![]() Because while it is a very stark and interesting portrayal of working people, much of the film’s humor comes from its main characters, Dante and Randall, sneering with contempt at their customers, who are all presumably other working people.” Rose says, “It diminishes the appeal and any sort of political or social import the film otherwise has by constantly undercutting by showing how unlikeable these two slackers really are-and we’re still supposed to identify with them.” Drinkwater elaborates: “I think it shows that Smith has no real ideology-all his films, even as early as Clerks, really don’t make any wider point about their working-class settings, it’s all just grievances, especially towards women.” Rose agrees, “Oh, all his films are especially weird, almost Freudian, about women in general but lesbians in particular.” I always have hated Kevin.” He continues, “And I think a lot of that has to do with Kevin’s act-he wants to come off as progressive and working class, when his films show nothing but venom and malice towards working class and queer people, even though his films show complete condescension to the former and confusion and fear of the latter.”Ĭlerks, Smith’s first low-budget effort about convenience store workers in suburban New Jersey, is a point of controversy for the hosts of “Kevin.” “ Clerks exemplifies everything good and bad about Kevin Smith. I was a huge fan of Smith because I felt like he was a working-class person who really ‘made it’ in filmmaking.” Rose continues, “I felt like if he could make it, so could I and a lot of people from my background.” (Rose grew up in a working-class area of Canada). “We really just wanted to make a podcast about an auteur filmmaker and we all gravitated towards Kevin because we were all mostly familiar with his work from being kind of ‘geeky’ pre-teens obsessed with movies. “We never intended to make a political podcast,” Rose explains. “Kevin’s” hosts spoke to me on the date they recorded their season one finale about the pod’s aims and future. Their podcast, “We Need to Talk about Kevin,” exists to, in the sarcastic words of Drinkwater, “Seek the complete annihilation of Kevin Smith and his films and reputation.” “Kevin,” now in its second season, has become a “dark horse” of left-wing podcasts, featuring guests like Matthew Christman of “Chapo Trap House,” “Murder Bryan” from “Street Fight Radio,” the hosts of the left-wing pop culture podcast “Struggle Session,” as well as Tim and Eric alum Vera Drew. The left-wing Twitter provocateurs Rose and Trevor Drinkwater and their friend and producer, Ted (TedAnon), take a completely different tack. Today Smith obsessively waxes sentimental over the latest offerings by Marvel Studios and other Disney conglomerates on podcasts with titles like “Fatman on Batman.” Parallel to Smith’s foray into podcasting, a number of leftwing podcasts analyzing political culture and writing emerged in the wake of Donald Trump’s election in 2016. By the time Jersey Girl rolled around, it appeared all but clear that Smith had a commercial interest in maintaining proximity with the Hollywood system that had ignored him. In Roger Ebert’s review of Smith’s second film, the sex comedy, Mallrats, he recounts, “The year that Clerks played at the Cannes Film Festival (…) Kevin Smith cheerfully said he’d be happy to do whatever the studios wanted, if they’d pay for his films. Yet, this movement away from his “authentic artistic vision” was foretold, perhaps most tellingly by Smith himself. His last few films, including 2019’s “return to form,” Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, could not find widespread theatrical distribution-a far cry from his early films’ status as pathbreaking works of brutally honest low-budget cinema. Strike Back struck a different chord from his previous “serious” works, Clerks and Chasing Amy it was obnoxious, filled with gay jokes, and startlingly vicious towards online critics of Smith’s films. ![]() Smith spent the nineties in Harvey Weinstein’s stable of rising “auteurs,” but 2001’s Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back promised to place an end to Smith’s comedic depictions of working-class Jersey miasma. A new populist filmmaker whose low budget films offered a vision strikingly as familiar as the petit bourgeoisie haunts I inhabited as an adolescent had appeared.īut even by the time I watched Clerks for the first time in 2003, Smith’s reputation was in a state of decline. Echoing many of the conversations I had with my friends, Kevin Smith appeared as the voice of the everyman. 1994’s Clerks on VHS shone forth to me a promise of a cinematic universe bound by pop culture ephemera and Star Wars references. It wasn’t since I first saw Pulp Fiction on HBO that I was so enamored by a film.
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