
tends to be an invisible category thought to stand in for humanity writ large, the
"universal signifier for humanity" (28). Yet Dyer urges us to "see the specificity of
whiteness, even when the text itself is not trying to show it to you, doesn't even know
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that it is there to be shown" (13-14). Thus the overwhelming whiteness of the View
Askewniverse presents a challenge to the critical viewer who wishes to see the specificity
of that whiteness. One of the ways to approach the issue is to look at how the white,
suburban buddy duo in Mallrats is raced and classed vis-a-vis each other. Brodie is
suburban and white but not especially rich, living off his parents and collecting comic
books using discretionary funds whose source is never revealed-he is a Gen Xer
benefiting from white privilege and the tolerance of parents who let him live at horne.
T.S., on the other hand, signifies as financially better off than Brodie: he does not worry
about the cost of a romantic trip to Disney World with Brandi, he provides $58.60 for
Brodie and himself to pay for the services ofIvannah the Topless Psychic, and unlike
Brodie, he has his own car. In this latter respect T.S. and Brodie are positioned similarly
to Dante and Randal from Clerks-the former has a car, his slacker buddy doesn't.
Of course, in Western culture class status is raced, so where we see class
differences, we can expect racial coding to be in effect as well. In this connection, the
stagehands scene offers an encapsulated view of the function of white and non-white
racial representation in Mallrats and the View Askewniverse. The scene takes place
thirty-seven minutes into the film and depicts T. S.' s attempt to convince Mr. Svenning
that he is meant to be with Brandi. As the scene begins, Svenning is on the "Truth or
Date" stage, supervising the work of one of his workers, an ambiguously raced character
played by View Askew regular Walter Flanagan. Svenning gets into a fight with this
worker over the placement of a podium, and subsequently fires the worker on the spot.
Meanwhile, T.S. storms onto the stage and confronts Svenning, following him backstage
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after the firing of the first worker and looking on as Svenning instructs a second worker,
who is black, to complete the task the first worker began. The whole scene is actually
shot in one long take, two minutes in length, with a tracking camera that follows the
characters as they move from onstage to backstage over the course of the scene.4
At the outset of the scene, Mr. Svenning yells at a stagehand (Flanagan) whose
long, dark hair held back with a blue bandanna and dark facial hair mark him as
ambiguously raced~he looks possibly Italian, Hispanic, or of mixed race, all of which
are racial categories "often excluded, sometimes [...Jassimilated into the category of
whiteness" (Dyer 19). For example, in a telling moment during his rant at the first
stagehand, Svenning asks the man "Do you speak English?" a moment after he has just
heard him speak it. Of course, this snarky question can most directly be seen (and is
intended by Mr. Svenning) as an insult to the stage worker's intelligence. Yet it also
invokes a trope of ethnicity, implying that the stage worker may not have English as his
first or native language. This is a trope of racially inflected difference imposed by the
more white of the two characters (Svenning) to put the less securely white character (the
stagehand) into his place.
Once T.S. enters the scene from the left of frame, he is visually paired with the
ambiguously raced stagehand as they stand on either side of the irate Svenning (see
Figure 17). Not only does the scene's blocking suggest a parallel between them, but T.S.
and the stagehand both wear the same checkered flannel shirt and both happen to be dark-
haired (Svenning is bald). These conspicuously similar flannel shirts are the most
important visual motif of the scene, for T.S. 's is nearly identical to the shirts that both of
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the other two stagehands wear-this first one and the one who is backstage yet to be
seen-thus creating two separate yet similar visual rhymes as T.S. and each stagehand in
tum stand to either side ofMr. Svenning. But the similarity between T.S.'s and the first
stagehand's dark hair and features is significant too: Richard Dyer writes that characters
of ambiguous race are frequently "treated as a 'buffer' between the white and the black"
(19), and in this part of the scene both T.S. and the ambiguously raced stagehand act as
such buffers, mediating between the most white character, Mr. Svenning, and the black
stagehand we will meet shortly.
Figure 17: T.S. and the first stagehand flank Mr. Svenning, creating a visual parallel
between them.
The visual similarity between the first stagehand and T.S. marks them both as less
white than Mr. Svenning, whose German last name and bright, bald head mark him as the
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whitest of the trio. According to Dyer, ambiguously white identities such as the first
stagehand's "[incite] the notion that some whites are whiter than others, with the Anglo-
Saxons, Germans, and Scandinavians usually providing the apex of whiteness" (Dyer 19),
as Mr. Svenning here does.
Figure 18: Another, stronger visual parallel between T.S. and a black stagehand.
This first part of the scene takes place in a medium shot, with T.S., Mr. Svenning,
and the soon-to-be-fired first stagehand arrayed across the "Truth or Date" stage. Hence
the ambiguously raced stagehand is permitted to be "out front" of the stage and in the
public view, unlike his darker-skinned counterpart, who remains as yet unseen backstage.
The camera follows T.S. and Mr. Svenning around the comer to the backstage area and
settles into a still position when the pair reaches the black stagehand, at which point T.S.
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and the black stagehand are depicted in close-up on either side of Mr. Svenning, strongly
emphasizing the visual parallel between them (see Figure 18). This is a more visually
intense shot than the scene's earlier three-shot, with its increased physical closeness
between the three male characters and heightened sense of uniformity between T.S. and
the black stagehand, despite the more pronounced skin-color difference between them.
This close-up shot visually depicts the closeness many adolescent white males
feel they must have to black masculinity: as Eric Lott argues in his article on racial cross-
dressing, white masculinity depends upon proximity to an imagined black masculinity in
order to constitute itself as masculinity: "the assumption of dominant [white] codes of
masculinity in the United States is partly negotiated through an imaginary black
interlocutor [.. 0] [and depends] upon the momentary return [. 0 0 ] to a state of arrested
adolescence" (246). In short, black manhood is seen by whites as an immature form of
maleness that all white adolescents must pass through on their way to becoming full-
fledged white adults. Thus the shot ofT.S. and the black stagehand not only schematizes
this desired proximity for T.S., emphasizing his arrested adolescence, but it also suggests
that our geek, T.S., is in fact more racialized than our slacker, Brodie: in the View
Askewniverse, the geek is often coded as Italian American (Dante), Irish Catholic
(Holden), or Asian (Sang), while his slacker sidekick is usually less ambiguously white
(Randal, Brodie).5 Hence even the fairly white-seeming T.So is racialized through his
visual proximity and similarity of costume to the questionably white and non-white
flannel-wearing stagehands in this sequence, while Brodie's whiteness goes unquestioned
throughout the film.
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This subtle racial/class difference between T.S. and Brodie is heightened in the
later "stink-palm" sequence involving the duo's final encounter with Mr. Svenning.
T.S.'s possible Italianness is suggested at the outset of this scene, during an homage to
Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather films (1972, 1974): Mr. Svenning grasps the sides of
T.S.'s head, pulls him close, and tells him in a low voice that his daughter is too good for
him, as a trumpet melody reminiscent of The Godfather'S main theme plays. This of
course serves as a comedic, pop-cultural nod to a similar scene between Michael and
Fredo Corleone in The Godfather Part 11 (1974), but it also racializes Mr. Svenning and
T.S., rendering them (at least temporarily) Italian Americans-like Dante and Veronica
from Clerks! By contrast, the slacker sidekick (here Brodie, but also Randal and Jay) is
more emphatically white, also usually verging, in mannerism ifnot literal financial
standing, on lower-class "white trash." Brodie, while eschewing many middle-class
proprieties, is less obviously white-trashy than either Randal or Jay, and in fact during the
stink-palm sequence is revealed to be Mr. Svenning's neighbor, a fact which puts him on
a closer racial par with Mr. Svenning since they live in the same neighborhood. Yet, as
in Clerks, Brodie's more secure whiteness vis-a-vis T.S. does not guarantee him equal
financial status with his geekier buddy: he frequents the lower-class "dirt mall" flea
market (he is known by name there) and he does not have any cash on hand when he and
T.S. visit Miss Ivannah. And of course his status as Mr. Svenning's neighbor does him
little good either: Svenning throws both buddies out of the mall together at the end of the
stink-palm sequence.
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In the View Askewniverse, then, economic stability and/or advantage of the kind
Dante and T.S. enjoy vis-a-vis their slacker buddies is usually linked to a more
pronounced work ethic (Dante evinces this) and a slightly more advanced emotional
maturity: our geeks (Dante. T.S) are more conformist and mature than our slackers
(Randal, Brodie) and they reap a slight economic benefit for it. For example, Brodie
blows whatever money he does have on collecting comics and loitering at the mall,
whereas T.S. saves his income for trips to Disney World with Brandi, attempting to
achieve social maturity through literal investment in heterosexual mating activities
leading to marriage.
And there is a racial dimension to this, for the geekier protagonist, be it Mallrats'
T.S. or Clerks' Dante, is not only more mature and financially secure then his sidekick
(Brodie, Randal), he is also less white. This is due to the sidekick's status as a
nonconformist, clownish slacker as opposed to a more conformist, socially serious geek:
the slacker, in order to have anything to rebel or slack "against," must be white by
definition, for his slackerism is a resistance to white privilege that, according to Dyer, is
founded upon a cultural stereotype of whites as inherently industrious and enterprising:
"It is not spirituality or soul that is held to distinguish whites, but [...J get up and go,
aspiration, awareness of the highest reaches of intellectual comprehension and aesthetic
refinement" (23).3 For the slacker to rebel against his whiteness, to attempt to mark
himself as "not-privileged," he slacks. Our geek, meanwhile, is permitted to be more
enterprising because he is already (if subtly) racially marked.
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Queer Affection and Rivalry
The queerness of Mallrats manifests in the tenderness and affection evinced
between its primary buddy pair, T.S. and Brodie, and in the rivalries over women played
out by T.S./Mr. Svenning and Brodie/Shannon Hamilton.
The friendship between T.S. and Brodie has already been discussed in the context
of their lack of internal rivalry and their willingness to support each other in achieving
their heterosexual goals. This is quite a switch from Clerks, where Randal's relation to
Dante almost entirely consists of making him the butt of homophobic jokes and
counterproductively interfering in his heterosexual relationships. By comparison, Brodie
and T.S. 's queerest moment, which happens very early in the film, is when T.S. tells
Brodie how he was planning to propose to Brandi during their vacation and Brodie
replies: "That's the most romantic thing I've ever heard." And T.S. 's response: "Too bad
I'm not trying to marry you."
However, like Clerks and many of the 1980s films it also emulates, Mallrats
channels most of its homoerotics through male rivalries over women, where intense
conflicts and fight scenes between men stand in for homoerotic desire. As Eve
Kososfsky Sedgwick argues, in any erotic rivalry between male characters, "the bond that
links the two [male] rivals is as intense and potent as the bond that links either of the
rivals to the beloved" and hence "the bonds of 'rivalry' and 'love,' differently as they are
experienced, are equally powerful and in many senses equivalent" (Between Men 21).
Sedgwick thus argues that male "traffic in women" is a longstanding social structure that
permits straight-identifying men to displace their homoerotic tendencies into rivalries
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involving women as mediators. In the case of Malirats , this deflecting of the film's queer
sexual dynamics into more heterosexual-appearing configurations came about in large
part due to restrictions imposed from the studio producers: as Smith puts it on the
Mallrats DVD commentary, "the homoerotic subtext of the picture was trimmed way
down for fear of the other. Some got in, but not as much as I would have liked."
Nevertheless, some got in, and I find that the most intense queer erotics emerge
whenever Brodie and the femininely named Shannon are on screen together. This arises
due to their positioning as rivals at the base of Malirats , second erotic triangle and is
abetted by the queerness of Shannon actor Ben Affleck's prior star text. While Affleck
would later go on to become something of a mainstream "leading man" in films like
Phantoms, Armageddon (both 1998), and Pearl Harbor (2001), at the time of Mallrats's
shooting he was best known as a teen actor and for playing the ridiculously
hypermasculine villain, O'Bannion, in Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused (1993).
Affleck's portrayal of the rageful O'Bannion is not only a career highlight, it emphasizes
the link between intense homosociality and the threat of the ever-present homoerotic:
O'Bannion is over-invested in male bonding activities, having flunked his senior year of
High School, thereby staying on the football team for one extra year and, more
importantly for 0'Bannion, participating in freshman hazing rituals one more time.
O'Bannion takes particularly intense delight in sadistically paddling freshman boys' asses
in these rituals throughout the first half ofDazed and Confused, so much so that all his
senior cohorts comment on his overzealousness and perversity. O'Bannion receives his
comeuppance for this excessive homophobic/homoerotic violence when some freshmen
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engineer a prank in which he gets soaked with off-white paint, a soaking which, read
sexually, makes O'Bannion appear to have been doused with semen. In the wake of his
dousing, O'Bannion calls the pranksters' friend a "freshman faggot" and accidentally
breaks his beloved paddle in a fit of rage, both of which signify his impotence and his
homophobically violent response to that impotence. Given this previous role as an
infantilized, homophobic, and homosocially hyper-masculine villain, Affleck is well
positioned to bring a certain perverse machismo to the Shannon character's rivalry with
Brodie in Mal/rats. The sequence in which Shannon accosts and beats up Brodie
particularly illustrates the workings of this dynamic.
Brodie has recently had sex with Rene in the mall elevator and visits an
unidentified fast food counter to acquire more soda for his dixie cup. To a sinister
musical cue, Shannon enters frame from the left and, after Brodie makes a funny remark,
grabs Brodie and yanks him out of frame to the left. This is a "rhyme" with the opening
shot of Dante and Randal's "Catharsis" fight in Clerks, where Randal enters the Quick
Stop and is yanked out of frame by Dante.
The next shot takes place in an empty maintenance corridor. The whole fight
sequence takes place in this corridor and the angle from which it is shot-looking down
the length of the hallway into darkness with the two characters in profile in the
foreground-depicts a long, empty tunnel stretching away into darkness, emphasizing
how alone the pair are and thus increasing Brodie's peril. Further, in its tunnel-ness the
corridor COilllOtes Shannon's sinister penchant for anal sex, which we hear about later in
this sequence.
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Shannon throws Brodie against the wall at left of frame and punches him in the
stomach. Brodie sags against the wall and slowly slides down it over the course of shots
2 and 3 (see shot list in Appendix). Shannon removes his own jacket in shot 3 and in shot
4, with Brodie seated on the floor in front of him, head at Shannon's crotch 1evel-
suggesting, were this a literal sex scene, an oral preliminary to the pair's coitus-
Shannon starts lecturing to Brodie about why he hates him.
This diatribe continues over the course of shots 4 and 5, and interestingly it
centers on Brodie's status as a "mallrat kid" with "no shopping agenda." Shannon claims
to despise "shiftless layabouts" and persons like Brodie who come to the mall and act as
if they live there. Interestingly, Shannon's insistence upon the mall as a place for
shopping (as opposed to loafing or anything else) feminizes him, for as John Fiske notes,
men are not typically thought of as being shoppers: "Even the 'sensitive, intelligent' (i.e.,
nonjock) male [...J is incapable of understanding shopping" (20). Indeed, historically
the shopping mall was conceived as a feminine space "where women can be public,
empowered, and free, and can occupy roles other than those demanded by the nuclear
family" (Fiske 20) and thus the (non-mallrat) male mall visitor is relegated to a secondary
role: "Men in the mall are secondary figures. They come to wait" (Underhill 131).
Mal/rats bears out this stereotypical gendering of mall activities: Gwen and Rene are
almost always depicted shopping in clothing stores and indeed Rene makes several
costume changes throughout the film even though its events transpire over the course of
one day.6 Meanwhile, the film's male characters rarely shop, preferring instead to sit
around, walk the mall, talk, fight, and generally do anything but spend money.
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At the end of Shannon's anti-mallrat speech, Brodie makes a rude remark about
"motivated salesmanship" and Shannon kicks Brodie where he sits. Brodie falls over in
agony and now lies sideways on the concrete floor.
The next shot, shot 6, has always most intrigued me in this sequence: Brodie lies
sideways on the floor and the camera shoots his face in close-up, lying horizontally in the
bottom half of the frame. Shannon leans his head in from the top of frame and lays his
face alongside-that is, on top of-Brodie's and near-whispers the next line into Brodie's
ear: "Rene asked me to leave you alone, but she's fucking clueless." This has always felt
like a very intimate moment to me and the two character's horizontal orientation plus the
closeness of the shot denotes an intimacy between them (see Figure 19). This is where
the erotics of this rivalry and its violence are laid bare. Shannon speaks softly, though
threateningly, in Brodie's ear and their bodies are framed out of the shot. What are they
doing? How close are their bodies?
Further, there is no music in this shot nor this sequence; the two encounter each
other in relative silence. Kevin Smith has noted that the lack of music during this fight
makes the scene feel "creepy" to him, almost too real and dangerous rather than funny
(Mallrats DVD Commentary). I agree with his assessment but suggest that the
"creepiness" Smith detects may have to do with the fact that a real intimacy and sexual
tension is palpable between the two characters in this scene. The lack of music leaves
their exact relation here ambiguous and hence wide open to queer interpretation. Of
course, a goodly amount of sexual creepiness permeates Mallrats, including Shannon
Hamilton's aforementioned anal fetish, fifteen-year-old Tricia Jones's sexual "research"
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for her Bore-gasm book project, and the incestuous undertones ofMr. Svenning's
overprotective relationship with his daughter.? But in the encounter between Brodie and
Shannon, the creepiness takes on a particularly homoerotic-yet-vio1ent edge.
Figure 19: Shannon and Brodie get intimate during a fight.
The next couple of shots, which conclude the fight sequence, really drive home
the sexual dimension of the Shannon-Brodie rivalry and expose how it operates through
women: as Brodie (post-coitally?) breathes heavily, Shannon soliloquizes to Brodie about
his method of "picking up women on the rebound" and using their vulnerability and
"open[ness] to suggestion" to manipulate them into letting him have anal sex with them.
This penchant for anal sex queers Shannon, and his admission of it to Brodie is very
interesting indeed. For one, he opens this speech by addressing Brodie by his last name,
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Bruce. "Bruce" is a well-known euphemism for a gay man, and it is therefore notable
that Shannon is the only character ever to address Brodie thus. 8 In short, he begins his
speech about his own pursuit of a queer sexual practice, anal penetration, by indirectly
calling Brodie a fag.
Secondly, once Shannon describes his strategy for obtaining anal sex from women
on the rebound, which in this case indicates his intent to do so with Brodie's ex-girlfriend
Rene, Brodie gets enraged and attacks Shannon (shot 8). Brodie's attack is to no avail:
Shannon pushes Brodie back against the wall and punches him in the face. However,
Shannon's speech and Brodie's anger here expose that the stakes of their rivalry are
bound up in their desire to sexually possess Rene: just before the fight sequence, Brodie
spies Shannon hanging out with Rene in the mall and subsequently confronts her about it
in an elevator. Their argument culminates in the two of them having sex, and this act is
ostensibly framed as a reassertion of Brodie's sexual mastery over her: "She attacked my
libido and I felt obliged to defend myself' he tells T.S. afterward. However, this conflict
more emphatically indicates a homosocial bond between the two male rivals, and indeed
we know from Trish (Renee Humphrey) that Shannon mentioned his hatred of Brodie
after sexual intercourse with her: once again their rivalry is couched in sexual (in this
case post-coital) terms, and by playing out the physical component of their rivalry here in
the private setting of an empty tunnel, the homoerotic nature ofthat rivalry is
temporarily brought visually to the fore. Brodie then makes the sexual undercurrent of
the fight verbally explicit a few shots later by asking Gwen, "Am I still glowing?"-
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referring to an earlier exchange where she insisted that he was glowing after having sex
with Rene in the elevator.
Intertextuality and Comic Book Culture
Mal/rats is an incredibly intertextual film. In addition to the genre-mixing
strategies discussed above, this intertextuality includes visual and verbal allusions to
numerous New Hollywood "movie brat" films of the 1970s including Jaws (l975),
Apocalypse Now (1979), The Godfather (1972), and of course--Smith's favorite-
George Lucas's Star Wars trilogy (1977-1983) (Muir 63,68-9,71). These references are
not entirely new to Smith's oeuvre-for example, Clerks featured at least one lengthy
discussion between Randal and Dante about the Star Wars films-yet the quantity and
prevalence of Mallrats' s explicit intertextual nods are much greater than that of its
cinematic predecessor. For example, in Mal/rats, Silent Bob spends most of the film
obsessed with perfecting the Star Wars "ledi mind trick" oflevitating objects with his
mind. It is also significant that Silent Bob's single spoken line in Mal/rats-in other
cases a key piece of personal advice delivered to the film's protagonist, as in Clerks and
Chasing Amy-is in this case a line copped directly from The Empire Strikes Back
(1980): "Adventure? Excitement? A ledi craves not these things." This direct
appropriation of a Star Wars line by Silent Bob is unique among the Askewniverse films
and is emblematic of the extent to which Mallrats plays with intertextuality.9 Yet
arguably none of these film references, abundant as they are, are as important-in terms
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of Mal/rats's plot, intended audience, and promotional campaign-as the film's
references to comic book superheroes and their fans.
The most obvious evidence of Mal/rats' attempt to connect with comics-friendly
audiences is the 1995 publication of the Mal/rats Companion, a comic-bookish guide to
the film for fans, including the complete screenplay of Mal/rats. The text of the
screenplay as it appears in the Companion is laced with the same comic-book cover
images that run during the film's opening credits sequence, as well as photos of various
scenes from the film rendered grainy and primary colored to resemble comic book panels,
complete with speech balloons for the characters depicted. The Companion also includes
other fan tidbits like behind-the-scenes photographs, the complete text of Rene's break-
up note to Brodie, and an excerpt from Tricia Jones's book, Bore-gasm. lO Perhaps most
significantly, the Companion prepares the prospective Mal/rats viewer to deal with the
film's use of comic-book-like continuity: Smith's entire introduction to the 1995
Companion is about explaining the concept of "continuity" as it applies to the View
Askewniverse (Mal/rats Companion 3).
For beyond the mere existence of the Mal/rats Companion itself, there are two
broad levels upon which Mal/rats engages with superhero comic book culture and the
tastes of comic book readers: (1) Its move toward increased intertextuality and its
insistence upon continuity with the View Askewniverse established in Clerks, and (2)
Certain of its key diegetic elements such as Brodie's characterization as a comic book
fanboy and its inclusion of prevalent Batman iconography.
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Mallrats uses intertextuality and continuity to establish and train a "smart
readership" for the View Askewniverse films that is akin to superhero comic book
readership. As comics scholar Charles Hatfield writes, "comics solicit the reader's
participation in a unique way; [...] [the] fractured surface ofthe comics page, with its
patchwork of different images, shapes, and symbols, presents the reader with a surfeit of
options" that can be initially bewildering to decode (xiii-xiv). Indeed, comics artist and
theorist Scott McCloud has written a 215-page book on the subject of properly reading
comics, Understanding Comics (1993), in which he notes that comics reading is a
"learned ability" that requires the comic book reader to become a "conscious
collaborator" in the meaning-generating process (63, 65). Of course, this is true of all
textual decoding processes, yet, as McCloud suggests, with comics, even the proper order
in which to read the panels on a comics page varies from text to text (or even from page
to page within a single text), thus presenting a unique challenge to neophyte comics
readers. Overcoming this challenge and learning to grasp, over time and with habitual
practice, the formal conventions of the comics medium creates an elite taste culture
around comics, a culture that can and does identify itself against those who do not
understand or "get" how to read comics. For the initiated comics reader, this insider
knowledge, combined with other fan activities like collecting comics, attending
conventions, and knowing the back stories (or continuity) of the comics titles one reads,
confers upon the comics fan a postmodern hipness, a membership into a small and
geekily intelligent subculture. Of course, for superhero comics readers in particular, this
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hipness also carries the stigma of arrested development and refusal to give up boyhood
paSSIOns.
One key example should suffice to show how this process of training a skilled
readership functions in Mallrats and the View Askewniverse. This example, which
Smith himself discusses in the introduction to the Mallrats Companion, involves Brodie
and T.S. 's first encounter with Willam Black, a character who first appeared in Clerks
with the nickname "Snowball" and who was played in that film-as a spaced-out but
friendly weirdo with a scruffY beard-by Scott Mosier. The role of Willam was recast
for Mallrats, portrayed by the hulking, boyish-faced actor Ethan Suplee. The physical
differences between Mosier's and Suplee's portrayals might seem enough to suggest that
these are two different WilIams who happen to share the same name, but Willam's first
line to Brodie in Mallrats-"Do you work here now?"-is the same as Willam's first line
to Veronica in Clerks! Hence, this one short line serves two interrelated functions: (1) It
is an intertextual "shout-out" to Clerks and its fans, rewarding them for their insider
knowledge of Smith's previous film, and (2) It firmly establishes that the two WilIams
are the same person.
While recasting roles in ongoing series or in sequels is not uncommon-to cite
one relevant example, there is Robin Curtis's highly successful takeover (from Kirstie
Alley) of the role of Vulcan starfleet officer Lt. Saavik in the third and fourth Star Trek
films-in most cases the audience is expected to assume that the character is the same as
before, and usually the re-cast is done in such a way as to encourage the elision of the
casting change. In the case of Willam Black, however-in terms of physicality and
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costume but also in the very disposition and behavior of the character-the
transformation is far too extreme to be easily acceptable in the typical way. How, then,
does screenwriter Smith explain Willam's sudden shift from the skinny, spaced-out,
trenchcoat-wearing snowballer of Clerks to the hulking, angry, army-jacket-wearing
version we meet in Mallrats? By the "Willam of Two Worlds Theory," by which Smith
means that the two characters are indeed the same person but that some kind of bizarre
anomoly like a "paradox shift" has occurred between the two incarnations of the
character (Muir 66, Mallrats lOth Anniversary Q & A).II
This is a maneuver straight out of the milieu of superhero comic book narratives,
in which a "continuity"-the official storyline of a given superhero character and his
world-is established, then is frequently revised via recourse to all manner of diegetic
twists, including time travel, intervention by supranatural beings, and the introduction of
alternate realities and dimensions to regular continuity.
This analogy between the conventions of the superhero comic genre and the films
of Smith's Askeniverse is almost surely deliberate on the part of the View Askew
filmmakers. Smith and many of his cronies are comic book fans and collectors and, as
we shall see, comic book references, tropes, and marketing strategies will increasingly
come to permeate the View Askewniverse films from Mallrats forward.
In the specific case of Mallrats and its relationship to Clerks, Willam's presence
establishes a sense of continuity between the two films even as the extremity of his
recasting potentially threatens to disrupt it. I say "potentially" here because the way in
which Willam is presented in Mallrats-with a knowing wink to the Clerks-savvy
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viewer-indicates that, far from wishing to disrupt the smooth transition between the two
films, the filmmakers actually mean to establish a comic-book-like continuity between
them, albeit one that follows a very comic book- or science-fiction-influenced logic.
Willam's recasting, though potentially confusing to the viewer who has seen Clerks and
expects "straight" cinematic continuity, says through the character's clever first line,
"Welcome to the View Askewniverse where such seemingly illogical things can happen
without explicit explanation!" Such a move would make sense (or not matter much) to a
viewer who is familiar with the ways in which superhero comic books do the very same
thing as a matter of course. 12
Interestingly, this strategy, whereby comic book logic and self-reflexive
intertextuality are incorporated into the text in order to address a potentially very small
segment of the overall intended audience for the film-remember that Mallrats was
supposed to be the next Animal House!-is also a staple of the independent American
film industry of the 1990s. As Geoff King notes in American Independent Cinema, many
fornml strategies such as "[s]elf-conscious allusion to the narrative format" and
"ramblings [...] about splitting and parallel realities" are found in independent fare and
mark it as different from the mainstream (85). Indeed, Richard Linklater's Slacker,
Smith's inspiration for entering the independent filmmaking business in the first place,
begins in exactly this way, with the film's director speculating about alternate realities
that could have occurred had he done things differently at the bus station, and unfolds in
a narratively meandering way that can alienate viewers who prefer the more linear, cause-
and-effect narrative structures of the classical Hollywood variety.
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Yet Mallrats takes this independent film premise of narrative experimentation
and play (King 76) in a new direction by hybridizing it with narrative strategies borrowed
from superhero comic books. For example, while Slacker introduces narrative weirdness
to make a point about the constructed nature of cinema, Mallrats asks the viewer to make
connections between this film and the previous one-it assumes a viewership that has
prior knowledge of View Askewniverse events and characters. This is very much akin to
the way in which superhero comic book titles cultivate comics-literate readers: "Since
this [comic book] literacy is not held by all potential readers, telling a story in comics
form automatically limits its potential audience to comic book readers, something of
which members of this culture are keenly aware" (Pustz 123). In Mallrats Smith and his
View Askew team fashioned a text which rewards the View-Askew-literate viewer and
excludes those viewers who are not as literate, that is, who "missed out on the last issue."
By so doing, Smith and View Askew productions foster the development of a View
Askew-specific fan base who will tune in to each new installment, just like a diehard
comic book fan would.
A key example of the demands and rewards inherent in the kind of comic
book/independent film literacy Mallrats presumes is found in the film's first post-
opening credits sequence. T.S. comes to Brandi's house to pick her up for their vacation
together, only to find out that she has agreed to appear on her father's game show as a
result of the death of the original scheduled contestant, Julie Dwyer. Now Julie Dwyer
and her unusual death feature prominently in Clerks: Dante and Randal attend Julie's
funeral in the middle of that film. Close reading of the two films and determination of
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the exact evening of Julie Dwyer's death reveal that the events of Clerks actually take
place the day after the events of Mallrats, a continuity point that is not explicitly
discussed in either film. 13 This is the kind of "insider knowledge" that a "smart" or
particularly dedicated viewer might eventually pick out-and it is the very kind of
diegetic complexity that superhero comics titles also deliberately foster in order to retain
readership: as Matthew Pustz notes of cornie book titles with particularly complex
continuities, "continuity-heavy comics have very loyal, highly knowledgable followings"
(130). So Smith's claim that Mallrats would be a "Clerks redux" for consumption by a
wider audience to some extent belies the complexity of its address, and the intended
audience of that address. Mallrats wastes no time in establishing a diegetic milieu-the
View Askewniverse continuity, to use comics parlance-premised on the events of
Clerks and pitched to a independent film- and/or comics-literate constituency.
Mallrats continues its address to its "insider" fan base, assumed to be at least
somewhat comics literate, on the level of its diegesis. The two primary ways it does this
is (1) through its deployment of the figure of the cornie book fanboy as one of the film's
protagonists, and (2) direct appropriation of Batman iconography.
Brodie, one member of Mallrats's central buddy pair, is an obsessive cornie book
collector and fan. He refers to his basement bedroom as a "vault" and indeed he has
shelves full of bagged and boarded comics kept there. This marks him as a cornie book
"fanboy," an especially obsessive type of superhero cornie book fan and collector who is
often characterized as an "overt [speculator], buying comics as an investment," though
Matthew Pustz notes that many comics readers "have recaptured the terrnfanboy, using it
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to describe reading comics of any kind with a sense of fun and fascination, but the term
remains controversial within comic book culture" (Pustz xii). Brodie clearly reads and
loves the comics he collects, so might well fit into Pustz's second definition of the fanboy
type: he has posters of many superheroes (including Spider-Man and The Punisher)
prominently displayed on his bedroom walls and once he arrives at the mall he
obsessively discusses comic book heroes with T.S., Jay, and anyone else who will listen.
However, Brodie is also aware of the stigma attached to comic book collectors and
publicly denies his love of comics at certain points during Mallrats. In part this denial
arises from the stigma imposed from outside comic book culture by those who perceive
comic book fandom as a sign of immaturity or arrested development. But there is also a
negative stereotype of the fanboy-collector imposed from within superhero comic book
readership.
The phenomenon of the fanboy-as-collectorlspeculator arose out of changes to the
way comic books were distributed starting in the 1980s. Prior to the '80s, mainstream
superhero comic books were found primarily in racks at supermarkets, drugstores, and
newsstands. Bookstores typically did not carry comics, and specialty shops for comics
were not yet widely extant either. 14 So while mainstream superhero titles as well as their
alternative counterparts did evince a kind of proto-organized fandom throughout the
1960s and '70s, this was characterized by what Charles Hatfield calls "grassroots anarchy
(the private and inchoate discourse of isolated fan conclaves)" whose existence depended
upon "such institutions as used bookstores, small-circulation amateur 'zines (fanzines),
amateur press alliances (APAs), conventions, mail-order businesses, and 'letterhacking'
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(that is, writing letters for publication in comic books and corresponding with other such
writers, or letterhacks)" (21). However, as Hatfield writes, "[by] the early eighties, the
accelerating decline of newsstand sales led these [major comic book] publishers [Marvel
and DC] to rely increasingly on the then newly emergent fan (that is, direct) market to
stave off disaster" (21). The specialty comic book store quickly became the place for
fans to buy comics, and this shift from an anarchic and inchoate comic book fandom to "a
highly codified, in some sense disciplined and commodified practice [...] led, albeit
gradually, to an overwhelming emphasis on organized fandom as the comic book's core
audience-and on the costumed superhero as its core genre" (Hatfield 21). It is this
focusing of the market and culture of comic book fandom that gave rise to the
speculator/fanboy.
I find the fanboy type particularly interesting for the ways in which it parallels the
independent film fan of the 1990s, particularly the type of collector/fan that emerged with
the advent of the DVD format. I discussed the 1980s rise of the industrial infrastructure
for independent film distribution in the previous chapter, and the broad similarities
between comic book readers and independent film aficionados should be obvious
enough: both belong to subcultures largely ignored by the cultural mainstream and in fact
claim a sense of identity and/or belonging by (accurately or not) defining themselves
against that mainstream. However, as Geoff King documents in American Independent
Cinema, the introduction of the DVD format in the late 1990s, much like the rise of the
comic book direct market and specialty shops a decade before, encouraged independent
film collecting and, with its increased audio-visual quality and "potential to include extra
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features, made it a format of choice for more film-literate viewers, more than averagely
likely to be drawn to less mainstream fare" (24). And indeed, this parallel between comic
book collecting/fandom and its analogue in the culture of independent film is particularly
relevant to Mallrats and the View Askew films in general, for as View Askew producer
Scott Mosier has asserted, "Our career [...J is at least 75% born out of home video" (The
Erection ofan Epic: The Making ofMallrats).
In light of his status as an obsessive comics fanboy, then, it is no surprise that
Brodie's mall visit includes a stop at the comic book store, a key site for the expression of
comic book fandom: "For comic book aficionados, comic shops are gold mines, places to
find buried treasure, catch up with old friends, make new acquaintances with like-minded
souls" (Pustz 6). Brodie does indeed meet some "like-minded souls"-the buddy pair of
Steve-Dave and Fanboy (real-life Kevin Smith pals Bryan Johnson and Walter
Flanagan)-in line at the comics shop, but ends up arguing with them and nearly fighting
instead of making friends. The scene depicting their conflict, in which T.S. accuses
Fanboy and Brodie of being "testosterone-seething He-man comic book fans," expresses
the adolescent maleness of mainstream superhero comic book fandom, which Matthew
Pustz estimates consists of "[aJbout 90 percent [...J adolescent males ranging in age
from about twelve to twenty" (13). Indeed, the comic book shop is typically seen as a
homosocial environment for young men, for as Pustz notes, "[fJemale visitors commonly
become uncomfortable" in comics shops due to "the gazes of male patrons" and comics-
related "posters that frequently objectify women and/or glorify violence" (8). Since
comic book fandom, like independent film fandom, is an activity that by nature excludes
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certain (usually defined as "mainstream") people in order to define its own constituency,
it is perhaps not surprising that much of this exclusion in this case should occur along
gender lines, especially since superhero comics-as opposed to "alternative" or more
literary comics-are a hypermasculinized form to begin with, depicting primarily "men
in tights" with superhuman powers.
However, superhero comic book fandom, while ostensibly providing a safe haven
for the geeky adolescent male, is not necessarily understood or looked upon favorably by
those who stand outside this particular subculture (or even by some self-hating elements
within it). Brodie, who is very willing to discuss comics with those on the "inside" such
as Jay, T.S., or even Steve-Dave and Fanboy, is aware of the adolescent/geeky stigma
attached to comic book collecting and denies his hobby during the live broadcast of the
"Truth or Date" game show: "Comics? What are you talking about, lady? I don't collect
comics, comics are for kids!"
Brodie's public denial of his comic book fandom is especially funny in light of his
earlier contention that T.S. is somehow lacking because he is more interested in girls than
comic books. Brodie is aware of the outside perception that comic book collecting is
juvenile, yet still values comic book collecting and sees those (like T.S.) who would
depart the world of comics for the world of adult heterosexual coupling as highly suspect.
This is in large part due to Brodie's status as a "True Believer," an authentic insider to
comics fandom: by prioritizing comics and disavowing his interest in women he "keeps it
real" within his subcultural context. Indeed, for someone inside the geek subculture of
comics fandom, prioritizing the pursuit of women (and the transition into heterosexual
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adulthood they represent) over comics is a move toward "selling out," embracing adult
white privilege and turning away from the impractical yet somehow more authentic (that
is, authentically geeky) pursuit of comics collecting. Hence, Brodie's fidelity to comics
and resistance to romance, while a source of embarrassment to him in the wider world of
mainstream culture, is his badge of realness, superior knowledge, and cultural power
within his chosen subculture. On a homoerotic note, Brodie's attitude also suggests that
he may harbor fears that ifT.S. is more interested in girls than comics, he may abandon
their homosocial bond in favor of a romantic/marital relationship with Brandi.
Brodie's Mallrats adventure culminates when he meets Stan Lee, creator of
Spider-Man and founder of Marvel Comics, just prior to the film's climax. Lee's
presence in the film is obviously another gesture toward the Marvel comic book fans who
would recognize and love him, but it also calls up parallels between other classic films of
the teenpic subgenre, particularly George Lucas's American Graffiti (1973): prior to
Mallrats's release, one Universal executive likened Brodie's discussion with Stan Lee to
the Curt (Richard Dreyfuss) -Wolfman Jack conversation in Lucas's now-classic teen car
film (View Askew's Look Back at Mallrats). The comparison is apt: despite Brodie's
repeated attempts to tum the conversation to the subject of superhero genitalia, the
Brodie-Stan Lee sequence is actually more serious and sentimental in tone than much of
the rest of the film and deals with romantic relationships, leaving comic books behind,
and the difficulties of growing up-mUCh like the analagous sequence between Curt and
the DJ in American Graffiti. ls
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The Dynamic Duo: Batman and Robin
DC Comics's Batman is one of the most popular superhero icons in the world
today. As Will Brooker notes in his excellent Batman Unmasked: "From corporate
merchandise to localised creativity, the adult consumer to the primary-school fan, [...]
Batman got there"(4). Brooker argues that although "Batman and his meanings are still
tethered to a multinational institution" (10-11), Warner Communications, the core
components of the Batman signifier-his costume, Bat-symbol, and the basic outline of
his origin story-are now so ubiquitously known that "Batman could 'die' in the comic
book, or fold as a comic book-just as he now [in 1999] seems to have failed as a movie
franchise-but [...] his legend could not be killed" (331). I agree with this assessment,
and Batman's recent cinematic comeback in Christopher Nolan's immensely popular
Batman Begins, the eighth highest-grossing film of 2005, is just one testament to the
durability and cultural importance of the Batman icon and franchise (imdb.com).
It is no surprise, then, that a film as steeped in comic book culture as Mal/rats
would explicitly incorporate Batman iconography, mapping it onto the figure of Kevin
Smith's character, Silent Bob. Mal/rats's parodic appropriation of this powerful
iconography makes a rich addition to the "comic-bookness" of the film and also
contributes to the queer erotics that underlie its ostensibly heterosexual teenpic narrative.
To fully appreciate the meanings that the Batman accoutrements bring to Mal/rats, we
must first briefly discuss Batman's (queer) history.
Batman first appeared in Detective Comics in May 1939 and quickly became,
alongside Superman, one of the two most popular comic book superheroes of all time.
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The Batman character was loosely based upon the hard-boiled protagonists of pulp
detective fiction and film, and in his earliest stories Batman showed little remorse over
killing or maiming criminals and was not above using firearms, a feature that would soon
change. Batman received his own solo comic book title in 1940, while continuing to star
in Detective Comics as well.
The initial pulp-influenced portrayal of Batman started to soften in 1940 with the
introduction of Robin, the Boy Wonder, intended as an identification figure for the
comic's young (and presumably male) readers. 16 The subsequent foregrounding of
Batman and Robin's relationship and the lightening of tone in Batman and Robin's
stories over the 1940s and 50s led psychiatrist Fredric Wertham to warn of the danger of
homosexual interpretations of Batman in Seduction ofthe Innocent, published in 1954.
Batman scholar Will Brooker notes that Wertham's tract had the effect of promoting,
rather than suppressing, queer readings of the Dynamic Duo, and he states that "the
'camp' phase of Batman did not [...] begin with the TV show of 1966 but in the comics
from which the series was adapted," which began to soften and become gradually more
campy "in the mid-1940s" after the addition of Robin (153,150,99). Thus, it is textually
logical that the 1966 "Batman" television series, starring Adam West and Burt Ward as
the dynamic duo, would draw upon the campy exploits of the comic-book Batman and
Robin for its source material and thereby exponentially increase the circulation of the
lighter (and queerer) image ofthe duo.
After the cancellation of the Adam West TV series in 1968, which was
accompanied by a concomitant decrease in sales of Batman comics, Batman publisher
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DC Comics decided to return Batman to his more detective-oriented roots, and through
the 1970s into the 1980s, Batman slowly shed his do-gooder "caped crusader" image and
took on a more menacing and dark persona and appearance in comics. This darker vision
of Batman reached its apex in the mid- to late 1980s, when Frank Miller's The Dark
Knight Returns (1986) and Tim Burton's immensely successful1989 Batman film set a
new popular standard for how the character would appear: dressed in black, charged with
angst, and largely sans Robin. Of course, Batman could not shed his camp inflection
completely: even Miller's homophobic The Dark Knight Returns reveals the erotic nature
of the rivalry between Batman and his arch-nemesis The Joker, particularly in their final
showdown (pp. 141-51), and Burton's film features a highly camped-up and comedically
flamboyant Joker (Jack Nicholson). Indeed, as Brooker notes, Batman readers and critics
"who stress the distinction between the 'dark' vision [of Batman] and the unfortunate
distraction of the [1960s] TV show, may be forgetting or repressing the memories of
telling their daddies to stop laughing at an Adam West who, at the time, seemed manly
and heroic" (236). He thus emphasizes both the dual address of the Batman TV show-
kids took it seriously as parents looked on and laughed at the knowing camp humor-and
the historical and textual continuity between the camp and dark variants of the Batman
character. J7
As to the specifically queer interpretations of Batman and his youthful sidekick,
Brooker and others have noted the strong parallel between superhero and gay lifestyles
more generally: both often involve secret identities, double lives, unusual (and
effeminate) costumes, and both have ties to the homosocial sport ofmale bodybuilding.
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In addition to these general features, the 1940 addition of Robin the Boy Wonder to
Batman's milieu specifically enhanced the openness of the Batman text to homosexual
interpretations (Brooker 136, 137). As previously mentioned, the most famous
emergence of a queer interpretation of the Batman-Robin relationship resulted from the
publication and widespread popularity of Fredric Wertham's Seduction ofthe Innocent in
1954, in which Wertham documents the Batman-related homosexual fantasies of many of
his young male patients. As Brooker demonstrates, Wertham's text had the opposite of
its intended effect, proliferating rather than suppressing the queer interpretation of the
Dynamic Duo: "Wertham, in highlighting this [queer] interpretation, caused it to circulate
not just in his own decade but in the popular discourse of the next forty-five years. At the
end of the 1990s the joke that Batman and Robin are, or could be gay is something that
'everybody knows'" (161).18 While Brooker's claim that 'everybody knows' the gay
reading of Batman and Robin by the late 1990s must take into account the Joel
Schumacher Batman films of 1995 and 1997, released after Mallrats, his book makes
clear that the Dynamic Duo has generated queer readings of varying kinds ever since
their inception. Indeed, for someone of Kevin Smith's generation, the franchise-rescuing
success of the camp 1960s "Batman" television show and its subsequent syndication
certainly have kept the queer Batman alive and in circulation even through his somewhat
darker and camp-resistant incarnations of the 1980s.
Interestingly, as I have just suggested, Mallrats was produced at a time when the
Batman signifier was most heavily influenced by the "Dark Knight" interpretation of the
character, the serious vigilante ofFrank Miller's graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns
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(1986) and Tim Burton's 1989 Batman film, rather than the campy "Caped Crusader"
incarnation ofpre-1980s Batman comics and especially the 1966-68 Adam West
television series. Part of the project of the Dark Knight incarnation was an attempt to
repudiate the homoerotics of Batman, and indeed stories involving the Dark Knight
version of Batman since the 1980s typically exclude Robin, as in Burton's film, or
somehow attempt to de-queer Batman's sidekick, as in Miller's immensely popular The
Dark Knight Returns, wherein Robin is reconfigured as a young girL Of course, as
Christopher Sharrett has suggested, Miller's recasting of Robin as female "finally allows
Batman to express his sexual feelings for Robin" and functions as "a subtle expression of
[Batman's] gayness" that allows for the fulfillment of the Batman-Robin homoerotic
fantasy (37-8). Miller denies this interpretation even though in the same interview he
indirectly acknowledges Batman's queerness by admitting he conceptualized the Dark
Knight's Joker as a "homophobic nightmare" (Sharrett 36). Indeed, Miller's re-situating
of Batman's queerness into his relationship with The Joker would set the tone for all the
Dark Knight texts to immediately follow his.
In such seminal 1980s Batman texts as Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, Alan
Moore's The Killing Joke (1988), and Grant Morrison's Arkham Asylum (1989),
indicators of sexual queerness, gender play, and homoerotic desire are shifted from the
Batman-Robin relationship onto the figure of Batman's nemesis, the psychopathic Joker.
The ostensible aim of this shift was presumably to vilify queerness, conflating it with The
Joker's extreme psychopathology (Miller's "homophobic nightmare"), and to leave
Batman ostensibly desexualized: as Miller states in a 1991 interview, "Batman isn't gay.
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His sexual urges are so drastically sublimated into crime-fighting that there's no room for
any other emotional activity" (Sharrett 38). Yet by claiming that Batman is effectively
asexual since he sublimates his sexuality into violence, Miller opens up a reading of
Batman that suggests the character sublimates his libido as a defensive homophobic
response to his own latent queerness. Interestingly, Miller states in the same interview
that "I disagreed completely with everything [Alan Moore] did in [The Killing Joke]" and
links his disagreement to Moore's treatment of the Joker: "Alan's view of the Joker was
very humanistic" (Sharrett 36). I argue Miller disagrees with Moore's humanizing of the
Joker precisely for the sympathetic (as opposed to homphobically violent) queer readings
that that re-visoning of the super-villain engenders.
Thus the marginalization of Robin and emphasis on the queerness of The Joker
merely serves to re-queer Batman in a different configuration, and the homoerotics
between Batman and Joker are nowhere more overtly displayed than in these 1ate-1980s
"Dark Age" texts. For example, in Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, The Joker calls
Batman "Darling" and their duel to the death is depicted in viscerally passionate (if
overtly homophobic) terms (141-51). Moore's Killing Joke is indeed the most queer
Batman text of all, because not only are the erotics of his relationship with the Joker
foregrounded throughout the story, but Moore's Batman is not self-hating and in fact, he
spends much of The Killing Joke's narrative attempting to communicate with and
"understand" his queerer other half (Moore 267-8). This is also The Joker's aim
throughout The Killing Joke: to communicate to Batman the concept that we are the
same. What made you also made me. Moore's is the first Batman text to make this
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suggestion so boldly, and its "you made me, I made you" theme is carried forward into
Tim Burton's hugely successful Batman film of 1989, wherein the Joker is reimagined as
the killer of Bruce Wayne's parents and Batman is made responsible for The Joker's
disfigurement and insanity: they literally create each other. And that film is the primary
textual referent for Smith's deployment of Batman in Mallrats. 19
Early in Mallrats, Brodie and T.S. seek out Jay and Silent Bob to enlist their
assistance in somehow disrupting Mr. Svenning's game show, which is scheduled to
broadcast live from a stage in the mall later in the day. Claiming that they were planning
to trash the stage anyway, Jay and Bob accept this task and spend the rest of the film
attempting to trash the stage (they fail), running away from feared mall security guard La
Fours (named after Butch and Sundance's arch-nemesis Joe La Fours in Butch Cassidy
and the Sundance Kid), and ultimately helping Brodie to broadcast footage of Shannon
having sex with an underage girl to the assembled game show audience. Hence the
principal function of Jay and Silent Bob in Mallrats is to act as superheroes of a sort,
fighting the forces of "evil," that is authority, in the form ofMr. Svelming and La Fours.
