An Examination of the Themes of Kevin Smith's Films

[ledfloyd]

I think it's easiest to say that Chasing Amy is about yelling. And screaming. Crying too. That's about all I got out of it.

LOUD NOISES!

[Watashi]

Yeah, the scene in Chasing Amy where Ben does his long-winding monologue in the rain is when I knew I was going to hate Kevin Smith.

Though I'll still probably see his new one. Just cause and all.

[number8]

Yeah, the scene in Chasing Amy where Ben does his long-winding monologue in the rain is when I knew I was going to hate Kevin Smith.

Though I'll still probably see his new one. Just cause and all.

You want Seth Rogen's babies, that's why.

I'm seeing it for Katie Morgan.

[Wryan]

I love Chasing Amy.

[Raiders]

You want Seth Rogen's babies, that's why.

Change this to Elizabeth Banks, and bingo.

[Alex Weitzman]

Dogma

"So you were an artist! Big deal! Elvis was an artist. But that didn't stop him from joining the service in time of war. That's why he's The King, and you're a schmuck."

Ever walk into a project you were gonna do expecting it to totally be one thing...and then you realize it's something else? I expected, without a doubt, that Dogma would be the most obvious of thematic subjects to pin down. Duh. Religion, right? How could it not be? There's nothing in the film that's not about religion. Except...................well, does Dogma really deconstruct religion? It's certainly not looking at a wide range of beliefs. It's not seeking out anything specific within the religious community that needs revelation and exploration. And it's sure as hell not about faith, because faith is all about the belief of the unknown and everything in Dogma becomes pretty factual pretty durned quickly. While Dogma has things to say about religion, it ultimately does it in a skewed fashion by crafting a Catholic comic-book plot. And when I rewatched the film, I realized that the theme I was sensing was one that keyed into religion but wasn't necessarily a synonym of it. Dogma, really, is about acceptance.

This is a subtle theme for a deliberately unsubtle film, a film willing to let its characters speak very plainly and for quite a bit on end about their issues and their feelings. When push comes to shove, most of the conversations in the films have the surface topic of Christianity or Christian elements (angels, God, the Bible, etc.). But the trick is that religion is used by Dogma in the way that Chasing Amy uses comic books, as a surface topic of discussion that allows the film and the characters to dig into undercurrents. The only real difference is that Dogma just does that on a constant basis. Everything that Dogma brings up about or against religion is really a question regarding acceptance, be it humanity's ability to accept the divine or the divine's ability to accept humanity. Consider the pet issues of both Rufus and Serendipity. Both of them lash out against the proliferated misconceptions about God and/or Jesus that have been fostered by centuries of Church control. Both of them point, accurately, to the inherent prejudices within said Church that would prefer white males to be the personifications of entities that would otherwise be female or black. But what's their real complaint? Their real complaint is that people - people in power, especially, but also people on the whole - can't accept the idea that a "minority" can be the face of your deity. (One could easily argue about whether women are minorities, but they're certainly downtrodden enough.)

Same goes for the hiding of the truth behind Bethany's lineage. As Rufus says, they were "offered up as a sacrifice to the god of ecumenical politics." In other words, Christians couldn't handle the idea that Mary and Joseph had sex. I suppose that's the same instinct that keeps us from imagining our parents having sex. If we can't handle that, how can we handle imagining God's parents? (Well, maybe your God. I'm all agnostic-Jewish and stuff.) The topic of Bethany's lineage, of course, gives us a chance to talk about her inherent difficulty in accepting the task she's been given and the truth about her bloodline. When Bethany claims that God is dead in the beginning, she's using that postulation as a way to avoid accepting that there can be a merciful loving God who's allowed all the tragedy from her past to happen. Once Metatron shows up and sends her on her way, she spends close to the entire film being unable to accept everything that's happening to and around her. This is symptomatic of the Conradian "reluctant hero" archetype that Smith is using for Bethany, but when put into the context of this movie, it easily reflects her difficulty in relationship with her creator. And then she learns that she has a direct mainline of lineage to God. Why does that piss her off so much? Perhaps because she feels that it's such a crucial piece of information that the entirety of her life up until then has been rendered moot. But Metatron (in one of my favorite scenes of the film) calmly and sympathetically guides her back to herself by helping her accept that she is still Bethany Sloane, warts and all. She hasn't become someone else, and nobody was hiding something she desperately ought to have known earlier; her life, hard as it's been, was not in vain simply because she's actually the Last Scion. These are things Bethany needed to accept to be able to complete this journey.

