Courtesy Lionsgate
Quick Stop clerks Randal Graves (Jeff Anderson) and Dante Hicks (Brian O’Halloran) have become their own bosses in the franchise's third installment.
“I’m not even supposed to be here today.”
That oft-repeated phrase from the original Clerks perfectly sums up the ethos of the 1994 movie. It comes via Dante Hicks (Brian O’Halloran), a twenty-two-year-old Quick Stop clerk who feels an overwhelming sense of responsibility toward his job (but not so much toward the women he dates). The movie follows a day in his work life, from the moment he’s guilted by his boss to open the store after closing the previous night to closing again, all the while being pushed toward truancy by his best friend Randal Graves (Jeff Anderson), who works at the adjoining VHS store.
Along with Slacker by Richard Linklater and Singles by Cameron Crowe, Clerks served as a Gen-X cinematic masterpiece, movies about twenty-somethings who had none of their predecessors’ ambition. Not only this, but Clerks inaugurated its own cinematic universe, tied together by ribald duo Jay and Silent Bob (Jason Mewes and writer/director Kevin Smith). The film itself was the product of hard work: Smith created and financed the project largely on his own, putting expenses on credit cards until then-Miramax head Harvey Weinstein picked it up.
Despite its incessant references to the 1994 original, Clerks III—which releases wide on September 13—has none of its predecessor’s scrappiness. The film finds Dante and Randal, owners of the Quick Stop since the end of 2006’s Clerks II, still operating the store and complaining about customers, while putting up with younger employee Elias (Trevor Fehrman). We quickly learn that the perfect life promised to Dante in Clerks II has shattered when his wife Becky (Rosario Dawson) and their daughter died in a car accident. Outside of occasional trips to the graveyard, where Becky appears to him to swap raunchy dialogue, Dante barely acknowledges the loss, preferring to do his job and gripe at Randal.
At least until Randal nearly dies from a heart attack. Feeling a renewed sense of purpose, Randal insists on making something of himself, namely by making a movie about his life. To write the script, Randal draws from events he and Dante experienced, events that we saw in Clerks and Clerks II. Randal convinces his friends and customers—characters we saw in Clerks and Clerks II—to play themselves in the film.
In short, Clerks III is an extremely self-referential film, even by Kevin Smith’s standards. There are, of course, obligatory scenes with famous people who have appeared in his projects before, with cameos from Ben Affleck, Ethan Suplee, and others. But the meat of the movie consists of Randal and Dante shooting scenes for the fictional movie, literally recreating scenes from the first movie, complete with the original film’s cast. Occasionally, the meta aspects allow Smith to offer a mea culpa for racial jokes from that film (nothing is said about the rampant gay panic that carries over to Clerks II). But more often than not, the moments play as a trip down memory lane, an excuse to remember the good times and check in with folks we haven’t seen since the 90s.
At first glance, such indulgences feel far removed from the anti-work ethos of the original. “This job would be great,” Randal gripped in 1994, “if it weren’t for the fucking customers.” In 2022, it appears that he got his wish, as very few customers drop by to interrupt his and Dante’s banter. While it felt subversive for the duo to close the shop for a moment so they could visit an acquaintance’s funeral or play hockey on the roof in Clerks, Clerks III feels like such a fantasy that we don’t even question how they can pay their bills when no one seems to be shopping.
The economic anxiety that drove the first movie and remained present in the second is completely absent in the third, and not just because Dante and Randal have become their own bosses. In fact, outside of a cameo by Smith’s wife Jennifer Schwalbach Smith, as a rich woman who invests in Randall’s movie, and a tired running gag about cryptocurrencies, economics play no role in Clerks III.
The economic anxiety that drove the first movie and remained present in the second is completely absent in the third, and not just because Dante and Randal have become their own bosses.
And yet, given the movie’s setting inside of a convenience store, there’s something compelling about this refusal to give wage labor even its angry due. At its heart, Clerks III is about finding meaning in life. It is, like most of Smith’s work, unabashedly sappy, and locates that meaning in the relationships formed and lost. Never the visual stylist, Smith lets music drops do most of the heavy lifting. But for those who have followed his movies since the 90s, O’Halloran’s thinning hair and Anderson’s increasingly lined face have a weight all their own. When the two break into shouting confessions or tearful soliloquies, we genuinely sympathize with them.
While these moments most often happen on the job, they are never about work. Usually, Dante and Randal treat their jobs as a mere fact of life. Sometimes, they outright resent it as distracting from the stuff that gives that life meaning. When Randal sets off to film his story, he’s not honoring the drab Quick Stop location. Rather, he’s prying significance from the demands of wage labor, stealing back the hours he and Dante ransomed for the ability to pay bills and buy food.
Late in the film, ghostly Becky appears to Dante outside of the Moobies fast food restaurant where they met in Clerks II. “We had the best times of our life there,” Becky recalls, urging Dante to overcome his sorrow and go back in. It’s a strange thing to say about a garish purple brick building, with a literal golden calf as a mascot. But it underscores the movie’s assumption that no boss or corporate entity determines what we do with our lives, even when we’re on the clock.
For all its sentimental nostalgia and flat, self-referential humor, Clerks III refuses to acknowledge the expectations of wage labor. By largely ignoring the demands of the punch clock to celebrate community, the movie reminds us that no one is supposed to be here, working a job instead of enjoying the richness of life.