'.'
Jay and Silent Bob's sequences gradually cross the line from the duo's usual ineffectual
antics into a kind of cornie book fantasy realm, where the two bumbling mallrat stoners-
and especially Silent Bob-suddenly acquire superheroic abilities and gadgetry. This
gradual shift occurs over three sequences.
The first stage-trashing plan that Jay and Bob formulate involves Bob attacking
La Fours with a sock full of quarters while Jay knocks out a pin that holds the "Truth or
Date" stage together. At this point, Bob wears no obvious Batman accoutrements,
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though his black trenchcoat is somewhat reminiscent of Batman's cape. However, we
know we are entering a comic-book realm in this sequence due to the Wile E. Coyote-
inspired blueprints Jay and Bob look over at the outset of this episode. Bob gets his sock
of quarters spinning and takes off toward La Fours, but a mischievous kid rolls a toy
truck under Bob's feet at an inopportune moment and Bob rolls past La Fours, through a
women's clothing store, and plants his head through a dressing-room door behind which
Gwen is changing. She yells "Fuck!" and the sequence ends with Silent Bob looking up
at Gwen as she looks on in disgusted surprise. This last shot of the sequence feminizes
Bob, positioning him on his knees with a blue female undergarment wrapped around his
neck. Further, the sequence as a whole, quite funny in itself, is in some ways merely a
set-up for Jay and Silent Bob's second stage-trashing attempt, particularly since it
establishes the Silent Bob-as-voyeur motif that will reach its zenith in the second
sequence.
The second stage assault attempt, which Jay and Bob's cartoony blueprints
significantly dub "Operation Dark Knight," involves Silent Bob swinging from a rope
across the mall courtyard and snatching the pin that holds the stage together as he "flies"
by overhead. For this sequence, Jay reminds Bob "Don't forget your helmet," which
consists of a black helmet with pointed Batman-like ears on it. True, it is not an exact
replica of Batman's cowl, which covers his head as well as half of his face, but Silent
Bob does wear large goggles that obscure his eyes and the Batman connotations here are
obvious. Further, once in position atop the elevator tower, Bob unfolds his "wings,"
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which are bat-shaped and parodically emulate those used by Batman in Burton's 1989
Batman film.
Unfortunately for Silent Bob, this attempt at collapsing the stage fails also: he
swings across the mall courtyard only to miss the critical pin by inches, then crashes his
helmeted head through a wall into the "Popular Girl" dressing room where Gwen is (once
again) changing (see Figure 20). Gwen's breasts are exposed to the viewer just before
Bob's unexpected entrance, and her increased nudity combined with Bob's violent
entrance through a solid wall make his unintentional voyeurism this time much funnier
for the audience and much creepier for Gwen: she yells "You fucker!" at Bob and hits
him on the head.
Figure 20: Silent Bob as Batman the voyeur.
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What is most interesting to me about this scene is its conflation of the
Batman/superhero figure with voyeurism/peeping tom-ism, for one of the difficulties
inherent in positing superheroes like Batman and Superman is to explain why these
superbeings do not use their powers for just such activities. I know that as a young boy
the idea of being able to fly-encouraged by the George Reeves "Superman" program I
saw then in syndication-was immensely exciting to me, and indeed, given their assumed
audiences of young males, I see superhero comics as being a fertile ground for the
encouragement of childhood power fantasies. In this connection it is noteworthy that the
ability to fly is also one of Peter Pan's special talents, and in his stories flying is linked to
never growing up, "thinking happy thoughts," and clinging to childhood social
arrangements. A similar pattern is seen in Steven Spielberg's 1977 geek-meets-UFO
odyssey Close Encounters o/the Third Kind, wherein Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss)
abandons his wife and family and flies away with childlike aliens in their womb-like
mothership at the film's end. These fantasies of super-heroic (or extraterrestrial) powers
conflated with children's sensibilities was indeed the focus of Wertham's concern about
comics-that they might encourage young men to fantasize about homosexuality or other
forms of deviance-and indeed I admit that if! had Batman's powers and resources, I
would be most tempted to use them for personal gain or, as in Bob's plunge through the
dressing room wall in Mallrats, as a means to sexually possess others. Thus, by
incorporating superhero iconography and lore into an R-rated comedy film, Smith brings
out the sexual dimension of superheroic fantasizing, both through Brodie's relentless
obsession with superhero sexuality and the Silent Bob sequence just described.
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Already marked as a voyeur by the end of his second superheroic sequence, Silent
Bob (and Jay) is further queered in the third and final of his Batman-esque tums.20 The
stage-trashing business behind them, Jay and Silent Bob now rush to the rescue ofT.S.
and Brodie, who are being ejected from the mall by La Fours and his security team. Jay
stuns La Fours with a baseball bat, then Bob downs a couple security guards with a
"Vulcan nerve pinch" and next the two are leading Team La Fours on a chase around the
exterior of the mall. Not only does Silent Bob suddenly possess superhuman speed,
overtaking and passing the running Team La Fours with ease, but he next leads Jay into a
blind alley and commences his most elaborate Batman homage yet. As Jay panics at the
swift approach of Team La Fours, Silent Bob pulls a succession of strange objects out of
his trenchcoat: a vibrating, finger-shaped butt-plug and a fully inflated blow-up doll.
This is a comedic reference to the numerous gadgets that Batman secretes throughout his
costume and simultaneously continues the gag of linking Silent Bob/Batman with deviant
sexuality. The scene culminates with Bob pulling his jacket and shirt aside to reveal a
very Batman-like utility belt and grappling gun. He shoots the grappling gun, grabs Jay,
and the two of them are reeled up to safety just before Team La Fours rounds the comer
into the alley. After Team La Fours departs the scene without seeing our duo, Jay, who
is hanging aloft clinging atop Silent Bob, says: "Where do you get those wonderful
toys?" and then kisses Bob on the cheek. This line is copped directly from Tim Burton's
Batman film: the Joker (Jack Nicholson) wonders aloud "Where does he get those
wonderful toys?" after Batman (Michael Keaton) rescues Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger)
from the Joker's clutches at the end of the museum sequence-a sequence that Andy
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Medhurst calls the liveliest and campiest sequence in an otherwise "dour" film (160-1).
Hence, a line that is associated in Batman with the rivalry (channeled through Vale of
course) between Batman and the camped-up, homoeroticized Joker is now remapped in
Mallrats onto a rescue scene between the "Dork Knight" and his sidekick Jay. Thus this
scene in Mallrats comedically recovers the lost homoeroticism and tenderness between
Batman and Robin that the majority of the Batman texts of the 1980s sought to bury.
Jay's kissing of Silent Bob further highlights the homoerotics that exist between both
Smith's and DC Comics's Dynamic Duos.
It is also worth noting that these Batman references in Mallrats are parodic,
playing Batman for laughs by mapping his signifiers onto an overweight, stoner mallrat
with a beard: for example, when Silent Bob reveals the Batman-esque utility belt girded
around his midsection, the belt is shot in close-up and reveals his belly jiggling slightly,
comedically emphasizing the differences between Silent Bob's physique and that of the
usual athletic, hypermasculinized portrayals of Batman. The film's use of the double
signifier of Bob-as-Batman reflects a post-modem sensibility, ironically appropriating
imagery from one genre, superhero comics and films, and repurposing it in another, the
Generation X buddy comedy inflected through the conventions of the 1980s teen film.
Depicting Bob-as-Batman is also a queer move, for this comedic play with Batman's
visual accoutrements and behavior (such as rescuing his sidekick, a frequently occurring
trope in Batman stories that involve Robin) invokes the campier "Caped Crusader"
reading of Batman's signifiers and re-queers Batman and Robin in cinema one year
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before Joel Schumacher's Batman Forever (1995) would begin to do the same in a
mainstream studio context.
From Clerks to Mallrats to Chasing Amy
Clerks was an unexpectedly overwhelming success that cost virtually no money to
produce and, after its enthusiastic reception and acquisition by Miramax at Sundance
1994, launched Kevin Smith and his fledgling View Askew Productions into the
independent-sector limelight. It also paved the way for Smith and company to work with
Universal Pictures on MaUrats and to work within a budget-$6.l million-that far
exceeded their limited experience at the time and is frequently referred to by View
Askew personnel as having been too much for them to handle. Ultimately the difficulties
that attended Mallrats's marketing and distribution may have stemmed from this
disparity between View Askew's indie approach and the demands of Universal Studios,
but on the level of the text it also relates to the misplaced belief that a film loaded with
comic book in-jokes and centering on the exploits of a comic book fanboy could appeal
to a wider teen audience. As executive producer Cotty Chubb puts it, "We made an R-
rated movie for an audience that couldn't see it because it's R-rated. So the degree to
which people over 17 were interested in this picture was limited to, you know, [laughs]
emotionally stunted white boys who love comic books" (The Erection ofan Epic: The
Making ofMallrats).
Of course, Chubb's concern about audience inaccessibility applies primarily to
Mallrats's theatrical release; the film found great success on the home video market,
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where younger viewers presumably have much easier access to R-rated films. And it is
in the home video milieu that Mallrats's dual address was most effective. Younger
viewers found Mallrats to be an entertaining and accessible film, shot in color on a studio
budget, laden with humorous sexuality and vulgarity, and featuring a healthy dose of
comic book lore and culture-presumably a shared passion for many of the film's
teenaged male fans. Yet at the same time, the film appealed to the same Gen Xers who
enjoyed Clerks, due to its numerous New Hollywood references, John Hughes-esque
visual style, and explicitly Generation X twenty-something actors and characters. In
short, Mallrats appeals directly and simultaneously to two different audiences, Gen Xers
writ large as well as younger teen comedy and comic book fans. View Askew would
attempt this type of dual address again in 1997, across queer/straight cultural lines, with
its romantic comedy Chasing Amy.
As for Chubb's "emotionally stunted white boys who love comic books," in
Mallrats and particularly the character of Brodie Bruce, brilliantly and hilariously
embodied by Jason Lee, View Askew gave the comic book fan community an
incomparable cinematic gift.21 As we have discussed, Smith and his studio bosses at
Universal hoped this would be a gift that might also be accepted by a broader audience of
non-comics fans, but Smith's own investment in comic book subculture-he famously
sold his own extensive comic book collection to partially finance Clerks-may have
blinded him to the limitations of Mallrats's specific address to comic book fanboys and
Gen-X slacker males. Perhaps predictably, the film did find its audience in the home
video market and is now considered a "cult classic."
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However, the initial box-office failure of Mallrats and the circumstances of its
production undoubtedly influenced the View Askew team's approach to their next
planned film, a romantic comedy called Chasing Amy. As Scott Mosier notes, Amy was
originally planned-during the production of Mallrats but before its theatrical release-as
a "PG-13 Chasing Amy comedy based on [...] the [1995] success of Clueless" (Mallrats
10th Anniversary Q & A). However, after Mallrats tanked theatrically, those plans, which
were premised on the widespread success of Mallrats, were scrubbed and Chasing Amy
was reconceived as a much smaller, independent production. This shift, along with a
significant shift in genre-from the buddy filmlteenpic/Animal comedy of Clerks and
Mallrats to the melodramatic romantic comedy of Chasing Amy-would have a huge
impact on the type of film Chasing Amy would eventually become.
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Notes
1. Superhero films are the most consistent cinematic blockbusters of the new millenium.
Spider-Man was the top-grossing film of2002, and its sequel, Spider-Man 2, was the
second-highest grossing film of2004 (behind Shrek 2). The first X-Men film was the
eighth-highest grossing film of 2000, while its sequel, X2, was the sixth-highest grossing
film of 2003. Superheroes have also become immensely popular on television in recent
years, with shows like the WB's Smallville (200 I-present) and NBC's Heroes (2006-
present) bringing superhero plots, themes, and characters to a much broader audience
than ever before. As for the box-office and critical failure of Mallrats, Kevin Smith has
frequently commented on this issue in public in tongue-in-cheek fashion, perhaps most
famously when he suggested that Chasing Amy was his "apology" for Mallrats at the
Independent Spirit Awards in 1996.
2. William Atherton, who played sleazeball villain characters in Ghostbusters (1984),
Real Genius (1985), and Die Hard (1988), passed on the Mr. Svenning role before
Michael Rooker was hired to play it (Muir 67). Furthermore, actor Sven Thorsen (La
Fours) is a prevalent Arnold Schwartzenegger associate, playing roles in Conan the
Barbarian (1982), Predator (1987), The Running Man (1987), Red Heat (1988), and The
Last Action Hero (1993), as well as non-Schwartzenegger action films like Lethal
Weapon (1987), The Hunt for Red October (1990), and Lethal Weapon 3 (1992). Thus
Smith links the hypermasculine 1980s buddy action film with the 1980s John Hughes
teenpic/animal comedy through his casting choices in Mallrats.
3. Interestingly, and in line with Dyer's larger thesis that whiteness renders itself
invisible in order to stand in for all of humanity, Captain Kirk (William Shatner) of the
original "Star Trek" series (1966-1969) often cites this quality of "aspiration" and
striving to be better than ourselves as a general (and redeeming) quality of all humans.
This, plus the very name of Kirk's vessel, Enterprise, suggest that despite the program's
multiracial crew, whiteness is nevertheless held up as the invisible standard for
representing the positive qualities of the human species in general.
4. In Mallrats as in Clerks, Smith is fond of shooting long takes with minimal cutting,
using well-rehearsed actors to act out scenes largely in master shot. This technique is
also associated with independent film director Jim Jarmusch, whose early films Stranger
Than Paradise (1984) and Night On Earth (1991) feature many scenes shot in long
takes-in fact, the former film is famously shot entirely in this manner. Smith names
Jarmusch as one of his inspirational figures in the end credits to Clerks, so his emulation
of Jarmusch's style is not surprising. The use oflong takes also plays to Smith's talents
as a writer, showcasing the writing and delivery of the lines over skillful cutting or
camera technique.
5. Of course, many screen geeks are potrayed as being Jewish, including Woody Allen's
protagonists, Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws, Close Encounters, and American Graffiti, and
185
more recently, Judd Apatow and his repertory company of young Jewish comedians like
Seth Rogen (Knocked Up) and Jonah Hill (Superbad). These Jewish geeks, like Smith's
Italian American and Irish Catholic geek protagonists, are liminally raced and marginally
white as in Dyer's fonnulation.
6. Shannen Doherty undergoes so many costume changes in Mallrats in part because her
contract allowed her to keep all outfits she wore in the film.
7. The father-daughter incest motif is pervasive in U.S. cinema, as Kathleen Rowe
Karlyn argues in " 'Too Close For Comfort': American Beauty and the Incest Motif' in
Cinema Journal 44.1 (2004).
8. In addition to being Brodie's surname, Bruce is also the first name of Batman's alter
ego, millionaire Bruce Wayne. Will Brooker discusses the homosexual connotations of
the name "Bruce" in Batman Unmasked: "Batman's 'real' name, Bruce, had strong
associations with gayness which date back to the 1940s and have apparently survived
several decades" (132).
9. Mallrats is a film that revels in postmodern intertextuality and mediation: to cite
another key example, during the film's climactic game show sequence Brandi and T.S.'s
love is mediated by a game show, described as a "staple of 70's television," and Brodie's
final smiting of Shannon Hamilton comes via his showing an illicit videotape on a bank
of television screens that lines the game-show stage.
10. In another funny and revealing piece of View Askewniverse intertextuality, Clerks's
Randal is mentioned in an excerpt from Tricia Jones's male virility study Bore-gasm,
included in The Mallrats Companion: "People have theorized for years that Randal was
closeted, [ ] [and] after our vid-store floor encounter, I'm forced to lend that talk some
credence. [ ] I feel the subject would much better off throwing away the shackles of
gender role forced on him [... ] and accepting his natural inclinations toward same-sex
desire" (25). Tricia's book excerpt on Randal, which lays bare the homoerotics of
Randal's relationship with Dante, concludes by noting that if Randal embraced his
queerness, "[m]aybe then he'd quit calling girls 'Dante' as he climaxes" (25).
11. During the Mallrats 10th Anniversary Q & A session in 2005, Smith makes reference
to both Star Trek IV and possible Mallrats sequels such as Mallrats 2: Die Hard in a
Mall (Mallrats 10th Anniversary Q & A), revealing his awareness of the re-casting of
roles as they play out in science fiction and action film-sequel contexts.
12. In tenus of the View Askewniverse "continuity" this is actually reversed since
Mallrats takes place the day before the events of Clerks, making Willam's Mallrats
incarnation technically the first appearance of the character within the continuity timeline
(Muir 66). It is also worthy of note that Suplee's portrayal of Willam highlights both
the character's position as a queer manchild-Suplee has a boyish face and at one point
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exclaims that his inability to see the sailboat is "not a phase!"-and hints at a connection
between Willam and comic book superhero The Incredible Hulk: in the opening credits
sequence, he is called "The Bulk" on his comic book cover. The Hulk can be seen as a
queer figure due to his double identity and his alter-ego's first name, Bruce, a well-
known euphemism for a gay man.
13. To the best of my knowledge, this fact was not made explicit by anyone at View
Askew until it was mentioned by Kevin Smith in the Mallrats DVD commentary track
released in July of 1999. It later appeared in print as a View Askewniverse timeline in
the booklet accompanying the Criterion Collection DVD of Chasing Amy in 2000.
14. Charles Hatfield argues in Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature that the
alternative comix movement of the 1960s, spearheaded by such writer-artists as R.
Crumb, inadvertently laid the groundwork for a kind of proto-comic book direct market
by selling its titles through the specialty "boutiques (or 'head shops ') of the so-called
hippie movement" (16).
15. In the 1970s, Richard Dreyfuss frequently played boomer geek characters who
served as early prototypes for Smith's Gen-X geeks. See my Introduction and Chapter II
for more on the connection between cinematic Boomer geeks and Gen-X geeks and their
status in 1970s New Hollywood and 1990s Independent cinema.
16. Robin first appeared in Detective Comics #38 (1940).
17. Brooker also points out the well-known fact that the immense popularity of the 1966
"Batman" television series, which temporarily boosted sales of Batman comic books and
elevated Batman to the position of a pop-cultural icon, may very well have saved the
entire Batman franchise from "flagging [comic book] sales" and, perhaps, complete
financial ruin: "Whatever the complaints of some comic fans, Batman would very
probably never have survived beyond 1965 without the help of the ABC television
series" (179).
18. Interestingly, this culturally pervasive knowledge of Batman and Robin's queerness
was emphatically foregrounded in June 1995 when actor Chris O'Donnell appeared in
costume as Robin as a "cover boy for [British gay lifestyle magazine] Attitude" in
conjunction with the release of Joel Schumacher's Batman Forever (Brooker 164).
19. Will Brooker's Batman Unmasked (New York: Continuum, 2000) is an excellent
resource for those interested in a fairly complete cultural history of Batman, including a
whole chapter devoted to Wertham's attack on the morality of comics and queer readings
ofBatman and Robin.
20. Insofar as it goes against middle-class standards for acceptable behavior, voyeurism
can be seen as inherently queer, an argument I make at length in "A Stalker's Odyssey:
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Arrested Development, Gay Desire, and Queer Comedy in Chuck&Buck." Jump Cut 49,
Spring 2007 (39 pps in ms). <http://www.ejumpcut.org/home.html>
21. Mal/rats also launched Jason Lee's rather successful film and television career, for
even reviews that disparaged Mallrats-ofwhich there were many-would occasionally
praise Lee's performance, calling his portrayal of Brodie a "bright spot" in the film
(Stack C3). Arguably Mal/rats also helped Ben Affleck to become a Hollywood
megastar, though his star tum in Chasing Amy and Smith's involvement in finding
distribution for Good Will Hunting (1997) played a more significant role than Mal/rats
did in this case.
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CHAPTER IV
UNSPOKEN BISEXUALITY: CHASING AMY (1997)
Chasing Amy (1997) tells essentially the same story as Clerks, but in a
melodramatic rather than comedic mode. This shift in sensibility allows Kevin Smith and
his cohorts to explore the homoerotics and queer triangulations of his previous buddy
films in more emotional depth, taking seriously the sexual hang-ups and repressed desires
of his male buddy protagonists. This melodramatic focus on sexuality and love is further
queered in Chasing Amy by the inclusion of explicitly gay / lesbian / bisexual characters,
and especially the climactic bisexual "experiment" proposed by protagonist Holden (Ben
Affleck). To be clear, Smith himself identifies as straight, as do the two members of
Amy's central male buddy pair, at least at the film's outset. Yet Smith and View Askew
know that lesbianism and queer sexuality sell movies in the independent film marketplace
of the late 1990s, and in Chasing Amy queer sex, specifically bisexual sex, is posited as a
kind of cure-all for the sexual conservatism of the film's male geek protagonist.
If, as B. Ruby Rich argues, Chasing Amy is little more than an "imitation" of
other, more legitimate lesbian-themed independent films of its period, authored by a
straight man and deploying the figure of the mainstream-palatable femme lesbian in order
to appeal to non-queer audiences, it nevertheless does so in the context in an extremely
queer nanative ("Queer and Present" 24). Chasing Amy is obsessed with bisexuality. In
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fact, a certain kind of "transitional bisexuality" drives the narrative ofAmy to its unusual
climax and is viewed by the film's protagonist, Holden, as a cathartic phase through
which he must pass in order to reach sexual maturity in the queer sexual milieu the film
depicts. Chasing Amy climaxes with Holden proposing three-way sex between himself,
his lifelong buddy Banky (Jason Lee), and his lesbian / bisexual girlfriend, Alyssa (Joey
Lauren Adams), in the hope that their queer sexual consummation will blast away the
negativity and conflict that has accrued between all three parties: "This will keep us
together," Holden claims after he outlines his unusual proposal. Through the character of
Holden, Chasing Amy presents bisexuality as a kind of bridge or interstitial phase
between fixed sexual identities: after rejecting Holden's proposal, Alyssa ends up going
back to a lesbian relationship, and Banky's participation in the threesome is premised on
the fact that it will allow him to take the "step" toward claiming a gay identity that
"everyone else sees you should take" (according to Holden). Yet the film ends with the
threesome unconsummated and with questions like Banky's queerness and Alyssa's
commitment to exclusive lesbianism hanging in the air. In this way it can be seen as a
bisexual narrative that uses a lack of final, monosexual coupling or closure to allow more
fluid, bisexual readings of the film and its characters to stand. In this sense Chasing Amy
is similar to much independent cinema of the post-NQC period, cinema that, as Maria
Pramaggiore writes, insists on having its sex "both ways":
If Hollywood, and the plethora of independent producers whose work
dominates the contemporary film industry, need to "cheat" their
representations of homosexualities for mass audience appeal-making
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them legible to those on both sides of the fence-it may be the case that
the ambiguities, doubleness, and "both/and" of bisexual desire are
encoded in contemporary films and may, in part, make bisexual reading
practices possible and necessary. ("Straddling the Screen" 275)
This situation suggests that the very attempt to achieve crossover appeal, to engage with
queerness via a mode of "both/and" dual address, is that which most queers or
bisexualizes contemporary films like Chasing Amy.
Indeed, from a structural point of view we can consider all of Kevin Smith's work
to be bisexual, in that all his View Askew films hinge upon the dynamics of erotic
triangles: "Because the triangle offers the possibility for simultaneous desire and
identification among its various positions, regardless of the gender of the figures
occupying those positions, triangulation often highlights the both/and quality of bisexual
desire" (Pramaggiore "Straddling" 277). Yet Chasing Amy offers the clearest lens
through which to examine the bisexuality of Smith's cinema, since it is not only
structured bisexually but is also about bisexuality in terms of its narrative and the desires
of its principal characters.
In this context it is extremely interesting to note that the relatively low-budget
($250,000) Chasing Amy is well-known as Smith's most "personal" film, loosely based
upon a real-life past relationship between Smith and Amy costar Joey Lauren Adams.
Smith discusses this relationship and its connection to the film in the liner notes to the
Chasing Amy Criterion Edition DVD, encouraging the viewer to see the film as "me
[Smith] on a slab, laid out for the world to see" (n.p.). The personal nature of the film's
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content is supported at the level of the text by Smith-alter-ego Silent Bob's climactic
pathos-laden speech, an interjection into the narrative that raises key issues about the
function of Smith's stardom and the economic and artistic nature of Smith's auteur-ship.
While a full discussion of Smith-as-auteur will be deferred to Chapter VI, the concluding
section of the present chapter will discuss that important speech's impact on how we read
Chasing Amy and its comic book-creating protagonist, Holden McNeil.
Chasing Amy is also View Askew's most critically lauded film-it is the only
Smith film available in a prestigious Criterion DVD edition-and has achieved a greater
level of mainstream acceptance than any other View Askew picture. Thus, especially
compared to the two previous View Askew films, Clerks and Mallrats, Chasing Amy
carries a more "mature" status, both in terms of subgenre-romantic comedy is the most
respected and accessible comedic subgenre-and in its marketing as a personal statement
by an experienced and maturing writer/director. Amy also enhanced its "indie" credibility
and marketability by foregrounding its queer (bi-)sexuality, rendering explicit-in
carefully circumscribed ways-what Clerks only joked about and Mallrats more or less
elided.
Significant in this context is Chasing Amy's introduction of the first two overtly
gay-identifying characters into Smith's "Askewniverse," i.e., the mainstream-palatable
femme lesbian Alyssa Jones (Joey Lauren Adams) and the flaming gay black man
Hooper X (Dwight Ewell). Of course, as I have just hinted, these characters are
portrayed very carefully so as to make them palatable to a wide audience: Alyssa is a
beautiful femme "lesbian" who falls in love with a man, and Hooper is an obvious queen
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with a hyper-masculine public alter-ego who serves as a "magical Negro" selflessly
dispensing wisdom to the white characters. l Both Alyssa and Hooper are ultimately
relegated to secondary roles behind the film's central male buddy pair, Holden and Banky
(Jason Lee), acting as lightning rods to draw queerness away from Holden in particular.
In fact, the central argument of this chapter is that Chasing Amy uses fixed identity
categories such as "lesbian" (Alyssa) and "experimental heterosexual male" (Holden) as
smokescreens for a pervasive yet unspoken bisexuality.
In this chapter I first examine Chasing Amy's privileged critical status, focusing
particularly on its generic context. I explore how Amy both embraces and stubbornly
resists the conventions of the romantic comedy, which ultimately places the film in the
subgenre of the "nervous" romance or break-up film. Next I discuss Chasing Amy's
pervasive bisexuality, comparing its triangles of desire and some key scenes to the
previous two View Askewniverse films. Lastly, I discuss B. Ruby Rich's 2000 article
"Queer and Present Danger," which declares the death by mainstreaming of queer cinema
and specifically names Chasing Amy as a contributor to that trend. Using Chasing Amy
as a textual focus, I interrogate the validity of Rich's claim in its industrial and cultural
moment.
Chasing Amy tells the story of comic book artist Holden McNeil (Ben Affleck),
who writes a comic called Bluntman and Chronic with his artistic partner and lifelong
buddy, Banky Edwards (Jason Lee). After meeting fellow comic artist and avowed
lesbian Alyssa Jones (Joey Lauren Adams), Holden falls in love with her and confesses
this to her one rainy night. Surprisingly, despite an initial few minutes of anger and
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resistance, Alyssa swiftly forsakes her lesbian identity and circle of lesbian friends in
order to be with Holden romantically. However, once a queerly jealous Banky uncovers
the truth about Alyssa's sexual past-she had sex with men, and lots of them-Holden's
intolerance and insecurities kick in and his romance with Alyssa deteriorates. The film
climaxes with Holden proposing that the three of them-Holden, Banky, and Alyssa-
have three-way sex so that he can regain his confidence and Banky can explore gay sex.
Alyssa refuses the menage atrois and dumps Holden for good, and Holden and Banky
drift apart after the incident as well.
Holden's first name immediately invokes The Catcher in the Rye's Holden
Caulfield, a cultural emblem (since the 1950s) of white teen male angst and slackerism.
And indeed there are many parallels between J.D. Salinger's 1951 novel and Smith's
1997 film: Catcher and Amy share a New York City setting, a key secondary character
named Banky (see Catcher's Ed Banky, p. 55), and a self-defeating protagonist who is
surrounded by strong women he cannot withstand-in Holden Caulfield's case, his
domineering mother (72,99-100) and tomboyish sister (206-7,214), in Holden McNeil's
case, his newfound love interest, Alyssa. Further, both Salinger's and Smith's Holdens
appropriate black culture through proximity to black artists they admire-for Caulfield,
piano player Ernie and "colored girl singer, Estelle Fletcher" (Catcher 104-5,109-10,
149), and for McNeil, Hooper X-and behave in ways that can be read as whiny,
somewhat sissified, and thus feminized (Catcher 115, 220, 249). This connection to
Salinger's much-revered novel makes Amy seem more serious, literary, and high-cultural,
akin to Clerks' Dante and his moniker's invocation of The Divine Come~v but unlike the
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more lowbrow protagonists of Mallrats, Quint and Brodie, named instead after characters
from Spielberg's Jaws.
Not only do these echoes of Salinger help qualify Chasing Amy as a more mature
or serious work than Smith's previous two film comedies, many aspects of the Amy text
itself were constructed in order to further this impression. View Askew Producer Scott
Mosier comments that "a film like Chasing Amy says that Kevin Smith can write great
scenes and create an environment for actors where they can produce good work. [...J
Chasing Amy elevated us on all levels: as far as audiences, within the industry, and
financially as well" (Muir 88). Mosier's comment is on the mark, for Amy not only won
back Clerks fans who were disappointed by Mallrats's perceived commercialism, it was
also the most profitable View Askew film to date, making an estimated total domestic
gross ofjust over $12 million on a $250,000 investment. And as Mosier suggests, much
of this rise in status is attributable to Smith's excellent writing and the strong
performances of his handpicked cast. Further, despite its fairly low budget relative to
Mallrats, the Chasing Amy crew was newly sprinkled with industry professionals who
brought an increased level of sophistication and skill to crafting the look and sound of the
film. Most significant in this context is production designer Robert Holtzman, who
previously held crew positions on Philadelphia (1993) and Twelve Monkeys (1995) and
would go on to work as set decorator on The Sixth Sense (1999) as well as production
designer on all future View Askew projects. Holtzman's contributions to Chasing Amy's
mise-en-scene represent a significant aesthetic jump up from the earlier View Askew
films: his production design and the accompanying lighting are quite striking in many
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sequences, including the yellow-orange blanket lying across Alyssa as she lies on
Banky's orange-red couch, or the purple and green hues of the light behind Holden's
SUV when he pulls over in the rain to deliver his confession of love to Alyssa. David
Pimer's superb Chasing Amy score is also notable here, going beyond the grunge-
influenced soundtrack of Clerks and the cartoonish orchestrations of Mallrats to create a
sometimes whimsical (as in the opening credits theme), sometimes somber and dramatic
(as in the rain sequence) musical palette for the film.
This process of maturation or "growing up" is also represented geographically in
the film itself: this is the first film of the New Jersey cycle to feature a location outside
the suburban tri-town area of New Jersey, specifically, New York City. Many of
Chasing Amy's key scenes take place in NYC, including the Manhattan Comicon that
starts and ends the film, Holden and Banky's visit to the lesbian club "Meow Mix," and
Holden's important discussion with Hooper X in the record store. Amy represents New
York as an explicitly urban, cosmopolitan, and queer-friendly place: the film begins with
a montage of NYC street scenes set to an aggressive hip-hop beat, including one image
(the third shot of the montage) ofa gay couple holding hands as they walk down the
sidewalk.
Chasing Amy graphically and comically highlights this New YorklNew Jersey
dichotomy in a key early sequence, Holden and Banky's visit to NYC lesbian bar Meow
Mix. This sequence is structured as an elaborate joke on the central buddy duo,
especially Holden, who does not yet know of Alyssa's lesbianism but finds out in a
startling fashion during the "punch line" of the sequence. For, after singing a sultry song
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that she dedicates to "that special someone out there," Alyssa beckons in Holden's
general direction and walks offstage toward him. Unfortunately for Holden but to
Banky's (and the viewer's) delight, Alyssa has been dedicating her song and pointing her
finger at casual lesbian lover Kim, whom she now passionately embraces and kisses right
in front of a shocked Holden. The diegetic music, a techno song that begins with the
sound of a ringing alarm klaxon, heightens the impact of the joke. In certain ways, Judith
Halberstam's comments on a similar set of sequences from Neil Jordan's The Crying
Game (1989) are illustrative here:
In a series of scenes set in the gay bar, the Metro, where Dil performs, the
viewer's gaze is sutured to [straight male protagonist] Fergus's. In the
first few scenes, the bar seems to be populated by so-called normal people,
men and women, dancing together. But in a scene at the Metro that
follows Fergus's discovery of[transvestite] Dil's penis, the camera again
scans the bar and finds the garish and striking faces of the drag queens
who populate it. [...] [L]ike Fergus, we suddenly see the bar for what it
is: a queer site. (In a Queer Time & Place 81-2)
The Crying Game uses a straight man's visits to a transvestite bar to spring a
surprise on the protagonist and the audience-a shocking surprise that is in some ways
merely fallout from the film's central shock, the original horrific revelation of Dil's
penis. Chasing Amy, on the other hand, makes no such effort to keep Alyssa's sexual
identity secret from the audience. For one, the theatrical trailer for Amy gives away the
fact of Alyssa's lesbianism, a strategy that already sets Smith's film far apart from
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Jordan's, which was marketed on the basis of the "secret" ofDil's gender. Further, I
think the name of the club, Meow Mix, offers a linguistic clue to the viewer that it is a
queer space: Hooper calls Alyssa a "kitten [with] a whip" in their first sequence together,
links the lesbian to the kitten and of course a kitten needs her Meow Mix!
Last, for viewers who don't pick up on these somewhat extratextual and arguably
subtle hints, there are ample clues in the Meow Mix sequence itself to let the viewer in on
the joke before it is sprung on an unsuspecting Holden. To take just a few examples: (1)
Hooper, an out gay man, works there as a bartender. (2) Hooper attempts to warn Holden
that "there's something you should know" about Alyssa, a warning Holden foolishly
ignores. And (3) Banky makes the ridiculously ignorant comment that "This is so
fucking gay," to which Hooper replies, "You don't know the half of it." In short, while
The Oying Game uses strategic visual secrecy to "[construct] a mainstream viewer for
the film and [ignore] more knowing audiences" (80), Chasing Amy actually presumes a
more knowing viewer, one who will tune in to the fact that Meow Mix is queer space and
that Holden and Banky are buffoons for not realizing it. Their buffoonery and ignorance
of queer space is linked to their provincial status as New Jerseyans-it is in part Alyssa's
own New Jersey roots that seal the bond between her and Holden during this sequence-
and New Jersey is the place the buddies will flee back to at the end of their wild evening
in New York.
In this context it is interesting that Alyssa is a self-identified Jersey girl living in
New York: with respect to the divide between the New Jersey suburbs and New York
City, she has switched sides, she goes both ways. In fact, throughout Chasing Amy,
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metropolitan New York is differentiated from suburban New Jersey through the former's
explicit alignment with queerness: NYC is home to Meow Mix, Hooper X (who only
ever appears in the city), and, of course, Alyssa herself. Conversely, New Jersey is the
comfortable home place that Holden and Banky never left, the sanctuary for their
longtime homosocial buddy relation.2 Hence, by the geographical logic of the film, it
takes a dose of New York queerness, in the form of bisexual Alyssa, to help Jersey
buddies Holden and Banky to reach their "catharsis": the exposure of their mutual desire
for one another.
Romantic Comedy: Chasing Amy and Annie Hall
While romance plots have been a central and enduring component of narrative
cinema since its origins, the romantic comedy had its first major peak as a comedic
subgenre in the 1930s, the era of the so-called "screwball" comedies. The screwball
comedy, of which Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934) is typically cited as the
inaugural example, centers on a heterosexual couple who are "made for each other" yet
blocked in their attempts to unite by "whatever obstacles lay between them (for example,
class difference, mistaken perceptions of each other's feelings, sheer obstinacy)" (Krutnik
58). The various delays leading to their inevitable union open up narrative space for the
couple to engage in witty verbal play and one-upmanship that is largely responsible for
the genres' "screwball" moniker. As Frank Krutnik puts it, the central romantic couple of
the classical screwball comedies develop an "intimacy [...] through mutual play" that
ultimately "[validates] love as a [...] magical force which would triumph eventually over
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all manner of real or imagined obstructions" (61,57,58). The romantic comedy posits
love as that which effaces all other differences-in the screwball comedies, usually class
status or unequal power relations between the sexes.
The screwball film's popularity declined during the 1940s: the genre's romantic
resolutions and general frivolity seemed out of place during the war and postwar years
(Krutnik 58). Of course, the romantic comedy did not disappear, and it gained popularity
again in the 1950s and early 1960s in the form of the less idealistic and more sexually
charged "transitional" romantic comedy. Exemplified by such films as It Started With A
Kiss, Pillow Talk (both 1959), That Touch ofMink (1961) and Sex and the Single Girl
(1964), the transitional sex comedy is, according to Krutnik, marked by an increased
emphasis on seduction over courtship, a clearer separation between sex and marriage, and
a privileging of male rather than female point of view (59-60). The transitional romantic
comedy's shift toward increased (male) sexuality and decreased romantic idealism
reflected changes in American cultural mores since the 1930s and '40s, such as the
"restoration of the gender relations that World War II had disturbed both in the home and
the workplace, [...] anxiety about the mental stability of returning veterans[,]" as well as
the general rise of "sexual self-consciousness" that occurred in the wake of the Kinsey
Reports ofl948 and 1953 (Cohan xii).3 This move away from the classical screwball
fonnula within romantic comedy is also the result of related changes in cinematic
industrial practices during the late 1950s and early 1960s, most significantly the "gradual
erosion of the Production Code," the dissolution of which would alter the way films
could depict relations between the sexes (Krutnik 59).
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The transitional period' gave way in the 1970s to what Krutnik calls the era of the
"nervous" romantic comedy, which includes such films as Starting Over (1979) and
Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979). According to Krutnik, the
nervous romantic comedy "betrays an intense longing for the restitution of faith in the
stability of the heterosexual couple as some kind of bulwark against the modem world"
and is particularly suspicious of feminism, laying "much of the blame for the fragility of
heterosexual relations in the late 1970s upon a 'feminist' sensibility" (63). The
characteristics of the "nervous" romantic comedy subgenre become clear by contrasting
the "nervous" romance par excellence, Woody Allen's Annie Hall, and its 1990s
counterpart, Kevin Smith's Chasing Amy. I have long been fascinated with the structural,
thematic, and ideological similarities between these two films, and I maintain that
Chasing Amy represents an updated entry into the "nervous" romance subgenre as
delineated by Krutnik. Chasing Amy not only adheres to the conventions of Krutnik's
"nervous romance" but also represents a key entry, along with My Best Friend's Wedding
(1997), The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005), The Break-Up (2006), and Knocked Up (2007),
into the more recent grotesque I ambivalent romantic comedy.
Thomas Schatz argues that Annie Hall (1977) disrupts classical Hollywood
narrative conventions, specifically those of the romantic comedy, by assuming a
"modernist" sensibility that includes ironic distance and self-reflexivity. Schatz
characterizes Annie Hall's formal structure as a classical courtship plot embedded within
a non-chronological, stream-of-consciousness "narrative" that mimics the associative
logic of a stand-up comedy routine (184). Schatz concludes that the Annie-Alvy
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courtship story constitutes "a classical text imbedded within a primarily modernist one"
(185) and that it is actually the "modernist" aspect ofAnnie Hall-i.e., the Allen/Alvy
comedy routine-that "sustains its narrative integrity throughout" and "subvert[s] our
reading of the courtship story as a traditional romantic narrative" (186, 185). Schatz
further claims-and this may bear most directly on my reading of Kevin Smith's role in
Chasing Amy-that by making Alvy a comedian and playwright and allowing the Alvy
character to "[intrude] directly upon the Alv[y]-Annie story" at many points, Woody
Allen the auteur "never directly intrudes upon the comedy routine or the narrated
autobiography. Thus, Allen is able to play the film both ways" (186).
Smith does the same thing, playing a literally silent figure whose authorship of the
Chasing Amy text is also depicted literally during the film's diegesis, yet who is still a
character, which therefore allows Smith and the viewer to read the film on multiple (or,
to use Barthes' term, plural) levels. Is Chasing Amy simply a fantasy invented by Kevin
Smith? Yes, but his careful intervention in the guise of the Silent Bob character allows
us to maintain a classical or non-reflexive reading of Holden and Alyssa's story even as
Bob's "Chasing Amy" story deconstructs that reading before our very eyes. As with
Allen and Alvy, the blurring of the line between Kevin Smith and Silent Bob allows
Smith the writer/director to "play the film both ways" and ironically note its
constructedness even as he (and his "serious" proxy Holden) earnestly insists that he
"finally had something personal to say."
Just as Annie Hall frames its romantic love plot within a standup comedy
structure narrated by Allen-as-Alvy Singer, Chasing Amy begins with a focus on its male
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buddy pair, Holden and Banky, who are signing autographs for fans at a Manhattan
comics convention. The two films also end the same way: Alvy tells us of his chance re-
meeting with Annie in voice over, again emphasizing that this is his story, more
interested in the impact of the meeting on Alvy than on what they discuss together, and
Chasing Amy ends where it began, at the comics convention a year later, with nearly as
much screen time dedicated to Holden's interaction with Banky (almost two minutes) as
his re-meeting with Alyssa (just under three minutes). The importance of the Banky
portion of this denouement is further highlighted by the very long (over thirty second)
gaze Banky gives Holden before he leaves to meet Alyssa, and is reemphasized even
after the Alyssa encounter by the closing credits theme music, Soul Asylum's "We 3,"
which encapsulates the film's events from Banky's perspective: "She's your girlfriend,
seems she ain't too fond of me / I guess if that's the way it was meant to be / There we
were, just we three / You, your girlfriend, and me." And while Chasing Amy ends with a
tracking shot that slowly pulls back from Alyssa's autograph table, it is ultimately
Holden's story: it is his maturing, his exit and the closing of the door behind him that
ends the story of the film.
Much as Woody Allen contains the romance of Annie Hall within a larger stand-
up comedy structure, thus reclaiming the film for comedian comedy, so Smith keeps his
focus on the male buddy pair at the same time that he develops the Holden-Alyssa
relationship. However, while Smith's previous and subsequent work reveals his
preference for comedian or male-centered comedy as a genre, in the case ofAmy I read
the film's emphasis on the male buddy duo to be as much about privileging male
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melodrama and suffering as it is about championing one form of comedy over another.
In fact, Holden and Banky have nearly as many dramatic scenes together as Holden and
Alyssa do (three versus four: Banky has the four-way road "dyke" exercise, the stoop
talk, and the fingercuffs sequence, and Alyssa has the swings talk, the car sequence, the
in-bed talk, and the hockey game break-up), and if we count the record store scene
between Holden and Hooper as another homosocial scene invested in the male buddy
pair, these equal out at four dramatic scenes each. (I don't count here other scenes played
for comedy, such as Alyssa and Holden's first post-comicon meeting in the bar, their
skee-ball date, or the various comic scenes involving Banky and Holden.) And as I will
discuss later, the film may even depict more tenderness and intimacy between Holden
and Banky than it does Holden and Alyssa.
Another characteristic that links Allen's and Smith's films to one another and also
to the screwball tradition is their emphasis on witty speech and verbal play. As Kathleen
Rowe Karlyn notes, "In the romantic comedy of the classical Hollywood period, playful
and out-of-bounds speech becomes one means by which the female hero takes control of
the narrative" (Karlyn 37). Indeed, both Annie Hall (the character) and Alyssa Jones do
to some extent embody Karlyn's "unruly woman," who uses verbal wit to (at least
temporarily) overturn patriarchal gender hierarchies: for example, Alyssa assertively
initiates her friendship with Holden by showing up at his door and offering him a "story"
about his own flight from the bar the previous evening. "Would you have any interest in
a story like that?" she asks him playfully. That Holden actually does use this story as the
basis for his "personal" comic book Chasing Amy by the end of the film demonstrates
~------------_._._- --------------------
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Alyssa's power to verbally foretell and shape narrative events to come. Chasing Amy's
verbosity therefore makes it an ideal fit for the witty, "screwball" type of romantic
comedy film, especially insofar as it allows Alyssa to participate on at least equal footing
with the male characters in this register.
However, both Annie Hall and Chasing Amy, true to their "nervous" subgeneric
status, tend to undermine that gender transgression by emphasizing the male point of
view through pathos and melodrama. Chasing Amy in particular is laden with much more
melodrama than a classical screwball comedy could withstand. Like the "nervous"
romances Krutnik discusses, Amy is much more concerned with how the difficulties of
negotiating romantic relationships impact the male protagonist than depicting love as a
magical cure-all for both parties. For example, Holden's confession oflove during the
lengthy rainy car soliloquy is both the film's most melodramatic moment~rain pours
outside, and Ben Affleck's performance of the pathos-heavy speech is full of vulnerable
emotion~and it is all Holden's show: indeed, Alyssa seems struck mute for most of the
sequence. That Amy's privileging of the male point of view is most evident at the film's
most melodramatic moment shows how Smith uses melodrama to elicit viewer sympathy
for Holden at the expense of Alyssa's subjectivity. White masculinity is always front and
center in View Askew films, even (or perhaps especially) when feminized by
melodramatic pathos and destabilized by (bi-)sexual queerness.
Chasing Amy's disruption of white masculinity by means of queer sexuality is
achieved via recourse to the grotesque. For although, as I have outlined, Chasing Amy
shares many commonalities with the nervous romances of the 1970s and can rightfully be
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considered a nervous romance, it is also the product of the 1990s and as such it differs in
one key respect from its forbears: it integrates the elements of the grotesque and
ambivalent. Film scholar Leger Grindon has recently commented upon the increased
presence of ambivalent and grotesque elements in the romantic comedy post-1996:
[B]y the late nineties the grotesque elements of animal comedy, the
slapstick humor, focus on sex, gross physical jokes, and uninhibited
vulgarity became integrated with romantic comedies. [Films like] There's
Something About Mary [and Chasing Amy] found humor in masturbation,
castration, voyeurism and perverse fetishes to name just a few subjects of
fun. (6)
Indeed, a marked increase in verbal vulgarity and sexual explicitness separates Chasing
Amy from its predecessors like Annie Hall, and its focus upon sex over love, upon the
sexually grotesque over the romantically pure, makes Chasing Amy less reaffirming of
romance, more ambivalent toward the ultimate union of the lovers, than earlier romantic
comedies: even Annie Hall, which ends with Alvy and Annie apart, reaffirms the
centrality of romance through its nostalgic tone and Alvy's concluding joke, which
asserts that all of us crave true love even when it repeatedly fails. Chasing Amy's ending
is more ambivalent toward romance, focused more upon Holden's maturation and his
subsequent (redeeming) recognition that he handled his relationship with Alyssa badly.
This increased ambivalence toward romance, Grindon suggests, is tied to post-
1996 romantic comedies' focus upon failed or inadequate male sexuality: "[T]he power
of sex to disturb, humiliate, distort, and infantilize becomes the subject of these [recent]
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films. One is tempted to call them sex comedies rather than part of the romantic comedy
genre, even though they incorporate the long standing conventions of romantic comedy"
(6). I agree with Grindon that Amy and its imitators like There's Something About Mary
hybridize the romantic comedy with the animal comedy, for this explains Amy's incessant
focus on Holden's feelings of sexual inadequacy and the changing face of the Holden-
Banky buddy duo. I would add that it is not just any sex that infantilizes these films'
male protagonists, functioning as a disruption/obstacle to love, but specifically queer sex,
that is, in Amy, three-way "fingercuffing" and bisexuality, and in Mary, voyeurism and
shoe fetishization. In Chasing Amy queer sex is opposed to the "grace of passion," at
least in Holden's view (Grindon 7). Alyssa has no trouble reconciling her sexually
adventurous past with her ongoing quest for a Platonically ideal life-partner, but from
Holden's melodramatically rendered perspective, these two things-bisexuality and
lasting love-remain largely antithetical.
Male Melodrama
View Askew's tum from buddy comedies to romantic comedy represents
something of a maturational step up, dealing as it does with the more "adult" theme of
heterosexual romance rather than the pre-Oedipal homosociality of the male buddy duo.
While this is a Freudian, heterocentrist model of maturation that I do not necessarily see
as positive, and that queer theory generally opposes, for Smith and Chasing Amy it led to
much more widespread critical acceptance and acclaim. Given that Amy is also the first
View Askew film to feature a lesbian / bisexual character and a black gay character, this
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wider critical and public acceptance of the film may at first seem counterintuitive, but
recall that the 1990s is the decade of queer cinema, and in 1997 Chasing Amy was
cresting the queer cinema wave. Further, the fact that Alyssa turns out to be searching for
her one true monogamous life-partner and Hooper X is marginalized as a "magic Negro"
helps to contain these queer characters' queerness, making them palatable to white,
heterocentric critics and audiences. And Amy's generic status as a romantic comedy
potentially opens the film's appeal even wider, perhaps attracting an audience segment
(such as women) who might not have found much to connect with in Clerks or Mallrats.