And while Bethany ultimately claims a victory in acceptance, Loki, Bartleby, and Azrael fight their own battles in acceptance and fail. The whole conflict of Dogma is spurned on by dual inabilities to accept the fates consigned to them: Azrael cannot accept his punishment for refusing to take a side (or, more accurately, take the right side) in the battle between Heaven and Hell, just as much as Loki and Bartleby cannot accept the punishment they received for slighting God regarding Loki's office. We spend enough time with these guys to learn that at no point have they ever considered that their punishments may have been justified, or at the least significantly spurned on by their own behavior and/or choices. Thusly Serendipity's killer comeback to Azrael, seen at the top of this essay. Azrael in particular is a wounded petulant toddler of a character; Bartleby at least has the credit of having gone insane before he shifts into full-out villain mode. Azrael would rather destroy the universe than consider the mistakes inherent in his own actions, like a child who burns down the house because he got grounded.

In fact, a comment from the deleted segments of Azrael's climactic bar speech is very telling. He insists that Hell is what it is because humanity brought its guilt there, because humans are convinced that God will never forgive them their greivous sins, and from that sprung psychically all the fire and brimstone and yada yada. But Azrael is no different from them, never considering that God could possibly forgive him. He's so deep in his own "me vs. God" built-up conflict that he can't accept that God would easily accept him back if he had the tiniest bit of self-awareness about what got him in Hell in the first place. And ironically enough, Bartleby proves Azrael as a schmuck when he finally kneels before the reconstituted God and apologizes to her; although the manner of death is gruesome, God's demeanor of patience and understanding towards Bartleby implies that maybe she reversed her own decree. I'm spitballing here, but it's because we weren't supposed to totally hate Loki and Bartleby. Loki starts as the more unreasonable one, and Bartleby ends as that, but both guys are pushing themselves towards their extremes. Unlike Azrael, whose scheme is based on "if I can't have it, no one can", Bartleby and Loki didn't realize their actions would result in complete nonexistence. I felt sorry for them, and well we should, because they simply can't accept the idea that God has no love for them anymore. And indeed, this was one they were right to not accept because that wasn't necessarily the case, but God may have made a mistake in just not communicating very well to them out in Wisconsin. So when Bartleby and Loki die in the end, maybe God's presence there implies that she's willing to turn the tables and let them back in (now that they're transubstantiated and dead). I don't know if that means that I'm not willing to accept their unhappy end, but oh well.

The point here is that denial is a spiral towards madness and fury. We see acceptance, and the refusal of it, in several ways within Dogma. Serendipity doesn't like her place as a muse so she leaves and finds out she can't use her gifts for herself (but luckily, she's more accepting of that once she realizes it). Jay and Silent Bob show us what kind of acceptance can be had when you're not exactly smart enough to understand what's going on....which is to say, very little. Cardinal Glick's "Catholicism WOW" campaign is a refusal to accept that people may have moved on from the religion, but instead of adapting it to fit modern needs, he merely changes the decorations. Even the Catholic Church's stand against euthanasia (which keeps God out of the picture for a while) is a lack of acceptance that some people are ready to die. Religion and faith is all about what you can and cannot accept, and in that way Dogma is very much about religion. I can see where it may hit some people in uncomfortable spots; hell, it ought to be uncomfortable for most atheists given how much it essentially preaches acceptance of God. But ironically, it's a favorite film of many people who aren't especially religious, and maybe that's because religion itself has issues of acceptance with God. Religion is like the DMV, the bureaucracy standing between you and your driver's license (or, in this case, God). It shrouds faith and makes accepting God harder through a whole litany of rules and traditions, all of which are invented by man. I'm agnostic myself, so I just shrug when it comes to explanations of existence and say, "Eh, it could be." But from that position, all I can see when I look at organized religion is a group of people making a simple concept of acceptance incredibly difficult for themselves.

[Ezee E]

Change this to Elizabeth Banks, and bingo.

Why have one when you can have both?

[EyesWideOpen]

Why have one when you can have both?

HOT!

[Teh Sausage]

He's not a terribly cinematic director, is he?

[Alex Weitzman]

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back



"That's what the Internet is for! Slandering others anonymously."

