Jesus, nobody twisted your arm to be here today. You're here of your own volition. You like to think the weight of the world rests on your shoulders. Like this place would fall apart if Dante wasn't here. Jesus, you overcompensate for having what's basically a monkey's job. You push fucking buttons. Anybody can waltz in here and do our jobs. You... You're so obsessed with making it seem so much more epic, so much more important than it really is. Christ, you work in a convenience store, Dante! And badly, I might add! I work in a shitty video store, badly as well.

You know, there's a million fine looking women in the world, dude. But they don't all bring you lasagna at work.

When I told my brother that I had finally watched Clerks, he responded with a bit of surprise that I had never seen it before. I couldn't help but share his reaction on paper—highly influential, semi-ironic auteurish indie comedy has my name written all over it, and yet I have never been an acolyte of the View Askewniverse, perhaps because my one and only real taste of Kevin Smith's work (besides the worst tweet in the entire world) is Dogma, played on TNT after school—a film that upset me in a very literal sense, having struck me then and still striking me now as unpleasant for the sake of unpleasantness, which is never a thing I really go for.

All of that aside: Clerks is great. It's a simple, funny, thorough film that never feels anything close to masterly, and is all the better for it. At some point over the past decade or so, our popular definition of the term indie film has become bastardized into meaning that the director has only done one Marvel film and not multiple. And Clerks is a movie that you cannot love for production value: you can only love for what it is trying to be relative to everything else, for filling a void in the zeitgeist that might now today seem banal (it is charming to think of a time where Star Wars banter was niche and idiosyncratic).

I can't pretend to have experienced anything about the early nineties enough to speak to it being true to form, but these characters are real people in a timeless and obvious way: they are clever, cynical, selfish, and miserable, without a neat narrative or crisp resolution. You hang out with them as if they are friends of that one older friend of yours: you're not sure if you like them, you're not sure if you'll ever see them again, but they're pretty damn funny.

★★★★