As Kathleen Rowe Karlyn argues, the shift into romantic comedy is represented
generically by the introduction of melodramatic elements to the genre's comedic
structures. Calling melodrama "romantic comedy's shadow genre," Karlyn elaborates
how post-classical romantic comedies play with the tension between the witty humor of
romantic comedy and the pathos of melodrama in order to achieve their effects (114). In
broad tenns, this play consists of deploying melodramatic suffering, usually in the fonn
of fights or misunderstandings between the lovers, to generate narrative desire for a
happy resolution, then, by the end, oscillating toward the comedic side for a wittily
humorous happy ending that finally brings the lovers together.
As Linda Williams argues, melodrama is best understood as an American
cinematic mode rather than a specific genre, since its conventions-which center on the
righteous suffering of its protagonists-can be found in nearly every genre of American
film: "[The] basic vernacular of American moving pictures consists of a story that
generates sympathy for a hero who is also a victim and that leads to a climax that permits
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the audience, and usually other characters, to recognize that character's moral value"
(58). Chasing Amy's hero, Holden McNeil, is a victim of love whose suffering, which
constitutes the central focus ofthe film's narrative, results in his "growing up" and
learning an important moral lesson about relationships, albeit too late to win Alyssa back
or change the doomed nature of their relationship.
This sense of doom and character helplessness is another hallmark of the
melodramatic mode, which typically depicts a "[closed] world" where characters are
trapped in a "cycle of non-fulfillment" that always brings the characters to their senses or
to action too late to affect the outcome of narrative events (Elsaesser 79,85). Indeed, the
sense of "too little too late" that leads to melodramatic non-fulfillment and suffering
perfectly characterizes Holden's story in Chasing Amy: once he realizes that action is
required in order to save his relationship with Alyssa, Holden charges in, only to say and
do all the wrong things, ultimately driving Alyssa further away instead of winning her
back during the film's strange climactic sequence. This sense of characters being trapped
by their circumstances and helpless to change them is also represented by melodrama's
displacement of emotions-especially sexual desire and/or frustration-onto objects and
mise-en-scene, as in the Chasing Amy confession scene in the rain that I will analyze
shortly.
Yet, despite the centrality of the Holden-Alyssa love story to its narrative
structure, Chasing Amy is primarily a male melodrama, much more concerned with
Holden's (and to a lesser extent, Banky's) problems and pain than it is with Alyssa's.
Alyssa's problems are not irrelevant. Indeed, as Pam Cook argues, "the problematisation
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of female desire [in melodrama] means that her choice of the romantic hero as love object
is usually masochistic, against her own best interests, and she suffers for her desire"
(254). As we shall see, this is absolutely true of Alyssa, who gives up much more to be
with Holden-her friends, her lesbian identity-than he does to be with her. And yet
most of Alyssa's suffering occurs offscreen: we see her get ostracized by her lesbian
friends and we also see her agony in the scene outside the hockey rink, but beyond that,
the film is much more interested in Holden's tribulations and feelings than it is Alyssa's.
In sum, as Linda Williams argues, "[i]f emotional and moral registers are
sounded, if a work invites us to feel sympathy for the virtues of beset victims, if the
narrative trajectory is ultimately more concerned with a retrieval and staging of
innocence than with the psychological causes of motives and action, then the operative
mode is melodrama" (42). And Chasing Amy, despite its status as a comedy,
incorporates melodramatic conventions extensively and finally gives melodrama the last
word: in a denouement that dramatically stages Holden's essential innocence and moral
goodness, the victim-hero shows up at the Comicon a year later having learned his lesson,
and both Banky and Alyssa, overcome with the virtuousness of his prolonged suffering,
forgive him for his earlier insensitive transgressions. In this way Amy follows the
melodramatic convention of allowing suffering to "solve" or at least gloss over narrative
and ideological problems, in this case, Holden's earlier intolerance of Alyssa's sexual
past.
Indeed, melodramatic elements give Chasing Amy a very different tone than either
of the two previous View Askew films: while there are many very funny moments and
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Smith's usual pervasive frank dialogue, there are also many heavily dramatic scenes,
such as (to name a few) the aforementioned rainy car soliloquy, Holden and Alyssa's
fight outside the hockey rink, and Holden and Banky's argument over the latter's use of
gay slurs in his own home. While melodrama is a cinematic mode historically associated
with the women's film or weepie, and Karlyn has discussed its use in female-centered
romantic comedies like Moonstruck, she also notes "the increased use of melodrama in
recent romantic comedy to tell the stories of men's lives. [...] [T]he post-classical
comedy, beginning in the 1960s, is both more skeptical about love and more sentimental
about its victims. It also privileges the subjectivity of its male hero over that of the
female" (192). This perfectly describes Chasing Amy (and Annie Hall as well),
suggesting that its use of melodramatic tropes to favor the male perspective aligns it with
much recent romantic comedy as well as male melodrama, for example Judd Apatow's
male-centered rom-coms The 40-Year Old Virgin (2005) and Knocked Up (2007).
Chasing Amy privileges Holden's point of view throughout and is particularly
invested in depicting his pain and suffering: "Smith's modus operandi is to make the
audience closely identifY with every scintilla of pain and yearning Holden feels. [...]
Watch for Holden not in comforting medium shot, but in tight emotional close-ups"
(Muir 100). This pushes the film into the realm ofmale melodrama, and unlike other
post-classical romantic comedies like Moonstruck, which "[argue] finally for comedy
[over melodrama]" (Karlyn 192), Amy ultimately resolves its tensions through male
suffering and the catharsis of overcoming emotional immaturity. In short, it argues
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finally for melodrama over comedy, a position exemplified by its ending, where Holden
righteously suffers because he does not "get the girl"-or the guy, for that matter.
However, it does still generically adhere to many ofthe conventions of the
romantic comedy, including its use of a musical montage sequence to represent the
unrepresentable: romantic love. Interestingly, this montage occurs while Holden and
Alyssa are ostensibly still "just friends" and only shortly before Holden confesses his
love for Alyssa first to Banky, then to Alyssa herself: another privileging of his point of
view as the film asks us to see their developing friendship in romantic terms, just as
Holden does. The film pulls a similar trick at the conclusion of what I call Alyssa's
bisexuality speech, during her first sexual night together with Holden: uplifting music
swells as Holden (repeating Banky's words) jokingly suggests that all Alyssa needed was
a "good, deep dicking" in order to give up her lesbianism. I will return to Alyssa's
speech shortly, but for now I wish to note how the film uses music, the melos of
melodrama, to lighten the mood here and emphasize the lovers' connection (Alyssa
laughs and they playfully wrestle) even though Holden's comment is blatantly dismissive
of Alyssa's lesbian-identifying past.
To fully grasp the impact of this dismissal-turned-joke, and to further elucidate
the specific melodramatic structures that encourage the Chasing Amy viewer to align with
Holden's perspective, we must examine the car scene involving Holden's confessional
soliloquy. This analysis will show, based upon Alyssa's ultimate decision to embrace
Holden as a lover at the end of this sequence, that Alyssa's bisexuality is a "bisexuality of
the heart," an incidental consequence of her all-inclusive search for the "one right
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person" that will monogamously fulfill her. Thus, it desexualizes her bisexuality and
actually renders her more romantically conservative than Holden for the second half of
the film. Shortly after this sequence, Holden's obsession with Alyssa's sexual past, and
the fixation on possible future bisexual deeds it catalyzes in him, will take over the
narrative of Chasing Amy completely.
In the opening shot of this sequence, which takes place just after Holden and
Alyssa leave a diner where they have been talking together, we see Holden and Alyssa
driving in Holden's car as rain pours on the windshield outside. The camera is positioned
behind them in the back seat, focusing first on Alyssa in the passenger seat, then panning
to Holden and back again to Alyssa as they converse. With the exception ofAmy's being
shot in color and the different biological sex (but, significantly, not the gendering) of the
participants, this is an exact replication of the car scene between Dante and Randal from
Clerks, with Holden in Dante's role as the driver and Alyssa in Randal's position. In the
scene from Clerks that this one mimics, Dante and Randal are on their way to Julie
Dwyer's funeral. As we shall see, the Clerks trope of a car ride leading toward an event
related to tragedy and death is a significant intra-textual clue to what will transpire once
Holden stops the car in response to Alyssa's initial speech and gift.
The conversation in the opening part of this car-ride sequence centers upon a
cheap painting Alyssa buys for Holden in the diner. As yet unaware of Holden's deeper
romantic feelings for her, Alyssa claims that that painting has "captured the moment" and
will serve Holden as "a constant reminder, not just of tonight, but of our introduction, the
building of our friendship, everything." This statement motivates Holden to pull the car
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over and finally confess to Alyssa the extent of his feelings for her. His soliloquy to her
lasts fully three minutes, and while the camera, now alternately shooting the two of them
in shot/reverse shot from the front seat, does show Alyssa's dumbstruck reactions for
brief moments, the scene and speech belong to Holden. However, despite the privileging
of Holden and his feelings that takes place during his speech, the film nevertheless
encourages us to see Holden and Alyssa's romance as a bad idea, linked via its "rhyme"
with the Clerks sequence to death/tragedy and marked by its own mise-en-scene and
sound design as a relationship doomed to failure from its inception: rain pours outside
throughout Holden's impassioned confession and distinct thunderclaps are heard at two
key moments, most significantly when Holden first says "I love you" to Alyssa. Hence
his profession oflove is not accompanied by romantic catharsis or joy, only sinister tones
that mark Holden and Alyssa as "star-crossed lovers" whose union will end in tragedy.
Once Holden concludes his heartfelt speech by telling Alyssa that he would never
need a picture of birds bought at a diner to remind him of how much knowing her has
meant to him, Alyssa, still speechless, gets out of the car and walks away in the rain.
Holden lightens the mood a bit with the self-deprecating quip, "Was it something 1 said?"
then follows her outside. Dramatic music that begins when Holden opens the car door
immerses the viewer in the melodrama of Holden's situation; the handheld camera that
follows him as he chases Alyssa down the rainy street further connects us to his troubled,
emotionally raw subjectivity. What follows when Holden catches up to Alyssa is one of
the most rich and complicated segments of the film-it begins when Alyssa angrily
explains to Holden why it would be impossible for her to love him:
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ALYSSA: Do you remember for one fucking second who I am?
HOLDEN: So? You know, people change.
ALYSSA: Oh, oh, it's that simple: you fall in love with me and want a romantic
relationship-nothing changes for you, with the exception of feeling hunky-dory
all the time! But what about me, Holden? It's not that simple! I just can't get
into a relationship with you without throwing my whole world fucking world into
upheaval!
HOLDEN: Listen, that's every relationship! There's always going to be a period
of adjustment!
ALYSSA: (incredulous) Period ofadjustment? (hits him in the chest) There's no
period of adjustment, Holden, I am fucking gay! (hits him again) That's who I
am! And you assume that I can tum all that around just because you have a
fucking crush?
Alyssa's words here explain the stakes of the relationship for her and firmly
ground her lesbianism in a social context: she never says she doesn't care for Holden but
makes clear that her entire "world" and identity as a gay person would be destroyed if she
became romantically involved with him. At the conclusion of her response, it seems as
though she has chosen to retain that identity and reject Holden: she tells him to "go
horne" and then continues walking away from him into the rainy night. Holden watches
her go for a few seconds (the camera stays on Holden-his viewpoint is still privileged)
and then walks slowly back to his car, followed once again by the handheld camera.
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Exactly thirty seconds after Alyssa tells Holden to go home, as he is re-opening
his car door to do just that, Alyssa runs back into frame from the left and into Holden's
arms, letting out a desperate, wordless cry as they embrace. Thus begins their short-lived
romantic relationship. And despite the fact that Alyssa will later offer an explanation for
her swift reversal here, her sudden capitulation in this scene has always bothered me a
little, even though it "works" given the high melodrama and intense emotions of the
moment, including the rain, the gravitas and pathos of Holden's speech, and the ferocity
of her initial rejection. Furthermore, given that the textual evidence suggests that these
two will not stay together, I do believe we are encouraged to see Alyssa's flight into
Holden's arms as a big mistake on her part-a fact that helps me understand Alyssa in
this moment as something other than "ludicrous: a piece of wish-fulfillment who
functions primarily to aggrandize Holden's ego" (Guthmann D-3), as one Amy reviewer
put it.
However, the film's hints at the ill-advised nature of this pairing aside, I still
struggle with the moment of Alyssa's capitulation every time I watch Chasing Amy, and I
think this has to do with the film's melodramatic emphasis on Holden's subjectivity and
the tendency of post-classical romantic comedies to depict women as somehow
"underdeveloped" and neurotic. As Kathleen Rowe Karlyn argues in her discussion of
the nervous romance, "little irony surrounds the melodramatized male. Ifhe suffers, we
understand and sympathize, for he is not neurotic, merely sensitive. If she [the heroine]
suffers, she is simply neurotic" (The Unruly Woman 197). And indeed, that is really the
best explanation the film offers for Alyssa's quick reversal at the conclusion of this
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pivotal sequence: that she is neurotic, a slave to the whims of her heart in spite of the
clearly stated truths she just expressed in her rejection speech. As that insightful if
unforgiving reviewer from the San Francisco Chronicle notes, Alyssa "is so drawn to
Holden that she readily sacrifices her friends, community and sexual identity in a
heartbeat. [...J In Smith's view, lesbians are gorgeous, confused and merely biding time
before they meet the right guy" (Guthmann D-3).
Like all post-classical nervous romances, then, Chasing Amy offers up a
seemingly independent and worldly/cosmopolitan woman only to collapse her resistance
to heterosexual commitment just when the male-centered narrative wants to shore up the
desirability and power of its male protagonist: "Each of these heroines resists her male
suitor less out of her inherent independence or recognition of his need to change than out
of something wounded or undeveloped in her-qualities which allow the hero to
demonstrate his greater wisdom, charm, or sensitivity" (Karlyn 197). Chasing Amy re-
articulates Holden's privileged place in its narrative by allowing Holden to charm Alyssa
away from her lesbian community and strongly professed sexual identity, ostensibly
because he loves her in a heterosexual way. However, as the next section will reveal,
there is more at work in the film and in the various matrices ofHolden's complex-and
as I will argue, bisexual-desire.
New Triangulations
As my previous discussions of Clerks and Mallrats have shown, Kevin Smith's
films are typically structured around one or more erotic triangles, each of which pits two
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characters against each other in an erotic rivalry over a third character, usually the film's
geek protagonist (Dante, T.S., Holden). The central erotic triangle in Chasing Amy,
while structurally similar to the one at the heart of Clerks, carries added weight due to the
melodramatic tone of the Amy and the more overt queerness of all three participants,
emphasizing the heightened gender deviance and cross-gender desire that permeates this
third View Askew film (see Figure 21).
To begin with, Alyssa's lesbianism masculinizes her, even though she is a femme
lesbian. Alyssa may not be a flat-out butch-far from it-but she is a tomboy, and she
spends much of the film palling around with Holden and engaging in very frank,
masculine talk with Banky about her past lesbian sexual experiences.4 Joey Lauren
Adams, the actress who plays Alyssa, tends to play tomboyish women: for example, she
plays Simone in Dazed and Confused (1993), who despite minimal screen time
nevertheless concludes the film as the only woman in a car full of male buddies, and
portrays a strong-willed, independent farm girl named Beth Ward inA Cool, Dry Place
(1998). Neither do her masculine qualities go overlooked in Roger Ebert's review of
Amy: "She [Adams] has the kind of deep voice and conspiratorial smile that make you
think she could be a buddy as well as a lover" (2).5 Like Veronica in Clerks, then, Alyssa
is a tomboy/masculine woman whose presence in the film feminizes the men around her,
particularly Holden. And in fact, although Holden develops conscious romantic feelings
for Alyssa first, it is Alyssa who actually initiates their friendship by showing up at
Holden's studio, and in the end it is Alyssa who actively desires a monogamous
relationship with Holden, and not vice-versa.
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Holden
Banky (rivals) Alyssa
Figure 21: The Banky-Alyssa-Holden Erotic Triangle
Banky fulfills the role of buddy "sidekick" and homoerotic rival that Randal did
in Clerks (visual clue: Banky wears a reversed baseball cap on his head, also Randal's
trademark) and that Brodie did in Mallrats (extratextual clue: Jason Lee plays both
Brodie and Banky). In Amy, the rivalry between the feminine-male sidekick and the
masculine-female girlfriend, prevalent in Clerks and severely downplayed in Mallrats, is
carried to new heights of intensity in Amy because the relation between the two male
buddies is explicitly and denotatively sexualized: at Chasing Amy's climax, the desire
between Holden and Banky is spoken directly and the two even kiss.
But back for a moment to Alyssa's masculinity and its specific resonances with
the character of Randal. I have already analyzed the Chasing Amy car scene in which
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Holden-Alyssa are physically placed in the same positions as Dante-Randal from
Clerks-that placement is anything but accidental. In fact, as Ebert's comment about
Adams's/Alyssa's suitability as a "buddy" suggests, the parallels between Alyssa and
Randal run deep: for example, in a scene shot for Amy but cut before its release, Alyssa
and Holden discuss true love in a bar as they play darts (a shortened version of this
sequence is actually in the final cut of the film). Interestingly, this dialogue was not
originally written for Amy but rather for Clerks, where it was featured as "a discussion
between Dante and Randal" (Muir 90). The fact that Smith was able to transpose a whole
scene verbatim from the mouths of Dante and Randal over to Holden and Alyssa speaks
volumes about Alyssa's masculinity-she can speak lines intended for Randal with no
revision needed-as well as Randal's queerness (see Chapter II). Indeed, as in previous
View Askew films, queerness is aligned with masculinity and sexual conservatism with
femininity, regardless of the biological sex of the character in question. In Chasing Amy,
tomboyish lesbian Alyssa is more sexual, queer, and masculine than histrionic geek
Holden is.
Of course, as I have already suggested, Banky too has a great deal in common
with Randal and other View Askew queer sidekick figures. Just to select one prevalent
example, Banky's "Fingercuffs" investigation, in which he exposes Alyssa's (hetero-)
sexual past to Holden in a professed effort to protect him, replicates Randal's interference
in Dante's relationship with Veronica from Clerks. Banky also displays a penchant for
porno magazines that would do the porn-obsessed Randal proud. However, what is most
interesting about Banky is the unprecedented degree to which his sexual queerness is
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explicitly linked to latent homosexuality, specifically his erotic desire for Holden.
Numerous jokes are made throughout the film about Banky's gayness-see, for example,
my analysis of Alyssa's introductory sequence in the next section-but it is just as often
taken seriously, as when Hooper claims in the record store that "That boy [Banky] loves
you [Holden] in a way he ain't ready to deal with," or most dramatically, during the
film's remarkable climactic scene.
Buddy #1: Geek Buddy #2: Slacker
Role romantic protagonist/superhero comedic "sidekick"
Characters Dante (Clerks), T.S. (Mallrats), Randal (Clerks), Brodie (Mallrats),
Holden (Chasing Amy), Silent Banky (Chasing Amy), Jay
Bob
Gender feminized - whiny, passive, gets masculinized - snarky, rebellious,
dumped and/or manipulated by cares more about pop culture,
masculinized women and is video games, and/or comics than
troubled by it relationships
Sexuality seemingly straight queer - into deviant sexuality and
is frequently asexulized vis-a-vis
women
Developmental aspires toward maturity but fails puerile, infantilized
Sta~e
Table 3: Buddy Pairs in Clerks, Mallrats, and Chasing Amy
So, since Banky is more sexually queered than any previous View Askew
sidekick, and since Alyssa's masculinity is thrown into such sharp focus by her status as a
lesbian, what Chasing Amy really does in its early sequences is divide the sidekick
function between a masculine-queer female and a sexually suspect male, at least until the
revelation of Alyssa's past heterosexuality "queers the deal" for Holden and turns her
into a problem rather than a buddy/lover for him. This sharing of the sidekick role
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between Alyssa and Banky is exactly what makes their rivalry so heated and bitter:
Alyssa is fairly dismissive of Banky from the get-go, and by mid-film Banky is
downright insulting toward Alyssa, making her feel unwelcome in his home and calling
her a "dyke" and a "bitch" when she isn't there. Of course, this misogyny on Banky's
part aligns him with the stereotype of the woman-hating gay man, but it also highlights
how far Alyssa's tomboyishness and "conspiratorial smile" (as Ebert puts it) go toward
endearing her to Holden, displacing Banky as Holden's new best friend. In short, as I see
it, Banky and Alyssa initially compete for the position of Holden's buddy/sidekick, and-
in both cases-it is Holden who initiates a sexual/romantic dimension of the relationship
with each of them. Given our previous discussion of the film's generic roots and its
framing of a romantic comedy structure within a male-centered buddy comedy, this
emphasis on the buddy relation across the lines of gender, sexuality, and romance is a
logical pattern for Chasing Amy to follow, and bisexualizes the film and its narrative.
One might ask: Isn't Holden in competition with Alyssa's lesbian lover(s)-and
to some extent, her very lesbianness-at the outset of the film? And doesn't he play out a
rivalry of sorts with his imagined version of Alyssa's past male sexual partners? While I
must offer a mitigated "yes" to both of these questions, I maintain that the diegesis of
Chasing Amy contains no present rival versus Holden for Alyssa's affections: she herself
dismisses her lesbian lover at Meow Mix as a passing thing based on attraction but not
love, and we know from her offhand comment that she "Got laid [last night]" during her
skee-ball "pseudo-date" with Holden that casual sexual encounters may well constitute
typical behavior for Alyssa, at least until she and Holden become sexually involved.
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Hence there are no specific lesbian rivals Holden must best, and thus (so far) no erotic
triangle with Alyssa at the top.
Unless we count her past encounter with Rick Derris. As the film shows,
Alyssa's menage a trois with Derris and Cohee Lundin is the event in her past that
Holden obsesses over and perceives as the central obstacle to his being with Alyssa. The
importance of Rick Derris in Holden's mind is even wryly emphasized at the level of the
text by the casting ofEmie O'Donnell-who played Derris in Clerks-~as a bystander who
overhears Alyssa's forced retelling of the three-way sex incident to Holden at the hockey
rink. Yet 0 'Donnell's appearance in that scene does not constitute a diegetically specific
reference to Derris-the character is called simply a "bystander"-and the intertextual
joke it plays can easily be read as a kind of subconscious projection of Holden's fears and
suspicions, which are very much the subject of the hockey rink sequence. Hence, all of
Holden's struggles with the figure of Derris and what he represents vis-a-vis Alyssa's
past are internal ones that are usually displayed, O'Donnell's appearance
notwithstanding, via discussions Holden has with Banky, Hooper X, and even Jay and
Silent Bob, rather than with Derris and Cohee themselves. In sum, Holden's suffering
may be highly melodramatized and the primary focus of the film, and furthermore the
cause of that suffering may be posited as other men Alyssa had sex with in the past, but I
think the film encourages us to see those imagined rivals as just that: the products of
Holden's overactive and over-jealous imagination. This is certainly how Hooper X,
arguably the film's wisest character (as the narrative's "magical negro"), sees it, and he
tells Holden so directly in the final scene they share in the record store.
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The central Alyssa-Holden-Banky erotic triangle schematizes the channels of
desire that flow throughout Chasing Amy and can be seen operating formally at key
moments in the film's diegesis to queer certain characters and suggest specific intimate
duos. To fully unpack the subtle meanings of one such formally laden sequence-the
scene that follows Hooper X's violent speech at the Comicon panel, the scene where
Hooper first introduces Alyssa Jones to Holden and Banky- we must first analyze View
Askew's first "out" gay character, black comic book artist Hooper X.
Hooper X
As we discussed in Chapter II, secondary queer characters such as Willam the
Idiot Manchild in Clerks serve to shore up the alleged non-queerness of the principle
male characters, Dante and Randal, by being more obviously queer than they are.
Similarly, in Chasing Amy effeminized and "out" gay man Hooper X (Dwight Ewell)
helps Holden and Banky appear more straight by contrast with his out-ness. However, in
Amy Hooper also serves a second and somewhat opposite function: to queer Banky. As
we will see in the following sequence analysis, the film visually and verbally constructs
Hooper as Banky's potential lover-a potential that will be realized two films later when
the pair emerge as a romantic couple from a movie theater at the end ofJay and Silent
Bob Strike Back (2001).
Hooper X first appears in Chasing Amy onstage, giving a talk to white Comicon
attendees about his comic book, White Hating Coon. His speech is laden with catch
phrases from Malcolm X speeches and Black Power rhetoric, and at the culmination of
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his speech, after Banky interrupts him from the audience with an overtly racist remark,
Hooper pulls a pistol from his jacket and shoots Banky in the chest while yelling "Black
rage!" (see Figure 22) The all-white audience flees the room, with the exception of
Holden, the prostrate Banky, and one of the other Comicon panelists, Alyssa Jones.
Figure 22: Hooper X shoots Banky.
Hooper steps down from the podium and approaches Banky, kneeling down
beside him and tapping him on the head to let him know that his performance is
concluded. This shot is interesting in that it suggests a sexual connection between
Hooper and Banky in two subtle yet condensed ways: not only has Banky already been
shot by Hooper, acting as the recipient of Hooper's phallic discharge, but when Hooper
first kneels down, his black gun enters frame right next to Banky's face, continuing the
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gun-as-penis metaphor and suggesting (not for the first time) that Banky is the passive
member of their duo who may well fellate Hooper's powerful symbolic phallus (see
Figure 23). Further, and this is my second point, Hooper's tap on Banky's head echoes a
similar scene that introduces Brodie (played, as Banky is, by Jason Lee) in Mallrats: he is
asleep in bed and Rene taps him on the head to wake him up. This slippage between the
Brodie and Banky characters is further emphasized in the next scene at the bar, when,
during an argument Banky and Hooper have over the queerness of traditional comic book
characters, Banky points at Hooper and says "You"-in the exact tone that Brodie uses to
hail Rene at the end of Mallrats. Hence, these intertextual moments that hearken back to
Jason Lee's performance as Brodie in Mallrats work to place Hooper in the role Rene
previously occupied, i.e., as our sidekick's lover, and thus queer Brodie retroactively,
especially since the highly queered Shannon Hamilton (Ben Affleck!) answers Brodie's
first hailing of "You" in Mallrats.
These visual and intertextual connotations of the sexual connection between
Hooper and Banky are reinforced at the verbal level as well: one of the first words out of
Hooper's mouth as he kneels down and addresses Banky is "Bitch!"-a word Hooper
will use throughout the film to address and refer to Banky, a word that positions Banky in
the more passive role in their relationship, the bitch, and Hooper himself in the more
masculine/active role as Banky's butch.
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Figure 23: Hooper kneels down, placing his symbolic phallus in Banky's face and
tapping him on the head, just as Rene tapped Brodie's head in Mallrats.
As if this weren't enough, the homoerotics between Banky and Hooper are further
driven home by a portion of the conversation that ensues once Banky stands up:
HOOPER: [...] I need to sell the image to sell the book. Would the audience still
buy the whole 'Black Rage' angle if they found out the book was written by a...
well, you know...
BANKY: Faggot?
HOOPER: When you say it it sounds so sexy. (grabs Banky's face and kisses him
on the mouth)
BANKY: (wipes his mouth) Hey, hey, hey! I'll play your victim but not your
catcher!
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Although this joke to some extent depends upon the thinness of the line dividing
"victim" from "catcher," particularly in light of the visual cues that suggest the
homoerotic energy between Banky and Hooper I've already described, the double irony
here is that, as much ofAmy suggests and as the denouement ofJay and Silent Bob Strike
Back explicitly reveals, Banky will indeed end up playing Hooper's "catcher" or bitch in
due time.
However, despite this kiss and as the film (and even Hooper himself) constructs
it, Banky's latent homosexual desires are in fact primarily directed toward his longtime
buddy Holden. Thus, in this scene as elsewhere, Hooper serves as a kind of proxy for
Holden's denied/displaced/unspoken gayness: in the context ofAmy's plot, the kiss
Hooper plants on Banky in this scene is a visual foretelling of the very similar kiss
Holden and Banky will share in the film's climactic sequence.
Interestingly, this conversational snippet and kiss take place in a three-shot that
includes (from left to right of frame) Hooper, Holden, and Banky. The shot depicts a
threesome with Holden in the middle, a visual setup that anticipates the film's central
erotic triangle between Alyssa-Holden-Banky. And indeed, no sooner is Alyssa
introduced in the next shot-in an upward-tilting camera movement that echoes
Veronica's first appearance in Clerks-than she rushes into this three-shot and chases
Hooper out of the frame, effectively displacing him in the queer threesome this shot
visually suggests (see Figure 24). Most interestingly, however, is the fact that Alyssa
does not stop and literally occupy Hooper's place, but rather chases him completely out
of frame, thus reconstituting the four characters into two separate two-shots, one with
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Hooper and Alyssa (the New Yorkers and overt queers) and one with Holden and Banky
(the New Jersey homosocial buddies). This reconfiguration visually schematizes
Alyssa's ultimate role in what will follow: to help expose the homoerotic desire between
Holden and Banky.
Figure 24: Alyssa chases Hooper out of a three-shot with Holden and Banky.
Not only does Hooper playa key role in visually representing the queer erotic
triangles that impel Chasing Amy's narrative, he also complexly embodies black
masculinity, in many ways exemplifying its marginalized position within white superhero
comic book culture.
In the comics panel scene we learn that Hooper has a dual personality of sorts: on
the one hand, within comic book culture he performs a "black rage" style of
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hypermasculinized blackness that is rooted in both the Black Power movement and the
caricatures of the same proliferated by the Blaxploitation films and comics titles of the
1970s. For example, Hooper X's name and the rhetoric he deploys in his diatribe against
white mass media are lifted directly from the identity and speeches of Malcolm X:
Hooper says that "the chickens are corning horne to roost, y'all," a famous phrase lifted
from an answer Malcolm X gave in response to a question following his "God's
Judgment of White America" speech made on December 4, 1963. Yet when Hooper
pulls his gun and shoots Banky, funky Blaxploitation-style music is heard on the
soundtrack, both to assure the Chasing Amy viewer that this is a hoax being played for
laughs but also to indicate Hooper's positioning as a deliberate homage to b1axp10itation-
inspired superhero comics characters such as the protagonist of Luke Cage: Hero For
Hire (1972-86), and to more recent real-life, militant cornie book artists like Nabi1e P.
Hage.
I make this comparison between Hooper and Hage based upon Jeffrey Brown's
description ofHage in Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and their Fans: "Perhaps
the most visible, certainly the most controversial, of the Ania books is [...JZwanna: Son
a/Zulu by artist John Ruiz and the outspoken writer Nabile P. Hage-~who dresses up as
Zwanna for cornie book conventions and once, in full costume, was arrested for climbing
the Georgia capitol building and tossing down copies of his cornie book" (47). The
parallels between Zwanna and Hooper's Maleekwa are obvious, and both Hage and
Hooper display a tendency to perform outrageous stunts in order to promote their work.
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The other side of Hooper's dual personality, the one the film insists we see as the
"genuine" Hooper, is that of a fairly effeminate gay man. The gay Hooper, the "real"
Hooper-who is called 'Hooper LaMont' in the liner notes to the Chasing Amy Criterion
DVD-makes very clear in the sequence following his onstage performance that he is
well aware of the contradictions inherent in his dual persona: as he puts it quite succinctly
to Banky and Holden, "I need to sell the image to sell the book."
By exposing Hooper's hypermasculine "Black Rage" persona as merely a public
performance he enacts in order to sell White Hating Coon, the film explicitly
demonstrates the constructedness of all identities: if a swishy queen like Hooper can so
effectively perform black hypermasculinity that he can keep himself in business as a
comic book artist, then couldn't other identities in the film-most particularly, Holden's
ostensible straightness-also be performances that mask contradictory realities
underneath?
Intriguingly, Hooper's ability to negotiate a dual identity is a feat endemic not
only to most gay lives, where various forms of passing and closetedness veritably
constitute what it means to be queer in our culture, but (as I mentioned in Chapter III) it
is also a defining feature of the superhero comics genre:
Since the genre's inception with the launch of Superman in 1938 the main
ingredient of the formula has been the dual identity of the hero. While the
superhero body represents in vividly graphic detail the muscularity, the
confidence, the power that personifies the ideal of phallic masculinity, the
alter ego-the identity that must be kept a secret-depicts the softness, the
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powerlessness, the insecurity associated with the feminized man. (Brown
174)
This description, right down to its gender particulars, fits Hooper X/Hooper LaMont as
perfectly as it does Superman/Clerk Kent.
In terms of gender, Hooper does have a stake in keeping his feminized gay side a
secret from his readership, since he perceives that no one will "buy" the Black Rage
angle if they find out that he is really a gay man. In part this is a response to the
homophobia that pervades our culture and might be especially prevalent in a male-
dominated industry like comic book production and consumption: as an overwhelmingly
male homosocial environment, comics culture is a place where homophobic disavowals
may be particularly pervasive and emphatic.
However, Hooper is also well aware of the difficulties that accrue to his position
as a member of a particularly vilified minority: a black gay man. As he puts it, "[s]crew
that 'all for one' shit. I gotta deal with being the minority in the minority of the minority,
and nobody's supporting my ass. While the whole of society is fawning over girls-on-
girls, here I sit-a reviled gay man. And to top that off, I'm a gay black man-
notoriously the most swishy of the bunch." Hooper's claim points to the radical fear-
generating potential inherent in identities that are not easily fixed, identities like his that
involve "being the minority in the minority of the minority." This power to disrupt
normalizing, socially constructed identity categories is what Robert F. Reid-Pharr refers
to when he argues that "black gay men represent [...] the reality that there is no normal
blackness, no normal masculinity to which the black subject [...] might refer" (l03).
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Since Hooper must live and work in a white male-dominated society and industry, and
since he is also a member of a racial and gendered group-black men-that is
particularly homophobic, he must carefully negotiate his various cultures' imperatives
toward normalizing, fixed identities, and his solution is to split his personality in two
along the public/private, passing/queer divide.
In fact, Hooper's two personas dramatically embody a central contradiction
inherent in the historical construction of Black American masculinity: that black men are
stereotypically expected to be more masculine than their white counterparts, to assume an
"exaggerated style of toughness" to compensate for the historical "frustration,
discrimination, and educational and employment inequities faced by Black males"
(Brown 172, 171). Indeed, this dependence upon exaggerated toughness and
hypermasculinity has led much of black male culture to be particularly homophobic, for
feminized queerness is perceived as a near-impossible obstacle for black men struggling
to assert their masculinity in the face of white oppression and racialized
infantilization/feminization. Yet, as Jeffrey Brown points out, this "tough" and
exaggerated Black masculinity, itself highly performative, frequently only calls attention
to its constructed status as a "mask of masculinity," a mask that leads hypermasculine
Black males to be "perceived as relatively too masculine" compared to their white
counterparts (172). Indeed, although Hooper playfully dons a mask of Black
Nationalistic too masculine-ness in order to sell his politically radical comic book, he
bemoans his need to silence his gay identity in the process: "Look what I have to resort to
for professional respect. What is it about gay men that terrifies the rest of the world?" In
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short, by the multiple cultural logics he operates within as a minority within a minority,
Hooper X cannot be a Black activist or a professional comic artist without completely
hiding his gayness; his two minority identities are mutually exclusive.
In terms of the superhero genre, Hooper LaMont (the swishy gay man) can be
said to have a super-heroic alter ego, Hooper X (the militant Black Power activist whose
name invokes Malcolm X)-hence, Hooper X himself is a comic-book hero whose
"secret identity" is that of a flaming gay man. In this manner, and once again, Smith
casts queerness back upon the figure of the costumed superhero.
In fact, Chasing Amy again emphasizes the queerness of superheroes and their
fans during the final "One Year Later" Comicon sequence. As Banky exchanges a series
of hand signals with Holden, a comics fan played by Ethan Suplee rambles on excitedly
to Banky about a comics club he founded with some friends. As it turns out, he tells
Banky, the club eventually disbanded over a disagreement as to "who looked better in
tights-Elektra or Robin" (296). This line hearkens back to Mal/rats and Brodie's
obsession with superhero genitalia, only now it is presented in a more bisexual register,
since the two fanboys argue over the relative merits of (female) Electra's and (male)
Robin's physiques. This queering of superheroes, which began with View Askew's camp
appropriations of Batman in Mal/rats, and continues more explicitly in this moment and
in the figure of Hooper from Amy, will reach its apex in the fifth View Askew film, Jay
and Silent Bob Strike Back.
I have two final points to make about Hooper X and his superheroic double
identity. The first is very simple but will show its structural importance in my next
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section: Hooper, although he seems to be exclusively gay in terms of his sexual identity,
is (in a more holistic sense) a bi-identity person.
Second, and this is related to my assertion that Hooper's total identity in the film
is bi-faceted and structured like that of a superhero, I think one way that Hooper's super-
heroism is expressed in Chasing Amy is through his generosity and wisdom as a person.
True, we do not get to know Hooper as well as we do any of the other three main
characters, yet what we do see of him is immensely likeable, sensible, and sensitive.
What I'm getting at is that Hooper is seemingly above all the other characters in terms of
his comfort with his own identity, his handle on his career, and his ability to see and hear
others and offer them excellent advice and feedback.
Of course, these seemingly positive qualities align Hooper with the figure of the
"magical negro," a stereotypically wise and self-sacrificing Black male character that is
"very familiar to U.S. film audiences for decades and to readers of American Literature
for centuries" (Colombe n.p.). In her article "White Hollywood's New Black
Boogeyman," Audrey Colombe observes that the 1990s saw an upsurge of these magical
Negro figures in mainstream cinema, in films such as Driving Miss Daisy (1989), The
Legend ofBagger Vance (2000), The Green Mile (1999), The Family Man (2000), The
Matrix (1999), and Smith's Dogma (1999), to name a few. Perhaps most interestingly for
our consideration of Hooper is Colombe's argument that "this recent incarnation [of the
magical Black man] [...] has supernatural powers to please: killers cure the sick, and
thieves turn out to be fairy godmothers. Their special abilities propel them into the
intimate, even subconscious, lives of the White male characters" (n.p., emphasis added).
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From this point of view, Hooper is less a character than a magical, supernatural place-
holder who exists in order to assist and reinforce the narrative centrality of Chasing
Amy's white, male characters. His extraordinary powers-i.e., to maintain a positive
attitude and a nuanced approach to sex and relationships in the face of his own social
oppression-are ultimately placed in the service of a white man, Holden, who is unable
to appreciate or enact the excellent advice Hooper gives.
The most condensed example of Hooper's wisdom / magical Negro-ness takes
place in his record store discussion with Holden just after the latter has learned about
Alyssa's sexual past.6 After slipping quickly into and back out of his hypermasculine,
anti-white persona in order to interact with a young fan, Hooper wisely tells Holden: "Do
yourself a favor-just ask her [Alyssa] about her past, point blank. Get it out of the way,
before it gets too big for y'all to move." Had Holden followed this mature advice,
delivered two scenes before Silent Bob tells him essentially the same thing, he might
have prevented the tragic end of his relationship with Alyssa. However, he doesn't, and
furthermore, this scene is the last we see of Hooper in the film. Like the superheroic /
marginalized magic Negro figure he is, Hooper swoops in, does what he can to save the
white man's day, then moves on to other as-yet-untold-and unseen-adventures. As
Colombe writes, "[t]he incredible growth of White wealth and world influence in the 90s
coincided with a good deal ofWhite male nervousness about the gains" and hence, "[i]t is
[...] easier for White audiences to feel good about a [Black] figure that simply appears
and then leaves the narrative without imposing any messy particulars concerning the real
world" (n.p.). This deployment ofHooper as a magical Negro who dispenses wisdom to
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Holden and then conveniently vanishes mitigates against the more progressive aspects of
his portrayal as a complex and capable bi-identity individual.
This doesn't mean that Hooper doesn't have his troubles or isn't aware of his
difficult position as a gay black man. As his "Screw that 'all for one' shit" speech
reveals, Hooper feels relatively isolated from support networks within the black or the
gay community, trapped, perhaps, by the very dual identity structure that makes him a
living: straight-identifying blacks revile him for his queerness, and queer persons may
well object to his public, hypern1asculine, "passing" persona. Even Roger Ebert, who
agrees with me that Hooper is a "wonderful character," notes that he is "a gay black man
whose militant anger is partly a put-on and partly real pain, masked in irony." Yet Ebert
may be giving the text too much credit here, for how does the viewer know Hooper's
pain is "real"? The film shows the viewer only the ironic mask, and doesn't tell us
enough about Hooper to. speculate about the real depth of his feelings or struggles.
Yet perhaps in this sense Hooper stands as a metonym for the entire film and
much of Smith's cinematic output: View Askew films depict the difficulties of queer
white male geeks and slackers as they negotiate their fluid identities in a world not yet
fully able to comprehend or accept them. Thus, like his white counterparts, trapped
between multiple "fixed" identity categories yet making the best of it, using camp
strategies and identity playas a form of militant (and financially sustainable) expression,
Hooper X serves as a cross-racial model of bisexual queerness and identity-fluidity for
Holden and the viewer that is not diminished by Holden's melodramatic inability to
follow his example and advice.
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Unspoken Bisexuality
Romantic comedies seek to resolve ideological crises through melodrama and the
catharsis of consummated romance. At first glance, we might suspect that Chasing Amy
wants to resolve the crisis of queer sexuality: after all, the thing that keeps Holden and
Alyssa apart, at least initially, is her ostensible lesbianism. Yet Holden is undeterred by
this: "Holden has 'zero' problem with Alyssa's homosexual experience" and repeatedly
apologizes to Alyssa for what he perceives to be Banky's insensitivity to lesbian issues
(Muir I0I).7 Of course, lesbianism I female bisexuality is a visual staple of straight male
porn and erotic fantasy, and in this sense it is culturally acceptable to a straight-
identifying, white male subject. 8 Especially as framed by straight heterosexual porn,
lesbian sexuality is usually seen as a prelude to straight sex, perhaps more indicative of
female promiscuity or sexual fluidity rather than as a marker of committed lesbianism.
And indeed Holden ultimately sees Alyssa this way, asking her to join him and Banky for
a three-way at the end of the film, a deed Alyssa herself equates with his treating her as
his "whore." Strangely, it is Alyssa's past sexual openness that most disturbs Holden, yet
is the very thing he banks on when he makes his ultimate proposal.
So, while Alyssa's lesbianism provides an initial obstacle to the consummation of
her and Holden's love and is thus what we generically expect from a romantic comedy-
which usually depicts romance happening with "the one least likely" as Alyssa puts it-
this obstacle is dissolved once Alyssa runs into Holden's arms in the rain, and the second
half of Chasing Amy is much more interested in Alyssa's heterosexual past and Holden's
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inability to deal with it: "[Alyssa] becomes emotionally and sexually involved with
Holden, only to be castigated by him when he learns she was not a 'real' lesbian"
(Pramaggiore 256).
However, and this is my main point, it is quite significant that Holden falls in love
with-or continues to fall in love with, since, to be fair, he does not realize Alyssa is a
lesbian the first time he meets her-someone he knows has no interest in men. Not only
does this potentially spare Holden from actually having to consummate a sexual
relationship with Alyssa, under the guise of the romantic trope that one often falls for
"the one least likely" Holden is able to establish an intimate relationship with an avowed
lesbian, which indicates that on some level Holden is interested in exploring his own
queerness: his love for Alyssa queers him. In fact, over the course of the film, Holden's
relationship with Alyssa functions as the primary catalyst for the overt queering of his
relationship with Banky, and ultimately for Holden's literal staging ofa bisexual fantasy:
the menage atrois he proposes to Alyssa and Banky at the film's climax. Hence, the
ideological crisis the film (unsuccessfully) attempts to resolve is the problem of Holden's
felt but unspoken bisexuality.
It is Banky himself who comes closest to putting words to Holden's interest in
bisexual experience, when during one of their most heated arguments he yells: "Why do
you bother wasting time with her [Alyssa]? Because you're Holden fucking McNeil-
most persistent traveler on the road that's not the path ofleast resistance! Everything's
gotta be a fucking challenge for you, and this little relationship with that bitch is a prime
example of your fucking condition." Banky's jealous misogyny aside, I find his
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characterization of Holden as possessed by a "condition" that makes him the "most
persistent traveler on the road that's not the path of least resistance" quite suggestive of
bisexuality-after all, in matters of desire the path of least resistance would be to
embrace a single fixed sexual identity category, such as "gay" or "straight." Bisexuality
in this context connotes an openness to anything, and as Banky points out, Holden has a
history of questioning the status quo and taking challenging, experimental roads-just as
Alyssa has. Like Hooper's dualistic black gay masculinity, Holden's refusal to find a
strictly heterosexual love interest places him outside simple binary identity categories, in
a liminal position fraught with contradictions and potentially plagued by social
marginalization. As Maria Pramaggiore argues, Holden "isn't permitted to call into
question the distinctions between friends and lovers in his own sexual and erotic journey.
He must choose from the available monosexual options in order to mature" (257). Even
Banky boils Holden's situation down to an untenable binary at the end of his "persistent
traveler" diatribe, telling Holden that it may eventually come down to a choice between
"her or me"-rather than the bisexual solution Holden eventually (unsuccessfully)
proposes.
Holden's interest in bisexuality is also signaled by a couple of key visual and
verbally described images from the film. The most significant of these is the literal
image ofa swing-set that appears in a New Jersey riverfront park. This park and
specifically the swing-set serves as a crucial location in the development of Holden's
relationship with Alyssa and the bisexual fantasizing it inspires (see Figure 25). The first
frank conversation the two of them have after Alyssa's lesbianism is revealed takes place
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on these swings, and like the ball tossed back and forth by the kid in the pre-Clerks View
Askew animation (see my Introduction), I take these swings as emblematic of sexual
fluidity, as in the popular concepts of "swinging both ways" (bisexuality) and/or simply
"swinging" (non-monogamy). Further, this initial conversation about Alyssa's
lesbianism culminates with Alyssa demonstrating the act of vaginal fisting-a practice,
however, that is most often associated with gay male sexual practice in the form of anal
fisting. 9 Hence, Alyssa's fisting demonstration not only masculinizes Alyssa within the
context of her own queer sexual practices, but also can be read as a piece of information
crucial to Holden's evolving bisexual fantasy from this point forward-he is shown how
fisting works and is assured that while it does hurt, it hurts "in a good way." He is taken
aback by the concept-out of horror? Or fascination/desire masked as shock?-and,
significantly, needs extra time to pry himself out of the swing in the wake of Alyssa's
visual demonstration.
The second (and I suppose most obvious) indicator of Holden's bisexuality is his
obsession with Alyssa's nickname "Fingercuffs" and the sexual practice it refers to: two
men penetrating one woman, one orally, one from behind. Such a practice allows the two
male participants to physically have sex with a woman while clearly facing each other,
literally positioning the woman as the conduit or channel that mitigates male-male
desire. 1O To my mind, this one bisexual image, discussed incessantly throughout the
second half of Chasing Amy, is the single most important symbol of Holden's fears (he
cannot get over the fact that Alyssa has "fingercuffed" in the past) and desires
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("fingercuffing" is essentially what he proposes to Alyssa and Banky at the end of the
film)-both the fear and the desire centering on the idea of bisexual menage atrois.
Figure 25: The swings, a key site for Holden and Alyssa's relationship, suggestive of
"swinging" bisexuality.
Further, despite much of Holden's misleading rhetoric to the contrary, it is Alyssa,
not Holden, who actually wants the two of them to be a "normal"-i.e., monogamous and
heterosexual-couple:
The real "secret" of Alyssa's bisexuality is its absence. Her sexuality rests
upon a very traditional foundation in the Platonic notion of the humans as
originally hermaphroditic: Alyssa seeks the one individual, man or
woman, who is her opposite, her "other half." Smith's film thus creates a
space for bisexuality only to foreclose it. The film's focus on Alyssa-its
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chasing of "Amy"-eclipses Holden's exploration and rejection of his
bisexuality. (Pramaggiore 257)
I don't necessarily agree with Pramaggiore's assessment that the film "forecloses"
Alyssa's bisexuality-I think it actually forecloses her lesbianism. Pramaggiore seems to
assume here that monogamy and bisexuality are mutually exclusive, which they aren't. If
anything, Alyssa's serial monogamy is at odds with certain aspects of her supposed
"experimentalism," i.e., engaging in sex with multiple partners at once. As Pramaggiore
herself puts it, "Alyssa isn't a 'nymphomaniac' or 'erotic glutton' at all, but, instead, a
choosy lover in search ofPlatonic completion" (257). But even the
monogamous/experimental binary does not constitute an outright opposition since sexual
experimentation is widely accepted as a developmental phase that many young people go
through on their way to a fixed sexual identity. Hence, if anything it is Alyssa's
lesbianism that is minimized, contradicted, foreclosed by this film: her exclusive
lesbianism never really exists except at her insistence and through the negative reactions
of her lesbian friends to its supposed disappearance-they ostracize her specifically for
her non-lesbianism, her bisexuality.