Okay, so who can guess what the theme is for this film? You, in the third row from the back? Masturbation? Not really, no. The film is a wankfest for the fans and makers alike (and a fairly good one, at that), but that doesn't make its wanking a theme. That just makes it a description. You there, staring at the boobs of the girl in front of you! Gay stuff? Close, but no cigar. There's quite a lot of jokes based around homosexuality in the film, but the truth is that we have to recognize that this is a longtime gag of the titular characters themselves, so any film based around them would be drenched in it. The film itself actually does have a separate theme. So, anybody else? Anyone? No? That's fine. It's not necessarily an obvious one, but it is something that's followed through enough within the film to make it the film's definite theme. And that theme is fame.

It can be forgiven if this is not a realization that came readily to you. After all, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is arguably the least thematically-cohesive of all of Smith's films. That's because it has a lot of shouting-out to do, and it has a lot of silly gags it'd like to use. These elements on their own are fun enough, and Strike Back deserves credit as a silly, amusing film. But it does detract from Smith's normal ability to use his theme as a backboard for the majority of his film's conversations. Even Mallrats was able to do that with the theme of leisure; Strike Back has several other needs to fulfill before doing anything with a theme. That said, the shoutouts at least clue us in to one of the film's meta-uses of the theme of fame: this film wouldn't exist without the built-up View Askew fanbase and the fan-favorite lead characters. Jay and Silent Bob captured the audience's attention, and their fame led to a movie being built around them. It doesn't get specifically reflected in the film itself (and so it'd be a fair argument as to whether it counts or not), but the film's use of a road movie structure along with explosions and chases and a meant-to-be romantic interest hits at least this viewer on a meta-level because the preexisting fame of Jay and Silent Bob as characters to us makes it possible for these classic/cliche movie techniques to be used. Strike Back is, in that way, just as much of a commentary on these cookie-cutter star vehicles that Hollywood is always churning out. They use ready-made characters and plots and sticking any "hot" movie star into the mix as if the star's fame will somehow make the whole project gel. Jay and Silent Bob are not celebrities of that status, but their fame is enough for Smith to use them as almost satirical figures in a film that uses its own cliches against itself. (Quite a bit of Strike Back's formulaic elements are deconstructed by characters in the film before we the audience even get a chance; ergo, the satire holds water.)

But still, there's a lot of fame at play here. Fame can apply to any thing, idea, or person, as long as it's widespread enough in common knowledge. And I must point out a subset within the theme of fame: infamy. Technically, infamy is still fame; it's just fame you don't want. (Just ask Affleck.) The root word is fame, after all. And infamy is the key weapon in Sissy's plan to frame Jay and Bob, using a false terrorist threat and identifying them as the leaders of the group to avoid attention for their diamond heist. We also get some presumed fame for the purpose of one main gag - the "unwritten book of the road". A random hitchhiker tells Jay and Silent Bob that you need to go down on any driver who gives you a ride, and then Jay misinterprets a nun's use of the phrase "the book" to presume she's confirming the hiker's story. Both Jay and the nun assume the other is in line with the presumable "fame" of their chosen subjects; indeed, let us consider how arrogant it is that someone can say "The Book" and just presume that the fame of that phrase will allow someone else to know they're talking about the Bible. Best of all, and often pointed out as the film's most bravura sequence, Jay and Silent Bob get into Miramax Studios (nyuk nyuk) and go through a whole series of encounters that riff off of fame and famous people. From the fakeness of Hollywood to the sinful abuses like hookers to the disinterested directors to the diva-like actors who can yell "Cut!" when they want to, we get a pretty large riff on fame there. Jason Biggs in particular can't escape his own American Pie fame, that dirty piefucker.

For the most part, a goof of a film like this is one you'd guess wouldn't have too much insight to dig out of its key theme, and for the most part Strike Back doesn't. But given that we follow Jay and Silent Bob as our protagonists the whole time, maybe what the film most says about fame is that it has no inherent rewards. Jay and Bob, at least, don't seem to care much for it. The whole film is predicated on their fury about the kind of fame they've attracted for themselves on the Internet at MoviePoopShoot.com, thanks to a series of snarky postings. Jay and Bob, when they heard about the Bluntman & Chronic film, never had a moment where they thought, "Hey, we're gonna be famous movie characters! Cool!" No, first they just wanted the likeness-rights check they were due, and then they wanted to full-out destroy the movie so that the Internet nerds would stop slamming their reps (despite Holden's reasonable argument that they're not really saying anything about the real Jay and Bob). And by the end, even after they've gotten hundreds of thousands of dollars from Banky, the film still doesn't hold much interest for them and they prefer to use their funds to personally find each one of those Internet bastards and beat them up. If Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is saying anything deep about fame, it's that it doesn't account for quality and it doesn't actually fill you up inside. Jay and Bob, despite their stupidities in various ways, seem to know this implicitly and never seek fame as a goal even while being given various avenues into fame in this film. After all, these guys are fans of Morris Day and the Time. I don't think they care too much about what's famous. Just what they like.

