Sobriquet 27.8: Kevin Smith's Clerks II

At first it wasn’t all that funny. I thought maybe Kevin Smith’s well had gone dry, leaving little more than a few stale gay jokes with which a chubbier, older Randal Graves (Jeff Anderson) would irk an equally rotund Dante Hicks (Brian O’Halloren) as the pair reprised their roles from 1994’s Clerks. At first, it seemed like Smith was flogging his dead View Askewniverse (as his fictionalized New Jersey world is known to fans) horse.

Then, as if on cue, “Goodbye Horses,” the rather obscure Q. Lazzarus song made famous by Jonathan Demme’s brilliant decision to use it as the backdrop for Jame “Buffalo Bill” Gumb’s disturbing penis-tucked-behind-his-legs “Would you fuck me?” dance in The Silence of the Lambs, blasts out of Silent Bob’s (Smith) boombox. From that point on, the film was a pure joy.

You see, for many people of my generation, The Silence of the Lambs has haunted our imaginations since its release in 1991. Ted Levine’s creepy Jame Gumb, perhaps even more than Anthony Hopkins’s Hannibal Lector, is lodged beneath our skin, unsettling and amusing us by turns. And behind it all is the dark, late eighties synth-pop of Q. Lazzarus. Sure, the song originally appeared in Married to the Mob, but “Goodbye Horses” is Jame Gumb, and Jame Gumb is scary as all Hell.

In his most recent book, A Man Without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut notes that “[h]umor is an almost physiological response to fear” (3). Perhaps this is why Jame Gumb keeps popping up in my generation’s favorite comedies: Eric Cartman plays “Lambs” with Bebe in South Park and Seth Green has stated that the voice of Family Guy’s Chris Griffin is essentially an impression of Levine’s Buffalo Bill. Now, as Jay mimics Levine’s nude dance, we laugh like crazy at precisely what scared the living daylights out of us fifteen years ago. We laugh because imitating a lunatic shouldn't be funny. We laugh because it is how we deal with fear, how we prepare to move on and mature. And it is the union of fear and humor that ultimately makes Clerks II every bit worthy of its predecessor.

The movie opens a decade or so after the original Clerks left off. The conveyance store and video rental outlet where Dante and Randal have seemingly always worked burns to the ground, leaving the pair unemployed. A year later, having found work with Randal at a local fast-food restaurant, Dante prepares for his last day at work before he leaves New Jersey for Florida to marry his fiancée.

While Randal initially seems as immature and crass as he did a decade earlier, we soon sense that he dreads Dante’s leaving. Beneath his gay jokes and bullying behavior, we see a thirty-something man terrified of losing his best—and, essentially, only—friend. Likewise, Dante initially seems utterly enamored with his fiancée, Emma (Jennifer Schwalbach Smith), but eventually belies a fear of marrying a woman he does not love.

Furthermore, the fear of aging pervades the entire film. Not only do Dante and Randal express anxiety over hitting their thirties while still holding low-wage jobs, but even Jay expresses the desire to have done something more with his life as he approaches middle age.

The humor in Clerks II is bittersweet. We laugh at the immaturity of the characters as we recognize in them our own fear about growing older, we chuckle at the “I love you, man, but not in a gay way” attitude expressed by Randal while empathize with his fear of loneliness, and we smirk at the obviously affected “I don’t believe in romantic love” mantra Becky (Rosario Dawson) repeats throughout the film at the same time as we inwardly feel a twinge of that same fear of rejection and unrequited love.

But the film is funny and it does have all the scatological and sexual humor one expects from Kevin Smith, but it is tempered. There’s a definite sense of growing up and leaving certain things behind that runs throughout the film. Whereas the penis jokes in Clerks were indicative of sarcastic youth, much of the humor in Clerks II—to borrow Randal’s justification for a mid-day go-karting expedition—reminds the adult of the sarcastic youth left behind.

In the end, the film wraps up neatly; all the principal characters end up happy and content with life. Acceptance of adult responsibility and a refusal to hide from one’s reservations about what one needs to be happy ultimately emerge as Smith’s big themes. The gay jokes and racial ignorance are only as funny as they are instructive.

Ladies and gentlemen, Kevin Smith has grown up. And so must we.