Ultimately, however, it is difficult to put a precise label on what Alyssa is: she
identifies as lesbian, acts bisexual in the film's diegesis, and her most revealing speech
(analyzed below) exposes her as something between a bisexual and a serial monogamist.
The difficulty in pinpointing Alyssa's sexual identity is due in large part to the fact that
many details of her past are left murky. When, for example, did she become an exclusive
lesbian or start identifying as such? She may well have had bisexual encounters or a
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period of bisexual transition between her earlier heterosexual days and her current
lesbianism. Hooper's faux-shocked reaction to the "Fingercuffs" revelation and his
comment to Holden in the record store that "Kind of gal Alyssa is, you don't think she's
been in the middle of an all-girl group-grope?" hints at her openness to unconventional
sexual practices, and her sexual relationship with Holden in the diegesis ofAmy confirms
the non-exclusive nature of her lesbianism. Hence, the only proper word for her
behavior, if not her self-identity, is bisexual.
The speech Alyssa delivers midway through the film in Holden's bed is the
strongest evidence we have that Alyssa is bisexual, particularly this passage:
ALYSSA: I'm not with you [Holden] because of what family, society, life tried to
instill in me from day one. The way the world is-how seldom you meet that one
person who gets you-it's so rare. My parents didn't really have it. There was no
example set for me in the world of maleIfemale relationships. And to cut oneself
off from finding that person-to immediately half your options by eliminating the
possibility of finding that one person within your own gender. .. that just seemed
stupid.
Maybe in some sense Pramaggiore is right and Alyssa really is-she certainly verbally
self-identifies as-a lesbian who has merely slept with some guys here and there. I I Yet
her self-description in this speech is anything but lesbian-essentialist: she does not claim
some "authentic" lesbian identity that emerged from the closet at some point after years
ofheterosexist repression. Rather, Alyssa expresses a fluidity of desire, a quest to find
that one right person regardless of gender, that suggests not lesbianism but bisexuality-
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a point that is contextually driven home by her delivery of this speech to Holden as they
lie (heterosexually) in bed together. In sum, Alyssa's in-bed speech is a perfect
description of bisexuality, and yet, true to the slipperiness ofAmy's queerness
throughout, it ends with a musical celebration of her and Holden's heterosexual bond that
seems to override her earlier claims to exclusive lesbianism.
So Alyssa's bisexuality, such as it is, is described (in the speech above) and acted
upon (when she falls for Holden) but goes explicitly unspoken as bisexuality. However, I
argue that Holden is aware of its existence and implications and is scared of them
because of the latent bisexuality he feels in himself: as Pramaggiore argues, "[t]he fact
that she [Alyssa] had sex with two men at the same time in high school forces him
[Holden] to question his own view of sexuality and, more particularly, monosexuality,
the strict division of sexual orientation into gay or straight" (257). Thus, when Holden
breaks up with Alyssa outside the hockey rink because he wants them to be a "normal
couple," he is really doing what Silent Bob tells him he mistakenly did: projecting his
fears about his own (slippery) desires and sexual object choice onto Alyssa, then pushing
her away. Unable to express his bisexual desire openly or productively, he instead does
emotional violence to its external representative, first judging Alyssa, casting her aside in
the parking lot scene, then trying to manipulate her into being "his whore" in the final
sequence despite her repeated warnings not to continue. Just as Clerks ends in an
explosion of displaced violence-the fight between Randal and Dante-so too does Amy,
this time figured as the violence of Holden's manipulative proposal, which not only
denigrates Alyssa but forcibly "outs" Banky at a time not of his own choosing.
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So, in sum, throughout Chasing Amy, Holden's interest in bisexuality surfaces,
drives the plot to its unusual climax, yet is never named. Similarly, Alyssa continues to
be described as a lesbian even after the film reveals that she has engaged in behaviors that
would suggest that she, too, is bisexual. In fact, as Pramaggiore points out, it is
ultimately the fluidity and queerness of Alyssa's desire that makes her desirable to, and
even more importantly an identificatory figure for, Holden: "Holden devises a plan that
will satisfy him-he suggests a three-way sexual encounter among Banky, Alyssa, and
himself-a move that reflects his desire to be more like Alyssa, to act on his
identification with her and her 'experimentation' rather than only acting on his sexual
desire for her" (256). I find it significant that just before Holden invites Alyssa over to
his and Banky's place to make his three-way proposal, he returns to the riverfront park
and those swings, and is seen sitting on a swing, looking again at the yearbook page
where Alyssa is depicted over the nickname "Fingercuffs." The sense of this scene is that
Holden is putting the finishing touches on his plan, thinking it over one last time before
taking the plunge and making his radical proposal. Hence for Holden, the proposal he is
about to make is explicitly linked to "swinging both ways," Alyssa, her bisexuality, and
specifically the practice of "fingercuffing" that I discussed in detail earlier.
Yet his proposal (see Figure 26) is rej ected. Banky, while initially agreeing to it
with little hesitation, utters the phrase "Thank Christ!" after Alyssa says no, and his
intonation and emphasis make me believe that he means it: he is relieved that the menage
atrois won't happen, because he is still not ready to confront the queer desire in himself
in so direct a way. Alyssa, in possibly her best speech of the film, outlines for Holden
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why she doesn't want to engage in such queer sexual activities anymore, finally slapping
Holden and castigating him for thinking she would be his "whore" and go along with his
fantasy. She exits, telling Banky, "He's yours again." Yet Banky gets up and leaves
without a word, and that is where the scene ends: the violence and self-centeredness of
Holden's proposal have alienated both Alyssa and Banky, and the homoerotic desire
between the two Jersey buddies that has just been exposed in the form of their kiss and
Holden's offhand admission that "in a way, I'm attracted to you" is left unacted-upon.
Figure 26: Holden's three-way proposal schematized via a three-shot.
Instead the film jumps us ahead "One Year Later," to Holden's appearance at the
next Manhattan Comicon. Here he briefly touches base with Banky via a "dialogue"
consisting of hand signals, and ultimately ends up at Alyssa's comics-signing table,
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presenting her with a copy of his self-produced limited-run comic, Chasing Amy. This is
all meant to signal that Holden has grown up,leamed his lesson from his experiences
with Alyssa and Banky, and is the better person for it, as the uplifting soundtrack music
and general feeling of forgiveness in both Holden's encounters denote. Yet the film tells
us nothing at this point about Holden's presumably evolving sexuality, and in fact implies
through its silence that he may well be pretty much back where he started: a straight-
identifying man who silently harbors unacted-upon queer desires and identifications. We
just don't know for sure. But it is in this context that I wish to suggest two possible
interpretations of the film's title, Chasing Amy:
On one level, and this is Silent Bob's version of the story, Chasing Amy suggests
that Amy, the woman, is "the one that got away," a woman that could have satisfied the
male protagonist in an enduring way-Holden tells Jay and Silent Bob that "I look at this
girl, I see kids. I see grandkids"-and might have led him into a whole new realm of
adult heterosexual monogamy. But the protagonist's fears and insecurities lead him to
sabotage the relationship, refusing to enter that more adult world of commitment and
possible progeny.
The second way I read the film's title is in the sense I suggested in my reading of
the first Hooper/Alyssa introduction scene: that it is Amy who does the chasing,
appearing in the male protagonist's life primarily to catalyze (by acting as an
identification figure) his recognition of own latent queer desires.
So which one is it? Is our lead buddy afraid of growing up and accepting the
mantle of adult, heteronormative, procreative sexuality? Or is he afraid of the
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bisexual/queer/homoerotic desire that the Amy figure chases out into the open? I think
both. In fact, I think these dual meanings embedded in Chasing Amy's title are
emblematic of Smith's entire cinematic corpus and constitute a key element of my
current project: to expose the fear of women, particularly masculine women presented as
domineering mothers and scary dykes, that impels the queered 1990's male slacker
toward refusing to make any decisions whatsoever, to instead remain in a homosocial yet
strangely desexualized world of male buddies characterized by an ironically comical
arrested development. Chased into the open, forced to see the queer and abject linings of
his own straight-passing subjectivity, our slacker protagonist ultimately retreats-albeit
in a comedic ifme10dramatized way-before the horrifying possibility of his own
unspeakable bisexuality.
The Comics Industry as Metonym for the Independent Cinema
Through its rendering of comic book creators from different racial, sexual, and
gendered backgrounds, Chasing Amy offers depictions of the comic book industry as a
metonym for the independent cinema business at the time ofAmy's production. I will
make this case by looking again at the opening sequence of Hooper and Alyssa's panel,
and then will analyze the scene near the end of Chasing Amy in which Jay and Silent Bob
appear.
The panel that Hooper abruptly concludes by shooting a gun and scaring away the
audience is called "Words Up: Minority Voices" and thus is an appropriate place for
minority-group artists like Alyssa (a woman) and Hooper (a black man) to be heard. Of
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course, applying the tenn "minority" to women is inherently (quantitatively) problematic,
and the very existence of a "minority voices" panel implies that there is a majority
against which its constituents are defined, and that majority is of course made up of white
males. Hooper, Alyssa, and Holden discuss this matter explicitly in their post-panel
trialogue, Alyssa putting a particularly fine point on it when she tells Holden to "[l]ose
the dick or change the skin tone and we can get to know each other on panel after panel."
Indeed, this same discussion reveals that Holden and Banky's puerile comic Bluntman
and Chronic-explicitly modeled after the "real-life" View Askew characters Jay and
Silent Bob-outsells Hooper and Alyssa's comics put together. This marginalization of
female, black, and queer voices in the comics business is, of course, prevalent in 1990s
independent cinema as well, and many textual clues in Chasing Amy suggest that the film
is well aware of this connection.
The inequities suffered by non-white-male comics artists/filmmakers is
dramatically displayed in the opening credits sequence of Chasing Amy. This sequence
shows still images of comic book pages and covers, as well as press clippings tracing the
careers of Alyssa, Hooper, and, most prevalently, Holden and Banky. In one such
clipping, a writeup about the duo's first comic book release, a title called 37 that
constitutes a barely veiled reference to Clerks, is seen alongside blurbs about Hooper and
Alyssa's work, but thereafter the images and articles displayed focus almost exclusively
on the two white creators' successful Bluntman and Chronic title. This parallels Smith's
own cinematic career: after the wild success of his first independent release, Clerks, he
has been able to continue making films starring his own buddy duo, Jay and Silent Bob.
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Similarly, and in another striking parallel to the career of Smith, Holden's misgivings
throughout Amy about the dangers of "selling out" and permitting the production of a
televised Bluntman and Chronic cartoon echo Smith's own struggles to achieve
mainstream recognition, both in the failed experiment of Mallrats (see previous chapter)
and in his own negotiations with ABC over production of a Clerks animated series. What
Alyssa and Hooper are careful to point out to Holden (and thus the viewer) is that he
occupies a place of economic and artistic privilege: in the comics industry as in
independent cinema, only white males are ever given a chance to succeed and "sell out"
in the first place. This angst in the face of disproportionate social privilege is typical of
the white male Romantic hero dating from the 19th century, characterizes later figures
such as Catcher in the Rye's Holden Caulfield, and finds renewed emphasis in the post-
1970s era of the media-producing geek (e.g., George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola) and
the 1990s Generation X slacker.
It is in the context of white male privilege that specific mention must be made of
Guinevere Turner, co-writer and star of the 1994 independent lesbian feature film Go
Fish. Go Fish was released the same year as Clerks, was represented by the same
legendary John Pierson who repped Clerks (and associate produced Chasing Amy), and in
fact bears a great many formal similarities to View Askew's debut feature. Yet unlike
Smith and his View Askew team, Go Fish director/co-writer Rose Troche, a Latina
lesbian, has struggled to continue working in the independent film business: after seeing
her sophomore film, Bedrooms and Hallways (1999), get buried by its distributors and
the next one, The Safety ofObjects (2002), get critically panned for its supposed
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"didacticism," she has now retreated into directing the occasional television episode
(Lane 203). Meanwhile, Troche's Go Fish collaborator Gwen Turner, a personal friend
of Smith's since their meeting at Sundance 1994, has acted in many independent features
including making cameo appearances in Chasing Amy and Dogma (1999). Turner's
ability to keep working may owe something to her whiteness, her good looks, and the fact
that she aspires to be an actor, not a writer/director like the marginalized Troche.
For as Christina Lane shows in her article "Just Another Girl Outside the Neo-
Indie," independent female writer/directors have not fared nearly as well as their white
male counterparts. Lane concludes that this imbalance is due to structural sexism within
the industry: "From development to reception, the male-oriented gangster or thriller
genres [exemplified by the work of Quentin Tarantino], and the quirky 'loser' film [by
the likes of Richard Linklater and Kevin Smith], have helped to condition major
independent studios' ideas about what makes money and what makes film sense" (204).
Obviously, as a leading, iconic filmmaker in the "quirky 'loser' film" genre, Smith and
his team have (perhaps unwittingly) benefited from this structural inequity.
However, in one sense, Smith's inclusion of Turner in Amy and Dogma acts as a
visual reminder of the independent cinema's misogyny, and I like to think that, although
Smith is well-known for casting his friends, his placement ofTurner in so many of his
texts can also be read as a subtle political statement of sorts, as if to say, "look, this
business doesn't typically support female filmmakers like Turner, but remember, here she
is." Perhaps I give the View Askew team too much credit in this, though, for another
way to read Smith's inclusion of friends and lesser-known independent actors in his films
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is as a strategy to maintain some kind of independent credibility in the face of his
continued niche-market success. In this sense, his casting of Tumer, a beautiful femme
lesbian and indie film star, in Amy can be read as an attempt to cash in on lesbian chic.
For indeed, Chasing Amy itself replicates the gendered inequities that certain
moments I've just described seem to want to counter or at least expose. Early in this
chapter I discussed how Amy frames its romantic comedy elements within a larger
comedian-comedy/male melodramatic structure. Nowhere is this male-centered
orientation made clearer than in the scene late in the film where Jay and Silent Bob meet
Holden in a diner to pick up their likeness-rights money. The core of this sequence
consists of Silent Bob's "Chasing Amy" story, wherein he describes a past relationship
that is an obvious mirror image of Holden's own present troubles with Alyssa. The
telling of this story by Silent Bob has multiple effects. The first is to reassert Smith (who
plays Silent Bob) as the auteur of Chasing Amy: the fact that these events supposedly
happened to Silent Bob in the past aligns with the fact that the very story Holden is
caught up in has already been written and orchestrated by Smith. Bob's speech also
foregrounds the "personal" nature of this particular View Askew film, since the past
relationship Bob describes is a reference to Smith's real-life romantic relationship with
Amy costar Joey Lauren Adams: hence the line between Bob and Smith is made very
blurry indeed in this sequence. This blurring of the distinction between the figures of
Kevin Smith and Silent Bob is a subject I will address at length in my fifth chapter.
However, not only does this sequence highlight Smith's authorship and control of
the Chasing Amy cinematic text, it also diegetically establishes Silent Bob as the
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originator of the title and concept for Holden's cathartic independent comic book,
Chasing Amy. Alyssa provides the content for the Chasing Amy story throughout the
events of the film, and now Silent Bob literally gives Holden the title and structure he
needs to form that content into a narrative comic book. By depicting Holden paying Jay
and Silent Bob for their Bluntman and Chronic likeness rights and then copping his
comic book idea from Bob's pathos-laden story, this sequence reveals that Holden's "art
is merely a vehicle for the recirculation of cultural artifacts [he finds] around [him]. [...]
His creativity was a sham" (Pramaggiore 258-9). So even as this sequence reminds us of
Smith's authorship of the text, it also undermines the very concept of such authorship,
showing it to be a "sham" dependent upon the input of the people the so-called "author"
meets and interacts with in his daily life.
This leads us back to the 2000 article by B. Ruby Rich I mentioned at the outset
of this chapter, which states that filmmakers like Smith and particularly films like
Chasing Amy constitute an invasion by straight-identifying directors into the territory of
queer cinema: "If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Chasing Amy (1996) was
probably the most sincere product of its season. Not only did Kevin Smith manage a
career comeback, but his film managed to draw all the attention in a year when numerous
lesbian independent features languished for lack of publicity and audience" (24). Despite
Rich's mistaken assertion that Amy was released in 1996 (a "misprint?" as Clerks' Dante
might ask), herpoint about the changing face of what constitutes queer cinema is a
poignant one. As opposed to the films of the New Queer Cinema "moment" of 1991-2,
which were all produced by queer-identifying filmmakers, queer cinema in 1997 is
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indeed a difficult thing to define: noting that "[i]dentity politics doesn't meld well with
market considerations," Rich's article asks "what's a queer film? The films and their
receptions over the past few years have rearranged all [...] definitions" (24).
Yet, despite the gendered, racial, and sexual politics that support this privileging
of white, straight, male filmmakers above all others, there is also a way in which this
dissemination of queer filmmaking into other hands can be seen as liberating, productive
of a multivalence of new queer cinematic voices. Of course I abhor the structural
inequities that allow Smith to succeed while Rose Troche and others struggle and
frequently fail, yet I also think that queerness as I define it wants to move past the
limitations of identity politics and allow liminal or harder-to-define filmmakers like
Smith to explore queer issues from different vantage points. For while Smith himself is
ostensibly straight-identifying, films like Chasing Amy, "imitation" or no, certainly
constitute a form ofqueer cinema, perhaps most emphatically insofar as its white male
protagonists are exemplars of the "post-closet" queer straight man. This figure is
described by Ron Becker as benefiting from the increased presence of out gay characters
like Hooper, whose outness provides security-by-contrast for the queer straight male:
"[T]he banal ubiquity of [...] openly gay guys supports the illusion of a post-closet
world where all men who are gay are out, and any man who isn't out is obviously (and
securely) straight-otherwise they'd be out" (Becker n.p.). Of course, as we have seen,
this inductively logical smokescreen for the queerness of characters like Holden and
Banky ultimately fails, especially when their queer desires rise so strongly to the
narrative surface of films like Chasing Amy. Indeed, Amy takes great delight in showing
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its audience how queer Holden and Banky really are, even if neither of them know it yet,
in this way performing the same maneuver on both buddies as Holden does on Banky
when he outs him in the film's penultimate scene.
Thus while Amy's subtle deconstruction of white male auteur-ship seems to
acknowledge that its "queer representation is not based upon any necessary connection to
the real in terms of writers, actors, directors, etc." (Pramaggiore 264), in depicting the
plight of queer straight men like Holden and Banky it simultaneously serves as an
example of "straight queer cinema" and perhaps subtly outs its creators as being invested
in forms of white masculinity that are not so straight as they seem. In short, by poking
fun at Holden's sexual conservatism and exposing both his and Banky's homoerotic love
for each other, Chasing Amy reveals that the post-closet world is an illusion and that
queerness does not have to be out to be queer. Hence I don't think we can specifically
blame Smith or View Askew for doing what they do, even if-or perhaps especially
since-their work in some ways exposes structural misogyny that limits what voices and
views may be heard in independent cinema.
Maria Pramaggiore argues that Chasing Amy's representation ofbisexuality,
particularly its presentation of a bisexual woman, is emblematic of the tensions inherent
to the queer/Independent cinema binary. Arguing that the figure of the bisexual is
threatening due to its supposed lack of discrimination-bisexuals swing both ways,
refusing gender distinctions in the formation and expression of sexual desire and
identification-Pramaggiore concludes:
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The various bisexual dynamics in these films [Chasing Amy and Lisa
Cholodenko's High Art (1998)] enact fears associated with the breakdown
ofNew Queer Cinema distinctions: fears that representations of queerness
will not be the province of 'real' queers, and that queer cinema will evolve
as merely one more niche market. (264)
I acknowledge the validity of these fears and am immensely sympathetic to those
who end up marginalized as a result of the independent film industry's money making,
niche-marketing practices. But just as I would have liked to see Holden find a way to
embrace his queer desires, to "speak" or fulfill his bisexuality at least for a short while, I
see the "bisexualizing" of queer cinema as opening up an opportunity. For if queer
cinema is to be "about" anything, I feel it should focus on breaking down the binary
structures that support existing patriarchal power and sexist modes of representation, be
they centered on sexual identities, gender distinctions, or binarized claims to "real"
queerness or queer authorship. In sum, a queer cinema that includes queer 'imitative'
works like Chasing Amy and thus corrodes the distinctions that allow our culture to
hierarchize and discriminate can only enhance the ability of persons and media
productions to recognize, speak, depict, and experience ourselves and each other as we
truly and fluidly are, on or off the cinematic screen.
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Notes
1. For a thoroughgoing discussion of the magical Negro figure and his deployment in
recent mainstream cinema, see Audrey Colombe's "White Hollywood's New Black
Boogeyman" in Jump Cut No. 45, Fall 2002, found online at:
<http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc45.2002/colombe/>
2. A similar but even more dramatic deployment of the New JerseylNew York
dichotomy will be played out in Smith's 2004 non-Askewniverse film Jersey Girl, where
New York will be the place of fast-paced business, financial success, and cocaine use,
and New Jersey the locus of family, fatherhood, and authentic, clean living. I will
discuss this film in my work-in-progress, Falling Out ofthe Closet: Kevin Smith and
Post-Closet Independent Cinema.
3. Perhaps no single book better documents this period and its effects on/in cinema than
Steven Cohan's Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties.
4. The Jaws-homage scene where Alyssa and Banky share their "permanent" scars
masculinizes Alyssa by having her brag about cunnilingus-related wounds, not to
mention that the original scene this one pays homage to depicts the male homosocial
environment of sailors together at sea.
5. Also notable along this line is that the character Adams plays in Mallrats, while not
overtly masculinized, is named for out lesbian actress and Smith pal Gwen Turner, who
herselfliterally appears in a cameo role in the Meow Mix sequence in Chasing Amy. As
for JLA's voice, many viewers find it to be too little-girlish and breathy to be read as
"masculine." And perhaps this aspect of her voice somewhat infantilizes her, which for
me enhances the "tomboy" aspect of her persona, making her the tiniest bit sexually
indeterminate. So while I acknowledge the legitimacy of this view, I find I generally
agree with Ebert, hearing a depth of pitch in Adams' voice that mitigates against or
combines with its breathiness to connote tomboyishness rather than traditional
femininity.
6. Interestingly, Hooper X actor Dwight Ewell suggested the addition of this scene to
Amy, convincing Smith of its necessity by arguing that, in the initial draft of the script,
"Hooper seemed to be used as comic relief, only one-dimensional. All of the other
characters talked frankly about their sexual encounters except for him" (Muir 93).
According to Ewell, after he brought this to Smith's attention, "Kevin understood
immediately and [...J came back with that scene in the record store and I loved it" (Muir
93).
7. And while some ofHolden's embarrassment is warranted-Banky does make the
claim at one point that lesbianism is nothing more than "bullshit posturing"-he is just as
often off the mark about Banky, accusing him of homophobia when in fact Banky is more
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so healthily curious. I am thinking particularly of the scene where Alyssa and Banky
discuss their cunnilingus-related injuries, a scene where, despite Holden's protestations,
Alyssa seems perfectly comfortable discussing her sexual practices with Banky and
where the two of them laugh over a shared interest in a particular sexual deed.
8. Female bisexuality is perhaps especially enticing to geeky slackers like Randal and
Banky who enjoy sexual voyeurism and porn. See, for example, Banky's incessant
staring at Alyssa and Kim during the Meow Mix scene, similar scenarios of geeky guys
obsessed with lesbian sex in American Pie 2, or Gareth's fascination with lesbian sisters
in Series One Episode 4 ofBBC's "The Office."
9. I am deeply indebted to Caetlin Benson-Allott for pointing out the gay male
signification of this act during a conversation of March 9,2007.
10. I am again grateful to Caetlin Benson-Allott for highlighting just how queer this
sexual configuration is.
11. This position, that of a lesbian who occasionally sleeps with men but does not
identify as bisexual, is best outlined in a sequence from Go Fish, wherein lesbian Daria
(Anastasia Sharp) defends her decision to sleep with a man to a gathered "mock court" of
angry, accusatory fellow lesbians: "Ifyou're talking about me calling myself a lesbian,
that's what I am! [...] [H]e's a friend of mine, what's the big fucking deal? Women are
my life. I love women. [...] I don't [consider myself bisexual]. I'm a lesbian who had
sex with a man" (Go Fish Ch. 9, "Sex With Men"). I have always wished that Alyssa
would say something to this effect when she is attacked by her own lesbian cohort group
in Chasing Amy-but alas, she remains silent.
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CHAPTER V
RACING QUEERNESS ON THE ROAD:
DOGMA (1999) AND JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK (2001)
Dogma (1999) and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001) function generically as
queer road movies, bearing many formal similarities to more "out" queer road films like
My Own Private Idaho (1991, dir. Van Sant) and The Living End (1992, dir. Araki). In
the process of bringing together the discourses/tropes of race, gender, (queer) sexuality
and the road, Dogma and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back finally make explicit what all
previous View Askew films have only hinted at: the queer attraction between Jay and
Silent Bob (Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith), the production company's most enduring
and iconic male buddy duo. This intensification of the stakes of Jay and Bob's
closetedness/outness vis-a-vis each other, while handled humorously in both films, is
accompanied by a concomitant increase in the element ofjantasy, specifically comic-
book influenced super-heroic jantasy, that dominates the View Askewniverse for the
duration of these two films. So while, for example, Mallrats includes isolated segments
of superheroic fantasy-Jay and Bob's Batman-flavored attempts to destroy the mall
stage etc.-integrated into what is essentially a John-Hughes-esque teen comedy, Dogma
and JSBSB fully embrace that superheroic, comic-book version of reality, using it, as we
shall see, as a comedic fantasy milieu in which Jay and Bob, functioning as comedic
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superheroes, can finally find ways to safely express their queerness without ostensibly
"queering the deal" of their longtime buddy relation.
This increased level of fantasy and homoerotics also interconnects with issues of
race: Dogma and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back depict Jay and Silent Bob interacting
with more nonwhite characters than in previous View Askew outings, and the duo's
highly charged relation to black masculinity is particularly foregrounded in these two
road films. For in the View Askewniverse as in U.S. culture writ large, homophobia is
raced and classed, with homophobic straightness generally coded as white and queerness
typically projected/reflected onto less white or nonwhite characters such as Willam Black
(Clerks) and Hooper X (Chasing Amy). It is Jay in particular who struggles to maintain
his semblance of straightness in Dogma and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, for his
lower-class behavior-signaled by his vulgar speech, obsession with money, and
hypermasculine posturing-singles him out for extended comedic anxiety around his own
"outing" in Dogma. Indeed, in this film as throughout his View Askew career the
character of Jay appropriates racialized (hyper-)masculinity in order to cover his
queerness. And while Silent Bob may appear to be more sensitive and in touch with his
feminine side, he is also Jay's "heterosexual life mate" and ostensible bodyguard, hence
his silence and deferral to Jay in most matters read as a kind of hypermasculine toughness
meant to cover his less traditionally masculine qualities.
Hence these two films-and perhaps the entire View Askew oeuvre to this
point-are all about queer disavowal, defensive homophobia played for comedy. This
explains why the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) went after
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Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back after its release, yet as we will see, these films to some
extent presume a knowing audience who will be "in on the joke" of Jay and Bob's
longstanding homoerotic relationship and desires. Longtime View Askew fans know
JSBSB's disavowals to be funny, in large pati due to the homoerotics that have pervaded
all View Askew films to this point, and perhaps especially since Jay is "outed" by Rufus
(Chris Rock) in Dogma. Dedicated fans of View Askew films, the target audience for the
in-joke-Iaden Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, would have seen Dogma and known of this
"outing," hence Jay's disavowals in JSBSB are rendered doubly ridiculous and funny to
the insider viewer.
So Jay and Bob's queerness will come out, but little will change between them as
a result. No, ever constant, ever puerile, Jay and Silent Bob will conclude Jay and Silent
Bob Strike Back, intended to be their final film appearance, frozen in a freeze-frame shot
(see Figure 27). And they are not standing alone, nor in their fairly white suburb of
Leonardo, New Jersey, but rather onstage in urban Los Angeles with their black role
models, Morris Day and Jerome Benton (see Figure 28) of 1980s funk/rock group The
Time, a group most famous for their musical appearances in Prince's 1984 film Purple
Rain. The Time rocketed into national fame due to the Purple Rain phenomenon, scoring
hit singles with "Jungle Love" and "The Bird." The Time frontmen Day and Benton
gave particularly comedic performances in the Purple Rain film as a buddy duo who was
as funny offstage as they were funky onstage.
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Figure 27: Jay and Silent Bob in freeze-frame at the end ofJay and Silent Bob Strike
Back, an homage to the final shot of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969).
Figure 28: Morris Day and Jerome Benton onstage with The Time in Jay and Silent Bob
Strike Back.
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Thus, Jay and Bob's concluding freeze-frame shot in Jay and Silent Bob Strike
Back is not only an homage to that ur-text of post-classical buddy films, Butch Cassidy
and the Sundance Kid (1969) (see Figure 29), but in its depiction of white male buddies
immortalized in a freeze-frame and surrounded by a band of mostly black associates, it
serves as the launching point and ending point for the themes of this chapter. 1
Figure 29: The closing freeze-frame shot of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
To briefly summarize, Dogma tells the story of two angels, Bartleby (Ben
Affleck) and Loki (Matt Damon), who have been forever banished to earth yet find a
loophole within Catholic dogma that will allow them to regain entrance to Heaven
against the wishes of God. If they successfully enact their plan, all of existence will be
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unmade. So God dispatches several of her minions-an angel called Metatron (Alan
Rickman), a muse called Serendipity (Salma Hayek), and a thirteenth Apostle, Rufus
(Chris Rock)-to assist the so-called Last Scion, Bethany (Linda Fiorentino) to prevent
the two renegade angels from passing through the doorway of a church in Red Bank,
New Jersey. Also joining in the mayhem are two "prophets," Jay and Silent Bob (Jason
Mewes and Kevin Smith) and a vengeful demon named Azrael (Jason Lee). The action
of the film largely consists of the two angels racing Bethany and company to the New
Jersey church, and ends with a violent bloodbath as one of the angels, Bartleby, vents his
centuries-long frustrations upon a bunch of Catholics gathered at the church for a
ceremony. However, God (Alanis Morissette), who throughout the film has been trapped
in a coma in corporeal form, is released by Silent Bob, brings all the churchgoers back to
life, and prevents the angels from entering the church. Existence is saved, the heavenly
beings return to heaven, and Jay, Bob, and Bethany are left on the church steps in the
film's last shot..
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back follows a similar road-movie pattern as Dogma,
but this time, only Jay and Silent Bob's reputations are at stake. Early in the film, the
stoner duo learn that a movie based upon their comic-book likenesses, Bluntman and
Chronic, is being made by Miramax and that, as a result, internet bloggers are saying
insulting things about "Jay and Silent Bob" on a movie-buff website. This upsets the
"real-life" slacker duo and they vow to travel from New Jersey to Hollywood to prevent
the Bluntman and Chronic movie from being made. On the way to California, Jay and
Bob accept a ride from a group of four female diamond thieves who set the slackers up as
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"patsies" to take the fall for one of their crimes: Jay and Bob steal an orangutan from a
chemical testing facility while the thieves rob a diamond exchange next door. Thus Jay
and Bob spend most of the film running from a Federal Wildlife Marshal, Willenholly
(Will Ferrell), in the company of a stolen orangutan, all the while attempting to reach
Hollywood. Once they reach L.A., many wacky hijinks ensue, and the film culminates
with one of the thieves, Justice (Shannon Elizabeth), turning in herself and her associates
to the police, thereby exonerating Jay and Bob. Jay and Bob fail to prevent the Bluntman
and Chronic movie from being made, but make enough money from the successful film
to pay for airplane tickets around the country, and they travel around and physically beat
up all the bloggers who made fun of them on the internet. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
ends with the premiere of Bluntman and Chronic and an after-party wherein the duo's
lifelong heroes, Morris Day and The Time, perform "Jungle Love" and ask the two
stoners to join them onstage.
Buddy Comedies and Road Movies
While each of the first three Kevin Smith films qualifies as a male buddy film,
none of them functions as that most enduring of comedic subgenres, the buddy road
movie. Although both Clerks and Chasing Amy feature pivotal sequences that involve
one of their central buddy duos interacting in a car, none of the first three View Askew
films takes its New Jersey-based characters any further than a local funeral, a suburban
shopping mall and dirt market, or nearby New York City. Both Dogma and Jay and
Silent Bob Strike Back, by contrast, fully embrace the conventions of the buddy road
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movie: Dogma traces two different buddy pairs as they race from points in the American
midwest (Wisconsin and Illinois) to a church in New Jersey, while Jay and Silent Bob
follows its titular heroes from their hometown of Leonardo, New Jersey, to that most
ubiquitous and overdetermined of road-movie destinations, Hollywood, California. This
chapter explores the implications of these films's placement in this specific subgenre,
arguing that both of these films more or less fit Robert Lang's description of the "new
queer road movie" (335, 342-6).
Historically, Dogma and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back were produced and
released at a time (post-Chasing Amy) when the so-called "mainstreaming" of queerness
was well underway in the independent and, to a lesser extent, studio sectors. The key
example of this trend took place in 1999, the year ofDogma's release, when Hilary
Swank won a Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of real-life transgendered teen
Brandon Teena in Kimberly Peirce's independently produced Boys Don't Cry. This
Oscar win by Swank has been widely acknowledged as a turning point in the fortunes of
independent queer cinema, a moment where A-list actors and the major Hollywood
studios realized that to "play queer" could not only be profitable but could win Oscars as
well (which is in itself profitable). No doubt this film and Swank's resultant Oscar win
laid the groundwork for future queer portrayals by straight, mainstream stars like, for
example, Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain (2005).
Further, 1999 marks a turning point in the careers of Kevin Smith and his View
Askew Productions team. After returning to their humble economic roots in 1997,
making the critically acclaimed Chasing Amy for the ultra-low sum of $250,000, View
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Askew would now, on Dogma, work with a $10 million budget, almost double that of the
next-most expensive View Askew film to date, Mallrats ($6 million). Hence Dogma,
which had been gestating in Smith's imagination since before 1994, would be more epic
in scope and more special-effects laden than any previous View Askew film (Muir 112,
115). Further, on the basis of its increased budget and the cache of Chasing Amy's
widespread critical acclaim, it would attract respected indie and studio veterans like
Robert Yeoman (Director of Photography on all ofWes Anderson's films and The Squid
and the Whale), Howard Shore (composer for Big, most of David Cronenberg's films,
and The Lord ofthe Rings trilogy), and special effects wizard Vincent Guastini (Requiem
for a Dream, Hannibal) to key creative positions, and A-list actors such as Alan
Rickman, Salma Hayek, and comedian Chris Rock.2 These factors represent a major
overhaul to how View Askew would make movies from this point forward; the days of
four crewpeople shooting at night in cheaply obtained locations, which was how the
entirety of Clerks and much ofAmy was shot, were now gone, and View Askew would
make Dogma and all its subsequent films in a way that is much more akin to the typical
procedures of a major studio production. Smith and company had now entered the
cinematic "big league," and would celebrate this rise in economic power by making a
comic-book fantasy road movie featuring demons, angels, God, a poop monster, and, of
course, an increased dose of highly visible queerness.
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Superhero Comics, Queerness, and the Road
Before discussing Dogma and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back themselves, we
must first take a look at another View Askew-produced queer buddy road "movie" that
takes the form of a comic book: Chasing Dogma, the Smith-penned comic-book prequel
to Dogma. Illustrated by Duncan Fegredo, the lasciviously over-the-top book provides an
explanation for how Jay and Silent Bob make their way from Leonardo, New Jersey, to
McHenry, Illinois between the events of Chasing Amy and Dogma. Along the way, the
iconic slacker duo get involved in various sex-, porn-, drug-, and heavy metal-related
escapades, most of which are incredibly far-fetched and fantastical even when compared
to some of the zaniest moments from the first three View Askew films, or at least Clerks
and Chasing Amy. For example, while Clerks ends with a woman inadvertently fucking a
dead man in a darkened bathroom, and Amy depicts a "lesbian" who falls for a guy, none
of these compare to the outrageousness of Jay and Bob working on the set of a porn film
or sheltering a fugitive orangutan while on the run from a federal wildlife marshal. Only
Mallrats, with its comic-book-fantasy sequences involving Jay and Silent Bob,
approaches this level of outright departure from reality. And further, as we shall see in a
moment, the very motive behind the duo's travels in Chasing Dogma is so silly as to be
legible only as fantasy. Hence a shift has been made: we are no longer in a slightly
verbally heightened (due to Smith's prose) version ofa more or less believable slacker
milieu, as in Clerks and Chasing Amy. No, with Chasing Dogma, we are now inhabiting
a version of the View Askewniverse that much more closely resembles the fantastical,
superhero-inspired fancies of Mallrats. Indeed, as if to signal this connection explicitly,
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the opening scene of Chasing Dogma takes place in the apartment of Trish the Dish, a
View Askew character featured only in Mallrats up to this point.
Thus, the Chasing Dogma comic book is noteworthy for how it readies its
audience to accept the narrative innovations, the expanded sense of fantasy, and, finally,
the queerly sexual openness ofDogma. For, as I have indicated, Chasing Dogma not
only reemphasizes the View Askew films's already strong connection to comic book
culture, iconography, and narrative conventions; it ratchets these resonances up a couple
of notches in order to prepare the reader for the fantastical, comic-book-epic proportions
of Dogma.3
The main strategy by which Chasing Dogma achieves its goal of carrying the
View Askew fan from Chasing Amy to Dogma is through its use of continuity, a property
of ongoing, serialized narratives (such as periodical comic books) whereby the official
storyline of a given set of characters and their world evolves and changes over time.
According to the continuity principle, each new installment of a serialized text
contributes new information to the cumulative and ongoing continuity (or "back story")
of a series and its diegetic world.
Yet Chasing Dogma also introduces an element that will eventually, upon the
release ofJay and Silent Bob Strike Back in 2001, create a rupture in the View
Askewniverse continuity: Suzanne the orangutan. First seen during the closing credits of
Mallrats, Suzanne joins Jay and Silent Bob on the road during the third issue of the
Chasing Dogma comic book-an episode that is more or less "imported word-for-word
into Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back" (Miller 86). Indeed, the orangutan and wildlife
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marshal subplot was recycled for use in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back once Smith, post-
Dogma, decided to temporarily abandon plans for Clerks 2 to make a Jay and Silent Bob
movie instead. Hence the dedicated View Askew reader/viewer is confronted with a
contradiction: did Jay and Bob's adventure with Suzanne happen before the events of
Dogma (as per Chasing Dogma) or after those events in the subsequent film, Jay and
Silent Bob Strike Back? Matthew Miller notes that, to his surprise, View Askew fans did
not react negatively to this recycling of the Suzanne story, and in fact "hardly a mention
is made of the [Suzanne] continuity breach" by fans (86). This inattention to a major
continuity break may stem from the relatively lesser number of fans who read Chasing
Dogma compared to the much greater number ofpeople who saw Jay and Silent Bob
Strike Back in theaters and on home video. However, it also has to do with how the View
Askewniverse has established its canon.
As the View Askew franchise has grown since 1994, and the View Askewniverse
has expanded into various media forms besides film, "Smith's fandom has evolved [...]
[and now] has more in common with the culture that has coelesced around Star Wars"
(Miller 87). Indeed, this should come as no surprise since Smith is such an ardent Star
Wars fan himself. But how exactly does his View Askewniverse emulate the Star Wars
textual universe in such a way as to negate the effect of the continuity breach created
between Chasing Dogma and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back? By instating a hierarchal
canon in which certain texts, i.e., the View Askew films, have the greatest level of
canonicity and thus stand as the "official" version of View Askewniverse events, even
when contradicted by less canonical texts such as the Clerks Animated Series or the View
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Askew comic books. View Askew fans understand this hierarchy and thus would not be
confused by JSBSB's repeating of the Suzanne episode-in fact, as of its inclusion in that
film, that episode would be understood as "officially" taking place after the events of
Dogma.
Despite the less-canonical status of View Askew comics vis-a-vis the films, comic
book culture, fandom, and especially continuity have been a part of the View
Askewniverse nearly from its inception: View Askew's second feature, Mallrats, was
released simultaneously in 1995 with The Mallrats Companion Book, a Mallrats
screenplay and trivia book that formally resembles a comic, and starting in 1998, Smith
began work in earnest on actual comic book stories based on Clerks, and of course
Chasing Dogma itself. But while the Clerks comic book and The Mallrats Companion
Book provided stories or anecdotes involving View Askew characters that were
apoclyphal or supplemental to the main View Askew continuity, Chasing Dogma marks
the first time a comic book narrative was offered forth as a necessary component of the
overall View Askew story arc. How else do Jay and Bob reach Illinois by the beginning
ofDogma if not via the road trip they embark on in Chasing Dogma?
Indeed, Jay provides a brief recap of the duo's Chasing Dogma adventures thirty
minutes into Dogma: Bethany asks Jay how he and Silent Bob came to be in Illinois, and
Jay, referring to the fictional Illinois city of Shermer, the setting of most of John
Hughes's 1980s teen films4, explains:
See, all these movies take place in this small town called Shermer in
Illinois, where all the honeys are top-shelf but all the dudes are whiny
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pussIes. [...] [Best] of all, there was no one dea1in', man. Then it hits
me: we could live like fat rats if we were the blunt connection in Shermer,
Illinois! So we collected some money we were owed, and caught a bus.
Thanks to Jay's explanation, the events of Dogma, and Jay and Bob's relocation from
Jersey to Illinois just prior, can be understood without reading Chasing Dogma. Yet it is
noteworthy that Smith and View Askew chose to release a comic book as the textual
bridge between these two important movies, Chasing Amy and Dogma. In tone, Chasing
Dogma actually presages Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back: both star Jay and Bob as central
protagonists (instead of their usual supporting roles) and therefore the emphases are on
fast pacing, fou11anguage, and sexually and scata10gically explicit humor. However, like
Chasing Amy and its View Askew predecessors, Chasing Dogma is chock full of pop-
cultural and View Askew-specific references and in-jokes, not the least of which is its
presentation of Neil Patrick Harris of "Doogie Howser, M.D." fame as an aspiring porn
director.5 And like Dogma, Chasing Dogma begins to treat the View Askew characters
like comic book superheroes and to plunge them into increasingly more improbable and
fantastical situations, including meeting children's television superstar Fred Rogers (he
calls Jay a "scumbag"), working as "fluffers" on a hospita1-themed pornographic film,
and sheltering a fugitive orangutan.
A dedicated View Askew fan, who is very likely comics-savvy and who doubtless
encountered references to the Chasing Dogma comic book when it was promoted (in its
original four-issue form) on the View Askew website in 1998 would be encouraged to
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seek out all the explicit, juicy details of Jay and Bob's pre-Dogma adventures, readily
available in comic-book form. 6
For while Dogma is certainly about spirituality and the Catholic Church, and
likely retains its most dedicated and enthusiastic fans largely on the basis of that content,
it is first and foremost a comic-book movie, aimed at the same fan demographic that has
made up View Askew's core audience since Clerks and Mallrats: white male slacker
comic-book fans. In fact, there was an important precedent, culled by Smith and
company from the comic book industry, for putting religious/mythological content into a
superhero comic context: Neil Gaiman's incredibly popular comic book series The
Sandman (1988-1996).
The Sandman recounts the adventures of Morpheus, the Lord of Dreams, an
anthropomorphic, immortal personification of all dreams. At the start of the series,
Morpheus is captured by an occult group in 1916 and held prisoner for 70 years, but he
escapes and sets about rebuilding his kingdom in the contemporary world. The
Sandman's storylines primarily take place in Morpheus's dream-realm, called the
Dreaming, and the waking world of the contemporary West. However, the character
frequently visits other mythological locales such as Hell, Faerie, ancient Greece, and
Asgard. In this way writer Neil Gaiman is able to bring together characters and stories
from a variety of mythological sources, and in the course of the series Morpheus has
doings with a wide array of mythological and folk figures including Lucifer, Loki, Odin,
Puck (of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream) and even other DC comic-book
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figures such as John Constantine, a character who originated in Alan Moore's Swamp
Thing and also features in his own series, Hellblazer.
The aforementioned Swamp Thing comics title bears special mention here, as it
serves as the original inspiration for Gaiman's work on The Sandman. The Swamp Thing
character first appeared in House ofSecrets #92 (June-July 1971), then, after the success
of the short story in House ofSecrets, DC asked the original creators, Len Wein and
Berni Wrightson, to write an ongoing Swamp Thing series. Hence Swamp Thing #1
(October-November 1972) was created.
In February 1984, soon-to-be-legendary British comics writer Alan Moore took
over writing duties for Swamp Thing, re-envisioning the titular character as a non-human
embodiment of nature rather than a human being fused with plant material. In making
the Swamp Thing non-human, Moore also vastly expanded the hero's powers and, most
significantly, gave him the ability to access the Green, an alternate dimension that
connects all plant life on Earth. Gaiman would later model Morpheus's realm, the
Dreaming, upon Swamp Thing's the Green, and like Moore, Gaiman would bring many
occult, folkloric, and comic-book figures into the diegetic world of his comic series.?
Indeed, Alan Moore's inventive re-imagining of the Swamp Thing character had a
profound effect on mainstream superhero comic books writ large, both in terms of
content and intended audience. With his work on Swamp Thing, Moore began a trend
(most notably continued by Gaiman on The Sandman) of mining the DC Universe's vast
collection of minor supernatural characters to create a mythic atmosphere, and characters
spun off from Moore's series eventually gave rise to DC's Vertigo comic book line. Like
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Moore's Swamp Thing, Vertigo comics titles such as The Sandman, Hellblazer, and
Gaiman's The Books ofMagic were written with adults in mind and often contained
material unsuitable for children. Published under the Vertigo imprint, The Sandman
became a cult "crossover hit" with adults and women. Indeed, much of The Sandman's
readership is female, many are in their twenties or older, and many read no other comics
at all (unlike the typical adolescent male superhero comics reader/collector). By the time
The Sandman series concluded in 1996, it was outselling the titles of DC's flagship
character, Superman.
Of course, a comic book fanboy himself, Kevin Smith is certainly aware of
Moore's and Gaiman's contributions to "mythological" comics and acknowledges his
debt to these sources by thanking Gaiman, Moore, and two other comic writer/artists in
the closing credits to Dogma.8
In fact, Chasing Dogma's very existence indicates that Smith and his cohorts
conceive the View Askewniverse in terms comic-book continuity: the fan is meant to
move seamlessly from film (Chasing Amy) to comic (Chasing Dogma) to film (Dogma),
reading these three texts as one long story. And, at least on the level of plot and
characterization, Dogma does indeed resemble a Sandman-esque superhero comic book
in many crucial ways: it features a pantheon of well-known and lesser-known immortals
who, in a contemporary U.S. setting, clash over obscure yet world-shattering
religious/mythological codes and rituals. Though it retains a sense of comedy
throughout, like Sandman, Dogma is most properly generically classified as superheroic
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fantasy grounded in real and pseudo-real folklore, and is decisively set apart from the
three previous View Askew films on this basis alone.
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back takes the postmodern Sandman principle one step
further, being truly a pastiche-based film that skips readily from genre to genre: it is a
highly condensed View Askew-style comedy for its first twelve and a half minutes, then
becomes in turn a road movie, a live-action version ofa Scooby-Doo cartoon, a 1990s
heist/action movie, a Fugitive-style chase movie, and of course a The Player-esque
deconstruction of the movie business. And yet, because the sense of comedy is much
stronger in Jay and Silent Bob than in Dogma, I think that the former film actually
coheres more fluidly, and is more enjoyable to watch, than its issue-laden and sometimes
unexpectedly violent and gory predecessor. Admittedly, the violence in Dogma can be
explained by the generic shift I have noted, for as a fantasy (rather than teen or romantic
comedy) film, there needs to be action sequences and "realistic" battles.9 Yet the goriness
of some of the images in the film's climax nevertheless strike me as incongruous or
. 10
excessIve.