[Dead & Messed Up]

He's not a terribly cinematic director, is he?

Not terribly, but I thought he found some good images in Dogma and Jersey Girl.

[Dead & Messed Up]

Oh, and this thread is full of win.

[Alex Weitzman]

Jersey Girl





"It's called 'juice'. And it greases your father's insides so he can better swallow the shit his son feeds him twice a year, when he can be bothered to come to visit him."

After rewatching Jersey Girl, I'd been debating with myself for a couple of days about whether the theme of the film is "parenthood" or "family", or if perhaps it was doing both. But really, the debate was about the latter term, under the question of whether the thematic subject of "family" really got enough play in Jersey Girl to merit significant analysis. There are more characters in this film than there are strict parent/child relationships, and if "family" works as a theme for the film, then I can weave everybody into it. But when push comes to shove, there's not enough in Jersey Girl that really gets into family exploration beyond the parent/child relationship. Perhaps the longer cut of the film that existed at one point (apparently 2 hours and 40 minutes) gave more bulk to these characters, like Greenie and Block, who often get referred to as "uncles" despite being nothing of the sort. Everybody else functions either as added color or sounding boards for the main characters to work their issues through. So, I must sadly admit that "family" as a theme in Jersey Girl was an unrealized possibility. But at least, we can indeed examine parenthood as the film's strongest and very insightful theme.

As I mentioned, the cast of characters in Jersey Girl mostly function for the benefit of the main characters: Ollie, Gertie, and Bart. In fact, from a thematic perspective, Jersey Girl is probably Smith's most pared-down, laserlike of examinations. He doesn't create a world that reflects the theme so much, but he also doesn't linger too much on that world and makes the film almost entirely about these two parent/child relationships. It makes the film similar to Chasing Amy (as it's been pointed out by others), in that a full narrative storyline instead of disconected vignettes do the thematic lifting. One of the parent/child relationships is more subordinate to the other (Bart and Ollie), but it's always present in the film and feeds into the main one crucially. This is a risk for Smith, who usually makes his films more of a writer's world, everything reflective of what he's getting at. The poor reception of the film is unfortunate (and unfair, given why a lot of it happened), since this risk mostly pays off well. And while these essays are thematic analyses and not reviews, I must point to what it is that makes me feel like Jersey Girl works so well as a breakdown of parenthood. First is the writing. Along with Smith's usual strengths, what he especially shows here is an absolutely killer ear for children's speech and thought processes. One of the hardest things to do in a film that's essentially about adults is insert a realistic child in a major role, and Gertie is maybe one of the most realistic portrayals of a child on film. Smith never inserts words in her mouth that she wouldn't say, and keys directly into that ability of seven-year-olds to understand everything they can understand at a certain level. It's breathtakingly good writing. And it's matched with excellent acting; Affleck, Castro, and Carlin all deliver world-class performances in this film and give the themes much of the voice that they need. Truthfully, this film and this story was really depending on the acting to make it sing, maybe more than any of Smith's other films, and they all knocked it out of the park. So given that, maybe you'll understand what it is that I'm seeing here.

Parenting, in Jersey Girl, is a commitment that neither can be made lightly nor can be considered light itself. Ollie is not quite as ready as Gertrude is, sadly, even if he doesn't know it. Even in the wake of the tragedy, he gets too wrapped up in himself to come to the full realization that the life of his daughter is entirely in his hands now. It takes Ollie some time in the beginning of Gertie's life to come around to her, but when he does, he enters into a process that cannot and will not be interrupted: her raising. In the story that Smith tells, with Ollie's search for work and Gertie's search for a scene for her school's show, we get a lot of chances for parental issues to come into small or large play. Ollie's endless debate with Gertie about Cats echoes that interminable situation when a child will not drop a request no matter how many negatory responses are given. Ollie taking Gertie to see Sweeney Todd gives us a chance to live that horrific moment in a parent's life when they realize that their children can watch things like sex and violence and take those concepts in. And, of course, "you show me yours and I'll show you mine" rears its ugly but necessary head, a crucial comment on how children grow at a rate that we're never prepared for and that the parents will inevitably fumble their way through that growth as best as they can....even if they get caught with their own words coming back at them (as Gertie does to Ollie and Maya when she catches them).

