Wonkette Labor Day Matinee: Clerks
'I'm not even supposed to be here today!'
Happy Labor Day!
Celebrating workers and the unions that support them.
The laborers in Clerks would have benefitted greatly by being unionized!
Dante and his friend Randal are both working at dead-end, low-paying, shitty service jobs that most of us have suffered through at some point in our lives. But how this work is perceived by the two friends is totally different. Dante’s life is in a quandary with a complicated mess of a love life and dealing with the paradigm of humanity that parades daily through the door of Quick Stop.
Randal runs the video rental store next to the Quick Stop and he hates customers so he takes great pleasure in the vilifications those who just want to rent a video. It’s his way of dealing with the malaise of his employment. While he revels in fighting against the system in his own way, his best friend Dante wallows in the misery, defeated and listless.
Vilification, Syntax, Vagary, Purgation, Malaise, Harbinger, Perspicacity, Paradigm, Whimsy, Quandary, Lamentation, Juxtaposition, Catharsis, and Denouement.
These words are the intertitles that flash on the screen as lead-ins for each bit of life Dante experiences in one day working the counter at a convenience store. He starts his day awakened by a phone call from the store’s owner. When it’s your day off, getting a call from the boss is a harbinger of a bad day. This is another one of those movies that would be changed entirely by the addition of caller ID.
Clerks was written by Kevin Smith who also stars in the flick as Silent Bob, with Jason Mewes as his partner in crime, Jay. The duo stands outside the Quick Stop, with Jay providing his whimsical observations on life and Silent Bob being, well, silent. They are their own bosses and love their jobs because they sell weed. I wonder if today’s legal weed stores have unionized employees? The answer is yes, the UFCW or Union for Cannabis Workers.
Clerks stars Brian O’Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Kevin Smith, Jason Mewes, Marilyn Ghigliotti, and Lisa Spoonauer. Directed by Kevin Smith.
Clerks is available with subscription on Netflix. Free with ads on Pluto TV. $3.89-3.99 in the usual places.
To make requests and see the movie lists and schedules, go to WonkMovie.
Our cartoon is a 2017 award winning animated short, Coin Operated. Directed by Nicholas Arioli.
The next Movie Night selection is 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐁𝐢𝐫𝐝𝐬. https://open.substack.com/pub/ziggywiggy/p/wonkette-movie-night-sept-7-the-birds?r=2knfuc&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
𝐁𝐎𝐍𝐔𝐒 𝐓𝐑𝐈𝐕𝐈𝐀:
Kevin Smith:"We filmed for 21 nights straight. I closed the store at 10.30pm, we would start shooting by 11 and continue until 6am. Everyone assumed I was making a porno. At 6, the store would open, and I’d go back to work until 11am. When the next shift came in, I would go up to New York to drop off the footage, or home to sleep, because I had to go back to work at 3pm. But I was never tired – I could’ve done it for another 21 days.When we screened it at the American Film Market, hardly anyone was there, and I watched my $27,575 playing up on the screen. That first 15 minutes was the only time I was worried, sad, broken, thinking: “What have I done?” Then I relaxed and thought: “You saw Slacker here in this same movie theatre. In a little over two years, you’ve gone from watching someone else’s movie to watching your own."
Luckily, one of the few people in the room not connected to the film was Bob Hawk, who worked with the selection committee at Sundance. He only went to see it because it had a crappy picture in the catalogue and he felt sorry for us. But he thought it was fantastic, and recommended we submit it to Sundance in 1994, where it was a breakout hit and Miramax bought it for $227,000. I can’t believe it has lasted for 25 years. A lot of YouTube creators , the next generation, have said to me: “It’s because I saw Clerks that I realised I could do that.” It’s the movie that launched a thousand ships."