In any case, Chasing Dogma sets us up to see Dogma and Jay and Silent Bob
Strike Back as literally part of a comic book series's continuity. Unlike Mallrats, which
centers on a comic book fan (Brodie) and includes Batman-esque fantasy sequences, or
Amy, which is about comic book artists, Dogma goes beyond being about comics or the
artists who create them to instead become itself a kind of cinematic comic. It is, in terms
of narrative, a cinematic version of a Neil Gaiman-esque fantasy, making superheroes out
of angels, prophets and muses. And in fact Jay and Bob finally are full-time superheroes
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themselves-not only are they the "heroes" of a real, printed comic book, Chasing
Dogma, they begin the film Dogma by vanquishing an evil threesome of supernatural,
demonic kids. Silent Bob also kills the Golgothan poop monster as well as arch-demon
Azrael-he is Batman/Bluntman, and Jay is his infantilized sidekick, roles that will be
finally made literal in View Askew's fifth film, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. In fact it
is for their formal similarities, particularly their episodic plot structures and superheroic
characterizations, that I wish to group Dogma and Jay and Silent Bob together, as queer
road movies and as superhero "comic book movies."
Yet Chasing Dogma is not only interesting for how it prepares the View Askew
viewer/reader to receive Dogma (and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back for that matter) as a
cinematic superhero-comic narrative, it also "outs" at least one member of its central
buddy duo, Jay and Silent Bob. For while I have argued from the outset of this project
that Jay and Silent Bob have been queer all along-remember Jay's first soliloquy from
Clerks in which he declares that "I'll fuck anything that moves!" and his subsequent offer
to suck off Silent Bob "like a circus seal"-it is not until Chasing Dogma that we find the
first concrete linkage between Jay and the actual term "queer," in an episode that echoes
that first Clerks soliloquy and sets the stage for Jay and Bob's further "outing" in Dogma
and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
The episode in question occurs after Jay and Silent Bob have bought their bus
tickets to Illinois and have decided to spend a goodly chunk of their travel time hanging
out and smoking weed in the bus's onboard lavatory. After an irate passenger accuses
them of committing "George Michaels-type [sic] shenanigans" in there and the bus driver
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finally stops the bus and ejects them, Jay wonders aloud to Silent Bob: "What the fuck is
this country coming to?!? First, we're accused of brown-humping each other, and then
we get kicked to the fucking curb for having a smoke! You know, there was a time when
a man could fuck his friend, and enjoy a goddamn toke, and nobody said shit!" Jay's
tirade is only getting started, and over the next two panels, he expostulates:
[...] What if! wanted to fuck you, Silent Bob? (I'd never, because I
fucking love chicks, man-even though I know you think about cuddling
up to my three-piece set all the time.) But I'm saying "what if' here. Like
the comic book-except it ain't about "What if [Spider-man's teenaged
alter-ego] Peter Parker had been beating off in the lab, and the spider bit
his knob," or some such shit. What if I was all pent up, and all I needed to
keep me from going postal on that bus was to bust a nut in your dark and
stinky?
This passage is remarkable for many reasons, not least for how it confuses/conflates the
kind of "what if' fantasizing that is common amongst comic book fans and writers with
Jay's own (homo-)sexual fantasizing. Jay says that the two types of fantasy are different,
yet he compares and relates them to each other all the same, perhaps dimly aware that the
presence of this statement in an actual comic book tends to undermine the difference he
is attempting to highlight. Jay's sexual fantasies may be more urgent or real than Peter
Parker to him, but his fantasizing takes place in a comic book and thus, from the reader's
perspective, is not much different from what happens to Peter Parker. Yet there is one
more layer to this: Jay at once wants to delineate his sexual "what if'-"What if I wanted
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to fuck you, Silent Bob?"-as being separate from, of a different order than, comic book
fantasizing. His tone suggests that his sexual need to fuck Silent Bob might in fact be
more real, more pressing, more potentially dangerous than mere comics-based
speculations. Yet this is a comic book, where such fantasies and speculations do indeed
happen, are made real themselves at the level of the artwork and narrative. In short, by
evoking a homosexual fantasy in the panels of a comic book, which may be somewhat
different but no less real or unreal in this context, Jay runs the risk of having this very
scary/desirable fantasy of fucking Silent Bob come true! And while Chasing Dogma
does not yet go that far, Jay's indignant speech about his right to harbor such a fantasy
does go one decisive step further.
Two panels later, in a half-page spread centered on the next page, we see Jay,
dressed in women's lingerie, golden hair flying, standing upon a literal "soap" box with
an American flag behind him, shouting: "[...J I should be able to scream-if I so
desired-from the bathrooms of the buses that traverse the unending roads of this great
country, to the bathrooms of the public parks and rest-stops that dot the landscape like a
thousand points of light. .. I'M HERE! I'M QUEER! GET USED TO IT!!!" (see
Figure 30).
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Figure 30: Jay's "soapbox" declaration in Chasing Dogma.
This last tripartite phrase the well-known motto of queer rights activist group
Queer Nation, and Jay's invocation of it is suggestive enough. Yet the passion with
which Jay makes all these declarations, not to mention his hilariously unwitting mention
of "the bathrooms of the public parks and rest-stops that dot the landscape like a thousand
points of light"-a reference both to the stereotypical notion that gay hustlers often work
public rest stops and to George HW Bush's 1989 Inaugural speech about community
organizations as exemplars of the grassroots imperative to "pitch in" and help solve
social problems-belies his understated disavowals ("if! so desired") and confirms for
the reader what has been hinted at in the View Askew films all along: that beneath his
tough-talking, working class, New Jersey masculinity, Jay truly identifies as sexually
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queer. He may not consciously acknowledge or admit it, but as of this passage, the
reader knows it. Jay's fairly explicit outing here creates a site of viewer pleasure that will
be increasingly tapped over the course of Dogma and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
For not only does the audience's knowledge of Jay's queerness as of this moment make
his forthcoming disavowals more pleasurable-we know something Jay doesn't, we
know his homophobic protests are a cover-up-it also adheres to the principle of
continuity by revealing a new truth about an ongoing character (Jay) that a loyal View
Askew fan incorporates into his bank of knowledge of the character's history. This
moment generates a pleasurable inclusion or "knowingness" for View Askew fans who
access this particular text, the first View Askew text wherein Jay's long-connoted
homosexual feelings for Silent Bob are confirmed.
The wriggling verbal dance Jay performs as he makes his way toward this final
not-so-startling declaration is a key example of the difficulty in negotiating the "radical
and irreducible incoherence" that separates homosocial bonding from homosexual desire
in Western culture (Sedgwick, Epistemology 85). Jay's contradictory declarations and
qualifications are also emblematic of the particular difficulties many working class males
encounter in articulating any kind of queer or gay identity. For while historically, queer
practices have been a part of working class masculinity and have even been somewhat
legitimized in certain homosocial environments like the Army or the prison system, queer
identities have been largely a possession of the middle and upper classes.
In this connection, the American flag in the background of Jay's "soap box"
moment, held aloft by a crouching gay muscle man, both helps Jay to disavow the
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content of his speech-since the flag and its bearer mark the panel as a fantasy aside, Jay
might simply be defending queer rights on general principle-and yet simultaneously
expresses the conditions that necessitate that disavowal: to be queer is to be un-American,
and to be queer (in the sense of identity, not behavior) and working-class is impossible,
unexpressable. As Amy Brandzel argues in "Queering Citizenship? Same-Sex Marriage
and the State," "[t]hrough legislation that criminalizes sexualities located outside the
purview of the heterosexual, monogamous family, the [U.S.] state has constructed
heterosexuality as a prerequisite to citizenship and as the unspoken norm of membership
and national belonging" (172). Indeed, Brandzel correctly notes that despite the rhetoric
of inclusion that adheres to the concept of U.S. Citizenship ("Give me your tired, your
poor," etc.), such citizenship is actually a "necessarily exclusive, privileged, and
normative" process that has a long history of excluding the queer and differently raced
(173). One of the key axes upon which this exclusion occurs is along lines of sexuality,
with heterosexual marriage being a major regulatory force in determining who is (and is
not) a U.S. citizen: "by promoting and naturalizing heterosexual marriage as the primary
institution of American domestic life, the state can not only produce heterosexuality as
the norm but also produce heteronormativity as inextricably linked to a properly
gendered, racialized, and sexualized citizenry" (179). Thus Jay's scene with the flag and
the gay muscle men aligns him with the effort to queer American citizenship, to give
voice to the perspective of those who are excluded from heteronormatively gendered,
racialized, and sexualized national belonging.
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Of course, Jay is also forced to disavow his own declaration of queerness because
the person he's talking to, Silent Bob, is also the object of his desire, and he will certainly
queer the friendship ifhis sexual love for Bob comes out into the open. Hence, even after
the sturm and drang of his queer rights speech, Jay looks nervously at Silent Bob and
belatedly says, "Uh...all I'm saying is that. ..uh.. .I can't believe they threw us off the
bus for smoking weed."
This denial to Bob is similar to the one given at the end of Chasing Dogma, on its
very last page. The page depicts of a photo of Jay and Silent Bob (Jason Mewes and
Kevin Smith)-the comic's more photorealistically "real" counterparts, there to comment
on the behavior of their drawn selves-with a series of three descending speech balloons
positioned over Jay. In the first (top) speech balloon, Jay makes a number of disclaimers
about the content of Chasing Dogma, claiming that the book is " a work of parody" and
that no one should sue them for it. In the next balloon, in reference to a scene from
Chapter IV of Chasing Dogma in which he gives a male porn actor a handjob, Jay claims
he "never. .. never. . .jerked no guys off." And then, in the final balloon, he adds,
"Snoogans."
Now "snoogans" (and its variants) is a catch phrase that Jay has used since the
inception of his character, but not until 2001 's Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back does it get
specifically defined. In a scene where Justice has just asked Jay to help her "liberate" an
orangutan from a testing lab (a revisioning of a similar episode from Chasing Dogma),
"snoogans" is defined by Jay:
JUSTICE: [...J It's for a good cause.
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JAY: Oh, it's for the best cause, mon cheri: the cause oflove. Snoogans!
JUSTICE: What the heck is that?
JAY: What's what?
JUSTICE: Snoogans, I believe it was.
JAY: What the fuck do you think it means? It means I'm kidding!
JUSTICE: (disappointed, then suggestively) Oh. Well, that's too bad.
Of course, Jay isn't kidding-we know this because he has already told Silent
Bob that he really loves Justice. So the audience knows that "snoogans" is a similar sort
of pseudo-disavowal as those that appeared in Jay's "I'm here! I'm queer!" speech: it
may fool the person who he is wanting to hide his desire from, but it does not fool the
reader/viewer. So his use of this phrase at the end of the Chasing Dogma disclaimers is a
clear indicator to the reader that his denial of handjobbing guys must be taken ironically,
humorously, and with a very large grain of salt.
New Queer Road Movies
In their introduction to The Road Movie Book, Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark
note that "[a]fter Thelma and Louise [1991], Hollywood films began to recognize [...]
the hospitality of the road to the marginalized and alienated-not only women [...], but
also gays [...], lesbians [...], and people of color" (Cohan and Hark 12). Yet as Robert
Lang argues in his piece from the same collection, it wasn't Hollywood so much as the
independent film sector that specifically cleared the way for what he terms the new queer
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road movie: "Clearly, if the road movie as a genre has developed a new, queer variant, it
is because of what the independent film in the 1990s makes possible" (Lang 332).
Lang delineates the two main features of the new queer road movie as being the
tendencies (1) to feature queer sex workers/hustlers as protagonists and (2) to resist
heteronormative closure, i.e., a happy return to home and family, by the film's
conclusion. I will return to this latter point in my final section, but first let us consider
the figure of the contemporary queer hustler as a road movie protagonist.
As Lang puts it, "the figure of the hustler [...] can be seen as emblematic of the
queer road movie protagonist" in large part because he already makes his living on the
streets: "One of the reasons the hustler can be proposed as an emblematic road movie
figure is that, like the nineteenth-century jlaneur, every hustler can be seen as living his
own daily road movie, whether on the open road or on the streets of the city. But, if the
jlaneur is a man of pleasure, the hustler is a worker, he is on the job" (333, 335). Since
the hustler as described here is inherently homeless and mobile, he is the perfect
candidate to get swept into an adventure on the road. He even has, by virtue of the
portability of the commodity (sex, his body) he sells, the means to fund his travel as he
goes.
This male hustler figure is also quintessentially queer, according to Lang, in part
because his line of work contradicts the usual patriarchal construction of men as agents
and women-only women-as objects of desire: "The figure of the contemporary hustler
[...] threatens the very underpilmings of the patriarchy, in which men can never
themselves serve as commodities on the market" (333). This alone queers him to some
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extent, since he is violating masculine gender codes by selling his body. But in the new
queer road movies, the protagonists are also queer in relation to heteronormative social
constructions like the nuclear family: "the queer subject learns early that [...Jhe has no
place in the traditional family. Ifhe is to be a desiring subject, a sexed body, he must
leave the spaces of home and family" (344). And indeed, as we will see, this description
of a queer subject who must take to the road simply to find a space in which to be queer
applies to Jay and Silent Bob as they take to the road in Chasing Dogma, Dogma and
especially Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
Early in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, after being ejected from a bus for lack of
tickets (in a scene explicitly reminiscent of the bus-eviction episode from Chasing
Dogma), Jay and Silent Bob encounter an old Hitchhiker (George Carlin) standing
alongside the road. This Hitchhiker, it turns out, is a new queer road movie hustler a fa
Lang-a working class and/or homeless man who apparently makes his way in life by
trading rides for sexual favors. In fact, he explicitly links hustling (in the form of giving
blowjobs for rides) with the rules of "the unspoken book of the road," reinforcing Lang's
idea that the road is a liminal space where hustling is a typical way of doing business.
Indeed, when Jay and Bob protest that they could not fellate someone in exchange for a
ride because "we ain't gay", the hitchhiker admonishes them: "Don't be so suburban!
It's the new millennium. Gay, straight-it's all the same now. There are no more lines."
And to this quintessentially queer statement he adds, "Hey, all the hitchers do this. Why
do you think people pick us up? If you get a ride, it's expected-I don't care who the
driver is." In addition to setting up an impending joke involving Jay and a sedan-driving
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nun, Carlin's hitchhiker has here perfectly delineated the hustler-based economy of the
road, intimating that hustling is indeed so integral to the act of hitchhiking/road tripping
that it is, in the new millennium, "expected."
It bears noting that even before his encounter with the hitchhiker, Jay is a full-
time drug dealer, which can be read as an alternate form of hustling. Like the sexual
hustlers played by River Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho (1991) or Jon Voight in
Midnight Cowboy (1969), Jay lives a life making money on the street-or more to the
point, on the street in front of the Leonardo Quick Stop, the setting of Clerks. Jay's fairly
constant shouting of sexually explicit phrases, including propositioning female passersby,
as he stands in front of the Quick Stop aligns him somewhat with the figure of the pimp
or hustler, albeit in an exaggerated, comedic way.
However, by the end of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, the Hitchhiker's advice to
Jay takes hold, and Jay is a full-blown (pun intended) ora1-sex-giving hustler by the time
he reaches Hollywood. And while the "road b10wjob" Jay gives is sexually straight-
when we see him finish going down on a charitable driver as they pull up to a Los
Angeles streetcorner, that driver is female-it will not take Jay (or rather, writer Smith)
long to land the slacker duo in a situation that will reverse that gender polarity and,
significantly, will get as close as View Askew has ever been to explicitly
admitting/depicting the homoerotic charge that exists between Jay and Bob.
Once in L.A., the duo seek out the Miramax studio lot in order to sabotage the
Bluntman and Chronic movie that they perceive to be the cause of their names being
slandered on the internet. After Jay and Silent Bob are pursued and caught by Miramax
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security guard Gordon (Diedrich Bader) for illegally entering the lot, Jay uses his
pimping skills to parlay the duo's way out of going to prison:
JAY: [to guard] Hey, I'll make you a deal, this guy [indicates Bob] will
suck your dick off if you let us go!
GUARD: Ha! Contrary to what you believe, not everyone in the industry
is a homosexual.
JAY: How about this deal: he'll suck my dick while you watch and jerk
off.
GUARD: All right. [pulls them around a comer] Make it fast-and sexy.
JAY: [to Bob] It's either this or jail--and you know what they do to you
in jail.
GUARD: [nods to Bob, confirming Jay's statement] I was a guard.
As Silent Bob consents and gets onto his knees in front of Jay, the guard instructs him:
"Alright. After it's all over, you say, 'Oh, what a lovely tea party. '" Silent Bob then
opens his mouth wide and slowly inches his face forward toward Jay's crotch. Both the
guard and Silent Bob anticipate the coming sexual deed, the former with relish, the latter
with some terror (see Figure 31). Their facial expressions generate narrative suspense
here-will Bob and Jay finally make sexual contact?-that is meant to be comedic,
terrifying, and even titillating: Bob is scared and thereby can serve as surrogate for more
homophobic viewers, but the guard is unabashedly excited, having scored quite the deal
in getting to see these two go at it, and he provides an entry point into the text for those of
us who would finally like to see Jay and Bob consummate their bond in this way. This,
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in condensed form, is what all the View Askew films to this point have been about:
watching two male buddies who clearly love each other struggle (usually under
exaggerated comedic circumstances) with their feelings of fear, hOlTor, titillation, and
desire in the face of their own queer sexuality.
Figure 31: "Ooh what a lovely tea party."
Of course, at the last possible pre-fellatio moment, Jay knocks the guard over the
head and the duo escapes, but not before Jay says to his longtime "heterosexual life
mate": "Oooh, dude, you were really going to suck my dick!" Bob shakes his head in
denial, but after Jay walks out of frame, Bob turns directly to the camera and nods
affirmatively, belying his earlier terror (see Figure 32).
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The "What A Lovely Tea Party" sequence is significant for many reasons: it
connects homosexual deeds to prison and implicates prison guards in voyeurism, it places
Jay in the role of pimp to Silent Bob's hustler, and finally, its denouement solidifies what
many fans have suspected for some time: that Bob does indeed queerly desire Jay.
Literally ifnot audibly, Silent Bob's "silence" around his desire for Jay is broken with his
knowing nod to the camera. Formally speaking, this moment is rendered doubly
significant by Bob's breaking of the fourth wall and his offscreen identity as Smith
himself. Is Smith also nodding to us, admitting to a queer sexuality that extends beyond
the Bob character and the cinematic world he inhabits? The film and Smith are
delectably, titillatingly ambiguous on this issue.
Figure 32: Silent Bob's knowing look at the camera tells all.
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This is one of the most important queer scenes in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
and possibly the entire View Askew oeuvre, for it also carefully delineates a type of
homosexual desire that is firmly rooted in working-class culture (the guard, Jay) and thus
"dare not speak its name." Like Jay and Bob to the hitchhiker early in the film, the guard
disavows being homosexual-he does not identify as queer even though he apparently
likes watching "deviant" sex acts and hearing them compared to tea parties. I I However,
he clearly has non-heteronormative desires and fantasies, and these desires cause him to
take Jay up on his offer of a queer sex show. The fact that Jay and Bob end up as the
stars of this would-be fellatio show is the capping joke of years worth of innuendo and
highly coded yet very suggestive situations between the two buddies. For the guard, he
can disavow his participation in a homoerotic sex act because he is not physically
involved, only watching. Jay and Bob could disavow their homosexual desires (though
Bob doesn't) since they are technically hustling, performing this deed for business
reasons, under external duress.
Racing Queerness on the Road
Once our white slacker buddies hit the road, they enter a permissive milieu away
from home, a wild and transitory place where all kind ofqueer doings might potentially
take place. Thus it becomes increasingly necessary for the members of the buddy pair to
find ways to shore up their presumed heterosexual masculinity, and one key way they do
this is through association with (ostensibly heterosexual but actually very queer) black
masculinity. However, their homophobic disavowals through recourse to cross-racial
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appropriation always fail, and in fact seem to emphasize, rather than suppress, the
homoerotics that exist between them. The more Jay and Bob "race" away from their
queerness, the more they discover that queerness is always already raced and that there is
nowhere for them to run.
I now analyze a long sequence that takes place midway through Dogma,
examining how it brings together discourses of race, queerness and disavowal, and (white
and non-white) working-class masculinity. The sequence in question begins shortly after
Rufus, the thirteenth Apostle (Chris Rock) joins Jay, Silent Bob and Bethany on the road
to New Jersey. The foursome stop for a meal at Mooby's fast food restaurant, where
Rufus reveals that as a dead person, he is able to spy on the living from Heaven and see
everything that each person does, no matter how private. The following brief interchange
ensues between Jay and Rufus:
JAY: Yo, man, tell me something about me.
RUFUS: You masturbate more than anyone on the planet.
JAY: Ah, fuck, everyone knows that, tell me something nobody knows!
RUFUS: When you do it, you're thinking about guys.
JAY: [aside to Bob] Dude, not all the time!
Not only does this episode repeat the exposure/disavowal pattern between Jay and Bob
that we saw earlier in the "I'm here! I'm queer!" passage from Chasing Dogma, it also
represents the first time we have ever been offered external (rather than self-avowed)
evidence that Jay does indeed experience same-sex desire on some level. Jay's
immediate disclaimer to Bob-" Dude, not all the time!"-only confirms for us that Jay
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is not exclusively homosexually desiring; that is, he is likely bisexual or (as Kevin Smith
puts it) "ambisexual" (Kilday 62).
But now that external confirmation of Jay's queerness has come forth, this verbal
disavowal on Jay's part is not strong enough to dispel the threat of same-sex desire
between Jay and his longtime slacker buddy. Hence the two of them adjourn to a nearby
strip club, where, as Jay puts it to Bethany in the next scene, he must "prove to this
bastard I ain't gay" by demonstrating his interest in female stripper Serendipity (Salma
Hayek). What ensues from here is incredibly interesting and fairly complicated.
To begin with, the only other patrons of the strip bar besides Jay, Bob, Rufus and
Bethany are the members of a black street gang, presented in stereotypical fashion,
wearing Adidas-like sportswear and red bandanas. The leader of this five-man gang,
Kane (Dwight Ewell), gets involved in a bidding war with Jay over the favor and
attentions of the stripper, and this sequence unfolds in a series of shots and reverse shots
between Jay and Silent Bob on the one hand, and Kane and his right-hand man on the
other. This visual rhyme between the two duos emphasizes their similarity to one
another, and the internal interactions within each duo align both duos with a stereotypical
black pimp/black bodyguard dynamic.
In fact, the Jay/Silent Bob duo has always functioned thus, with Jay as the duo's
vocal dealer/hustler/pimp, and Bob as the silent provider of "muscle"/bodyguard. Jay
and Bob's identification with this formulation is made explicit in Jay and Silent Bob
Strike Back, when Jay reveals that they have modeled their whole lives after Morris Day
and Jerome Benton, the black buddy duo that fronts funk/rock band The Time, and whose
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onstage antics, including synchronized dancing and Jerome holding up a mirror so Morris
can adjust his hairdo, campily exaggerate this specific type of culturally black buddy
structure. Jay and Bob's longtime appropriation of the pimp/bodyguard trope, rendered
visible in the Dogma strip club scene by the proximity of black buddies enacting the
same structure, is deployed as a further attempt to negate Jay's queer sexuality: what
could be more masculine and heterosexual than a "black" pimp like Morris Day?
Yet as I have already suggested, even pimp par excellence Morris Day subtly
deconstructs his own cool image through comedic/camp exaggeration: his pimp-ness is
so overbearing and silly that he ends up (by design) playing more the buffoon than the
suave seducer of women he seemingly imagines himself to be. 12 As Herman Beavers
writes of this same phenomenon in the comic persona of Eddie Murphy, "as Hollywood
icon, [he enjoys] the luxury of criminal trespass. He can act [...] as a transgressive
figure. [...] As [a] comedian, even striking a violent pose, he means no harm" ("The
Cool Pose" 254). Hence the very quality that allows Murphy (or Day) to assume a "cool
pose" in the first place is also what defangs him: in one swoop he is both presented as
dangerous, transgressive, cool-and rendered harmless by the comedic, performative
nature of that presentation. Of course, this is also what Jay does time and again-enacts
a hypermasculine pose that actually reveal him to be a queerly immature buffoon. Jay's
failure to adequately perform masculinity is based upon his misperception that Morris-
Day-style masculinity is actually masculine and heterosexual, rather than a camp
deconstruction of pimp style. Jay's impersonation of a black pimp, like an Elvis
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impersonation, is a form of failed, "self-damage[d]" masculinity, a performance ofa role
that is itself a performance verging on caricature (Lott 201).
In the Dogma strip club sequence, the link between Jay/Bob and the Morris Day-
esque black pimplbodyguard paradigm is iterated visually, through Jay and Bob's
proximity and similarity to Kane and his lieutenant: in each duo, the pimp (Jay, Kane)
repeatedly nudges his attendant (Bob, unnamed gang member), who then produces
money for the stripper (see Figure 33). Ultimately, Silent Bob is able to produce more
money than Kane's lieutenant does, and so Jay and Bob win Serendipity's attentions,
dramatically staging in one swift sequence the history of white appropriation of black
culture for economic and sexual purposes. 13
Figure 33: "Bodyguard" Silent Bob bids on "pimp" Jay's behalf.
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The entire Jay/Kane bidding competition transpires without any spoken lines: the
soundtrack is dominated instead by the music the stripper dances to, New Edition's 1983
hit single, "Candy Girl.,,14 This choice of song, accompanied by Serendipity's
appearance, serves to infantilize both the black gang members and Jay and Silent Bob:
Serendipity wears big glasses frames and her hair in pigtails, emulating a "little girl"
look-she even sucks her thumb seductively at one point (see Figure 34). And the song,
sung by a then fifteen-year-01d boy perforn1er (New Edition lead singer Ralph Tresvant)
in falsetto, has a distinctly androgynous sound to it. In fact, this motif of ado1escence-
inflected androgyny is carried to its conclusion by Serendipity herself once she comes
offstage and reveals herself to be a Muse, who, like angels and demons in the world of
Dogma, does not possess any sexual organs. Thus Jay and Bob and their black
counterparts are made the butt of a joke when it is revealed to the viewer (but not to
them) that they have engaged in a bidding war over a female-appearing but sexually
neutered androgyne. The masculine, heterosexual practice of bidding over a "female"
object of desire has turned out to be a sham, a performance-just like the masculinity it is
meant to prop up.
Once Serendipity finishes dancing, she comes offstage and is reunited with Rufus,
meets Bethany, and the three of them have a conversation while Jay and Silent Bob, now
literally incorporated into Kane's group as honorary gang members, joke and drink with
the black gang. We do not hear the gang's conversation and none of the black gang
members has yet spoken any lines: they a~e, while boisterous, as voiceless as Silent Bob
as far as the audience is concerned.
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Figure 34: Serendipity's glasses and thumb-sucking androgynize and infantilize her.
Cut to the strip club bathroom, where one of the unnamed gang members gets up
from sitting on the toilet. As he exits, a foul brown ooze bubbles up out of the toilet bowl
in his wake, visually suggesting that whatever foulness is about to arise and take shape
may be in some way connected to this anonymous black man's excrement-a suggestion
that may partially explain the logic of what occurs next. The ooze takes the shape of the
Golgothan, a shit-demon assassin sent to kill Bethany. It bursts into the main room of the
club, and Kane rallies his gang. He asks Jay if the shit-demon is a "friend of yours?" and
Jay replies: "Smoke that motherfucker like it ain't no thang!!" Kane then shouts
"Represent!!" and, brandishing a pistol, leads his four black companions into an offscreen
battle with the monster (see Figure 35). Perhaps as a result of the black gang member's
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suggested complicity in creating the demon-he defecates, then the demon appears-the
gang quickly loses this battle: while we do not see the specifics of the fight, we see all the
gang members dead at the Golgothan's feet in a subsequent shot.
Yes, the death of the black gang at the hands of the Golgothan poop monster
occurs offscreen, which, while no doubt necessitated to some extent by Dogma's budget,
also robs the black gang's heroic deeds of impact or importance, revealing that they were
primarily placed in the strip club to prop up Jay's own insecure masculinity and to make
Silent Bob look better for vanquishing the demon they could not. For after the black
gang members have fulfilled their function of permitting Jay to reinvigorate his
masculine status through their acceptance of him, they are swiftly ushered offscreen and
killed by the poop monster, setting up the demon as a formidable foe that Bob will soon
neutralize with a deodorant spray that "knocks strong odors out." Hence, even after their
demise, the gang continues to serve as a means ofremasculization for both Bob and Jay:
after witnessing their deaths, Jay tells Bob that it "[l]ooks like we're in charge of the gang
now." Jay and Bob's literal appropriation of the black gang and the pimp-style
hypermasculinity it represents is the raison d'etre for this sequence.
As we have seen, the primary way in which Jay and Bob are connected to the
black gang members is through cross-cultural appropriation or impersonation. In fact,
the slacker duo has been appropriating black culture and language ever since their first
appearance in Clerks,15 frequently citing rap lyrics-especially NWA's "Fuck tha Police"
(1988) and other works by NWA member Ice CubeI6-and, as already mentioned,
modeling their entire lives after black buddies Morris Day and Jerome Benton. Jay's
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entire mode of speaking can be reasonably compared to black vernacular street talk: he
uses black slang words like "yo," addresses male associates as "dog" or "G," and he
refers to w.omen as "bitches" until Justice advises him not to in Jay and Silent Bob Strike
Back. This impersonation/appropriation continues at the extra-textual level: the
promotional poster for Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back depicts Jay wearing a huge
knuckle-duster (similar to those worn by the character Radio Raheem in Do The Right
Thing) etched with the film's title
Figure 35: Jay and Silent Bob look on as Kane's gang attacks the poop demon.
Eric Lott argues in his article on Elvis impersonators 17 that working-class white
impersonation of black masculinity is a process in which "blue-collar machismo is
produced and reclaimed in [...] damaged and partial form" (Lott 197). Never able to
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"live up to" the original-be that original Elvis Presley (in the case of Elvis
impersonators) or black musicians/stars (in the cases of Jay, Silent Bob and Presley
himself)-the impersonator is always trapped into performing an image of himself that
"enables a phallic self-inflation but also exposes the insufficiency that requires it" (201).
Lott also notes, however, that impersonation and the "overblown, [...J kitsch"
associations that come with it can constitute a form of working-class resistance to
middle-class cultural norms: "What reads to many as 'bad taste' may just be a refusal to
conform to middle-class [...] expectations" (216). This class-based refusal/resistance is
very much in line with the typical stance of the white male slacker, who is white and
middle-class by definition and uses strategies of apathy, underachievement, stoner-ness,
extended adolescence, and-in Jay and Silent Bob's case-identification
with/appropriation of black cultural tropes in order to distance himself from his own
white, privileged socioeconomic heritage. The slacker feels guilty about his position of
privilege and seeks to repudiate it through his slackerism, much as the Boomer generation
before him repudiated mainstream values by embracing the Civil Rights movement,
Black Power, and other forms of social activism.
Yet I agree with James Snead, in his discussion of white appropriation of black
culture in Disney's Song ofthe South, that cross-racial appropriation-exemplified by the
white fantasy of "leam[ingJ to 'tell Uncle Remus Stories' [...J without blacks"-is
always premised on the suppression or erasure of black desire and agency, and therefore
constitutes a form of racist "cultural plunder" (96, 97). Hence we must remain, I think,
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suspicious of Jay and Silent Bob's desire to approximate and inhabit black cultural
spaces.
And while there is a refreshing element to be found in View Askew's depiction of
black characters who, like Rufus, Hooper X (Chasing Amy), and Jay and Silent Bob
Strike Back's loudmouthed film director Chaka Luther King (Chris Rock), vociferously
resist and denounce the white establishment for its racial inequities, ultimately these films
do to them what Dogma does to Kane's gang: whisks them offstage and forgets them.
Rufus in particular is a frustrating example of this unfulfilled potential. A progressive
mouthpiece for the racism of the Bible, who reminds his companions and the audience
that Jesus of Nazareth was black, Rufus and his concerns over the "spin on [Jesus's]
ethnicity" that constitutes a racist "error you guys have been basing the [Catholic] faith
on" are shunted aside at the end ofDogma: he asks Metatron if God is "ready to make
some of those changes I've been talking about?" Metatron replies with a dubious "We'll
see," Rufus rolls his eyes in exasperation and, like Uncle Remus in Song ofthe South, he
"is not thanked for his intervention, but merely relegated to a marginal position" and
swept offstage with his story left unfinished (Snead 98). Rufus's sole reason for getting
involved in the events of the film in the first place-undoing the racist whitewashing of
Holy Scripture-is blown off as unimportant and Rufus, like Remus, is consigned to
accept white authority, suppress the needs of himself and his ethnic group, and shut up
(Snead 96, 98).
Thus, in the end, despite some wonderful characterizations and moments along
the way (particularly in the case of Hooper from Chasing Amy), View Askew films are
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only able to imagine blacks as stereotypical gang members (Kane et. al.), drug dealers
(Pumpkin Escobar from JSBSB), and Hooper-esque Black-Power extremists (Hooper X,
Chaka Luther King from JSBSB) who are ultimately laughed at, killed, dismissed, and/or
forgotten about by the last reel.
And the Muse, Serendipity, played by Mexican-born actress Salma Hayek, fares
no better. That she is a Muse who spends her time "inspiring" cash out of strip club
clients she refers to as "Horny retards" is indicative of her level of agency within the
Dogma narrative. Serendipity's motives for assisting Bethany on her quest to stop the
two renegade angels is never articulated, and once her initial stripping scene and
confrontation with the Golgothan is over, she is left offscreen for most of the film, only
coming back near the end to deliver information it is too late to do anything about. 18 In
sum, she shows up long enough to strip and inspire the men, vanishes, then pointlessly
reappears at the end to play second fiddle to the white male slackers and the white female
Last Scion.
View Askew vs. Disney and Miramax
As I mentioned earlier, a substantial industrial and economic shift occurred for
View Askew Productions in the wake of Chasing Amy, and the financial success of
Dogma-it grossed more than $30 million, more than any previous View Askew film-
cemented the independent's newfound prosperous status. What this rise in fortunes
seems to have provoked at the filmic level for View Askew is an increased distaste for
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corporate culture, a streak of corporate parody and critique in the films following
Chasing Amy. This trend first emerges in Dogma, in the form of the Mooby's
Corporation, and continues with a vengeance throughout Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
For if, on a thematic level, Dogma is representative of Kevin Smith's struggle
with spirituality and religion, then Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is his comedically
cinematic confrontation with corporate culture, View Askew's increased prosperity, and
the notion of "selling out" for bigger studio budgets versus "keeping it real" as an
independent filmmaker. Yet, in addition to being a very funny deconstruction of the
independent movie business, JSBSB is also something of a private gift to his longtime
fans, a text that truly rewards the faithful View Askew viewer. Not only do the first
twelve and a half minutes constitute one big View Askew in-joke, featuring virtually
every significant View Askew regular, but the entire film is, as I have implied,
representative of View Askew's rise from small-town unknowns to Hollywood players.
And one of the key tropes that View Askew introduces into these later films is a deep
suspicion of the very corporate structures that literally underpin their own continued
existence.
To begin with Dogma, there is a notable scene about halfway through the film-
in fact, it occurs between Serendipity's strip club performance and the appearance of the
Golgothan-wherein renegade angels Bartleby and Loki visit the corporate headquarters
for the fast food chain Mooby's, an obvious reference to McDonald's and its ilk, but also
to the Disney Corporation. Pastor Kenneth Stevenson, the head of the church where
portions of Dogma were shot, is not alone in pointing out that Mooby the cow, the kid-
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friendly Mooby's mascot, is incredibly similar in appearance to Mickey Mouse: "if that's
not Mickey Mouse, I'll eat my hat without salt!" (Judge Not: In the Defense ofDogma).
In the sequence in which Bartleby and Loki confront this Mickey-Mouse surrogate and
his cadre of corporate executives, they condemn all but one of the executives for their
sinful lives and Loki guns most of them down in cold blood. Quite a startling image
when one considers View Askew's corporate position at that moment: making a film for
Miramax, a Disney affiliate, and showing a group of faux-Disney executives getting shot
to death-this is satire of the most brutal cinematic kind!
Early in this chapter I stated that View Askew would make Dogma and all its
subsequent films in a way that is much more akin to the typical procedures of a major
studio production, and that this process would be more or less completed by the time of
JSBSB, the first View Askew film to be shot almost entirely in Los Angeles, on studio
lots. So View Askew's euphemistic attack on Disney, the very company that indirectly
financed their entire career since Clerks (Disney bought Miramax in 1993), may at first
seem contradictory. But I argue that this intense criticism of their own major
entertainment conglomerate, appearing just at the time when Smith and company reached
the apex of their commercial success, allows them to claim an outsider position vis-a-vis
Disney, distancing them from the Disney brand and reasserting their status as indie
filmmakers.
Ultimately, Dogma would become distanced from Disney for an entirely different
reason: the corporation refused to release the film due to threats from the Catholic League
that they would boycott not only the film but Disney theme parks. As John Kenneth
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Muir notes, "Disney, the parent company of Miramax, [...Jhad faced this kind of
censorship before and buckled" (123). So Harvey and Bob Weinstein, CEOs of
Miramax, "put up $12 million of their own cash to buy the rights to Dogma, so Disney
would no longer be attached to any of the controversy" (123). Ultimately the brothers
Weinstein found a distributor for the film, Vancouver, Canada-based Lion's Gate Films
(Muir 123-4).
In fact, this trend of criticizing one's parent company would continue in Jay and
Silent Bob Strike Back, albeit with far less vitriol and violence. In JSBSB, Miramax itself
becomes the object of ridicule, which is especially apropo given that JSBSB was actually
financed by Dimension Films, the Miramax subdivision dedicated to releasing light
comedies and genre pictures such as the Scary Movie franchise. JSBSB and Dimension
were a good fit, and Smith even claims that his move from Miramax to Dimension was
deliberate (Biskind 377). Whether or not this is the case, working for Dimension perhaps
allowed the View Askew filmmakers the leeway they needed to wage a humorous but
fairly spot-on deconstruction of the highly commercialized and somewhat pretentious
entity Miramax had become since the indie days of the early nineties.
This pretentious art-house quality of Miramax's late-90s output is ridiculed early
in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back: three scenes into the film, the titular duo meet Brodie
in his comics shop and learn that the Bluntman and Chronic comic book property (the
same one attributed to Holden and Banky of Chasing Amy) has been optioned by
Miramax:
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JAY: Miramax? I thought they only made classy pictures like The Piano
or The Crying Game.
BRODIE: Once they made She's All That, everything went to helL
Silent Bob nods his assent to Brodie's assessment, which is a not-so-subtle extratextual
reference to Smith's real-life vitriol against Dimension-distributed She's All That during
the test-screening phase of Dogma: John Pierson reports that "[w]hen Dogma started test
market screenings [...] She's All That had either just opened big or was about to open
big. The fact of the matter was thrown in Kevin's face" (Muir 156). No doubt this
comparison on the part of Miramax bigwigs rankled Smith, who has long been disdainful
of independently-produced films with mainstream aesthetics and/or narrative
sensibilities. For example, he is particularly venomous toward Edward Burns's The
Brothers McMullen (1995) on those very grounds: "The Brothers McMullen [...] was a
movie that absolutely could have been made by a maj or studio. It had as much edge as
vanilla ice cream" (Biskind 203-4). To have Dogma, his most ideologically risky project
ever, held to the same market standard as a mainstream-palatable romantic comedy like
She's All That obviously stuck with him.
Further JSBSB gags ridiculing Miramax include a scene in which L.A. crack
dealer Pumpkin Escobar claims that Miramax accounts for 78% of his drug-dealing
business, and another in which Holden (Ben Affleck) claims that Miramax only casts Ben
Affleck and Matt Damon in all their movies, his offhand remark suggesting a sameness
and implied art-house pretentiousness associated with the Miramax films in which
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Affleck and/or Damon play key roles: Good Will Hunting (1997), Rounders, Shakespeare
in Love (both 1998), and The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999).
However, although Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back has a great deal of fun at
Miramax's expense, it ridicules its geek/slacker protagonists even more so. Jay and Bob
are the butt of countless jokes in the film, an especially key instance of this being when
the duo first meet Jay's love interest Justice (Shannon Elizabeth) in a Mooby's fast food
restaurant. This sequence undermines Jay's pretentions to sexual prowess and adult
masculinity via a formal technique common to geek / slacker cinema of the new
millennium: the "realistic" portrayal, and subsequent revocation, of a geek's self-inflating
sexual fantasy.
Early in their journey to Hollywood in JSBSB, Jay and Bob stop at a Mooby's fast
food restaurant to get some breakfast. Before they can order their food, Justice (Shannon
Elizabeth) enters the restaurant and catches Jay's eye immediately. In fact, her entrance
is presented in heightened, fantastical terms: Bon Jovi's "Bad Medicine" blasts onto the
soundtrack, heralding Justice's slow-motion, soft-filtered arrival into the restaurant. This
is Jay's point-of-view: as Justice walks in, she makes lascivious eyes at the camera and
touches her own body suggestively (see Figure 36). Then Jay walks up to her and they
kiss passionately. Seconds later, it is revealed that Justice's suggestive looks and their
shared kiss are all in Jay's imagination: he is actually still standing at the counter next to
Bob, wriggling around uncontrollably, and Justice walks into frame like any typical
person would, sans sexual demonstrativeness, and introduces herself.
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Figure 36: Jay's fantasy of Justice (Shannon Elizabeth).
This trope of being sutured into a geek or slacker's fantasy world, only to have
that world suddenly revealed as fantasy for comedic purposes, is common to much geek
and slacker cinema and television. The TV comedy "Scrubs" (200 I-present) is premised
upon constant depictions of geek protagonist J.D. 's fantasy scenarios, and similar scenes
also occur in mainstream geek films High Fidelity (2000) and Harold and Kumar Go To
White Castle (2004). The point of the trope is to poke fun at the geek's inability to fulfill
the demands of his own fantasy, which typically involves him vanquishing a more
masculine enemy (in High Fidelity Rob and his coworkers beat up an intimidating
romantic rival) or, like Harold in Harold and Kumar or Jay in the Mooby's sequence
under discussion, accessing a beautiful woman sexually. The return of the fantasizer to
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reality exposes his masculine lack and reminds us that he is an infantilized clown rather
than the "manly man" he imagines (or in Harold's case hopes) himself to be.
Yet by the end ofJay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Jay wins Justice's heart: the
film as a whole makes Jay's fantasy come true. This has to do with the geek-as-hero
trope that has in fact dominated Hollywood and independent cinema since the 1970s:
starting with Woody Allen's protagonists and Richard Dreyfuss's "everyman" characters
in the early films of Spielberg, infantilized and nerdy men have increasingly functioned
as the central heroes of comedic and melodramatic narrative cinema in the last quarter of
the twentieth century. And to accompany this new, geeky protagonist is the figure of the
"geek goddess," the beautiful woman who is as dissatisfied with her shallow
"mainstream" female friends and identity as the male geek is alienated from traditional
masculinity and the social capital that comes with it. Geek goddesses are women who
look classically attractive yet are (usually somewhat inexplicably) attracted to feminized,
geeky men: key examples include Heather Graham's Lorraine in Swingers (1996), Elisha
Cuthbert's Danielle (an ex-porn star!) in The Girl Next Door (2004), and of course,
Shannon Elizabeth's roles in the first two American Pie films (1999, 2001) and in Jay
and Silent Bob Strike Back.
Shannon Elizabeth's star image is largely determined by her role as
Czechoslovakian exchange student Nadia in American Pie and American Pie 2. Nadia,
quite simply, functions as a super-hot, sexually available web-geek fantasy. In the first
film, she is caught on a webcam and ogled by every geek in the high school as she
undresses and masturbates in sensitive geek Jim's (Jason Biggs) bedroom. Over the
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course of the first two American Pie films, she loves and pines over the hapless Jim and,
after Jim rejects her (!) in the second film, she falls for ultra-geeky geek Chuck Sherman,
or, as he calls himself, "The Shermanator" (Chris Owen). Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
explicitly and playfully acknowledges this previous history of Elizabeth's by
incorporating American Pie star Jason Biggs into its plot: on the Miramax Studio lot, Jay
asks Biggs if he ever fucked "that Nadia chick," and Biggs, who shamefully admits that
he did not, is ridiculed for the reminder of his cameo by being labeled "the pie fucker," a
reference to a key comedic scene from the first American Pie.
In Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back Elizabeth's character is rendered even more
geek-friendly than the lustful Nadia: after her initial "fantasy" entrance, Justice wears
glasses throughout the remainder ofJSBSB, suggesting that she might be somewhat nerdy
herself and thereby rendering her geek-friendly (see Figure 37). Indeed, Justice is so
incessantly positioned as an object of geeky male heterosexual fantasy that even in the
context of her lesbian diamond thief gang she is singled out for heterosexual affection: in
the first part of their van trip, environmental activist nerd Brent (Sean William Scott,
another American Pie alumnus) singles her out from the other women and makes a pass
at her. In fact, Justice's seemingly heterosexualized position in her lesbian gang may to
some extent echo Alyssa's rejection by her lesbian cohorts in Chasing Amy once they
find out she's dating Holden.
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Figure 37: Justice wears glasses, rendering her geek-friendly.
Not only is Justice made geek-accessible by her eyeglasses, her de-Iesbianization
within the context of her gang, and her remorse over setting up Jay and Bob as patsies,
she also represents a kind of postmodern ideal of exotically attractive womanhood.
Shannon Elizabeth was born Shannon Elizabeth Fadal on September 7, 1973 in Houston,
Texas; her father is of Lebanese descent and her mother has English, Irish, German, and
Cherokee ancestry. Shannon Elizabeth's status as half Lebanese has rendered her an
ideal choice to play ambiguously raced characters such as American Pie's Nadia, who is
Czechoslovakian, and it fosters a kind of global postmodern exoticism that makes her the
pinnacle of contemporary screen attractiveness. As Stuart Hall writes, "there's nothing
that global postmodemism loves better than a certain kind of difference: a touch of
ethnicity, a taste of the exotic, as we say in England, 'a bit of the other' (which in the
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United Kingdom has a sexual as well as an ethnic connotation)" ("What's this Black"
23). In fact, Elizabeth's Persian ancestry is enough a part of her public persona that
after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, she recorded a public service
announcement in which she said, "I'm half Arabic, but I am 100 percent American. What
is going on affects me the same as everyone else." (IMDB.com News. Retrieved October
7, 2007). In this connection Elizabeth signifies similarly to other recent mixed-race
screen ingenues / sex symbols like Jennifer Tilly (half-Chinese American), Rosario
Dawson (half Puerto Rican and Afro-Cuban), and pop star Mariah Carey (half Afro-
Venezuelan).19 The popularity of these stars supports Hall's claim that postmodern pop
culture in fact thrives on (racial, sexual) otherness, so long as it is carefully managed and
contained. This is the very strategy that Smith's work (and much of American
independent cinema writ large) has followed all along.
Comedy, Controversy, and Queer Camp
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back marks a return to form for Smith, who deliberately
set out to make a funny, light comedy after the more seriously themed films Chasing Amy
and Dogma (1999). Interestingly, it was precisely this "light" film that drew the first
public criticisms of Smith's work from a gay rights organization, the Gay and Lesbian
Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). GLAAD objected to Jay and Silent Bob Strike
Back's irreverent treatment of queer situations and the alleged homophobia of its titular
characters, writing a letter to Smith that claimed:
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We, or course, are familiar with your work as a writer and director and
understand that satire is a large part and object of your expression. The
intentional excesses ofJay and Silent Bob Strike Back and over-the-top
characterizations and situations are fundamental to its nature. However,
we believe that satirical sophistication is not a fundamental expectation of
an audience bombarded by fag jokes and gags revolving around genitals
and simulated sex acts. (posted at News Askew on July 31, 2001)
This letter's claim is premised upon an incorrect assumption about satire, that it is
somehow incompatible with "lower" forms of humor and the grotesque. Not only does
Jonathan Swift's classic piece of literary satire, "A Modest Proposal," belie this
assumption, this idea is also contradicted by more recent popular examples such as the
animated TV series "South Park" and Mike Judge's excellent recent film ldiocracy
(2006).
Indeed, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back's main purpose is to satirize homophobic
stoner films and the studios that produce them, so for GLAAD to take the film to task for
how certain audience segments might incorrectly interpret its jokes seems unfair to the
text itself. For while Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back can certainly be read and enjoyed at
a very simplistic level as a buddy comedy, I would suggest that GLAAD may be
seriously underestimating both the film and the View Askew audience here. As I have
argued throughout this chapter, the intended audience for JSBSB is a textually
sophisticated group who is quite used to taking Smith's comedy ironically. Perhaps I am
overestimating this group somewhat, but I would be quite surprised if much of the View
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Askew viewership wasn't savvy to the fact that the "gay joke" in Jay and Silent Bob
Strike Back is on Jay and Bob themselves. The textual clues are far too obvious by this
point in the duo's View Askew career for any but the most wilfully homophobic viewer
to miss that Jay and Bob are queer for each other and that the joke is that they are in
increasingly precarious denial of that fact.