But most of all, Gertie is growing up, and the world she knows is the one she comes to love. Ollie is initially incapable of understanding this. He presumes that Gertie will take on his own feelings, the ones towards New Jersey and New York and a fast-paced high-falutin' lifestyle. But that is not a dream of children. It is the dream of an adult. More than that, it's the dream of a single man, one standing entirely on his own without any attachments or fellow souls coming with him throughout life. In other words, a childless person. There is a particularly ugly moment in Ollie's behavior that gets subtly by us, but deserves being pointed out. One of the obvious flaws in Ollie's early behavior is his attempts to drown himself in work and avoid his own child. The circumstances that follow require that situation to be reversed, but when he comes to have lunch with his old assistant Arthur Brickman and gets a chance at returning to his old career, he starts talking excitedly about moving back to New York and what he'll be able to do for Gertie. But listen to what he says: he'll put her in a private school and hire a nanny. He's imagining a life where he sees his daughter less, where he becomes a remote figure in her life once more because of work. The scene where he tells everyone that he's moving back is clear in its callousness, but it's not even quite as disgusting to me as the idea that he intends to return to the life of non-parenting that he once attempted to inflict on his daughter. Parents, when not paying attention, can sometimes presume too much that their children will simply come to the same conclusions and desires that they have; Ollie probably figures that Gertie will just be a self-motivated solitary figure in New York like he is. What a bad presumption.

If we wonder why he thinks that, let's look at Bart. Bart Trinke is not a parent we get to watch in specific action, as we get no flashbacks to Ollie's childhood or anything like that. But based on little side comments here and there, along with the general demeanor Ollie has towards living in his dad's house, we might be able to guess that Ollie had a lot of desire to get out of Jersey. Bart himself, earlier in the film, snarks a couple of comments here and there that implies that he might not have worked especially hard to dissuade Ollie of this notion; kick you out when you're a teenager and all that. But Bart changes over the course of the film just like Ollie does, although faster and much more subtly. He might have driven his son away with his alcoholism and his crankiness, and worries that perhaps his son is a lost cause for repairing the relationship. (Even while Ollie and Gertie live with Bart, Ollie makes it clear that he doesn't really want to be there.) Bart, thusly, becomes a much warmer grandfather than he was a father, which is usually the case anyway because grandparents are able to soak up a kid's love without needing to be enforcers of the law. And through that, he creates a relationship with his granddaughter that she is extremely unwilling to sever. It's partially a desperation play by Bart, to make sure there's somebody in the family still loves him and will care for him as he gets older. And the other, bigger part is that Bart loves Gertie, with the kind of love that reflects a regret that he never shared this kind of love with his own son. Bart may not have expected it, but being a good grandfather made him a better father.

Ultimately, what Kevin Smith is getting at with Jersey Girl is that parenthood is a complete commitment. More than that, it's sacrifice. You sacrifice yourself at the altar of your child, because you suddenly matter far less than your child does. And if your destiny in life was to be your child's parent, then that it is. Smith has taken a few accusations in this thread thus far of being in arrested development, or at least being a Stoic (which was not an accusation, but rather a description made out of interest). But while Jersey Girl does feature a story that structurally shows a man throwing over a big-city life and big-city success for modest small-town tranquility, it would be more immature to condemn him of immaturity for this resulting finale. The death of Ollie's career as a press agent is unfortunate, and it's obviously something he does well. But he wanted a child, and it becomes clear that in the wake of single parenthood that he could not be both press agent and single father. The mature decision is to be a single father. That is not arrested development. Arrested development would be self-gratification, and that would have been what the choice of remaining a press agent was. Parenthood is self-sacrifice. There is a young soul, mind, and body in development that now exists in this world, and he or she is under your care and guidance. You don't have the right anymore to have your own issues that would trample that development.

[Alex Weitzman]

Clerks II

"You know, come to think of it, my grandmother was kind of a racist."

And here we are, the big finale (at least, until Zack and Miri comes out). Kevin Smith has made seven films, this one the most recent, and so far they've all had very distinctive themes. This perception I've had of his work was one I actually formed a few years ago, before I'd even seen Clerks II. So when I went to see the film, part of what I was curious to determine was what Smith's theme would be this time. I was especially curious given that it was a sequel to another of his films; would it merely regurgitate the theme of "work"? Maybe it would even need to regurgitate it: could Clerks II be appropriately reminiscent of the first film without plugging into the first film's ever-present theme? But no, Clerks II has its own theme, one that pays heed to the first while being a totally new deconstruction, but it was a theme that it took me a while to put my finger on. It was elusive for a while, but I finally realized what the film was getting at: legacy.

It had to be, when you think about it. The meta-theme of it all is that Kevin is returning to the film that has most secured his legacy in popular culture. If any story was bound to make him consider what it means to make your mark in this world, it would be this one. Clerks has both made Smith's fame and also haunted his footsteps every step of the way, with people still thinking of him as the guy that makes paeans to register jockeys and laziness. Ergo, a story that deals with the fates of the Clerks characters is one that is most primed to address Smith's own questions about his own legacy. It's also a sequel that recognizes the significant time passage between the stories, being directly honest about the ages of the characters. Such a story requires that we deal with what kind of lives they're making for themselves, now that we have a before and an after point to compare. These characters are now old enough to have a legacy, one that's formed in the wakes of the lives they've been leading, even if it wasn't exactly the ones they expected or intended to lead. Along with the aging of the characters, the fact that the film is a sequel inevitably invites various structural or detail-oriented similarities to the first film (sex talk, Dante's love triangles, etc.), but the differences between this film and the first Clerks makes us think not just about the specific events themselves but also their comparison to twelve years before.

But as for Clerks II itself, within the film, the theme of legacy is quite pervasive. The afore-quoted racist grandma/porch monkey conversation is essentially all about the legacy of an old woman and her natural prejudices, as well as how her grandson has totally misread that legacy. Hell, the very debate about the offensiveness of racial slurs is all about the legacy left by the horrific and imbedded racism that produced said slurs in the first place. When Lance Dowds shows up, he prods at the legacy issues of Randal and Dante, but he also has his own legacy problems given that, no matter how rich and successful he gets, he'll always be "Picklefucker". Even Dante's minor concern about dancing in front of Emma's relatives (mostly an excuse for getting Rosario Dawson on the roof and dancing - which, let's face it, is a result that the whole movie is a good enough excuse for getting) is about leaving a strong lasting impression of himself on all of Emma's extended family so that he doesn't have a legacy amongst her clan as being just some schmuck.

Elias also provides several examinations of legacy questions. That's because he's the next generation of Dante and Randal, but the differences between Elias and those guys speak volumes about the changes in the nerd/slacker legacy as time has gone on. First off, Randal and Elias clash in regards to their chosen pop-culture reference points: Randal obsesses over Star Wars (original trilogy, of course), early Spielberg films, and Happy Days, while Elias is into Transformers and LOTR. The dueling fandoms' conflict, as we're very familiar with online (and gets its biggest play in Clerks II with Kevin Weisman's cameo), is a fight between legacies in regards to who has the better reason to stand the test of time. The debate is childish, of course, and both sides come across as needlessly touchy, which is very much the point since competition between artistic legacies means ultimately nothing. Elias is also a child of a generation of parents motivated by 80s prudishness and reinstituted thought control in kids (like the constant 80s/90s controversies over educational content in TV animation), and so he's the direct opposite of guys like Dante and Randal in his willingness to discuss, and even awareness of, frank sexuality. Ergo, the "pussy troll". The Gen-X attitude towards sexuality, as seen in Clerks II, is becoming an older legacy, one replaced by a generation of teens and twenty-somethings that are surprisingly undereducated and underexperienced in sex.

Jay and Silent Bob, of course, have their own concerns with legacy. Their first dialogue scene sees Jay wondering what else he could have done in his life. It's a moment of self-awareness that we wouldn't have expected from the character, but it makes sense once we find out what Jay's been through. He's become a drug dealer who remains clean, and suddenly his legacy is a bit stranger to him than it used to be. It's probably easier to stand around waiting for customers when you're stoned. We see Jay trying harder to redo what he was once known for (singing and being a horndog), but it has an awkwardness and a stiltedness that underlines how much has changed for him over time. Ironically (and mirroring where we go with Randal and Dante), it's having fun with Silent Bob that seems to end up giving Jay more life through the film, like when he busts out the Silence of the Lambs song and Jay plays around at being Buffalo Bill. Of course, Silent Bob himself has a meta-legacy, one that's spanned all the VA films, of being the guy with all the answers. And in one fell swoop, Bob defies that by not having the answer this time. It's a burden to be the guy that everybody expects to be smarter than all the rest, and sometimes those guys don't have the answers. If anything, it lends credence to all the times Bob has been so smart, because it means he does have to work at it to read the situation right.