Indeed, despite Jay's pervasive homophobia in JSBSB, which is itself played for
comedy at his expense-remember, since Chasing Dogma or certainly Dogma the
audience knows that Jay is queer-I would be far more worried about the possible
negative effect of Banky's anti-lesbianism in Chasing Amy or the rather flagrant racism
of Dogma, couched as these are in much more "serious," issues-based films. Banky and
Jay may be related homophobic figures, but Banky is given a melodramatic context and
real feelings in Amy that urge us to take him much more seriously than we are ever
meant to take Jay.
Genre must also be taken into consideration here: Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
is a buddy road comedy, and such is offers free license to all manner of non-politically
correct, extreme, and queer events and developments during its on-the-road narrative.
Insofar as the cinematic space of the road constitutes a kind of escape from the
heteronormative dictates of "home," it is very much an anti-moralistic, liminal, queer
space. This is why so many queer films are road films-for example, The Living End,
My Own Private Idaho, Priscilla Queen o/the Desert, and By Hook or By Crook, to name
but a few-and in this sense we can observe that all road movies transpire in what Judith
Halberstam calls "queer time," a temporality inhabited by those who "live in rapid
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bursts" and who therefore appear "immature and even dangerous" to those who adhere to
the heterononnative, middle-class values associated with home (Halberstam 4-5).
Yet perhaps Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is to some extent anti-gay. The text
(or its writer, Smith) seems to be aware of how the film's homophobia will be received,
and GLAAD's objection is anticipated in the film's diegesis: the character of Hooper
(Dwight Ewell) calls the Bluntman and Chronic movie "one ninety minute long gay
joke" as he exits the theater (with gay lover Banky) at the end ofJSBSB. Self-awareness
does not completely forgive transgression, but it does mitigate it, and in fact Hooper's
comment is not the first such textual admission: "Dawson's Creek" star Jason Van Der
Beek (playing himself) lectures Jason Biggs about his inappropriate use ofthe word
"gay" as pejorative in one very funny sequence. And while JSBSB features a
stereotypical trio of "evil" lesbian jewel thieves who are only caught due to the actions of
desirable heterosexual femme Justice, these same villainous lesbians also deconstruct
themselves, calling themselves "walking, talking, bad girl cliches" in the film's final
gunfight. Justice's name alone calls attention to the fact that viewers are to understand
these characters more as caricatures or abstractions than as "real" people.
So ifJay and Silent Bob Strike Back is anti-lesbian or anti-gay at points, it is at
great pains to point out its awareness of that fact. And whatever else it may be, the text is
certainly queer, showing as it does how homoerotics saturate buddy duos despite, or as
part of, their repeated emphatic disavowals.
Further, as commercially oriented and crude (in tenns of its humor) as it may be,
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back may be the only Smith film to achieve something
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approximating a queer camp sensibility. Camp sensibility is a "mode of aestheticism"
whose primary function is to "dethrone the serious" through an emphasis upon "'style'
over 'content,' 'aesthetics' over 'morality,' [and] irony over tragedy (Sontag 277, 288,
287). Camp plays with theatricality, artifice, and surfaces, and often insists that outward
appearances are more important (or at least more fun) than the deeper moral and social
significances found in objects, persons, or texts. Insofar as camp "neutralizes moral
indignation" and "sponsors playfulness" through its ironic aestheticism, it has been
deployed (and successfully received) most frequently by the homosexual community,
which, according to Susan Sontag, has "pinned [its] integration into [mainstream] society
on promoting the aesthetic sense" (290). Sontag thus acknowledges camp's long
historical ties to the gay community, though she ultimately insists that "Camp taste is
much more than homosexual taste" (290).
However, Jack Babuscio has subsequently argued that camp taste is gay taste, that
"[the] term camp describes those elements in a person, situation, or activity which
express, or are created by, a gay sensibility" (40). Interestingly, to accommodate this
definition Babuscio defines "gay sensibility" as "a creative energy reflecting a
consciousness that is different from the mainstream," one that "spring[s] from the fact of
social oppression"-an energy that might more accurately be called queer (40). For
while Babuscio himself does not use the latter term, the uses of camp he describes-as a
kind of secret code between knowing members of a marginalized community-have
certainly been taken up by queer (not just gay) media producers in the 1990s and beyond,
and have given rise to a particular strain of the camp sensibility called queer camp.
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Glyn Davis characterizes queer camp as an ironic form of address that "is used by
queers to speak to other queers, and although it may occasionally be humorous, it is never
'merely' funny; [...] it cannot be used by anyone from 'outside'" and is used to maintain
alterity from mainstream culture (57). Further, Davis concludes, while "[t]he 'gay'
campness of mainstream cinema [...] is fairly democratic and open, [...] the queer camp
of New Queer Cinema is somewhat elitist and exclusive" (59). While I have said that Jay
and Silent Bob Strike Back's queer humor approximates a queer camp sensibility, I do so
because it is important, I think, to preserve camp's historical grounding in the gay and
queer community, and I am also not yet sure if! am ready to claim Smith's work, or at
least JSBSB, for New Queer Cinema or queer camp.20 Yet JSBSB's investment in
addressing a small subcultural crowd-a crowd deeply implicated in the disavowed-yet-
ever-present structures of queer desire I have outlined throughout this chapter-parallels,
and perhaps overlaps with, queer camp's mode of exclusive, elitist audience address.
In this connection, and in addition to the previously discussed queer character
types and thematics germane to the road movie that inhere in JSBSB, I argue that Jay and
Bob's fairly constant litany of homophobic-seeming jokes are in fact a cover for
homoerotic feelings they are unable to articulate. And while their humor may not strictly
qualify as camp in the sense of it being rooted in the concerns of the "out" or self-aware
queer community, insofar as it serves the homosocial buddy duo as a working-class queer
coping strategy, it functions in the same way that camp does for "out" gays and queers.
One of queer camp's key features, for example, is a mode of line delivery by
onscreen characters that "is 'fake', deadpan, redundant" and thereby, "through exposing
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itself as perfonnance, attempts to reveal that there is nothing underneath"(60). While
Smith's work, even the highly postmodern Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, is a bit too
sentimental and in-earnest to be read completely as queer camp as Davis describes it,
there is a sense in which Kevin Smith's elevated and wordy prose has served this
function since the outset of his career, perhaps in some way "expos[ing] the supposed
'naturalness' of everyday behaviour and identity as a sham" (59). Especially in the
mouths of certain actors who struggle with his dense dialogue-perhaps most notably,
Linda Fiorentino in Dogma and Smith's wife, Jennifer Schwalbach Smith, in JSBSB-
this sense of queer (that is, non-essentialist) perfonnativity is highlighted in his films.
Jennifer Schwalbach Smith's appearance in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
deserves further mention, for this casting choice is one way Smith can "have it both
ways" in tenns of the film's pervasive queerness. Schwalbach's appearance in JSBSB
functions as a "straightening" strategy for auteur Smith, especially since her acting and
line delivery are somewhat amateurish compared to that of her immediate costars, Ali
Larter (Varsity Blues, Legally Blonde, NBC's "Heroes") and Eliza Dushku (True Lies,
Bring It On, Fox's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"). Her inexperience calls attention to her
presence as Jennifer Schwalbach, Kevin Smith's wife, reminding the viewer constantly
that Smith has a wife, not to mention a child (that child, Harley Quinn Smith, appears in
the film's opening shot as the "young" Silent Bob). Thus it is safe for Silent Bob to come
out via his "fourth wall"-breaking nod, confinning his queerness, while Schwalbach's
presence here assures us that Smith himself is safely heterosexual. This in no way
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mitigates the queerness of the film itself or its characters, but clears Smith of any overt
suspicion of queer tendencies in his "real life" public persona.2!
To conclude, Robert Lang, discussing that most cherished and, by some accounts,
most queer22 of American road movies, The Wizard ofOz, states that:
While it may be true that many gay men and women see Dorothy's escape
from Kansas as a potent fantasy that speaks to their own sense of
entrapment in a homophobic society, the film, ultimately, is made for that
mythically homogeneous heterosexual mainstream audience [...] who
want ultimately to belong to that mainstream, to take their rightful place in
its familial ordering of affective ties and identities. [...] The new queer
road movie believes in the dream [of Oz, as opposed to the heterocentrist
'reality' ofKansas] - in the sense that queer happiness is understood to be
possible - which is why the new queer road movie eschews the 'happy
ending' ofHollywood cinema, a tacked-on coda that at best is ironic and
at worst a reinstatement of the repressive structures the protagonist(s)
sought to escape" (342-3).
Jay and Bob may believe in the dream and they certainly "escape" in some sense of the
word, but they also conform economically in that they permit the Bluntman and Chronic
film to be produced so long as they get a cut of the profits.
A very queer resolution indeed: Jay and Bob end JSBSB onstage with The Time,
fulfilling their ultimate fantasy of staying on the road in an all-male, nearly all-black
organization. Jay may be "hitched" to a woman, but she is a convicted woman who will
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be kept out of the way for years to come by virtue of her prison sentence; and the
Bluntman and Chronic movie gets made anyway, hence Jay and Bob are presumably, like
their real-world analogues, financially rich. We will pick up their story again in Clerks 2,
but first we must tum to Silent Bob's real-world analogue, Kevin Smith, to examine the
complex interrelations between his status as writer/director, actor, businessperson and
indie icon.
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Notes
1. Jay and Silent Bob are "frozen," that is, retired as characters, at the end ofJay and
Silent Bob Strike Back only to be "unfrozen" again in order to appear, somewhat
improbably, in 2006's Clerks 2.
2. Smith and View Askew producer Scott Mosier have called Chasing Amy a kind of
"calling card" that gained them access to A-list actors for Dogma; its critical status and
credibility allowed them to woo actors like Rickman.
3. In fact, the really dedicated fan would have known at least a few general facts about
Dogma long before Chasing Dogma's release, as Smith had been working on versions of
the Dogma screenplay since as far back as 1994 (Judge Not: In Defense ofDogma).
4. For more on the connection between the 1980s teen films of John Hughes and their
influence on the View Askewniverse, see Chapter III.
5. Neil Patrick Harris is quite a popular icon amongst the slacker set, for he also makes a
delightfully irreverent appearance as himself in the recent stoner films Harold & Kumar
Go To White Castle (2004) and its sequel Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo
Bay (2008). Not to mention his role in Starship Troopers (1997), a satirical sci-fi favorite
of the same (or related) 'smart' film fan set.
6. Not only is Jay and Bob's journey to "Shermer" (actually McHenry), Illinois
significant from an industrial/economic standpoint-Chasing Dogma, released in serial
form in late 1998-early 1999, serves explicitly as a print-form teaser for the then soon-to-
be-released Dogma-it is also interesting for the way in which its central plot device, a
stoner duo traveling across country on the basis of information aboutfictional characters
and locales, presages 2001's Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
7. Gaiman acknowledges his debt to Moore's work on Swamp Thing in his "Sandman
Proposal" found in Absolute Sandman Volume One (546).
8. The segment of the credits in which Moore and Gaiman appear is prefaced thus:
"'DOGMA' is the culmination of a lifetime's worth of disparate spiritual and satirical
influences, which owes a debt to sundry storytellers and word-smiths. [T]hese authors
and instigators I humbly thank in no particular order. .." The two other comics writers
mentioned are Grant Morrison (author of the superb Arkham Asylum) and Matt Wagner
(creator of Grendel). Other notables on the list (of over twenty persons!) include
Cervantes, John Milton, George Carlin, Sam Kinison, and Spike Lee.
9. The decision to include a poop monster action sequence in Dogma actually originated
with Miramax rather than View Askew: according to View Askew historian Vincent
Pereira, "It was [...] a case of making things bigger. [...] The Golgothan and the
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Stygian Triplets weren't in the first draft [of the screenplay but] were all added to give
the film more action" (Muir 113).
10. Muir notes that many critics, including Jeff Giles ofNewsweek and Bruce FeU of
Entertainment Weekly, faulted Dogma for its use of gore and its didactic "speechifying
about religion" (126). Yet its economic success and ongoing popularity among View
Askew fans indicates that I may be in a minority in disliking Dogma for its violence and
didacticism and in strongly preferring Smith's outright comedies like Clerks, Mallrats,
and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
11. The tea party, an upper-class, aristocratic practice-albeit a feminine one due to its
historical connection to women-is rendered queer here, despoiled by its conflation with
a cheap, backstreet gay hustle. This evocation of the tea party could be a form of class
resistance on the part of the presumably working-class guard.
12. This buffoonery/clownishness of the part of Day and Benton is really quite funny and
is a major part of what makes the non-musical segments of the film Purple Rain (1984)
watchable.
13. For excellent sources on the history ofblackface minstrelsy and cross-racial
appropriation, see Eric Lou's Love and Theft.
14. Maurice Starr managed New Edition from 1983-84, but due to financial conflicts, the
boy band parted company with Starr in 1984. Interestingly, Starr responded by promptly
creating the group New Kids on the Block, essentially a carbon-copy of New Edition, but
featuring white, rather than black, teenagers.
15. I am grateful to Kom Kunyosying for first pointing out this connection to me.
16. N.W.A. released the groundbreaking Straight Gutta Compton on 8 August 1988
including Jay's favorite, "Fuck tha Police," as its second track.
17. LoU's article on Elvis impersonators also includes an interesting mention of
Batman's archnemesis The Joker, noting that the Joker is constantly "in whiteface" and
that the ethnic ambiguity this generates "evokes a threatening racial subtext" for the Joker
character (207). LoU adds that the Joker as played by Jack Nicholson in the 1989 Batman
film plays up that threatening subtext by appropriating black cultural signifiers such as
the "Prince soundtrack" and the "rap-rhyming" quality of his speech (207). I would
argue that the more recent Heath Ledger portrayal of the Joker in 2008's The Dark
Knight also plays upon the ambiguous racial coding evoked by the Joker's whiteface to
suggest his embodiment of "faceless" middle-eastern terrorists.
18. Serendipity's 30-minute absence through the second half ofDogma, which
commences only minutes after her first appearance in the film, reminds me of Lieutenant
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Saavik (Robin Curtis), inexplicably left behind on Vulcan at the outset of Star Trek IV, or
even Lieutenant Uhura's (Nichelle Nichols) similar absence throughout much of Star
Trek III. When the action starts, the women disappear.
19. On the male side, there is Italian-American character actor John Turturro, who an
Entertainment Weekly film reviewer recently (on June 13,2008) called "a reliable every-
ethnic" (Schwarzbaum 47). Indeed, Turturro has been a staple of both the independent
scene (a recurring collaborator with Spike Lee and the Coen brothers) and the cinematic
mainstream, playing Spanish, Jewish, Italian, and Palestinian characters, to name a few.
Turturro's ambiguous racing and ubiquity on both sides of the independent / studio divide
speaks to what Stuart Hall calls "the ambiguous appearance of ethnicity at the heart of
global postmodemism" (23).
20. The New Queer Cinema (NQC) refers primarily to a group of queer independent
films released between 1990 and 1992, including The Living End, Paris is Burning, My
Own Private Idaho, and Poison. See also my Introduction.
21. My in-progress book project, Falling Out o/the Closet: Kevin Smith and Post-Closet
Independent Cinema, will explore Smith's late-career "married" persona and
Schwalbach's ongoing presence as an actor in his films.
22. In this connection, see Alexander Doty's convincing argument that The Wizard o/Oz
constitutes a "lesbian fantasy film" in Flaming Classics pp. 49-78.
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CHAPTER VI
"JUST ONE PLEASANTRY SHY OF A COCK IN THE MOUTH":
KEVIN SMITH'S QUEER STAR TEXT
Six and a half minutes into the 2001 straight-to-DVD release An Evening With
Kevin Smith, a three-hour documentary of Smith's 1999 college campus question-and-
answer tour, the filmmakers take their camera outside the lecture hall prior to Smith's
appearance and show us a number of clips of View Askew fans explaining why they love
these films and their auteur. The fourth such clip depicts a male buddy duo dressed up as
their heroes, Jay and Silent Bob: the dark-haired, heavier-set fellow wears a backward
baseball cap and holds a cigarette to suggest "Silent Bob," and his friend "Jay" sports
long blonde hair and a sleeker, more womanly frame akin to that of real-life "Jay" actor
Jason Mewes (see Figure 38). The fan who plays "Silent Bob," interestingly the more
talkative of the two, describes their fandom thus: "Me and my buddy Jay here have spent
a lot of time mentoring ourselves in the ways of Jay and Silent Bob. [...] Clerks is
really where it started off. It's a whole new breed and a whole new era of moviemaking
that [Smith has] brought on, and everything from the Jersey shore has just been
wonderful. Kevin, thanks a lot man, it's been a great ride."
This fan's statement actually does a great job of summarizing the key features of
Kevin Smith's star text, that collection of discourses that make up what is known about
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Smith as a public figure and consumer commodity. The fan mentions: (1) buddies, (2)
Clerks and New Jersey, and (3) a "new era of filmmaking." Then he concludes with (4) a
personal salutation/thanks to Kevin himself. I will briefly address each of these features,
plus the fan's decision to dress up as Bob, as a prelude to mentioning the other, unspoken
element that this fan leaves out: Kevin Smith's queerness.
Figure 38: Two View Askew fans dress up as Silent Bob and Jay.
We have already seen throughout this project that Smith's View Askewniverse
films always feature at least one and usually two or more male buddy pairs. In Chapter II
I traced Smith's indebtedness to the conventions of the buddy road comedy and showed
(in that chapter and in Chapter V) how this is a cinematic subgenre that is particularly
open to homoerotic and queer readings. By mentioning buddies, and dressing up as one
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member of View Askew's most iconic and popular buddy pair, this fan acknowledges
and reproduces the buddy dynamic that is central to understanding Smith's work as a
whole. While we have already discussed the way these buddy pairs function in Smith's
films at length, in this chapter we will examine how buddy dynamics and buddy-based
homosocia1 male groupings shape the relations between Smith-as-starlauteur and his
various creative collaborators at key stages of his career.
The fan also mentions Clerks, saying that that film is "really where it started off."
The "it" he refers to here is undoubtedly his own fandom: he mentions Clerks in order to
establish himself as a certain type of Kevin Smith fan, that is, one who got into Smith's
work early and who may well be something of an indie film aficionado, as I was in the
early nineties. Mentioning Clerks shows off his knowledge of the origins of Smith's
corpus and establishes him as a View Askew fan who has been there from the beginning,
from the debut "cult" feature that few people knew about in the pre-Mallrats and -Amy
years. In fact, this is a behavior common to many Smith fans and indeed, fans of many
other media texts: to describe how (or with which specific text) one became a dedicated
fan. On that score this fan is clear: I got onboard with Clerks.
However, this fan's mention of Clerks is also significant due to the ways in which
that 1994 feature and its production continues to be a constitutive part of Smith's public
persona via its foundational place in the narrative of his rise to cinematic niche-stardom.
Indeed, alongside Robert Rodriguez's famous (if slightly misrepresentative) claim to
have made El Mariachi (1992) for a mere $7000/ Smith's "origin story"-that he made
Clerks for $27,000 of his own money while working full-time in the convenience store
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where it was shot-is arguably one of the most well-known and enduring rags-to-riches
tales in the history of American independent cinema. And as we shall see, it is largely on
the basis of this story, and Smith's enduring love for the ostensibly blue-collar state of
New Jersey, that Smith attempts to maintain his independent "street cred" in the face of
his ever-increasing economic success and mainstream-media recognition.
The Silent Bob fan's claim that Smith has "brought on" a "new era" of
filmmaking is not entirely incorrect either, for as we discussed at the outset of this study,
the independent "slacker" film is one of the two or three most dominant genres in the
1980s-90s independent filmmaking sector. Along with the indie gangster film
(exemplified by the work of Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino) and the films of the bona
fide queer cinema (of Todd Haynes, Gregg Araki, Gus Van Sant, Rose Troche, and
others), the slacker cinema has all but defined the independent film movement of the
90's, and Smith, due in large part to the popularity of Jay and Silent Bob, is slacker
cinema's most iconic writer/director.2
In fact it is the public visibility that Smith incessantly fosters through his frequent
question and answer sessions, his DVD commentaries and introductions, and his strong
internet presence that encourages fan access tolidentification with him. As this chapter
shows, Smith is well aware that his cinematic work creates a site for fan investment in the
"real" Jay and Silent Bob, and in himself as acknowledged auteur of the View
Askewniverse. So the fact that this fan (a) dresses up as Bob and (b) addresses "Smith"
(the camera) directly in a casual if congratulatory tone, is not at all unusual within the
realm of View Askewniverse fandom. In fact, the An Evening With Kevin Smith
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documentary cuts from this fan delivering his pre-show speech outside the auditorium to
his appearance inside the auditorium during the Q & A: a friend at the questioner's
microphone points to the dressed-up Jay and Bob duo and asks Smith, "Do you think that
this guy looks like you over here?" then asks Smith is he would like to hang out with him
and his friends after the show. Again we see the pattern of adoring fandom, exemplified
by the act of two fans dressing up for Smith to see, conflated with seeming casual
familiarity, as in the fan's invite to hang out afterwards:
FAN: We [...J wanted to know ifyou wanted to hang out with us after,
you know, maybe go home and drink some beer, you know. We've got a
big house.
SMITH: (sarcastically, indicating dressed-up fans) Yeah, especially after
that, yeah!
These fans' concurrent adoration and hope/assumption that Smith will actually hang out
with them speaks to the efficacy of Smith's self-presentation as simultaneously a
privileged media star and an "average Joe," a dichotomy that will guide much of our
analysis of Smith's public persona in this chapter. It is a contradictory combination that
Smith humorously acknowledges as somewhat ullilerving in his reply to the microphone-
wielding fan's invitation to hang out.
Although the Silent Bob-garbed fan's talkativeness at first appears at odds with
the figure he is imitating-the onscreen Bob is, after all, Silent-he and his quiet buddy's
rendition of what might be called "Bob and Silent Jay" actually replicates the real-life
stage dynamics between Smith and Mewes. That is, when Smith (as opposed to Bob)
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appears in public, he is quite verbose, and actor Jason Mewes says very little, a trend that
is consistent across all their onstage Q & A appearances and DVD commentary
performances. In fact, Smith's public persona can be reasonably understood as the very
opposite of the Silent Bob character he plays, a kind of "verbose Smith" who incessantly
articulates his own stardom through multiple media outlets, including but not necessarily
limited to: the lecture tour documented in An Evening With Kevin Smith and its 2006
straight-to-DVD sequel An Evening With Kevin Smith 2: Evening Harder, an abundance
of commentaries and introductions on the DVD versions of his films, his postings on the
View Askew website, a collection of essays written by Smith called Silent Bob Speaks
(2004), and most recently, a book-length collection of his blog entries, My Boring-Ass
Life (2007). I argue that this plethora of materials and appearances represents Smith's
effort to (I) encourage the kind ofloyal fandom he is familiar with from the subcultural,
niche-market world of superhero comic-book consumption (see Chapter III), and (2)
carefully control what is believed and said about him, particularly regarding his sexuality
and personal sexual politics-that is, his potential, incessantly suggested queerness.
For amongst this veritable over-abundance of words and multimedia discourses,
what is conspicuously left out? The one central feature that the Bob-emulating fan leaves
out of his litany of Smith's prevalent characteristics is the pervasive homoerotic content
of the View Askew films and Smith's star text. As I stated in the Introduction, the
current project is in part intended as a corrective to the view that Smith's View Askew
films are not queer cinema: I have a clear investment in calling attention to how his work
functions as queer(ed) slacker cinema. However, a crucial component of this queer
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reading strategy is to examine the way in which Smith himself negotiates the queerness
of his own work, and how he publicly manages the contradictions/incoherencies around
male same-sex desire that his films repeatedly, almost obsessively, expose. In this
context, it is helpful to examine both what Smith says on this matter, that is, in what ways
he laughs off, denies, or "explains" the queerness of his work when confronted with such
questions by fans, but also what he does not say, that is, those things he leaves ambiguous
through dismissive jokes and silences.
Thus, in this chapter I argue that Kevin Smith deliberately "plays" with his star
text when speaking or writing for public consumption, using jokes to address questions
about queerness and always maintaining an ambiguity with respect to his own sexuality
that is immensely interesting when considered in light of queer readings of his key
cinematic works.
Fortunately, as mentioned above, Smith has produced a wealth of extra-textual
materials that articulate his stardom, though for reasons of space I will confine myself to
close analysis of only a few of these. My three main texts will be the straight-to-DVD
documentary of Smith's college Q & A tour, An Evening With Kevin Smith (2002), a
View-Askew produced documentary found on the Clerks Tenth Anniversary DVD,
Snowball Effect: The Story ofClerks (2004), and Smith's published essay collection,
Silent Bob Speaks (2004). The latter of these is especially interesting in that its title,
Silent Bob Speaks-also the tagline of the Evening With Kevin Smith DVD-attests to the
slipperiness that exists between the figures of "Kevin Smith" and "Silent Bob." I argue
that this ambiguity between Bob and Smith has played a central role in helping Smith
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achieve and maintain his multimedia popularity, as his portrayal of Bob onscreen affords
him an exceptionally high level of visual recognition, not to mention a site from which he
can generate interest in his off-screen identity as auteur of the entire View Askewniverse.
Chapter VI also briefly examines the multiple media in which Smith's stardom is
articulated, including (in addition to the aforementioned film, print, and online sources)
his television appearances, his work in the comic book industry, and finally, his role as a
commodifier of his own characters via Jay and Silent Bob's Secret Stash, a specialty
store (now in two locations, Red Bank, NJ and Los Angeles) that sells comics and View
Askewniverse products of all kinds. It can be fairly said that Smith currently heads a
minor multimedia "empire," and his vehement defense of George Lucas's recent Star
Wars prequels may have as much to do with a shared penchant for intelligent marketing
practices as it does Smith's well-documented love for the original Star Wars films
themselves.
This emphasis on the role of film economics in the construction of cinematic
auteurship and/as brand recognition is aligned with "industrial auteurism," an approach
(advanced in the work of Jon Lewis, Timothy Corrigan, and Justin Wyatt) that analyzes
the tendency for "distribution companies [to] use film authorship as an industrial category
to increase the market value of individual filmmakers in a largely undifferentiated media
marketplace" (Tzioumakis 60). Smith and his company, View Askew Productions, are
outgrowths of an era wherein industrial auteurism has become the norm, where cinematic
authorship is constructed and promoted by the distributors of the films themselves rather
than granted to a filmmaker by film critics as a result of an extended body of cinematic
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work. Hence, while Smith himself may in fact qualify for more traditional, textually
based auteur status post-1997 (the year the pivotal Chasing Amy was released), since
Smith and View Askew are so actively involved in producing and managing what is
known about the figure of Smith, my primary interest here is in those supplementary
texts-DVD extras, Q & A appearances, documentaries like Snowball Effect-that offer
evidence of how Smith himself constructs his public persona. This makes sense in the
independent film marketplace of the 1990s, which increasingly depends upon industrial
constructions of authorship, and especially in the case of Smith and View Askew, who
promote Smith's auteur status with such gusto in their abundant secondary materials.
Just as I have had to limit which of those many secondary texts I will analyze at
length in this chapter, I have also had to make a few other provisional exclusions. For
one, while View Askew fandom is of great importance to understanding Smith's work, as
has been clear since our discussion of comic book fan culture in Chapter III, the present
chapter will not constitute a thoroughgoing fan reception study but rather an analysis of
how Smith presents himself to his fans, how he manages his own star text. My textual
choices thus include only widely available published works, since any kind of reasonable
analysis of, for example, Smith's online persona and its reception by online fans would
take far more research and space than the present project can accomodate.
In terms of historical scope, this chapter will sketch and analyze Kevin Smith's
public persona or star text from its inception circa 1994 until the end of its first broad
phase in roughly 2001, the year of the (presumed) final View Askewniverse film, Jay and
Silent Bob Strike Back. While, as we shall see, there have been many changes to Smith's
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circumstances and public persona over time, his pre-2001 star persona tends toward a
certain degree of stability, as it hinges upon the same small grouping of primary
characteristics delineated so well by the Silent Bob emulator Ijust described. It is not
until right around the tum of the millennium that two major events take place which
significantly alter Smith's public persona: (1) He meets, marries, and fathers a child with
Jennifer Schwalbach (Smith) in 1999, and (2) He writes and directs his first non-View
Askewniverse film, Jersey Girl, in 2003-04. Hence my present analysis will focus on
Smith's pre-1999 star text, the persona he maintained fairly consistently from Clerks
(1994) until at least Dogma (1999).3
Silent Bob Speaks
Kevin Smith's star text is made up of a wide variety of discourses that are beyond
anyone person's or corporation's control or full comprehension. As Paul McDonald
writes:
Stars are mediated identities, textual constructions, for audiences do not
get the real person but rather a collection of images, words and sounds
which are taken to stand for the person. From their familiarity with a
range of star texts, moviegoers form impressions of the person so that the
star becomes a collection ofmeanings. [...J It is never possible for any
individual member of the audience to comprehensively know all the
textual sources through which the star's identity is represented. (6, 7)
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In Smith's case, despite a wide array of media in which these discourses appear, the core
content of his star text remains fairly stable though the 1990s, repeating the same stories
and biographical "facts" about Smith from his emergence at Sundance 1994 through the
period of transition that began in 1999 with his marriage to Jennifer Schwalbach Smith.
Thus, when relating certain oft-repeated stories in this chapter, I will only directly cite
one key source for each story or fact, thereby avoiding the messiness oflisting the
multiple sources in which these pieces of information get circulated. I will provide
occasional endnotes that specify additional secondary sources for some of the anecdotes
and biographical facts I include.4
"Silent Bob Speaks" is the tagline for the straight-to-DVD release An Evening
With Kevin Smith as well as the title of his book of essays, Silent Bob Speaks. This title,
which attributes "speaking" or authorship to Silent Bob, conflates actual View Askew
author/creator Smith with the onscreen character he plays. And although Smith himself
claims that his decision to play the role of Silent Bob in Clerks was more or less
accidental (a point I will return to shortly), his self-casting in the role of Silent Bob has
yielded innumerable textual and economic benefits to Smith and his View Askew
product. For the oscillating conflation between Smith and Bob not only enriches the
intertextuality and self-reflexivity of his films, it is a primary factor in making the View
Askew brand name recognizable: Smith is at once its owner, founder, auteur, and mascot,
or at least half of its primary duo of mascots. Hence the image of Smith, whose
slackerish off-screen appearance is no far cry from Silent Bob's ubiquitous trench coat
and backwards baseball cap, becomes a super-condensed signifier, the central visual
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emblem, of View Askew Productions and its cinematic output. When Smith makes
public appearances, then, he not only enhances his own auteurist star text, he functions as
a living commercial for the films themselves, encouraging brand-name recognition of the
View Askew brand via the iconography of Silent Bob.
In fact, Jay and Silent Bob collectively constitute a "commercial intertext" that
Smith and View Askew deploy in order to "brand" their cinematic and extra-cinematic
products. And while the use of stars as a means of product differentiation and brand
recognition has been well-established in Hollywood since at least the studio era of the
1920s and 30s, McDonald notes an increased blurring between stars and their texts
starting in the "high concept" 1980s: "To describe this close integration of cinema with
marketability, [Justin] Wyatt uses the term popularised by the industry in the 1980s-'high
concept'-which he describes as 'a fOffil of narrative which is highly marketable'" (79).
Of course, the presence of iconic characters Jay and Silent Bob in every single View
Askew film qualifies those films as high concept and helps to make Smith's narratives
highly marketable, particularly by the time of the later films when the slacker duo have
become beloved to the core View Askew audience. Interestingly, in citing a key example
of high-concept filmmaking, McDonald chooses Tim Burton's Batman (1989), a film we
know to have been influential on Smith. McDonald states that Batman helped solidify
the "trend for high concept production in the 1980s" and goes on to explain that "[i]n the
era of high-concept filmmaking, [...] the image of the star [was used] as a means of
illustrating the premise. [...] [T]he star became the premise, and the premise was the
thing that made the film and other products marketable (79). As we will see, Smith
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seems to have understood the high concept approach from very early in his career: he
transitions from using other people's popular corporate logos as characters in his high
school sketches to using his own characters, particularly Jay and Silent Bob, as logos for
View Askew Productions, the duo of slacker stars that would become the central
"premise" for each of his first five films.
As previously suggested, Smith's presence as one of the two members of View
Askew's central starring duo has helped him to become more recognizable off-screen,
and has helped View Askew and Miramax to market Smith himself, in his role as
independent writer/director, as a media star whose public identity exceeds that of "the
actor who plays Silent Bob." In fact, Smith is one of the most notable beneficiaries of the
1990s indie-film-sector trend toward marketing the independent director as a star in his
own right. The tendency toward what James Schamus calls "infantilized auteurism," the
promotion of first-time indie directors as full-blown cinematic auteurs, was becoming
increasingly widespread by the time Smith sold Clerks to Miramax in 1994: "There are
few first novels in filmmaking, efforts that go into the drawer or up in flames, because
there are no-or very few-second chances. Or, to put it another way, indie film is
almost exclusively a cinema of first films" (qtd. in Biskind 474). As Liz Manne, one-
time head of marketing at Fine Line, bitterly describes the post-1994 indie scene,
[i]t was the independent-director-as-rock-star syndrome. These people
[like Smith] were getting their auteur stripes based on one film. And it
was no longer Andrew Sarris writing about them, it was some dipshit on
E! sticking a microphone in the face of somebody [...] who's never seen a
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Bernardo Bertolucci film in his life, and would not know Antonioni if he
bit him in the ass. It became a mockery. (qtd. in Biskind 165)
As opposed to the prior system, in which auteur status is conferred by a respected film
critic like Sarris assessing a director's sustained body of work, the 1990s independent
film business granted auteur status to promising first-time directors through/as marketing
leverage, using the "director-as-rock-star" technique to make new films and filmmakers
recognizable and thereby sellable. Manne's complaint that this form of auteurism is a
"mockery" results from who is delineating indie auteurs, that is, the distributors,
promoters, and light entertainment journalists like those at E!, and what kind of auteurs
they are promoting, that is, first-time, unproven, and often cinematically ignorant first-
timers.
Smith and Miramax have done a particularly effective job at promoting Smith as
an auteur and all-around independent-media figure. It helps that Smith knows his
persona generates interest/fandom and that he encourages his audience to identify him
with View Askew and its productions:
I spend inordinate amounts of time at my company's website, interacting
with people who like our flicks, and [...] I do panels at three or four big
comic book conventions and numerous college Q & A's per year. [...]
[I]fthe performer puts enough of himself or herself out there that the
audience can identify with, the work-and the quality of the work-
sometimes takes a back seat. It can sag a little, so long as they like you.
(Silent Bob Speaks 108-9)
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Not only does this passage repeat Smith's trademark self-deprecatory assessment of the
quality of his own films, it shows that Smith is well aware of the economic value of the
fan identification generated by his likeable persona and tireless efforts at self-promotion.
Additionally, Smith's role as Silent Bob, one of the two most beloved and
enduring characters in the View Askewniverse, is foundational in this context. While his
incessant blogging, message-board posting, and college Q & A appearances keep him in
the public eye and encourage his fans to view him as "just one of them," accessible and
likeable, it is his role as Silent Bob that has made him so visually recognizable. That
image~an overweight, bearded slacker in a trench coat and backwards baseball cap who
chain-smokes silently at Jay's side~has altered not one whit since the introduction of the
character in 1994. And in fact, as I have already mentioned, Smith's own wardrobe has
tended to emulate that of Silent Bob, particularly in Smith's preference for trench coats
and slacker-esque knee-length shorts.
Perhaps most importantly, Smith's star text writ large~the accumulation of what
is publicly known or perceived about him~is kept relatively consistent and stable over
time through constant repetition of the most salient features of his personal myth, to wit:
Kevin Smith is from New Jersey, he loves comic books and Star Wars, he is an average
Joe who made it big through hard work and $27,000 of his own money, he is loyal to his
(male) buddies and co-workers, he is a writer more than a visual filmmaker, and he is at
least partially responsible for instigating Gen-X slacker cinema. These points emerge
again and again in his Q & A sessions and in star-text generating special DVD features
such as the straight-to-DVD documentary, Snowball Effect: The Story ofClerks (2004).
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Snowball Effect is included as a bonus feature on the 2004 Clerks Tenth
Anniversary DVD, Clerks X, and is immensely interesting for the way in which it
succinctly articulates and links together all the canonical stories about Smith's rise to
independent-sector stardom. It reprises the well-known story of Clerks' production-it
was shot nights in the convenience store where Smith worked at the time-and reveals
that in addition to using credit cards to finance Clerks, Smith also sold parts of his comic
book and videodisc collections to complete production of the film. It tells of his meeting
and subsequent collaboration with Scott Mosier, a point I will return to in the next
section. And most importantly, by showing scenes of his New Jersey hometown,
interviewing his mom and brother, and telling us that after his success with Clerks and
the deal with Miramax, Smith returned to New Jersey and helped his friends fulfill their
dreams of making their own films (Bryan Johnson, Vincent Pereira) and opening a
comic-book store (Walt Flanagan), Snowball Effect reminds us that Smith is still just a
hometown hero who does not forget his buddies. 5 We will complicate this latter model in
upcoming sections, but the point holds that Snowball Effect, released by Miramax with
Clerks X and produced by View Askew Productions, is evidence of Miramax and View
Askew's ongoing canny management of Smith's public persona.
And while Miramax's skill at promoting and marketing their films and
filmmakers is well-documented, Smith himself seems to have been aware quite early on
of the potential appeal of placing his own image as creator/star at the center of his films.
For the construction of Smith's star text began even before Clerks or Snowball Effect,
with his short student film produced during his brief tenure at Vancouver Film School:
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Mae Day: The Crumbling ofa Documentary. Mae Day depicts, through interviews with
the crew including Smith and producing partner Scott Mosier, how a group of film
students led by Smith and Mosier lost their film's subject-a transvestite drag performer
named Mae who leaves town unexpectedly before shooting can begin-and subsequently
made a film about the failure of their project instead. Smith (usually in two-shot with
Mosier) is the most prevalently featured interviewee in Mae Day, thus positioned as the
director, star, and co-auteur of the work. Mae Day's comedic tone, foregrounding of
Smith and Mosier as auteurs, and ubiquitous use of two-shots hints at what is shortly to
come in Clerk<;: raunchy comedy, Smith and Mosier in key on- and off-screen roles
(Silent Bob/writer-director and Willam Black/producer, respectively), and generous use
of two-shots. In terms of Smith's broader post-Clerks career, I see Mae Day as a
harbinger of both his multifaceted stardom (he writes, directs, and stars) and of the
increasing self-reflexivity (Mae Day is a movie about filmmakers unable to make a
movie) his work would evince over the course of the 1990s.
Once Clerks was purchased and distributed by Miramax and became a niche-
market hit, Smith's career and public profile were further abetted by his
friendship/professional relationship with influential producer's representative and
independent cinema guru John Pierson. Pierson included Smith as a "conversational
collaborator" on his 1995 book about his career in indie cinema, Spike, Mike, Slackers
and Dykes, and also featured Smith as a guest on his Independent Film Channel show,
"Split Screen" (1997-2000). These appearances, backed by Pierson's unmatched
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credentials and reputation, helped solidify Smith's position as a visible representative,
perhaps the visible representative, of 1990s independent cinema.
Smith has also been extremely successful at marketing himself as a writer. He
has frequently said that he considers himself more a writer of dialogue than a strictly
visual filmmaker, and while it would be too reductive and misleading to accept his self-
deprecating claim that he has "no visual style," nevertheless it is as a writer that Smith
has particularly flourished. For example, Smith's post-Chasing Amy, Pierson-supported
image as a credible writer/auteur, plus the critical success of Chasing Amy in 1997,
attracted the attention of the major film studios, who would begin to tap Smith as a
screenwriter for comic-book-re1ated projects like the reboot of the Superman cinematic
franchise (as Smith humorously relates on An Evening With Kevin Smith disc 1, chapter
23). Further, Smith has diversified into other writing projects: he worked as a writer of
mainstream superhero comics (most notably on Daredevil at Marvel Comics from 1998-
2000 and Green Arrow at DC from 2001-03) an essayist (writing a monthly column for
UK-based Arena Magazine), and in 2006 his talents as a wordsmith were recognized
publicly when he won the UCLA Jack Benny Award for Comedy.6
Indeed, Smith's emphasis on his identity as a writer, albeit true to his talents,
positions him ideally as a "rock star" director/auteur within the 1990s independent
cinema marketplace. A brief anecdote about another iconic indie writer/director of the
same period, Quentin Tarantino, illustrates how important writing credit is to an
upcoming independent media auteur:
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[Quentin] Tarantino's attorney [...] was faxing over a rider to [Pulp
Fiction co-screenwriter Roger] Avary's Pulp Fiction contract according to
which Avary gave up his co-screenwriting credit in exchange for "story
by" credit. [...] Avary called his friend [Tarantino] and [...] [a]ccording
to him, Tarantino replied, "Well, yeah, I want the credits to end with a title
that says, 'Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. ,,, The reason for
that, says Avary now, was that "when you're positioning yourself to
become a media star, you don't want people to be confused as to who the
star is." (Biskind 170)
This story suggests that Tarantino, like Kevin Smith, is well aware that keeping a close
grip on the writing, the most crucial component of cinematic creatorship alongside
directing, is essential to establishing and maintaining media stardom in the independent
film sector of the 1990s. While Tarantino needed to fudge the facts to lay claim to his
Pulp Fiction writer/director credit, Smith's dedication to screenwriting and control over
the writing and delivery of his films' dialogue is legendary.?
Another similarity between Smith and other successful 1990s independent film
auteurs is his insistence on appearing in his own films. Tarantino gives himself roles in
Reservoir Dogs (as Mr. Brown) and Pulp Fiction (as henpecked house-husband Jimmie),
and Smith's hero Richard Linklater appears (as himself1) in the very first scene of Slacker
(1991) and near the end of Waking Life (2000). Smith adheres to this trend and makes it
work for him in a unique way by having his onscreen character, Silent Bob, say nothing
except at key dramatic moments-usually the climax-of his films. The moment when
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Bob breaks his silence thus becomes a much-anticipated occurrence in each new View
Askew film, and the fact that it is Smith himself, a highly recognizable figure due to his
recurrence as Bob and the similar (if talkative) slacker persona he portrays off-screen,
delivering these lines heightens the impact and humor of Bob's pronouncements, The
knowing View Askew fan knows that Bob will eventually speak, and that it is "really"
writer/director Smith speaking, and as such Bob's speeches take on special significance
and create audience investment in the character and the Askewniverse,
What, then, does Silent Bob say?
The table below outlines Silent Bob's speaking instances for all five of the View
Askewniverse films we have examined so far in this study.
View Askew Film Silent Bob Says.. ,
r--C_le_r_ks ------1 ~!1:.~.2.~~c:.t.g~~ .. Q::I:!1:!<? ..!(? ~!?y ..2Y.~!h Y~~(?!1:~.~.~ .
Mallrats quotes Yoda from The Empire Strikes Back:
"Adventure? Excitement? A Jedi craves
f- ---f .. !1:g!..!h.<?~~ ~h~.!1:g~.1.~.~.............. . .
r--C_h_as_i---!nR'-'--A_m-"'y ---+ ~p~~~~"?~.. §~~!h,!<?n~:>~!P:t'~!(?JY .....
Dogma Quotes Indy Jones from Indiana Jones and
the Last Crusade: "No tickets!"f----------------f - .
DORma "thanks!" - as Smithf--'-'--------------f . .
r-.li_a...LlY_a_n_d_S_l_'le_n_t_B_o_b_S_t_rl_'k_e_B_a_c_k_--t .X<?1.!~ ..~.~.!?y=~.~.~g~g~(?~~!1:.g~p?
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back Negotiates with Banky - Bob's surprising
business acumen
Table 4: What Silent Bob Says
Certain trends stand worthy of note here. First, I note Silent Bob's increased
number of speaking instances in the later films, as if once Smith had taken Bob to the
extreme of Chasing Amy, telling an entire story that is rather transparently Smith's and
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the film's, he created increased audience demand for Speaking Bob. Second, the content
of Bob's speaking occurrences shifts depending upon the film and at which stage in
Smith/Bob's career it takes place. In Clerks and Amy, Bob offers heartfelt, wise
relationship advice, and these early films are Smith's most personal and autobiographical
works: the former humorously documents his time spent working with Bryan Johnson in
the Quick Stop prior to the release of Clerks, and the latter is a fictionalized conflation of
details from his own relationship with Joey Lauren Adams and Scott Mosier's writings
about his circa 1994 crush on Guin Turner (see Chapter IV). In the less personal, more
comic-bookish films like Mallrats and Dogma, Bob tends to quote other pop-cultural
texts, mostly for humorous effect. Of course, these pop-cultural citations also reinforce
the Bob-Smith connection, for Bob loves the same 1980s mainstream films that Smith
does, and Smith frequently quotes from the same movies in his public appearances and in
his film scripts (for example, see Randal's incessant Star Wars and Jaws references in
Clerks).
Silent Bob's second speaking performance in Dogma, and both of his verbal
moments in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, are especially notable for how they
"develop" or complicate the figure of Bob and, perhaps more importantly, even more
strongly conflate him with Smith.
The second time Silent Bob speaks in Dogma, it is during the film's denouement,
after the battle with the two renegade angels has ended. Bob speaks in response to an
admonition from Rufus, the Thirteenth Apostle (Chris Rock)-a reprimand that, within
the diegetic world of the film, is certainly directed toward Jay, not Bob:
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RUFUS: And if you clean up your language, Ijust might put in a good
word [in heaven] for you, too.
SILENT BOB: Thanks!
Jay knows Rufus's line is directed at him and points an accusing finger at Bob, scolding
him for responding to Rufus in his place. But the knowing audience member easily
grasps the non-diegetic implication here: that it is Smith Rufus addresses, admonishing
him for his well-known penchant for blue language in his View Askew screenplays.
Whereas the Smith/Bob conflation in the "Chasing Amy" story sequence of Chasing Amy
still retained some ambiguity-for the uninitiated or overly literal audience member,
Silent Bob could have been telling a story that was indeed his and that had little to do
with Smith's autobiography or auteurship-this moment from Dogma firmly concretizes
the Smith-to-Bob equation since Bob's general silence, relative lack of foul language use
when he does speak, and proximity to Jay clearly exempt him from Rufus's admonition.
So, unlike the scene from Amy that can be read as the character of Bob and the figure of
Smith co-inhabiting the image of Silent Bob, the Dogma scene really can only be read as
Smith: to imagine Silent Bob responding to Rufus here is diegetically absurd. In short,
this moment at the end ofDogma drops the diegetic veil that separates Silent Bob from
Smith, and therefore marks the first unambiguous, bona fide appearance of Smith-as-
Smith in a View Askew film.
Given that the ending ofDogma baldly (if only momentarily) reveals Bob and
Smith to be the same person, and given that Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is View
Askew's most diegetically self-reflexive and fantastical (as opposed to "realistic"-see
346
Chapter V) film to date, we would expect Bob's speaking moments in JSBSB to maintain
this slipperiness between Bob and Smith and to possibly take it to yet another level of
self-reflexivity and postmodem humor. And indeed it does. Bob's first speech in JSBSB
is a shouted diatribe at Jay, in a moment where Bob is exasperated at Jay's inability to
observe clUcial details (the sign "Creatures of Hollywood" on the back of the car that
abducted their orangutan) and to understand his (Bob's) hand movements as he tries to
gesturally describe the sign to him. In some ways this moment is an extension of a
moment from earlier in the film, when Holden McNeil (Ben Affleck) wonders aloud why
the more sensitive, mature Silent Bob doesn't detach himself from Jay:
HOLDEN: Don't you ever want anything more for yourself? [indicates
Bob] I know this poor, hapless sonofabitch does. I look into his sorry,
doe eyes and I see a man crying out. He's crying out: When, Lord? When
the fuck can your servant ditch this foulmouthed little chucklehead to
whom I am a constant victim of his follies?!
Bob nods with dawning understanding during this speech, although he also quickly
reassures Jay with a dismissive shake of the head. But by the time of his shouting fit at
Jay an hour into the film, one wonders: has Silent Bob begun to consider the limitations
of his relationship with Jay? Is a long-felt but long-suppressed exasperation finally
coming to the surface? In short, is Silent Bob growing up and considering other options
besides a permanently arrested homosocial buddy pairing?
Of course, these considerations echo those of Kevin Smith at the time ofJay and
Silent Bob Strike Back's production: he intended the film to be the last of his New Jersey
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chronicles and Jay and Silent Bob's swan song. By marking the official ending of the
View Askewniverse and the Jay and Bob characters, Smith hoped to dissociate himself
from his "dick and fart joke" reputation and re-make himself as a more "mature"
filmmaker with his follow-up to JSBSB, 2004's Jersey Girl. It is particularly notable that
the scene that sets up Bob's anti-Jay diatribe, the scene where Bob first visibly questions
his partnership with Jay, takes place in the presence of Holden, who himself struggled in
Amy between "selling out" (making a "Bluntman and Chronic" cartoon) and creating
something more artistically respectable (his Chasing Amy comic). This struggle is
echoed in Smith's career.
Silent Bob's possible maturation beyond his relationship with Jay, and Smith's
analogous maturation within the world of independent cinema, is reflected in Bob's
second speaking instance in JSBSB. In this segment, Jay and Bob have confronted Banky
Edwards, now sole owner of the Bluntman and Chronic property and executive producer
of the fictional Bluntman and Chronic movie, and are demanding their share of the film's
profits. Banky tries to deny them their due, and Silent Bob launches into a lengthy
speech about the legalities of character likeness rights when they are transferred from one
artistic medium to another. Banky, convinced by Bob's speech, offers the duo one-half
of his movie profits, and they accept. This sharp movie-business acumen on Bob's part
cannot help but suggest Smith's own canny knowledge of multimedia marketing and
business practices: like George Lucas with Star Wars or Warner Communications with
the Batman franchise, Smith and View Askew have demonstrated over the course of their
career a canny knowledge of how to market their intellectual property across a variety of
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media including feature films, short films aired on "The Tonight Show," comic books,
posters, action figures, and straight-to-DVD releases like An Evening With Kevin Smith.
In short, Bob's intricate knowledge of copyright law not only reaffirms the Smith-as-Bob
condensation, it specifically reflects that aspect of Smith that has heretofore been glossed
over: Smith's acute industry know-how. We will return to the elision of Smith's
multimedia promotional skill at the end of this chapter, but for now let me end this
discussion of Silent Bob with a few remarks about his queerness.
Like Dante from Clerks, Silent Bob is more feminized than queered, sensitive and
accommodating but not particularly (queerly) sexualized. He also fits the geeky
"achiever" role as opposed to the clownish "slacker" role in his buddy duo, just like
Dante. Yet it is primarily Bob's silence I want to focus on here, a silence that leaves so
many questions about his sexuality ambiguous. In his first appearance in Clerks, Bob
remains silent as Jay proposes sucking him off, then accuses him of being a "faggot."
Then in Dogma, he calmly accepts Rufus's revelation that Jay thinks about guys when he
jerks off-a piece of infonnation that queerly implicates Bob and his buddy relation with
Jay. And of course, there is the nod to the camera and incessant queer jokes in Jay and
Silent Bob Strike Back, the humor of which all seems to center on the veracity of that
nod: "Yes, indeed," that nod seems to say, "We have been queer all along!" In this
context, Bob's ubiquitous silence and one brief nod serve as the knowingly ironic
counterpoint to Jay's vocal protestations against the duo's queerness. In short, Jay's
insistence that he is straight is not funny unless the audience knows-as Bob seems to
know-that Jay is in fact queer. Bob's apparent knowledge and constant silence combine
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to create a rich ambiguity around Jay and Bob's sexual relationship to each other, and by
extension to all the buddy duos in the Askewniverse.
For Bob's silence taken alone can be read as indicative of culturally
silenced/suppressed desires, as in the infamous "love that dare not speak its name."
Indeed, Alexander Doty and Eve Sedgwick both refer to the incoherence in the male
homosocial continuum as being characterized by cultural "silences and gaps" (Doty,
Flaming Classics 3 and Sedgwick, Epistemology 3-4,67-71). Silent Bob, with his
seeming awareness of the cultural expectations around his behavior, may be responding
to broad social imperatives not to express his non-straight desires, and he may be further
compelled toward silence by his immediate social circumstances: even if Bob
reciprocates Jay's homoerotic desire, which his nod to the camera in Jay and Silent Bob
Strike Back implies, still those kind of desires could not be openly expressed to Jay
himself, Bob's sexually queer yet overtly homophobic best friend. Thus it makes sense
that his affirmative nod to the camera in the wake of the "What a Lovely Tea Party"
sequence is to us, the audience: it is a shared (closeted) secret that the viewer shares with
the figure of Silent Bob. And as we shall see, through a dualistic separation of his public
persona, Smith is largely able to leave that open secret onscreen with Silent Bob, all the
while verbally obsessing over queer sexuality in true Randal- or Jay-like fashion in his
public speaking appearances.
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Dueling Personas
How does Smith's oscillation between the character "Silent Bob" and the public
figure "Kevin Smith" help him to coyly sustain yet carefully contain the homoerotics that
accrue to the onscreen buddy relation of "Bob" (Jay and Bob as possible lovers) and the
cinematic output of "Smith" (the pervasive homoerotics of the View Askew films)?
To respond to these questions I would like to briefly discuss The Dueling
Personas ofKevin Smith, a master's thesis-cum-vanity press book published by "View
Askew Books" in 2003. 8 This work, originally a master's thesis by Emory University
film student Matthew Miller, provides a helpful model for conceptualizing the dual
address of Smith's stardom by identifYing two main aspects of his star text: the comic
book fanboy, represented by the character of Banky from Chasing Amy, and the critically
acclaimed artist, represented by Banky's cohort Holden from the same film. Miller
maintains that after the runaway critical success of Clerks and the subsequent critical
failure of the fanboy friendly Mallrats, Kevin Smith pitted his "two biographies" against
each other in Chasing Amy, and that "the narrative resolution of the film finds Smith's
critical persona [Holden] winning out while the 'fanboy' persona [Banky] is disavowed"
(9). He further argues that the supposed triumph of the critically acclaimed artist over the
lowbrow fanboy helped pave the way for a positive critical reception of the next View
Askew film, 1999's Dogma.
However, while Miller's overall model of two Smith biographies working in
tension with one another is convincing, it is too reductive. For one, his claim that
Smith's fanboy persona is "disavowed" at the end ofAmy, while accurate with respect to
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the Banky character, fails to acknowledge how profoundly comic-bookish Dogma really
is, how indebted it is to the work ofNeil Gaiman and other Dark Age comics-see my
Chapter V. Hence, I see Dogma as evidence of the fruitful interplay of Smith's two
personas, a film that is both a critical favorite (for its "serious" spiritual themes, A-list
actors, and well-crafted dialogue) and a fanboy's delight (with its postmodem
mythological references, sci-fi-esque angels and monsters, and the presence of Jay and
Silent Bob). Thus, I accept Miller's model of two opposing personas detectable in the
work and star text of Smith, but I cannot agree with Miller that they are kept rigidly
"separate" immediately post-Amy (73).
In fact, a possible motivation for Miller's insistence upon the separation of
Smith's "Holden" and "Banky" personas becomes apparent when we examine his
analysis of those two characters in the context of Chasing Amy. For Miller seems
completely unaware of or unwilling to acknowledge the homoerotics that pervade and
motivate Amy's narrative, despite his admission (in his Introduction) that "[a]n
exploration of the tenets of the homosocial bond is implicit in most of Smith's work, and
Chasing Amy, Dogma, and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back explore the boundaries
between the homosocial and the homosexual in the pairings of their characters" (10-11).
In his analysis ofAmy he claims that "personal issues" come between Holden and Banky,
and that "Banky's involvement with the main plot, that a/the relationship between
Holden and Alyssa, is largely tangential" (44, 50, emphasis added). When I first read
these passages I was not surprised to find the author referring to homoerotic desire as
"personal issues," for euphemistic or non-specific language is often used to cover over
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queer sexuality in homophobic texts, but I admit I was shocked by Miller's blatant
misreading ofAmy's plot in the latter half of his analysis.9 Miller wants very badly for
the Holden-Alyssa relationship to be the narrative focus ofAmy, yet as my own analysis
of the film shows (see Chapter IV), the film is ultimately concerned with the relationship
between the two buddies, Holden and Banky, and to call Banky's role in the erotic
triangle that impels the film's narrative "tangential" is simply erroneous. However,
Miller is not alone in wanting to write out, downplay, or disavow the homoerotics of
Smith's work, and his textual strategy of acknowledging queerness generally-akin to
Smith's oft-repeated claim that he likes to "throw a little gay content in there"-but
disavowing specific instances of homoerotic manifestation is one we will see repeated by
Smith himself many times, perhaps most emphatically to a lesbian Q & A participant
during An Evening With Kevin Smith, discussed at length in an upcoming section.
Further, Miller's mapping of the two personas that constitute Smith's star text
onto the characters of Holden and Banky is immensely interesting, for, in its disavowal of
Banky the fanboy and its centralizing of the (presumed heterosexual) relationship
between Holden and Alyssa, it suggests a dual equation of Artist =: Holden =: heterosexual
and Fanboy =: Banky =: homosexual. This happens to agree (more or less) with my own
arguments from the beginning of this project: that one member of the homosocial buddy
duo (in this case Holden) is a feminized underachiever, an apologetic slacker who knows
he should be striving to be something more, and that the second member of the duo (here
Banky) is a queered clown, an unapologetic slacker who is perfectly content to live in the
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present, accompanied by his porno, his comic books, and his best friend. To graph this
onto my duo chart from previous chapters, this looks like:
pgp
Buddy #1: Geek Buddy #2: Slacker
Character Apologetic geek, (under-) achiever I Unapologetic slacker, clown
Type
Characters Dante (Clerks), T.S. (Mallrats), Randal (Clerks), Brodie (Mallrats),
Holden (ChasinfZ Amy), Silent Bob Banky (Chasing Amy), Jay
Gender feminized - whiny, passive, gets masculinized - snarky, rebellious,
dumped and/or manipulated by cares more about pop culture, video
masculinized women and is games, and/or comics than
troubled by it heterosexual relationships
Sexuality seemingly straight queer - into deviant sexuality and is
frequently asexulized vis-a-vis
women
Development aspires toward maturity but fails puerile, infantilized
Temporality mired in past and/or future lives in present
Role romantic rota onist/su erhero comedic "sidekick"
Table 5: Buddy Pairs in Clerks, Mallrats, and Chasing Amy, Expanded
Interestingly, though we might expect Smith to follow Miller's suit in denying the
possible homosexuality/bisexuality of the Banky and Randal (queered fanboy) figure, he
has in fact never shied away from acknowledging that Jay is "ambisexual" (Kilday 62),
and the textual evidence in Chasing Amy (not to mention the denouement ofJSBSB)
makes clear that Smith conceives Banky as gay. And yet, as we shall soon discuss in
detail, Smith himself seems broadly to identifY with the (feminized, artistic, sexually
conservative) characters on the left side of this chart, and to desire (or want to be) the
(queer, fanboy, deviant) characters on the right side. As we shall see, Smith's onstage
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persona during Q & A sessions primarily emulates that of RandallBrodie/Banky: he acts
as an outwardly confident, talkative, joke-cracking figure who is also sexually queered.
In short, he plays out his desires by inhabiting the role opposite that which he plays in the
films, thus producing a tripartite ambiguity between the onscreen character Silent Bob
(left side of chart), his onstage character Kevin Smith (right side of chart), and the auteur
Kevin Smith, who is some slippery combination of both of these, and more. This
ambiguity allows for much queer titillation without much specific avowal, and is
characteristic of the entire process by which Smith's star persona is produced and
maintained.
The very existence of The Dueling Personas ofKevin Smith as a published work
is further evidence of the ambiguous way in which Smith and View Askew manage
Smith's self-promotion. Not only is the book published by vanity press View Askew
Books, it also carries an endorsement from Smith himself on its back cover: "I get handed
about ten thesis papers about me a year. [The Dueling Personas ofKevin Smith] is the
most fascinating one I've read." Although this comment actually says very little of
substance, its presence on the back cover of this View-Askew-published book implies
Smith's approval, and I think Smith's endorsement is very interesting in light of Miller's
misreading of the erotics of Chasing Amy, and the suppression/disavowal ofhomoerotics
that so often accompanies descriptions of Smith's cinematic work. For Smith and Miller
seem to agree on at least one key point: acknowledging or discussing the homosocial
(male buddy relations, bonding practices, and non-sexual affection) in View Askew films
is okay, but the minute that homosociality blurs into the homoerotic it must be
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disavowed, written out, or laughed off. We will see how Smith himself negotiates this
precarious dance in the sections that follow.
Real-Life Buddy Duos
While in the previous section, following Miller, I analyzed one duality that
characterizes the figure of Kevin Smith primarily through his cinematic work, in this case
a model based upon characters and themes from Chasing Amy, now I wish to return to the
extra-textual side of Smith's star persona, examining some ofhis real-life buddy
relationships as they are (re-)presented by Smith himself.
For while I refute the idea that Kevin Smith's films directly reflect his life in
some simple, one-to-one ratio, nevertheless the buddy duos in his films, especially his
critically acclaimed debut Clerks, are promoted in View Askew materials as being based
upon certain of Smith's friends and life experiences. Hence it pays to briefly examine
those real-life buddy duos that inspired some of his most enduring cinematic creations,
and to see how Smith's corporate and production practices are reflective of/relate to View
Askew's cinematic-textual output.
The View Askew-produced documentary Snowball Effect: The Story of 'Clerks'
reveals that Kevin Smith's creativity, perhaps even his nascent auteurist approach to
writing and directing, took shape in the context of a group of male buddies / co-
collaborators as early as high school. In his high school days, Smith co-founded a troupe
oflive sketch comedy performers called S.C.M.O.D:s. with friends Ernest O'Donnell
and Mike Belicose. The group's name is an acronym for "State County Municipal
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Offender Data System" and is a reference to the 1980 musical-comedy film The Blues
Brothers. The troupe was so named because O'Donnell and Smith loved The Blues
Brothers and dressed up as the Blues Brothers characters for Halloween during middle
school: hence, shared boyhood fandom leads to public performance of that fandom and
subsequent original performance work written and overseen by Smith. For, according to
Snowball Effect, Smith wrote and directed S.C.M.O.D.S.'s sketches, applying elaborate
makeup for all the actors and, as O'Donnell succinctly puts it, doing "everything" to
prepare the skits for stage. The trio of Smith, O'Donnell and Belicose performed Smith's
sketches at six of the school's frequent talent shows, garnering local accolades for their
work. 10
However, in late high school Smith's social group shifted-O'Donnell and Smith
had a "falling out" senior year-and the aspiring comedy writer met and befriended the
man who would introduce him to comic book collecting, Walter Flanagan, and the
"prototypical slacker" who would serve as the template for Clerks' Randal, Bryan
Johnson. Yet despite this change to his "cast of characters," Smith's desire to write
material and co-produce it with his friends remained intact, and when he departed for
Vancouver Film School four years later, it was with the ostensible plan to return to New
Jersey, "teach Bry, Walt, and [friend] Ed [Hapstak] how to operate something [on a film
set] and we'd be off and running" (Snowball Effect). Smith may have been the instigator,
writer, and director, the Dante-esque achiever reaching for something more, but he
always had his close, male, slacker friends in mind when he hatched his creative
schemes.
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And it was through his homosocial buddy networks that Smith met some of the
key individuals who would continue to work with him into the View Askew Productions
period. The most significant of these is Jason Mewes, who would literally become the
onscreen "Jay" to Smith's "Silent Bob." Though Mewes is four years younger than
Smith, the two met when Smith was hanging out at the Highlands Recreation Center with
Bryan Johnson, Walt Flanagan, and Ed Hapstak. Johnson and Flanagan in particular
embraced the younger Mewes, and that is how Smith met him and realized he was a
"comic genius," a foul-mouthed muse for his View Askew films.
Interestingly, Mewes and Smith began as rivals, for Smith's friends enjoyed
Mewes for the same-and thus, in Smith's mind, competing-reason that they liked
Smith: his sense of humor. On Snowball Effect and elsewhere, Smith recounts the story
of one of the first times he met Mewes, when the younger man accompanied Smith's
group to an out-of-town comic book show. As Smith relates it, Mewes was making
Flanagan and Johnson "crack up" during the whole drive to the show, while Smith sulked
in the backseat of the car, thinking to himself: "He's not so fuckin' funny." Yet in time,
Smith and Mewes would become close friends and eventual longtime housemates, and
most significantly Smith would develop Mewes's sixteen-year-old personality-the
version of Jason he so resented on that fateful car ride-into his most popular View
Askewniverse character, the loudmouthed stoner "Jay."
This pattern of rivalry-turned-close bond repeated itself when Smith met fellow
aspiring filmmaker Scott Mosier at the Vancouver Film School in early 1992. Indeed, in
this case the initial dislike would be mutual. On Snowball Effect and elsewhere Mosier
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notes that his first impression of Smith was that he looked like a "smartass [in his] trench
coat," and he (Mosier) dubiously wondered: "Who the fuck is this guy?" As for Smith's
reaction to Mosier, he says he thought the soft-spoken Washington native looked like a
"pretty boy, [...] he looked like a 90210 kid, [with] product in his hair," a style that the
duo would sum up together in an interesting way in 2004:
MOSIER: I had just came [sic] from L.A. [...] I was pretty much~
SMITH: Gay.
MOSIER: (smiles) Yeah, I was gay.
Their mutual labeling of Mosier as "gay," and Mosier's subsequent assertion that what
ultimately brought them together was their shared "disdain for authority" (Snowball
Effect), is remarkable for its Freudian implications: as Troyer and Marchiselli maintain in
reference to cinematic "dude cinema" buddy pairs, buddy duos are always "confused
adolescent homophobes, frightened of, yet bent on escaping, paternal controls and fixated
on the talismanic bodies of women" (267). I would add that the "paternal controls"
slackers resist can be embodied by masculine, phallic women such as Clerks' Veronica or
Chasing Amy's Alyssa, and hence the slacker duo's fear and repulsion toward the father
or masculine principle can be~and usually is--directed against phallic mothers. I would
also add that the "talismanic bodies of women" can also be substituted with feminine,
pretty-boy, dare I say "gay" male bodies! Hence, enacting the same dynamics as their
onscreen buddy duos, Smith and Mosier became cohorts when both were called into the
office for talking in class, an experience that bonded them together against an oppressive
father-principle and led them to realize that they also had "a common sense of humor"
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according to Smith. And perhaps Mosier's pretty-boyishness also helped catch Smith's
eye?
From these homosocial beginnings would emerge one of the most consistent and
successful director/producer teams in 1990s independent film. Mosier and Smith's
professional teaming and off-screen friendship would not only enable Smith's writing to
come to life onscreen, it would impact the content of the films themselves, as when
Mosier plays the "gay pretty boy" version of himself during the roof hockey sequence in
Clerks, or when Mosier's crush on Go Fish star Guin Turner would provide raw story
material for Chasing Amy. Further, despite Mosier's quietly phlegmatic attitude and
seeming willingness to follow Smith's artistic lead, he has also exerted a strong influence
upon Smith's career at key points, most notably when his misgivings and/or lack of
interest in a mainstream film project functioned as a decisive factor in Smith's choice to
tum down the directorship of the studio-produced Green Hornet film in 2003.
So, in the context of his artistic career, Smith has moved from homosocial group
to homosocial group, depending upon his circumstances: during high school and
S.C.M.O.D.S., O'Donnell and Belicose were his collaborators; in the "slacker" period
after high school when Smith worked at the Quick Stop, it was Johnson, Flanagan,
Hapstak, and eventually Jason Mewes; and once he attended Vancouver Film School in
1992, he would fall in with future View Askew producer Scott Mosier and future Clerks
cinematographer David Klein. II Thus, despite changes to the exact names and faces who
inhabit Smith's inner circle, the overarching structure of a homosocial group of male
buddies who also serve as Smith's artistic co-collaborators remains consistent from
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Smith's high school years (1984-88) through the initial phase of View Askew's inception
and initial success, 1994-2001.
Bryan Johnson himself obliquely comments on Smith's movement from group to
group when he says on Snowball Effect that he was "surprised Kevin didn't ask me to go
with him" to the Vancouver Film School. Apparently, Johnson, a "prototypical slacker,"
did not have the self-motivation or desire to go to film school under his own steam, but
felt strongly enough about his buddy relationship with Smith to register surprise (and
possible hurt feelings?) at being left behind when Smith went away to Vancouver.
Johnson's comment reflects the values of arrested-development buddy groups who, like
Peter Pan and his band of Lost Boys, never want to grow up and wish to preserve their
boyhood buddy relations forever.
Yet, despite Johnson's worries, after film school Smith would not forget his old
friends: he cast O'Donnell in minor roles in Clerks, Chasing Amy, and Jay and Silent Bob
Strike Back, cast Johnson as Steve-Dave in numerous View Askew films, and used Walt
Flanagan in so many roles in Clerks that he would nickname him the "Lon Chaney of the
90's." Further, he gave Johnson money to make his own film, Vulgar, and hired comic-
book fanboy Flanagan to be the proprietor of his Red Bank, NJ, comic book shop, Jay
and Silent Bob's Secret Stash. Hence the Secret Stash store, the characters of Steve-Dave
and fanboy (played by Johnson and Flanagan), and frequent references to "Walt
Flanagan's dog" in multiple View Askew films all serve as cinematic and extra-cinematic
tributes to Smith's pre-Vancouver Film School days at the Highlands Recreation Center.
What's more, over the course of his career, even as he gained access to increasingly
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professional and sought-after Hollywood talent, Smith would continue to cast Flanagan,
Johnson, O'Donnell, and Clerks' Brian O'Halloran in his View Askew films, enacting
the "making movies with my friends" ethos with which he set off to Vancouver Film
School in the first place. 12
Perhaps the most significant contribution Smith's hometown friends made to his
later film work, besides the aforementioned Jason Mewes providing the template for
"Jay," would be Bryan Johnson's serving as the model for Clerks' clownish slacker,
RandaL In Snowball Effect Smith describes Johnson as someone who "[set me] on the
course to being who [I am] essentially for the rest of [my] life" and even claims during
the "Clerks Tenth Anniversary Q & A" that "I wanted to be [...] Bryan Johnson."
Further, since the release and success of Clerks Smith has admitted that Randal is based
on Johnson (and Dante on Smith himself), a fact which takes on added significance when
we note that in the original casting for Clerks, Smith himself planned to play the Randal
role! Thus the connection between Smith and Randal is quite literal: he wanted to BE
Bryan Johnson who was the model for Randal who Smith was slated to play in Clerks.
And while he ultimately gave up the Randal role in his debut film to Jeff Anderson, as we
will see in the next section, Smith has been able to fulfill his desire to be Bryan-like or
Randal-like in his onstage Q & A session appearances, shedding his own self-
deprecating, Dante-like propriety in favor of a funnier and snarkier version of himself
that is far more reminiscent of his clownish, unapologetic slacker characters. 13
As the work of Eve Sedgwick and this study have shown, the homosocial always
carries the threat of the homoerotic, and Smith's real-life buddy relations pervasively
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evince this. The most frequent source of homoerotic joking, teasing, and suggestion for
Smith occurs between himself and Jason Mewes, who frequently joins Smith onstage for
his college Q & A sessions. Perhaps the most condensed version of the eroticizing of
their relationship takes place early on disc one ofAn Evening With Kevin Smith, where
Smith explains how he taught Mewes how to be "Jay" on-camera for Clerks. He notes
that Jay was very nervous in front of the camera in the early days and needed to be fed
his lines by Smith on many occasions. Smith illustrates this point by making a hand
gesture like he is sticking his arm up Mewes' rectum and manipulating him like a
ventriloquist's puppet, a gesture that both violently reasserts Smith's authorship over the
"Jay" character and is suggestive of the "fisting demonstration" sequence from Chasing
Amy, a mapping of gay male sexual practice onto Smith and Mewes.
This sexualizing of Mewes, this positioning of him as a kind of sexual play-toy, is
perpetuated by Smith and Mewes throughout the Q & A session, where Mewes' status as
a sex symbol is repeatedly remarked upon by Smith and the audience alike, and where
Smith shares a fantasy in which Mewes is his personal fuck-buddy: he says Mewes
"looks like he sucks a lot of dick" and imagines a scenario in which there are "no chicks,
we went and saw some movies" and then Smith asks Mewes, "Hey, you want to suck my
dick?" Smith then provides Mewes' fantasy reply: "Alright, Moves." This fantasy,
which is presented jokingly, explores the same question as does so much of Smith's
cinematic work: Why is it so difficult for close male buddies to cross the line into being
sexual with one another? Why can't two buddies who have just returned from a movie
date fellate one another guilt-free? Smith's invocation of Mewes' private nickname for
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Smith, "Moves," heightens the irony here, bringing the two longtime friends' real buddy
relation into dangerously close discursive contact with Smith's Mewes-centered
homosexual fantasy.
Smith even implies that he would like to keep Mewes as his personal
puppet/fisting-mate for the indeterminate future. At two different points during An
Evening With Kevin Smith, Smith explains how he had to teach Mewes how to be "Jay"
on-camera even though the character is based upon a younger version of Mewes himself.
During one version of this humorous narrative, Smith contends that Mewes is "a comedic
genius without knowing it," a somewhat underhanded compliment that both credits
Mewes with providing the basis for Jay's humor while positioning himself (Smith) as the
conscious artist who shapes and guides Mewes's unconscious talent into becoming
something screenworthy (Evening With disc 1 chapter 9). This metaphor of Smith as
Mewes's puppeteer is presented as a visual joke during an earlier sequence (disc 1
chapter 2) wherein Smith mimics the motion of putting his hand up Mewes's rectum and
manipulating him like a hand puppet (see Figure 39). The hand motion Smith makes here
looks surprisingly similar to the "fisting" demonstration Alyssa gives to Holden in
Chasing Amy and is certainly sexually suggestive. Hence, when Smith later states that he
hopes Mewes still doesn't realize his own comedic abilities, it suggests that Smith would
like to retain Mewes as his unconscious puppet so he can continue "fisting" him.
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Figure 39: Kevin Smith mimics puppeteering / fisting Jason Mewes.
Interesting in this connection is Jason Mewes's physical resemblance to Highland
Recreation Center-era Bryan Johnson, who like Mewes sported long blonde hair and a
slender figure. Taken together with the previous comments on Smith's initial impression
of Scott Mosier as a gay-looking pretty boy, one begins to wonder at Smith's trend of
choosing blonde pretty boys as his closest friends and collaborators. And while I do not
suggest that Smith himself is necessarily conscious of this tendency, nor do I offer this as
evidence that the actual person Kevin Smith is bisexual, nevertheless it is notable,
especially when viewed in light of the way Smith frames his relationship to Mewes
onstage. For the onstage Mewes, who shows up for the Q & A perfoffilances but says
very little, is presented as a sex symbol, Smith's "bitch," a reversal of their onscreen Jay-
and-Bob dynamic. A clear instance of Jay's onstage role is found late on the first
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Evening With disc, when Jay is shot from a low angle sitting on a love seat with a small
tubular object held in his crotch, simulating masturbation while Smith attempts to answer
an audience member's question. This image, of Mewes "jerking off' while Smith talks,
says it all: with his long blonde hair, suggestive facial expression, simulated large
member, and lack of audible voice, Mewes is a phallic yet feminized (passive) sex
symbol, androgynous and femininely beautiful. And he is but an added attraction or
sideshow to the main event, that is, Smith's virtuoso verbosity.
One astute Evening With fan addresses Mewes' queer sexualization by asking: "In
the comics and the movies, does Jay's tiny dick and latent homosexuality come from his
escapades at the Rec Center? Or is there something else behind that?" Smith coaxes
Mewes into answering this query, despite Mewes' insistence that Smith should answer it
since "you write this shit." Yet Smith prevails, and Mewes responds with a fairly
standard denial that leads to a suggestive joke that itself turns into defensively
homophobic vitriol: first he says "I love pussy," then jokes that "I like the cock in my
mouth," then concludes by telling the questioner, "Why don't you put a cock in your
mouth and shut your face!" Mewes here repeats a pattern of coy suggestion and
homophobic denial that he shares with his onscreen alter-ego Jay, a pattern that
characterizes the buddy dynamics in all five View Askewniverse films and leads one
Evening With audience member to ask bluntly: "How come Jay and Bob didn't just get it
on [in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back]?" This recognizable pattern of homoerotic
suggestion accompanied by immediate denial pervades not only Smith's cinematic work
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and onstage appearances with his co-stars, but also his writings about his male friends
and cohorts.
In his essay collection Silent Bob Speaks, Smith frequently refers to close friend,
Hollywood superstar, and View Askew regular Ben Affleck, the next-most sexually
fetishized of Smith's male buddies after Jason Mewes. Smith is always effusive in his
praise of Affleck's professionalism and acting abilities, often repeating the joke that "if
they remake Jaws, Affleck could even play the shark." However, his expressions of
professional admiration and personal friendship with Affleck often bleed into the
homoerotic, as when he confesses that "It's no secret that I've got a heterosexual crush on
him. If! were gay, I'd let him plow my fields of anal gold in a heartbeat" (Silent Bob
Speaks 33). The "if! were gay" caveat deployed here allows Smith to engage the fantasy
of being anally penetrated by Affleck without necessarily outing himself as not-
exclusively-straight, and Smith's subsequent comment that ""[as] I'm just straight 01' me,
I'm simply a fan of the man-personally and professionally" is interesting for the way it
frames Smith's assertion of straightness with a cute cliche-"straight 01' me"-that is
tonally reminiscent of the way someone who is flirting but doesn't want to admit it might
say "What? Little 01' me?" Further, by equating his feelings for Affleck with fandom-
"I'm simply a fan of the man"-he positions himself as a star-struck admirer whose
personal and profession admiration blurs into the fanatical and possibly sexually desiring.
Smith makes his homoerotic attraction to Ben Affleck even more clear a bit later
in Silent Bob Speaks, when, contrasting him to the apparently less desirable Ryan
Phillipe, he writes: "I fantasize about [Phillipe] tackling me on a lawn a few yards from
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his own home (no homoerotic subtext, mind you; the boy's no Affleck)" (60). Not only
does this anecdotal admission belie Smith's possible desire for the disavowed Phillipe-
for why does Smith need to offer his parenthetical denial if not for the fact that his
fantasy of being tackled by the Way o/the Gun star does indeed carry a homoerotic
charge?-but it also makes clear that Smith is aware that his attraction to Affleck goes
beyond personal and professional admiration. This passage reveals that there is indeed a
homoerotic subtext present in the relationship between Smith and Affleck, and is later
supported by another very revealing passage that reads: "[T]hat's what Ben is to me-a
really good friend. I admire his talent and I cheer on his successes, but mostly, I rib him
as much as I can-solely to mask what would be more or less rightly construed as an
almost homoerotic blind allegiance. [...] I'll always love him" (188). Not only does
Smith once again use the term "homoerotic" to refer to his friendship with Affleck, he
displays an awareness of the way typical homosocial buddy dynamics attempt to cover
over or suppress those erotics: through "ribbing," which can be construed as both teasing
or joking but can also lead to full-on physical fighting as in the "Catharsis" denouement
of Clerks. This the most frank extant admission by Smith ofthe way in which ribbing,
joking, and homosocial bait-and-switching function "solely" as masks for homoerotic
love, and supports the idea that at some level, buried beneath the jokes, ambiguity, and
occasional defensiveness, Smith may indeed be aware of the homoerotic imperatives that
drive his work. 14
Before moving from these individual cases to a broader look at the View Askew
homosocial collective in general, a few words must be said about Smith's closest and
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most central cinematic co-collaborator, Scott Mosier. Mosier may not be an obvious sex
symbol like Mewes and Affleck are, yet we have already noted his "pretty boy"
appearance when he first met Smith, and his post-1992 dressing down ofhis appearance
has not exempted him from being considered as something more than a mere co-worker
and friend in Smith's writings and public comments. In fact, the most frequent
terminology Smith has used to describe his relationship to Mosier has been that of
marriage: on the Clerks 10th Anniversary Q & A he explicitly says that his 1999 marriage
to Jen Schwalbach necessitated his "divorce" from Mosier, and in the introductory
reference glossary at the opening of My Boring-Ass Life Smith calls Mosier "my first
wife" (n.p.). While this language downplays the sexual aspect of their bond to one
another, it nevertheless implies a relationship that is much more personal, intimate, and
binding than that of simple friends or co-workers. In fact, one might surmise-as I will
discuss in a forthcoming book project chapter-that much of Mosier's professional
burnout after Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and particularly Jersey Girl may find its
origin in the new dynamics he and Smith had to negotiate after Smith became a literal
husband and father in 1999. 15
However, rarely one to leave a homoerotic stone unturned, Smith discusses
Mosier in overtly sexual terms in a passage from his Jersey Girl production diary found
in Silent Bob Speaks. This diary opens with a "gay joke" Smith plays upon himself:
"Dear Diary, There's this boy in class that I'mjust dreamy over. He's got pretty blue
eyes, brown hair, and a huge, monster cock that barely fits up my... Shit. Wrong diary.
Lemme start over" (257). Part of the humor here is the way this passage feminizes
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Smith-he uses the word "dreamy" as he pines away after a boy-and, more bluntly, its
juxtaposition of the phrases "a huge, monster cock that barely fits up my..." and "Shit"
is suggestive of anal sex. On the next page, Smith reveals that in this fantasy, "naturally,
I'm talking about me and my longtime producer, Scott Mosier; everyone wants to know if
we're really fucking or 11ot" (258). By identifying Mosier as the object of Smith's
"schoolgirl fantasy," this passage evokes (in a comedic way) Smith's first meeting with
Mosier in Vancouver Film School, eroticizing their relationship retroactively from the
moment of their first meeting forward. And Smith's statement that everyone is curious
about the possibility of sexual attraction between the filmmaking duo is itself suggestive:
if everyone wasn't already curious about this, they sure will be now. And, as this passage
reveals, it is obvious that Smith has thought long and (ahem) hard about this possibility
himself.
Marginalized Women
Male homosociality by definition implies the exclusion/marginalization of
women, and this trend is evident in not just the films but the corporate makeup of View
Askew Productions: View Askew-or at least its most consistent core membership-
constitutes a homosocial boys' club. The most consistent and consistently promoted
players on the View Askew team are all men, a phenomenon easily grasped by a quick
look at the lists of commentary track participants for the first five View Askew DVDs.
As the table below shows, not one woman graces these commentary tracks, despite
significant co-starring performances by Marilyn Ghigliotti and Lisa Spoonauer (Clerks),
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Shalmen Doherty, Claire Forlani, and Renee Humphrey (all Mallrats), and perhaps most
significantly, repeat contributor and Chasing Amy star Joey Lauren Adams. While this
omission can be partially explained by the availability of certain of these women-
Doherty, Forlani, and Adams in particular have busy film careers that may have
prevented them from showing up for a commentary recording session-nevertheless the
consistent presence of extremely busy male A-list actors like Ben Affleck and Jason Lee
suggests that getting the boys back together is a higher priority to the View Askew
commentary producers than including the women contributors.
DVD commentary participants
Clerks (original 1995 DVD) Smith, Scott Mosier, Jason Mewes, Brian O'Halloran,
and others
Clerks X Smith, Scott Mosier, Brian O'Halloran, Jeff Anderson,
and Jason Mewes
Mallrats Smith, Scott Mosier, Ben Affleck, Jason Lee, Jason
"If ~u, Vincent PereiraH~~
Chasing Amy Smith, Scott Mosier, Ben Affleck, Jason Mewes, Bob
tI(l'0'~,}g~(]()r~()!?:1Yi~~~~!~~T~~~(l
Dogma Smith, Scott Mosier, Vincent Pereira, Ben Affleck,
}(l~()!?:M~'0'~~1}(l~()!?:!::~~........ ........
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Smith, Scott Mosier, Jason Mewes
IBack
Table 6: Commentary track participants on the first five View Askew DVDs
In fact, this shunting aside of women and the structural misogyny it suggests is
supported by passages from Silent Bob Speaks in which Smith describes some of his
female collaborators. For example, writing of his Jersey Girl experiences, Smith lauds
both Jennifer Lopez's and Liv Tyler's acting skills, saying Tyler is "in the running,
alongside Lopez, for best actress I've ever worked with" (284). Yet a mere five pages
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later, addressing the issue of the negative publicity that accrued to Ben Affleck and
Jennifer Lopez's relationship during Jersey Girl's production, Smith prints in its entirety
an anti-J-Lo email he received on his View Askew message board, ostensibly to refute it
but nevertheless committing to print phrases referring to Lopez as "1. Ro," a
"materialistic user," and someone who "lies to God" (289-95). And while Smith does
refute this nasty email point-by-point, he spares male Jersey Girl co-star Jason Biggs this
potentially humiliating treatment, opting to "forego the standard pie-fucking jokes" and
focus on commending the actor for his talents. 16 In fact, despite Smith's high regard for
Tyler's and Lopez's skills, it is male co-star Biggs who he plans to ask back to View
Askew again: "I love this fellow Jersey boy. Look for him in more of our stuff, ifhe'll
come back" (287). In short, men come back and become part of the consistent View
Askew team, whereas women are praised for their talents then brushed aside, especially if
they dare to have a star text that impinges on View Askew's ability to promote its films
properly. One also wonders if Smith's carefully veiled disdain for Lopez might relate to
his own (previously discussed) feelings for Ben Affleck?
And to be sure, some of the women who have been dropped quickly from the
View Askew roster have been involved in failed romantic relationships with various
View Askew men. The most notable of these after Jennifer Lopez would be Smith's own
relationship with Joey Lauren Adams, which provided some of the basis for Chasing Amy
and gave that film its female star. Yet after their breakup during the production ofAmy,
Adams drifted from the View Askew fold and was not included on the commentary track
for the Amy videodisc/DVD. Also notable is the Lisa Spoonauer - Jeff Anderson
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romance that blossomed on the set of Clerks, led to their marriage in 1998 and
subsequent divorce in 2000. Interestingly, Smith and Anderson fought over money in the
wake of Clerks' success and did not speak for many years, yet by 2003 they had
reconciled their differences-but Spoonauer herself has not been seen or heard in View
Askew circles again ("Clerks Tenth Anniversary Q & A").
While the commentary participant chart and these cases suggest a marginalization
or exclusion of women from the View Askew production team, there is also a detectable
strain of active misogyny in the View Askew films and secondary materials. Many have
noted the misogynist humor in Clerks and Mallrats, perhaps the most extreme example of
this being the climactic joke in Clerks wherein Caitlin Bree (Spoonauer) unknowingly
has sex with an anonymous dead man. And despite its openness to possible pro-lesbian
readings, Chasing Amy does ultimately marginalize Alyssa's desires and lesbian identity
in favor of taking Holden's male point of view.
In terms of supplemental materials, we have seen Smith's willingness to publicly
expose his own fans' virulent critiques against actress Jennifer Lopez, but his most
emphatic personal animosity is directed against popular independent and Hollywood
actress Reese Witherspoon. Smith is quite open and public about his distaste for
Witherspoon, calling her "Greasy Reese" in his Arena column and lambasting her for
being "faux-erudite as hell, and condescending to boot" (Silent Bob Speaks 55). Smith
claims that Witherspoon "held [a grudge] against me for not letting her audition for
Mallrats" and that she subsequently re-sparked his ire by "sneer[ing] at [Smith's then-
girlfriend] Joey [Lauren Adams]" at a Details-sponsored party in late 1996 or early 1997
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(58). Yet the final straw, the slight that caused Smith to become "livid" with
Witherspoon, is her rumored joking comment on the set of her 1998 film Overnight
Delivery-for which Smith scribed an early screenplay draft-that, due to Smith's
contribution, "[the] dialogue sucked" (Silent Bob Speaks 59). As we have seen, Smith is
particularly proud of his writing and strongly identifies as a writer of sharp and hilarious
dialogue for films. So for his arch-nemesis "Greasy Reese" to publicly slam him for
dialogue that "sucked" is a bigger insult than even the usually forgiving Smith can bear.
I suggest that Smith's rage at Reese is also an outgrowth of the larger homosocial and
misogynistic tendencies of his own social/professional group.
For Smith, who is one of the few figures in 1990s independent cinema to actually
get along with the famously unpleasant Miramax co-CEO Harvey Weinstein, does not
limit his scathing remarks to Witherspoon, though she is clearly his favorite target. 17
Smith also rants against Lindsay Lohan and Hilary Duff on An Evening With Kevin Smith
2, calling Lohan "trashy" and suggesting that a good movie might be where Lohan and
Duff be forced to fight one another with broken beer bottles (disc 1, chapter 6). As these
examples show, Smith targets female actors as objects of derision, and I have yet to find a
published source where he is so vitriolic against any male actor or filmmaker. In short,
there is a pronounced gendered dimension to Smith's public assessment of other film-
business figures.
This fear and anger toward women relates to slacker cinema's fascination with /
fear of masculine women, phallic mothers, and lesbians. As feminized male
underachievers who, "by remaining juvenile, [...] [evade] guilty memories of the
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original patricide [or phallic-matricide] on which [their] privileges pivot" (Troyer and
Marchiselli 267), slackers are particularly threatened by willful, high-achieving women
such as Witherspoon and the characters she portrays, and so it is no wonder that an iconic
slacker like Smith should so despise her in particular. It pays also to think here of View
Askew's foreclosure/erasure of Alyssa Jones's lesbian identity in Chasing Amy, for, as
we will see in the next section, there is perhaps no greater threat to the male slacker's
homosocial buddy milieu than an out, outspoken lesbian.
Slacker versus Lesbian: "Chasing Amy Politics"
In this section, I analyze a key scene from An Evening With Kevin Smith which
centers on Smith's response to a lesbian audience member / question-asker named Lela.
An Evening With Kevin Smith, a two-DVD set released straight to video in 2002,
is by, for, and about Kevin Smith's View Askew fans. It constitutes a selective visual
record of SmithNiew Askew fandom as it manifested on five college campuses in the
years between Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and Jersey Girl, 2001-02. As earlier
discussed, the question-and-answer format of the stage shows allows Smith to play
around withlin his Randal/Bryan Johnson persona, make jokes, and tell stories that
expand the mythology/continuity of his star text. As I argue, in these appearances Smith
literally and symbolically reasserts his control over that ever-expanding, ever-shifting
text. Favoring the more Randal-like aspects of his personality, which we can describe as
unapologetic, in-your-face, and opinionated, gives Smith an advantage in this: as we shall
see, he can brashly seize control of the rhetorical situation at any time under the guise of
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humor. As we might guess, Smith avoids the more Dante-ish side of his personality, the
apologetic, "forever backing down" persona who might be so receptive to the input of his
fan-questioners that he lets that discursive control slip.
An Evening With Kevin Smith is marketed toward the videophile crowd, which is
to some extent the crowd it depicts: university students and their friends. Indeed, it is
also the same general demographic that Smith's View Askew films have targeted all
along: Generation X pop culture geeks who consume not just home video materials but
also comic books, film soundtracks, Star Wars toys and paraphernalia, video games, etc.
The overlap between (predominantly white and male) comics fans, science fiction fans,
and DVD collectors/videophiles is reflected at the broader cultural and film-industrial
level in the recent boom of highly successful blockbuster films based upon comic book
properties, such as the Spider-Man, X-Men, and Batman franchises. Furthermore, the
influence of web-based reviews upon film commerce, parodied in Smith's Jay and Silent
Bob Strike Back, is significant enough to have been noted in the April 2007 issue of
TIME magazine: "[T]he fanboy, the typically geeky 16-to-34-year-old male [...], [is]
having his way with Hollywood. [...] [These] fans are enjoying an unprecedented era
of influence, through blogs, podcasts and movie-news sites that have become trusted
sources of movie information for millions of filmgoers" (Keegan 63, 64). In a similar
vein, mainstream pop culture magazine Entertainment Weekly ran two articles in July and
August of2007 documenting the increased imbrication of film and comic book cultures,
noting that comic book conventions have become key sites for the early marketing of
science fiction and superhero films (EW#945 9-10, EW#947 34-7). At the microcosmic
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level, Kevin Smith is himself a comics fan and an avid videophile, a laserdisc collector
who reportedly sold that collection to partially finance the shooting of Clerks. Thus
Smith is here metonymic for the overlap of videophiIe, 'smart' cinemagoer, and comic
book fan subcultures. 18
Indeed, the straight-to-video success of not one but two volumes ofAn Evening
With Kevin Smith, plus plans for a third volume to be released in 2008, demonstrates how
effectively Smith's off-screen relationships create a site of audience investment. What
are Mewes and Smith (who cohabitated with Smith even after Smith got married!) really
like off-screen? This speculation creatively fuels and economically finances the
existence of both Evening With Kevin Smith volumes, which taken together add up to
over seven hours of edited question-and-answer footage. Smith's fans want to talk with
him, and he is plenty happy to talk: it is well-known that Smith considers himself to be
first and foremost a writer and that he likes to use words to convey his ideas. For just as
in his famously tight-scripted feature films, his Q & A appearances prove him a potent
wordsmith who is able to verbally manipulate his own fans' perception of his persona and
work.
The general tone of the Q & A sessions documented on An Evening With Kevin
Smith is light and joking, and most of the stories and information Smith discusses consist
of humorous revelations about Smith, his collaborators, and the A-listers (like Batman
Wild Wild West producer Jon Peters and rock superstar Prince) he meets in his
professional life. However, the scene where Lela appears and asks Smith about the
possible anti-lesbian message of Chasing Amy abandons its jokiness fairly quickly and
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takes on a more emotionally charged tone that is unusual for the Q & A encounters.
Indeed, the DVD chapter where Smith meets Lela is entitled "Chasing Amy Politics"
(Evening disc 1 chapter 19), a title that uses "politics" to contain Lela's queerly inflected
critique. Smith announces early on in Lela's stating of her question that "This is
political!" as if to set her critique apart from the usual, non-political questions and
answers that get discussed onstage at the Q & A's. From the beginning of this filmed
encounter, then, Smith works to marginalize Lela's concerns, bracketing them off into a
special (and infrequently visited) realm called "politics."
Even earlier in "Chasing Amy Politics," Lela's self-introduction establishes that
she is an "out" lesbian, a piece of information that seems to make Smith mildly
uncomfortable and leads him to want to contain that revelation as well. After saying and
spelling her name, Lela begins her question by mentioning lesbian poet Adrienne Rich, at
which time Smith interrupts her (the first of a series of such interruptions) and asks: "Are
you coming out?" Lela replies that "they all know me" and when Smith asks, "Are you
out?!" Lela says matter-of-factly "Yeah" (see Figure 40). Lela's being out is greeted by
applause and moderate cheering from the audience, indicating a queer-friendly crowd,
perhaps more overtly at ease with Lela's lesbianism than Smith is. For Smith jokingly
admonishes the audience to "calm down" and says, "This is college-you all act like
you've never seen a lesbian before," perhaps mistaking their support of Lela for (his
own?) agitation over her revelation of confidently out lesbianism.
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Figure 40: Lela, the out lesbian audience member who asks penetrating questions about
Chasing Amy's treatment oflesbian sexuality.
In setting up her question for Smith, Lela states that "1 did feel that [Chasing
Amy] sort of made the point that all a lesbian needs is a good, deep dicking." But before
she can continue and fully articulate her question, Smith interrupts her again, saying,
"Did you? Excellent point!" These two short sentences are spoken loudly and heartily, a
bit too enthusiastically, as if Smith welcomes this kind of question. However, his
subsequent comments will make clear that his enthusiasm is exaggerated, and Smith's
rhetorical mission from this point forward will be to close Lela's line of inquiry down,
covering it over with the same stock defenses he has offered in response to this critique in
the past (see Figure 41). It is worthy of note that the audience does not boo Lela when
she says she does not like Amy nor when she makes the "deep dicking" claim, though
they cheer and laugh at Smith's clipped response, mistaking its meaning: he means that
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her point (in bringing the question up in the first place) is excellent, but their laughter
indicates that they think he means that the "deep dicking" assertion itself is excellent. In
short, they think he is making fun of her and they laugh. So despite the tolerance I
friendliness of the crowd when Lela first declares her out-ness, this is a group who is
nevertheless willing to cheer Smith on when he, in true Randal-like fashion, seemingly
dismisses her question with a snarky reaction.
Figure 41: Smith gets defensive.
And while Smith does not intend his comment in quite the way the crowd takes
it, and offers a clarification, the audience is nevertheless reading his intent correctly, for
from this moment forward he takes charge of the verbal situation and barely lets her
speak for the rest ofher time onscreen. And his manner changes: he gets touchy,
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defensive, and begins a proactive verbal assault on her (as yet not fully stated) position.
Is he afraid of a lesbian, and/or the lesbian critique of Amy? His defensiveness here
suggests that his earlier admonition to the audience, "you all act like you've never seen a
lesbian before," could refer to some part of his own self, the selfhe acknowledges when
he states in a 2000 article that "[I] wasn't always so enlightened [my]self' (Kilday 62).
Yet his 2000 admission that he used to be unenlightened with respect to queer issues
implies that he now is enlightened, and while he has probably made huge strides since his
growing-up years in suburban New Jersey, his fearful reaction to Lela remains evidence
of a lingering paranoia / appropriative guilt around the issue of lesbian representation.