Most of all, Clerks II deals with the legacies of our two main characters. Dante and Randal seemed like they were stuck in an interminable limbo in the first film, and while Dante dealt with the question of where to go next, Randal especially seemed to be wholly himself in just one place, without any sense of where he might go or what he might do. Now in his thirties, the clear lack of change in Randal is an insight all its own. We watch the man who once was the sharpest wit in the land learn that inactivity lends itself to desperation and atrophied respect. Randal got away with more in Clerks because he was younger. Now, he comes across as more abrasive in even smaller instances simply because the societal standards expect that a person would grow out of that behavior at some point. But in his quieter moments, Randal is growing in a way. He's having an honest epiphany with himself. His legacy thus far has been misanthropy and sarcasm, but in the wake of Dante's announcement that he's moving to Florida, Randal realizes that his true legacy, the one thing he's been really building in his life, is his friendship with Dante. The man's never going to breed (we hope), and that leaves Dante as the single most important person in his life. That's why, after all the crap that they've been through, Randal ends up idolizing the Quick Stop. It's the shrine to their relationship. And it's the place where Randal can most exercise and develop his legacy of friendship with Dante, but now with a form of growth in that now he works with Dante at the Quick Stop under their own power as opposed to being chained to the whims of an absentee employer. Randal carved out his section of life by the end of the film, with a company he owns and a place to be happy in his job. A legacy worth having.

Dante has the same end result of a situation, but his struggle is more at the forefront. And it's a struggle we've picked up from the first film, the clearest example of a thematic connection between the two stories. It's in Dante where the themes of "legacy" and "work" most connect, because in both films Dante goes through (to varying degrees) questions about being defined by what you do and being defined by what you've done. In the first film, there was reason to suspect that Dante was empowered enough to maybe get his life on track. At least, he was looking to get back with Veronica, the girl who most wanted him to do just that. And on that note, let us consider the comparisons and contrasts between the female duos in both films: Veronica and Caitlin vs. Becky and Emma. Dante's struggle in the first film was between a girl who didn't care what he did (Caitlin) and a girl who did (Veronica). We're invited to emotionally steer Dante towards Veronica, as she's more interested in fostering Dante's ambitions and seems like more of a real partner. Now, the sequel has switched it on us. Emma is the one looking to eject Dante from his established life, and we steer away from her towards Becky, who doesn't seem to care too much that Dante spend his life here. Ah, but the difference is age. In Clerks, Dante was at an age to make something of himself. In Clerks II, he's partially made who he is whether he likes it or not, and now is the time to be honest with himself as to who he really is and what he really wants. Emma's proposed solution to move to Florida and run one of her dad's car washes is (as Becky shrewdly points out) hardly a real advancement in life for Dante. And it also ignores who Dante really is, and we can see the relationship between Dante and Emma consist mostly of Dante sublimating his own instincts and letting her run the show. Becky is more of a match for who Dante has become, and self-awareness would show Dante this. Indeed, every bit of Dante's issues in the film reflect his halfhearted attempts to deny his own legacy, the life that he's legitimately created for himself in Jersey, be it Randal or Jersey or even his own feelings.

Clerks II is aware that it sends its characters on a circular journey. They start in one place and end in the same place. This is a storytelling phenomenon that I've bashed on other occasions; Shrek 2, for example. But circular journeys can have a point if they are less about the significance of the destination and more about the reasons for ending up in that same place. Dante and Randal end up back in the Quick Stop, now seemingly for the rest of their lives, but the circumstances of why they're there have changed. Because of that, I claim that Clerks II is a greater thematic exploration than Clerks, because it really gives a look at what the legacies we leave are and why we seek them out. The Quick Stop was once a painful burden to these guys. A job where the boss can screw them over in any number of ways. Owning the place makes such a difference, because now they are there by choice. Honesty to themselves about what they're really about has served Dante and Randal a true winning hand. Quick Stop and RST was once a job, and is now their legacy.