After this interruption, Lela attempts to continue asking her question, but Smith
jokingly yet firmly cuts her off again, claiming that he "let [her] go on [talking] for like
two hours" when in fact Lela only gets one and a half minutes at the mic before Smith
takes charge. The incredibly short amount of time he allots to Lela for articulating her
question is particularly significant in light of the fact that Smith frequently lets non-
"political" weirdos waste tons more mic time than he gives her. 19 Perhaps on some level
sensing that he is cheating her of mic time, Smith says, "It is like the Kevin Smith show."
He says this obsequiously, and yet it is the Kevin Smith show, and he is reminding Lela
(and us) of this fact as he seizes control of their debate. His mention of whose show it is
and his ability to take control rhetorically indicate that Smith is in the power position
here, just as Banky-whatever his "idiot" status may be-is in the power position over
Alyssa in Chasing Amy: he is the Iago who, albeit at self-destructive price, successfully
undermines Desdemona's relationship with her beloved yet too-jealous Othello.
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Once Smith has wrested verbal control of the situation from Lela, he uses what he
thinks she was going to ask him-she never finishes asking her question-as a
springboard from which to move into (1) his oft-repeated "Banky" defense of Chasing
Amy, which I will recount, (2) an assertion of himself as a "simple" entertainer without a
political agenda, and then (3) his standard "origin story" that explains why View Askew
has a "little gay content thrown in there": the existence of Smith's gay older brother.
To begin with the first of these points, Smith's initial response to Lela after he
heatedly interrupts her is to assert that his "feelings on that [issue ofAmy's anti-
lesbianism] have been the same since 1996 when I wrote it," another reminder of his
privileged "insider" position as the film's writer. He then goes on to explain that since
the controversial, offending assertion that "all a lesbian really needs is a good, deep
dicking" is put forth by Banky, described by Smith as Amy's "idiot character," then
Banky's obvious status as a fool deflates or invalidates that position. However, as I
discussed in Chapter IV, this "Banky-as-idiot" defense overlooks both (1) the ways in
which the narrative structure of Chasing Amy, and hence the film itself, never contradicts
Banky's heterocentrist belief, and in fact supports it through a sympathetic focus on
Alyssa's heterosexual relationship with Holden, and (2) Banky's sympathetic portrayal in
the film, which may lead an audience to laugh at and/or be disturbed by his misogynistic
views but certainly does not actively encourage us to dismiss or discredit him.
Interestingly, the audience in An Evening With is strangely silent when Smith
offers his "Banky-as-idiot" defense ofAmy-my sense is that there is some skepticism or
at least less-than-full acceptance implied there, but it is hard to tell.
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Smith next explains that "[a]ll I can do is make movies the way I want to make
them, the way I want to see them, as entertaining as possible. And if I can whip a little
bit of message in there, that's more than most cats do." This claim is interesting on many
levels. For one, characterizing the impetus behind his work as a desire to make films that
are "as entertaining as possible" downplays the ideological (or "political") content of the
films, attempting to deflect accusations of questionable politics via the hackneyed
defense that the films are "only entertainment." This is simply not true: Lela's comments
and half-formed question demonstrate that Amy contains messages that provoke strong
reactions from members of various communities, perhaps especially lesbians and their
allies in this case.
Smith's concomitant claim that it is his intention to "whip a little bit of message
in there," and that that is "more than most cats do," while seemingly in harmony with his
previous statement that he is first and foremost an entertainer, nonetheless becomes the
basis for the remainder of his defensive argument. So while he begins by claiming
"entertainment first, a little message second," the "little bit of message" becomes the fact
on which he will now attempt to convince Lela and the audience that he is in fact doing
"more than most cats do" in the area of politically progressive filmmaking. Further, this
"more than most" assertion reads like the ultimate slacker disclaimer, a Dante-like
argument that says it is okay to under-achieve so long as you do a little more-perhaps
just the bare minimum more-than most people.
Lela calls Smith on the weakness of his argument, though she does so in a way
that only seems to further agitate him. Attempting to support her anti-lesbian reading of
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Chasing Amy, she states that many of his fans are misogynist and objectify women, and
that "it wasn't maybe your fault but I think that movie put that [misogynist message] out
there."
Lela is complicating the issue here by addressing the misogyny of Smith's
audience as opposed to the text. And yet there is a connection between the two issues,
although Smith tries to deny this by saying that "that [misogyny amongst my fans] has
nothing to do with this [issue ofAmy]" and telling Lela to "stay on topic." Yet what he
fails to see is the salience of her underlying (if haltingly presented) point: that there is a
fundamental, constitutive cOlmection between male misogy~y (hatred / devaluation /
objectification of women) and the heterocentrist anti-lesbianism that Lela claims
characterizes Amy. Both serve patriarchy by equating maleness with subjectivity and
insisting upon male, penetrative sexuality as the only "real" or legitimate form of
sexuality. Lela has a real and important point here, but Smith isn't listening: he has his
own defense planned and is pushing their conversation steadily in its direction.
For all this is a lead-in to the story Smith really wants to deliver, the story he
frequently uses to assure his audience of his gay-friendliness: the tale of his gay older
brother. This story delineates Smith's desire to provide cinematic content for his out
older brother that would relate to his life as a gay man. Smith says that his brother, a
longtime supporter of Smith's comedy sketch writing, would complain to Smith that few
films being produced had any kind of content he could relate to as a homosexual man,
and Smith thus explains that: "The movies we've made have always had a little gay
content in there [...] so that my brother will know that I'm throwing it in there for him."
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This story is interesting for the way it admits to a pro-gay agenda and gay content in the
View Askew films, yet places the responsibility for that agenda and content upon Smith's
brotherly relation, a homosocial yet avowedly non-sexual paradigm.
But Smith needs more than just his usual "gay brother" story to convince Lela, so
he also takes the opportunity to suggest that "[a] large portion of the gay community
loves the stuff we [View Askew] do, while a very small pocket is like'He's a closet[ed]
fag-hater' and blah, blah blah-not knowing the amount of cock I chug myself." Smith
claims to know that "a large portion" of the gay community (whoever that might be) is in
favor of his work, and that it is only a vitriolic minority, which in this context implicitly
includes Lela herself, who opposes his deployment of queer characters and content. Then
he ends on a joking assertion that he himself "chugs cock," an attempt to assert queer-
insider status through coy reference to his possible bisexuality.
So, although Smith chides Lela for not staying on topic, it is in fact Smith who
leads the discussion off-topic by first asking Lela-once again asserting his rhetorical
control, his "authorship" of their scene together-if she agrees that there is gay-friendly
content in his films, eliciting her uncomfortable assent (she seems to know she's being
railroaded here), then launching into his gay brother story. This story has the tripartite
purpose of (a) asserting Smith's gay-friendliness through his connection to his brother,
(b) leading his and Lela's conversation away from her specific concerns about Amy,
since the story involves his whole career writ large ("from Clerks onward") and not any
specific film, and perhaps most importantly, (c) reasserts Smith's position as auteur by
connecting the core content / intent of View Askew's films to a personal inspiration
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based upon his experiences with his brother. Hence, by the end of the story, Smith has
drawn attention away from Lela's question about Chasing Amy's possible anti-lesbianism
and refocused the debate upon the possible gay-friendliness of his entire film career.
Beyond constituting Smith's uncomfortable attempt to exert damage control over
the homophobic/misogynistic elements of his own work and star text, the recounting of
his gay brother story on An Evening With shows that the filmmaker is well aware that
queer sexuality, or at least queer male sexuality, sells: during his debate with Lela he
admits that "When I found out we [View Askew] had an audience, I threw lots of gay
content in there." Smith claims in this context to have added more "gay" content to View
Askew's films in order to fulfill an educational mission, to intentionally "fuck with [the]
heads" of his misogynistic and/or queer-bashing audience members. This self-portrayal
of Smith as a filmmaker with an explicit gay political agenda is at odds with his
moments-earlier claim to be primarily an agenda-free entertainer. As I think this study
has shown, Smith's View Askew films are absolutely brimming with (often
contradictory) sociopolitical and psychosexual meanings and implications, And in truth,
both of these characterizations of Smith-as the simple entertainer and as the politically
motivated educator-belie the economic advantages that accrue to Smith as a result of his
including queemess in his film comedies.
Near the end of his time with Lela, Smith admits an awareness of the profitability
of his controversial and misogynistic use of queemess when he jokes that he "sold a lot of
merchandise on our website" to homophobic View Askew fans, and, in reference to such
fans, that "I'll make a profit on their backs." On the one hand, he claims to be "very
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uncomfortable" with the misogynist members of his audience, yet, on the other, admits he
needs their money and ongoing patronage. This latter implies that Smith's films will
continue to deal with queerness obliquely and ambiguously, walking a precarious line
between queer tolerance and the profitability of misogynistic and homophobic humor.
After all, as Eileen Meehan points out, "[p]rofit, not culture, drives show business: no
business means no show" (48), a fact of which Smith is well aware.
Unfortunately, even after the gay brother narrative, perhaps sensing that Lela
remains unconvinced, Smith is still not finished railroading his lesbian questioner. Smith
next makes a reference to "focus groups" and asks Lela "have you ever been in a focus
group?" Whether or not she has been in a focus group is irrelevant to the discussion but
highlights Smith's relative experience in the movie business, contrasting it with Lela's
ignorance (she hasn't been in a focus group). So the "focus group" story, ostensibly
about a homophobic audience member who reacted badly to the Banky character's
revealed gayness at the end ofAmy, is really about reminding Lela and the Evening With
audience (in the room and those watching the DVD) of Smith's self-valorizing
educational mission-Smith insists that viewing Amy may have made that homophobic
viewer reevaluate his own homophobia-and highlighting his greater experience and
movie-business knowledge compared to Lela.
For once it is revealed, in the wake of the focus group discussion, that Lela was
only eighteen when Amy came out, and is only twenty-two at the time ofAn Evening
With's taping, Smith wastes no time in snarkily labeling her a "bi-curious girl from
college"-an insulting remark that, in an eerily accurate echo of Chasing Amy's diegesis,
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baldly attempts to undermine Lela's ability to call herself a lesbian. By calling Lela a
"bi-curious girl from college," Smith implies that her avowed lesbianism is not only
phantasmal, a product of immature bi-curiosity and thus not "true" committed lesbianism,
but also a mere phase that will pass once she leaves college. I can hardly imagine a more
insulting or homophobic remark.
Not that Lela is completely blameless in how this increasingly uncomfortable
exchange unfolds: after Smith calls her "bi-curious," she somewhat passive-aggressively
calls Chasing Amy "dumb but harmless," a point she could have introduced more
tactfully and specifically, thereby possibly eliciting a more measured response from
Smith (italics indicate my dubiousness on this point). She instead confronts him head-on
with the queer-appropriative and misogynistic elements of his most critically lauded,
professionally important work, which triggers a defensive reaction from Smith: he
attempts to bury her critique under a flurry of his own pre-meditated arguments. To be
fair, Smith handles the situation with a fair amount of aplomb given how reactionary he
can get when his work is threatened: we have seen how Reese Witherspoon's disdain for
his writing made Smith "livid" and "enraged," and Lela's attack upon Amy is not
significantly different in kind from Witherspoon's (Silent Bob Speaks 59). But even if,
unlike Smith's ongoing public spat with Witherspoon, "Chasing Amy Politics" ends on a
note of ostensible reconciliation, the happy ending feels forced-by Smith himself. Like
the film to which it refers, "Chasing Amy Politics" makes me feel like a bullying session
has just occurred, the slacker having once again used his position of male, auteurist
privilege to silence, shout down, and/or elide the lesbian. Indeed, the parallel with the
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diegesis ofAmy is quite apropo here since Smith's need to verbally control the rhetorical
situation the moment a "political" or hot topic is raised seems related to his identity as a
writer who, in his role as director, insists that his actors always stick to the written word
of his screenplays. In short, Smith is used to being in control of verbal content in his
position as writer/director, and even in an impromptu setting like the Q & A session he
has difficulty relinquishing that control.
For Smith concludes the discussion by humbly asking for Lela's support: "You
have to give me credit-I have done flicks that are far more gay friendly than most?"
Lela smiles and says "yeah" but it is obvious that she is dissatisfied with their exchange.
Once again, by referring only to his "flicks" in general, Smith has utterly elided the
specifics of Chasing Amy, his most queerly visible and potentially lesbian-offensive film.
Given that Lela's critique ofAmy as anti-lesbian is far from unwarranted, by ignoring the
specifics of her question Smith avoids hearing her charges of homophobic appropriation
and in the process enacts an iconic scene that Banky himself would be proud of: that of
the slacker versus the dyke. At the conclusion, Smith wins Lela's halfhearted complicity,
but at the expense of answering, or even truly hearing, her real question: in fact, he
mutters "I've heard this one" even before she's finished asking it. Like Holden in
Chasing Amy, Smith is so fixated upon maintaining the facade of his own artistic
integrity and "political correctness" that he is willing to shout Lela down to prevent ugly
facts-such as his economic exploitation oflesbian imagery in Chasing Amy at the
expense of lesbians like her-from coming to presence during the Evening With Kevin
Smith Q & A.
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The scene with Lela is an example of the way in which Smith tries to control and
manipulate to a high degree the discourses surrounding himself and his work. As we
have seen, this control is evident in Smith's writing and directing of the View Askew
films themselves, his active interaction with fans on the internet, and in "live" instances
like the Evening With encounter with Lela. However, most importantly, what the scene
with Lela particularly illustrates is that Smith's need to control the discourse surrounding
him becomes most urgent when the issue is queer sexuality.
We have seen that Smith is able to rabidly defend himself against accusations of
homophobia despite his acknowledgement that his work is attractive to homophobic
moviegoers, a stance which might suggest Smith still has unresolved homophobic beliefs
of his own, or that (as he might be subtly implying in his response to Lela) the limitations
of keeping his core audience onboard prevent his work from being more openly queer-
friendly. Smith may not be actively anti-queer, yet he definitely shies away from
acknowledging his own investments in queer desiring structures and queer culture. In
spite of his large vocabulary, Smith rarely uses the word "queer," and never the word
"bisexual," even though these terms accurately describe much of his work, especially the
much-debated Chasing Amy. As my Chapter IV shows, a queer/bisexual reading ofAmy
reveals that, despite heterocentrist plot elements and Lela's valid claim that the film
ultimately undermines Alyssa's lesbianism and subject-hood, this film actually leaves
open many more queer possibilities than it forecloses, and is very sympathetic to a central
character (Holden) who is struggling with his own bisexuality. Hence discussing Amy's
truly queer elements could have helped Smith justify his narrative choices in Chasing
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Amy and opened up a rich dialogue with Lela on An Evening With Kevin Smith. Yet
when confronted by Lela the lesbian, Smith the slacker shuts down her queer critique of
Amy, much to my and Lela's shared disappointment and his detriment.
In sum, Smith is at great pains to be gay-friendly yet cannot stop doing a curious
and self-contradictory verbal dance around the queerness of his persona and work. The
end results are incoherent, affirming-yet-denying "answers" like Smith's response to
Lela, responses that freely intermix and exemplify the compulsory homophobia,
prevalent bi-curiosity, and confused gendering and sexuality of the Gen-X white male
slacker, particularly in the face of the out, confident lesbian.
Snowball Effect: Working-class Hero versus Multimedia Mogul
Filmmaking is collaborative, and Kevin Smith frequently acknowledges his View
Askew coworkers and uses "we" and "us" to talk about View Askew Productions and its
releases. Yet, as An Evening With Kevin Smith exemplifies, Smith's voice and image
dominate public discourse about View Askew's output, and Smith is the acknowledged
creator, auteur, and star of the View Askewniverse. Indeed, Smith has excelled at
placing himself front and center, taking advantage of the "indie decade's" auteurist
predilections and using his image and charm to promote View Askew's films and related
merchandise.
Indeed, this ability of Smith's to use his personal appeal to market his work has
been observed by many critics, including Andrew Sarris, who notes in a 2000 Esquire
piece that Smith has a "flair for merchandising" and is possessed of a "cultural
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ambidextrousness" that serves him well in the contemporary media marketplace (Sarris
218). Similarly, a Houston Press reviewer notes in his 200 1 review of Jay and Silent Bob
Strike Back that "Smith long ago stopped being a filmmaker and instead [has] turned into
a franchise-maker" (Wilonsky 50). Smith does not deny this, and in fact encourages this
"multimedia mogul" view ofhimselfthrough frequent self-comparisons to Star Wars
franchise-maker George Lucas. At two different points in Silent Bob Speaks, Smith
admits to modeling aspects of his career after Lucas's, and in the introduction to his
recent View Askew comics onmibus Tales From the Clerks (2006) he explicitly claims
that he got the idea for doing comic book stories featuring his film characters from the
Marvel Star Wars comic books of the late 1970s (SBS 9,38, Tales n.p.). In fact, Smith
seems to resonate with the concept of "creator" as it is deployed in the comics industry
(and, incidentally, television), and discusses this idea explicitly with Marvel Comics
founder and uber-creator Stan Lee. In an interview Smith conducts with Lee on the
straight-to-DVD Stan Lee's Mutants, Monsters & Marvels (2002), Smith and Lee agree
that just as Lee created the Marvel Comics universe, inventing many of its most enduring
characters such as the Incredible Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and the X-Men,
so too does Smith stand as the creator and public figurehead of the View Askewniverse
and its fictional denizens.
However, despite Smith's occasional public acknowledgement of his media and
business savvy, he is constantly at much greater pains to downplay his cinematic abilities
and emphasize his lack of skill with a camera. In his Q & A appearances, he makes
frequent offhand remarks about his "lack of [cinematic] style" and loves to remind
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audiences that he dropped out of Vancouver Film School halfway through the program.
This emphasis upon the unskilled, untrained nature of his cinematic success evinces
Smith's need to keep the legend of his humble origins alive in order not to damage his
independent street credibility. In fact, the entire premise and title of Snowball Effect (in
addition to its reference to Willam the Idiot Manchild's favorite queer sexual pastime in
Clerks) is to ground Smith's success and talent in his hard-working (if not exactly
working-class) New Jersey origins, to demonstrate that even when he makes it big he is
loyal to the people who supported him when he hadn't yet achieved national fame.
Yet as we have seen, Smith's relationship to his various successive buddy groups
is complex: remember that while Bryan Johnson may "love" that the character of Randal
is based upon him, he nevertheless felt hurt that Smith left him for film school, and Ernie
O'Donnell and Mike Bellicose were frankly bewildered at being cut out of Clerks. I do
not suggest that Smith should have dragged these old friends with him into the indie film
industry, but rather that their abandonment reflects a pattern for Smith: when O'Donnell
and Bellicose weren't up to the task of performing his work, he simply moved on to other
associates (actor Brian O'Halloran, producer Scott Mosier, cinematographer David
Klein) who were. Smith may not have forgotten his old friends but he did not cast them
in major roles in Clerks as he initially promised, suggesting that for Smith the creative
work of making and marketing his films generally takes precedence over the friendships
he makes such a big deal out of in Snowball Effect.
To be fair, Smith has remained loyal to many of his collaborators over the years,
and even turned down the opportunity to direct Green Hornet in order to continue
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working with his longtime producer Scott Mosier. What is important is that while Smith
does value his relationships, he also values his career, and he is very adept at making
those two things work together, both in the sense that he frequently works hard to cast his
friends but also uses those friends as a key part of his user-friendly, down-home image
when it comes to publicly promoting his films.
All that said, Smith is something of a genuine "hometown hero" and his New
Jersey roots are central to understanding his public identity as a filmmaker. Once Clerks
hit big, Smith returned to New Jersey to set up his base of corporate operations there: the
View Askew offices are located in Red Bank, NJ, as is Smith's comic book store, Jay and
Silent Bob's Secret Stash (established in 1995). Even after his move to Los Angeles in
1999, Smith continued to host View Askew film festivals called Vu1gar-a-thons every
other year in New Jersey, and even commissioned Miramax's private charter jet in 1999
to fly his wife Jennifer cross-country so that his daughter, Harley Quinn Smith, would be
born a New Jerseyan (Evening 2 disc 2 chapter 27). Not that these deeds are
disingenuous or are explicitly intended as publicity stunts, but Smith's fierce loyalty to
his New Jersey home is nevertheless reinforced by high-profile acts like the private
Jersey plane flight and by the cinematic efforts of Phil Benson, the director/producer of
Snowball Effect, which couches Smith's career almost entirely in terms of his Jersey
upbringing and high school friends. 2o
Smith has also been active in financing and promoting his New Jersey friends'
film projects, including Bryan Johnson's Vulgar (2000), Vincent Pereira's A Better Place
(l997), and most recently, Jeff Anderson's directorial debut Now You Know (2002).
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Smith's generosity with his filmmaking friends is genuine, but promoting the public
profile of Vulgar and other such projects through his executive producership and frequent
onscreen guest appearances in these films helps reinforce his image as a humble, giving,
and down-to-earth hometown hero, an image that plays well in the larger independent
film marketplace and especially with Smith's many adoring fans.
Another way in which Smith tries to "keep it real" by downplaying his talents and
financial success in public is to encourage the idea that his cinematic output has "no
style," that he is a talentless hack who is very lucky to be where he is. Yet Smith's
claims about having no cinematic style need to be questioned. Smith's humility about his
craft is charming but covers up the fact that "no style" is still a style, and in fact the low-
key, low-budget, self-referential style of Clerks was actually in high demand at the time
of its 1994 release. Indeed, at Sundance 1994, the year producer's representative John
Pierson describes as "the year when the ultra low-budget aesthetic was totally dominant,"
Clerks flaunted a low-budget look that was at the cutting edge of what it meant to be cool
and hip in the independent film sector (Pierson 286). Clerks' indebtedness to (and
closing-credits acknowledgement ot) prior independent films such as Jim Jarmusch's
Stranger Than Paradise (1984), Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989), and Richard
Linklater's Slacker (1991), reveal that Smith is a filmmaker who knows his indie cinema
precursors well, and probably surmised even before Clerks was accepted to the Sundance
Festival that it was the type of film an independent distributor might be interested in circa
1994. Clerks' formal similarities to Slacker and especially Stranger Than Paradise-
shot in low-budget black and white and built out of a series of loosely connected
395
vignettes linked by text-based intertitles-reveal that Smith actually does have a style,
and a fairly derivative one at that. In fact, to put a name to it, Smith might be the last
practitioner of the early-90s low-budget indie style.
Interestingly, Smith admits on An Evening With Kevin Smith that he himself is the
main source of the "no style" legend that surrounds him: he says that "I don't really have
a style per se," yet admits that he proliferates the notion that he's not very talented
"visceral[ly] or visual[ly]" in order to preemptively deflate that argument before it is
brought against him by a film critic (Evening With disc 2 chapter 26). Once again, this
demonstrates that despite his pretense to being a simple man with humble suburban
origins, Kevin Smith is actually incredibly clever when it comes to framing his public
image and controlling his multimedia career.
From time to time, Smith admits to his marketing savvy and his privileged
position in the contemporary film industry. For example, Smith's industry know-how is
explicitly on display during a moment from An Evening With Kevin Smith 2: Evening
Harder (2006), when Smith uses the term "revenue stream" to describe how he makes
money from his films: he states that in the age of DVD, the box-office success of
theatrical release is not important since a film's theatrical exhibition functions as "one big
commercial" to stimulate an ongoing "revenue stream" including "the real money" to be
made in DVD release and ancillary markets (Evening 2 disc 2 chapter 26). Furthermore,
in a separate essay Smith candidly states that he knows he truly hasn't been an indie
filmmaker since 1994: "I sold out a long time ago. [...] [1]n truth, I haven't been an
indie since the first two weeks of '94. The moment Miramax bought Clerks at the
396
Sundance Film Festival, [my] 'indie' title became negligible" (Silent Bob Speaks 155).
These admissions merely confirm what Smith's career has exemplified all along, that
Smith and his associates, with the backing of Miramax/Disney's money and resources,
have been very canny at finding their audience and marketing their films and
merchandise to that audience.
A key part of Smith's finding his audience has been his prescience in using the
intemet as a marketing and fan relations tool. In Chapter III we discussed how Smith
uses the world wide web as a fan forum, analogous to how published letter columns were
at one time used to interact with fans in the comic book industry. Taking his cue from
this aspect of comic book fan culture, and becoming a web geek long before it became a
widely occurring phenomenon in the late 1990s, Smith has tapped into a cultural resource
that both keeps him close to his fans and helps position him as a key Hollywood
tastemaker in the 2000s. Indeed, he was one of the first filmmakers to capitalize on the
power ofthe intemet, setting up the first official View Askew fan website in 1995
(imdb.com). His ongoing home-video success and constant web presence since 1995 has
increased Smith's visibility and options within the geek demographic, especially as the
aspects of geek culture Smith specializes in-slacker cinema and comic-book
properties-have entered the mainstream in the new millennium. In fact, in recent years
it has become possible to view Smith's influence in much more wide-ranging,
mainstream terms: for example, in 2007 he directed the pilot episode of superhero-
themed comedy "Reaper" on the CW network, and he has also served as a guest reviewer
on "Ebert and Roeper At the Movies" during Roger Ebert's occasional periods of illness.
397
Furthermore, Smith's body of cinematic work has paved the way for the recent boom in
high-grossing slacker comedies such as Knocked Up and Superbad (both 2007), making
possible the rise of Gen-Y slacker cinema producer par excellence Judd Apatow, named
by Entertainment Weekly as 2007's smartest person in Hollywood (EW#968, December
7, 2007). Yet amidst all this cultural affirmation of what Smith has been doing since
1994, his ongoing web presence (he is online every day), combined with his signature
self-depreciating humor and humility, keeps him accessible to his fans and encourages
them to see him as "just another webgeek" who surfs the web and hangs out at MySpace
o 10 k h 21Just 1 e t em.
Yet the aspect of Smith's persona that involves playing up his humble origins
serves one other important function as well: it lets him off the hook for any transgressions
he might commit against groups he does not understand, and, furthermore, valorizes him
for any political conectness or sensitivity he has gained since his early days in suburban
New Jersey. In 1999 Smith admitted to gay publication the Advocate that "he wasn't
always so enlightened himself' and regrets some of Jay's homophobic remarks toward
Dante in Clerks (Kilday 62). Smith's candor on this matter is refreshing, and I might
hope for him that he will one day look back and say a similar thing about his treatment of
Lela on An Evening With Kevin Smith. Yet the most interesting thing about this
admission is its revelation of the class basis of homophobia: back when Smith was stuck
in suburbia working thankless, low-paying jobs, he ignorantly participated in anti-gay
culture, yet frames himself now, after his enormous success as a filmmaker, as more
enlightened in these matters.
398
Strangely, Smith's admission of Clerks-era homophobia somewhat belies (or at
least mitigates) his claim that he has always attempted to make his films gay-friendly for
the benefit of his out gay brother. The truth is, as depictions of Generation X males
wrestling with their gendering and sexuality in the queer 1990s, Smith's View Askew
films are bound to evince both homophobic and pro-queer tendencies. As this study has
shown, this homophobic/pro-queer dualism-which is also a form of dual address-is
seen in all five of the View Askewniverse films produced between 1994 and 2001. And
if Smith's rise in class status and increased public profile since the days of Clerks
necessitate his closer adherence to the tenets of political correctness, the GLAAD case
against Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back in 2001 reveals that at least some members of the
queer community take issue with the homophobia that still lingers in his work. It is an
edge that cuts both ways.
My Chapter VI title is taken from a statement made by Kevin Smith during the
"Clerks 10th Anniversary Q & A" session included in the Clerks X 3-DVD set. Smith
first explains that he thinks women have an easier time in U.S. culture becoming
erotically involved with their female friends, a bit of male fantasy projection on his part
that once again reveals the androcentricity of Smith's work and worldview. Confirming
this, Smith next argues that "with guys, you don't have that fluidity, it doesn't work.
You're never just like: 'I fuckin' love you.' 'I love you, too.' 'Let me suck your cock.'
Everything stops one step shy of that. [...] That's how I see male relationships: just one
pleasantry shy ofa cock in the mouth." This statement could easily sum up Smith's
entire View Askewniverse oeuvre: constantly riding the line between humorous
399
pleasantries and explicit queer male sexuality. Smith's claim during this same Q & A
session that he doesn't necessarily intend for his films (or at least Clerks) to depict "how
these two dudes are totally fuckin' queer for each other" does not alter the pervasive
homoerotic content of his films, and, interestingly, frames the discussion of his work
much as I have here, around the concept of queer (even if it is predominately male
queerness).
As I have argued throughout this project, Kevin Smith is a savvy Generation X
media producer who knows what sells in the independent film marketplace of the 1990s
and the new millennium. As such, there exists, if nothing else, an economic imperative
for his View Askew films to engage with non-straight sexualities. As Maria Pramaggiore
argues in "Straddling the Screen":
Films that depict alternatives to heterosexuality have found profitable
markets, a situation that calls to mind (yet another) fence: that straddled by
film producers seeking a wider audience [...]. The economic imperative
of the mass market informs even the most well-intentioned attempts to
move beyond compulsory heterosexuality, however, and subtends recent
film narratives that attempt to have their sex both ways. (275)
As we have seen, Smith's attempts to have his sex and his market both ways is a slippery
negotiation indeed, and calls to mind his closing comment to Lela during An Evening
With Kevin Smith. Lela asks him: "Did you know you were straight when you were
eighteen?" To which Smith replies: "Ma'am, I'm still not sure." Once again, Smith
leaves open the possibility of his own bisexuality. Is he a repressed bisexual at heart? Or
400
does he, as a multimedia icon of the 2000's, ultimately want to leave this question
tantalizingly open so as to appeal to all possible comers? Is impossible to tell.
Yet I think the very unanswerability of this question is another register in which
Smith and his work play it both ways. Maybe his position, which is also the position of
so many of his geek protagonists, indicates that rather than falling out of the closet, the
Gen X male has instead seen the walls of the closet fall down around him. Suddenly
immersed in a cultural milieu where queer is hip and straight is square, in order to keep
ahead of cultural trends he has no choice but to acknowledge and engage with the
homoerotics that have underpinned his position all along. In this sense the slacker's
attempted step away from the white male privilege of his symbolic father, appropriative
and fraught as it is, may equal a step toward acknowledging alternate modes of
masculinity and sexuality, modes that integrate the feminine, the homoerotic, and the
queer. And these alternative modes may be best understood via the image of the bisexual
fence as opposed to the homosexual closet: "Bisexual epistemologies [...] acknowledge
fluid desires and their continual construction and deconstruction of the desiring subject"
and take as their central emblem "the fence, a permeable and permeating structure,
[which] is most akin to the mutually inclusive 'both/and' rather than the exclusive
'either/or'" (Pramaggiore 3, 4). Smith's work and persona are certainly characterized by
this sense of "both/and" rather than "either/or," and as such may be as permeable,
inclusive, and queer as recent cinema tends to get. That this degree of gender and sexual
fluidity is present in a body of cinema still widely considered to be "by, for, and about"
homophobic male fanboys is of no small interest, for whatever else Smith's films may
foreclose or disavow, their straddling of the fence of queer sexuality is undeniable.
401
402
Notes
1. Rodriguez's actual budget for EI Mariachi (1992) after post production costs is
estimated at $220,000 (imdb.com).
2. Despite Richard Linklater's having made the pivotal Slacker, Smith trumps Linklater
as the most iconic of Gen X slacker directors, due to his much higher public profile, more
aggressive marketing, and tendency to milk his status as director-as-star via his online
accessibility to fans, college Q & A appearances, and the like. Not to mention Smith's
consistent onscreen appearances as one half of the iconic duo Jay and Silent Bob.
Linklater's high-art aspirations and cineaste-inflected intellectualism (see his films
Slacker, Before Sunrise, and Waking L(fe) keep some of his key slacker works, especially
the eponymous Slacker, out of the reach of many less intellectual filmgoers.
3. I will address the shifts that characterize Smith's post-millennial star text separately in
an in-progress book project, Falling Out of the Closet: Kevin Smith and Post-Closet
Independent Cinema.
4. I use mostly primary texts for my analysis, since not much critical work on Smith
precedes mine, especially in terms of analyzing his public persona, and since I am
particularly interested in how Smith constructs his own public persona in the era of
industrial auteurism.
5. According to Brian Johnson on Snowball Effect, his straight-to-DVD film Vulgar was
funded partially by Miramax through a deal Smith had with them, and partially funded by
Smith himself.
6. Kevin Smith is the 24th recipient of this annual award. Past recipients of the
prestigious UCLA Jack Benny Award include Johnny Carson, Steve Martin, Chevy
Chase, John Belushi, Rodney Dangerfield, George Bums, Joan Rivers, David Letterman,
Bill Murray, Lily Tomlin, Robin Williams, John Cleese, Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg,
Carol Burnett, Candice Bergen, Roseanne Arnold, Leslie Nielsen, Kelsey Grammer,
Ellen DeGeneres, Conan O'Brien, Adam Sandler, and most recently Mike Myers.
7. Smith turned down directing Green Hornet because "It would never be my movie"
(Evening 2 disc 2 16:00) - he has a strong investment in his own authorship/creatorship,
and admits that he "likes to hear [his] own stuff."
8. To the best of my knowledge, The Dueling Personas ofKevin Smith is the only book
ever published by View Askew Books. All other published works pertaining to Smith
have been put out by established presses: Muir's An Askew View is printed by Applause
(a division of Hal Leonard music publishers), Silent Bob Speaks is published by
Miramax/Hyperion, and My Boring-Ass Life by London-based Titan Books.
403
9. See also my analysis of the popular reviews of Chuck&Buck in "A Stalker's Odyssey:
Arrested Development, Gay Desire, and Queer Comedy in Chuck&Buck" in Jump Cut
49, http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/CarterSoleslindex.html.
10. Smith's S.C.M.O.D.S. sketches, which he calls "SNL-type sketches," typically
featured protagonists appropriated from pop culture: Ronald McDonald, the Jolly green
Giant, the Keebler elves, James Bond (Snowball Effect). These pieces offer a foretaste of
Smith's later cinematic criticisms of corporate culture (Dogma, JSBSB) and knack for
witty intertextuality (all View Askew films). The sketches and the troupe were
frequently singled out by the local paper and Smith in particular was lauded for his sharp
and funny writing in those articles (Snowball Effect).
11. Intriguingly in this connection, Smith and Dave Klein would twice play onscreen
lovers: they would provide the voice-overs for the porn films Randal watches during
Clerks, and play an onscreen television-show-producing gay couple in the Bryan-
Johnson-directed and View-Askew-produced Vulgar in 2000.
12. Smith's "making movies with my friends" ethos would return with a vengeance in
Clerks II, which I discuss in my in-progress book chapter on that film.
13. Smith's very funny critique of Peter Jackson's Lord ofthe Rings movies ("they're
about walking") from Evening 2 (disc 2 1:48:40) is put directly into Randal's mouth in
Clerks 2. Thus Smith gets to play out his fantasy of being Brian Johnson by indulging
the Randal part of his persona onstage.
14. Smith also crushes on Tom Cruise in Silent Bob Speaks, writing of his first meeting
with Cruise that "as the mighty biceps of Cruise enfold me, I realize [...J I'm in love"
(199).
15. For more on Smith's post-1999 star image, see my in-progress book project, Falling
Out ofthe Closet: Kevin Smith and Post-Closet Independent Cinema.
16. As the lead in the hit teen sex comedy American Pie (1999), Biggs was involved in a
famous scene in which he has sexual intercourse with a freshly baked apple pie.
17. For more on the figure of Reese Witherspoon as a strong "unruly girl" in
contemporary cinema, see Kathleen Rowe Karlyn's Reese Witherspoon chapter in
Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers (forthcoming). For more on Harvey Weinstein's
legendary ability to alienate filmmakers and actors, see Biskind, Down and Dirty
Pictures.
18. On Evening 2 (disc 1 37:20) Smith even refers back to jokes and incidents from
Evening I, further evidence of the intertextuality of View Askew texts and continuity
knowledge of View Askew fans.
404
19. My favorite example of a non-"political" time-waster is one notable woman on the
Mallrats Tenth Anniversary Q & A who never really asks a question but instead gets
sidetracked into talking about her own ethnic background and the various places she has
lived over the years, giggling all the while. Indeed, many View Askew fans make jokes,
perform stunts, and tend to ask non-threatening and/or absurd questions when given a
chance at the mic at a Smith Q & A.
20. Benson appears to be a View Askew insider: in addition to producing and directing
Snowball Effect and a few other features on the Clerks XDVD, Benson associate
produced Smith's Jersey Girl and has worked as a sound editor on the View Askew films
A Better Place, Dogma, Vulgar, and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Also noteworthy in
this connection is documentarian J.M. Kenny, the producer and director of both An
Evening With Kevin Smith DVDs and producer of the Judge Not: In Defense ofDogma
documentary that appears on View Askew's Vulgar DVD.
21. Smith is so dedicated to encouraging internet-based View Askew fandom that in
2006 he thanked all 30,000+ of his MySpace friends by listing their names at the end of
the Clerks II end credits.
APPENDIX
SHOT LISTS
Sequence Analysis: Clerks, "Veronica Rescue"
Key: CR =Chewlies Rep, WCS =Woolen Cap Smoker
Shot Time Mise-en-scene Cinematography / Sound
Editing
1 9:45 QS doorway interior ms of V entering CR: "He smells the
store change is coming!"
2 9:47 QS counter with D Is over the CR rant continues
internally framed shoulders of mob
accusing D
3 9:50 CR in front of counter ms ofCR CR rant continues
4 9:51 D behind counter r cu ofD CR rant continues
5 9:52 mob in front of counter ms of mob "Cancer merchant!"
throwing cigarettes
6 9:55 back of mob throwing r ms of backs of blast of fire
cigarettes;fire mob extinguisher
extinguisher discharging
discharges all over
them in a white cloud
7 9:57 V stands atop freezer camera starts at V's pick-squeal into
case holding fir ext. at feet and tilts up distorted guitar
waist level, f.e. nozzle until her head and chord; V: "Who's
at chest level shoulders and the leading this mob?"
nozzle fill the frame
8 10:02 mob ms of mob (same as mob coughing; WF:
shot 6) "That guy."
9 10:05 QS doorway interior; ms of back of CR V (vo): "Freeze!"
CR leaving; he stops
and turns around at
V's command
405
Shot Time Mise-en-scene Cinematography I Sound
Editing
10 10: 11 V gets down from ms of V; pans to V tells CR to get
freezer and walks to follow her to CR out
CR
11 10:30 Donut rack with sign: V tells mob to "go
"NEW! Singles" V commute!"
stands to r of rack
12 10:43 front counter with Is of counter WCS: "Pack of
WCS and D; WCS cigarettes?"
orders cigs than D
storms off out of r of
frame
13 11:00 behind counter cu of cigarette
somewhere rolling in D's
fingers
14 11:03 D and V to one side of mls of D and V;
counter; he sits on long take
floor at 1, she kneels at
r; dirty mags over D's 1
shoulder
15 11:45 handwritten sign on cu of sign
counter: "Please leave
money on the counter.
Take change when
applicable. Be
honest." Near end of
take a customer leaves
some change.
16 11:50 D and V behind long take
counter; she sits
behind him; he paints
her nails
17 12:58 D's chest; their hands cu of D painting
V's nails
18 13:05 same as shot 16 long take
19 14:44 D and V stand up mls of D and V,
behind front counter; internally framed at
Willam stands in front counter
foreground at r of
frame,back to camera,
staring into space
406
Shot Time Mise-en-scene Cinematography I Sound
Editing
20-7 14:50+ W standing at counter; sirs sequence of
D and V behind conversation
counter; etc. between V and W
28 15:32 mirror on wall above ms of W in mirror V: "That was
"self service" sign; in on wall above "self Snowball."
mirror we see W exit, service" sign
bumping into
newspaper rack on
way out
29 15:36 counter; D restocks mls ofD and V, "37" talk; ends with
cigarettes as he and V internally framed; D: "My girlfriend
talk long take sucked 37 dicks!"
Cust: "In a row?"
30 17: 18 QS doorway interior; discussion, incl. D:
V heading out, D "Why did you have
catches up to suck their dick, I
mean, why couldn't
you sleep with them
like any other
decent person?"
31 18:07 QS exterior D: "Hey, try not to
suck any dick on
the way through the
parking lot!"
407
Sequence Analysis: Clerks, "Syntax"
Shot Time Mise-en-scene Cinematography / Sound
Editing
1 21: 13 Intertitle: Syntax silence
2 21:14 Dante at counter ms of both R: "Some guy just
reading, 1ft of characters in two- came in refusing to
frame, internally shot pay late fees [...J"
framed, lots of D: "A shocking
clutter. Randal abuse of authority."
enters, grabs a R: "I'm a firm
cellophane-wrapped believer [...J"
item from offscreen,
and leans on counter
at rt of frame.
3 21:30 Fruit pie sign: cu of revolving fruit R: "You want
Dave's Apple and pie sign - rotates something to drink?
Cherry (opposite clockwise I'm buying."
sides), "Real Fruit D: "No thanks."
Filling"
4 21:33 Randal at drink ms of Randal, R: "Who was on
cooler, takes a handheld camera, your phone this
Gatorade out of the moves backward as morning at like
cooler, reads the R walks down aisle 2:30? 1 was trying to
label then walks call for a half an
down aisle, convex hour"
mirror in D: "Why?"
background R: "I wanted to use
your car. (Snack
cake.)"
408
Shot Time Mise-en-scene Cinematography / Sound
Editin~
5 21:41 Randal joins Dante ms of both D: "You don't
behind counter, characters in two- wanna know."
walking in from rt shot R: "You call Caitlin
of frame, stands just again?"
behind him with D: "She called me."
newspaper as Dante R: "You tell
adds figures with Veronica?"
calculator and notes etc. - see attached
them on clipboard
(NOT internally
framed)
6 23:44 store exterior: Jay ms of Jay and Silent Rock music (which
dances, Bob Bob in two-shot began at end of
smokes, Jay holds previous shot):
out his hat to Bob, "Making Me Sick"
Bob puts something by Bash & Pop
(cigarettes? weed?
money?) in Jay's
hat
7 23:53 RST Video interior, ms of Randal at rt of Rock music fades
Randal behind frame, mother in but remains barely
counter (NOT profile at left audible.
internally framed) holding daughter, Female customer:
mother wears "Excuse me, do you
"B.U.M. sell videotapes?"
Equipment" jacket R: "Yeah, what are
you looking for?" [.
. .]
R: "Okay, I need one
each of the following
tapes: Whispers in
the Wind, To Each
His Own,"
8 24:21 Randal behind cu of Randal in "Put It Where It
counter, black profile Doesn't Belong,My
videocassette cases Pipes Need
line wall behind him Cleaning, All Tit-
Fucking Volume
Eight"
409
Shot Time Mise-en-scene Cinematography / Sound
Editing
9 24:26 video store interior, reverse ms of "1 Need Your Cock,
mother holds mother looking a bit Ass-Worshipping
daughter in white dismayed Rim Jobbers,
dress, ceiling-high
videotape shelves
behind
10 24:29 Randal behind cu of Randal in "My Cunt Needs
counter, black profile Shafts, [...]"
videocassette cases
line wall behind him
11 24:40 mother in video reverse ms of "Girls Who Crave
store interior [same mother looking Cock, [...J"
as shot 9] increasingly
displeased
12 24:44 Randal behind cu of Randal in "Men Alone Two:
counter [same as profile The KY Connection,
shot 10] Pink Pussy Lips, and
oh yeah, All Holes
Filled With Hard
Cock. [...] What
was that called
again?"
Rock music fades
back up.
13 24:55 QS interior, Dante ms of Dante in Rock music.
walks into frame profile
from rt, crosses in
front of counter to
left holding cat litter
box. Has a thought,
sets litter box on
14 25:03 Dante walks to ms of Dante at Rock music, which
phone phone abruptly ends once
Dante finishes
dialing.
410
I - ---
Sequence Analysis: Clerks, "Catharsis"
411
Shot Time Mise-en-scene Cinematography Sound
I Editing
1 1:24:00 Intertitle: Catharsis gong ringing
2 1:24:02 RST Video exterior; ms of Randal gong still ringing;
night. R emerges from fades
door at left of frame and
locks it behind him.
Walks out of frame to
the right.
3 1:24:11 interior of top third of cu of Randal R: "Dante?"
Quik Stop door; New Aggressive rock
Jersey Lottery sticker music begins when
prevalent, with bell Dante's hands grab
dangling down in front Randal's throat.
of it. Fire extinguisher Sound bridge to next
barely visible in lower shot.
rt. of frame. Renters,
says lin~, then D's
hands reach from rt. of
frame and pull R out of
frame by the throat.
4 1:24: 17 D at left standing, ms ofD andR Rock music
choking R who kneels from side
to rt. R pushes D back,
camera pans to follow,
taking R out of frame.
D staggers against
magazine rack, steadies
himself, lunges toward
rt. of frame.
5 1:24:22 D tackles R; they fall camera shooting Rock music
behind counter from I to across counter;
rt with D on top. D's lunge
Internal framing of matches from
counter previous shot
6 1:24:23 D atop R behind extreme high- Rock music
counter, they wrestle, R angle Is
hits D with a Pringle's
can and then kicks,
scooting away on his
ass
412
Shot Time Mise-en-scene Cinematography Sound
/ Editing
7 1:24:28 bread bin shot from one cu of R's hand Rock music
side, baguette loaves reaching into
stacked, R reaches in bread bin
and grabs top one
8 1:24:29 D's face, loaf swings in cu of D's face Rock music
from rt and hits him being struck by
loaf from rt to 1
9 1:24:30 black cat on counter, fs of cat reclining Rock music
looks to rt of frame on counter;
eyeline match -
cat
10 1:24:31 D and R on aisle floor, high angle Is Rock music
struggling, D 1, R rt. R
has partial bread loaf in
rt hand, drops it as he
kicks his way out of rt
of frame, throwing
something at D as he
retreats
11 1:24:38 black cat (similar to eyeline match - Rock music
shot 9) cat
12 1:24:39 aisle floor with debris ha Is (same Rock music
lying around; more position as shot
products fly into frame 10)
from rt
13 1:24:42 fight over; debris on ms of debris; tilts Rock music fades
floor; camera tilts up to to mls two-shot out.
take in D and R seated R: "How's your
against product shelves, eye?"
R 1, D rt. D: "The swelling's
not that bad. The
FDS stings." [...]
14 1:26:25 R throws yet another cu of D's face R: "[...] [without
candy bag at D, which even] discussing how
flies into frame from 1, he felt with his
hitting D in the face present one."
15 1:26:28 R yelling and pointing cu ofR R: "You wanna
his finger toward frame blame someone,
rt blame yourself. [...]
You're here of your
own volition."
413
Shot Time Mise-en-scene Cinematography Sound
/ Editin~
16 1:26:45 D listening rs cu of D (rs) R: "You
overcompensate for
having what's
basically a monkey's
job."
17 1:26:47 both sitting up rnIs two-shot R" You push fucking
buttons."
18 1:27:06 R talking cu ofR R: "[...] You know,
that guy Jay's got it
right [...]"
19 1:27:10 D listening rs cu ofD R's speech continues
20 1:27:13 R talking cu ofR R's speech continues
21 1:27:17 D listening rs cu ofD R's speech continues
22 1:27: 19 both sitting up, R rnIs two-shot R "[...] If we're so
finishes speech and fuckin' advanced,
walks out of I of frame what are we doing
working here?"
23 1:27:30 next intertitle:
Denouement
Sequence Analysis: Mallrats, "Shannon Beats Up Brodie"
414
Shot Time Mise-en-scene Cinemato2raphyIEditin2 Sound
1 42:07 fast food counter, ms of Brodie and Shannon B: "Fill this with
Shannon enters from Coke, no ice."
left of frame and looms sinister music.
over B, grabs him and
yanks him out of frame
to left
2 42:16 maintenence hallway; B Is of Brodie and Shannon
thrown into frame from
right, S follows and
punches B in the
stomach
3 42:22 hallway; S removes his mcu
coat as B slides down
wall to seated position
on floor facing S
4 42:28 hallway; Stalks Is S: "Mallrat kids"
5 42:38 hallway; the two talk, mcu of S - pans to B on S: "No shopping
then after B' s line S his line agenda"
kicks B all the way to B: "Motivated
the ground salesmanship"
6 42:46 hallway; S leans down cu of Sin B's face; lying
and presses his face sideways so S is literally
next to B's; whispers on top
line menacingly in B's
ear
7 42:51 hallway; S picks B up mcu ofB and S S: "You see,
and shoves him against Bruce..."
the wall, punches him B pants heavily
8 43:21 hallway; B ineffectually Is
attacks S, S laughs
9 43:26 in mall; Gwen and T.S.
talk, eventually spot
Brodie and hasten over
10 43:41 candy store; B on ms B tells Jay that the
ground framed by Jay Easter Bunny beat
and Bob him up
11 43:50 store; G and TS arrive; Is
J and Bob leave
12 43:59 candy store ms B: "Am I still
glowing?"
415
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