Transcript
Speaker: He was a good-looking man in his in his youth, I will Welcome, welcome, welcome back. Death is a photograph culture at the end of history. Just me, Chase, and Sam today talking about... That's right, no no more of this UK bullshit. No more London, no more Robinson...
Speaker: No more coal mining. We're going to the great state of New Jersey with Clerks and Clerks 2. Now, Sam, you... i mean, I've obviously seen these, but you've seen the first one, right? i Well, I thought I'd only seen the first one, and then on my rewatch of the second, I had a bunch of Proustian flashbacks. I realized that I had, in fact, actually seen the second one, too.
Speaker: I think the the scene that took me back to being 16 was the ah the Lord of the Rings scene with the... air Yeah. With... What's say, Randall doing a sort of like a summation of the narrative? ah The walking?
Speaker: Yeah, the two okay walking, the walking, the dropping there. And I realized that I recognize that from somewhere. ah So there's a lot of references in this film that was sending me spiraling back to being 16 years old in my next door neighbor's tiny sort of pizza encrusted semen, possibly semen encrusted. Teenage bedroom. Allegedly. Allegedly, assuming seamen encrusted, tiny bedroom covered in skateboards, drilled to the wall.
Speaker: And yeah, it was my next neighbor. He was, I would say he was about three or four years older than me. So when I was 13, he wouldd have been 16 or something. It was his favorite set of movies. And he was a strangely Americanized teenage boy. New Jerseyized even, you might say.
Speaker: I haven't seen him in years. i hope he's okay. um And I hope he's still watching Clerks. because Well, ah the the irony here, of course, is that ah you are the one still watching Clerks. Yeah.
Speaker: I've come back now with a fresh appreciation for Kevin Smith. Yeah, I mean, I'm the, you know, this was sort of my doing because if I haven't said this before, I'm very loyal to the great state of New Jersey. I've remained here after coming back from graduate school. I'm involved locally pretty strongly. And so, like, no matter what the flaws of a Kevin Smith movie, and they are myriad, like the acting in Clerks 1 is
Speaker: F-tier acting a lot of the time. But I do think that adds charm. But... I love Kevin Smith, not just because he represents New Jersey and not just because I want to defend him for that reason, but because he is, in all of its negative and positive dimensions, a perfect avatar of like a certain kind of Gen X New Jersey working class guy. Because I think his dad was like a postal worker,
Speaker: I don't remember what his mom did. Obviously, all of his friends are from similar backgrounds. if you I mean, if you just look at like Jay or Randall or Dante as characters, he worked at the convenience store Clerks is based around. What did he do when he got rich? He bought it and bought the place next door and now it's his podcasting studio.
Speaker: And I think, I mean, there's a lot to talk about what that means, like a Gen X working class New Jersey guy. But one of the biggest things is like a derivative of the slacker culture that we talked about on the C. Derek Varn episode. Yeah, i was going to say, apparently, Smith cites Richard Linklater's slacker as a direct sort of um inspiration for clerks, right?
Speaker: And he was impressed by the fact that it was shot in his hometown, Austin, right rather than um in Hollywood. But it's it's bizarre because Smith takes a very different approach. I mean, obviously, it's the same in the sense that it's about...
Speaker: kind of like slacker loser characters in a relatively restricted sort of, you know, non-primary place in the United States. I mean, for me, New Jersey, of course, has primacy of place at all times, but but there is there are certain weird differences. Like, Smith bizarrely is doing... You know how people say Donald Trump is the poor man's idea of a rich man?
Speaker: Like, This is the poor man's idea of an art film. Like, yes, he shoots in black and white because it's cheaper, but also it does give the whole thing this weird, like, I'm i'm watching, i don't know, ah one of the forgotten French New Wave guys, like short films, who is at Cahiers du Cinema, but like nobody really talks about anymore. and there's There's a kind of vibe of that about it that is unmistakable, which in Clerks 2 is totally gone.
Speaker: But yeah, for one. Yeah, it's it's interesting watching them sequentially. Like if you had just seen Clerks 2, wouldn't be as good a film. It does read just as a kind of buddy movie in some ways.
Speaker: Yeah, well, it's one of the things I mean, there's a lot to talk about to go through both. But one of the things that is so Kevin Smith and also so Gen X that we've talked about in the past is like the aggressive sexuality and the love of transgression around the idea of sexuality.
Speaker: Right. So obviously in the second movie, he takes it probably to the most extreme, which is what is described in the movie as a donkey show. Right. that turns out to be, let's say, a a a homosexual donkey show, which they were not expecting. um But in the first movie, I mean... that's the worst part of it, apparently. Yeah, that's the that's the offensive thing about it, today which is so 2006, it's ridiculous. But I mean, in the first movie, for example, one of the first conversations that happens is... or Let's start here.
Speaker: One of the big narrative drivers in Clerks 1, because it's just about guys who work at a convenience store, so that itself is not a narrative. One of the main, or maybe the main, sort of point of tension in the movie is Dante, the main character.
Speaker: And I'm sorry, to me, that is obviously Smith doing the poor man's art house thing. little little ah little reference there. Well, I also thought, was it not like very New Jersey to have an Italian first name? and like No, it is. Irish-y second name.
Speaker: i Well, first of all, yes. like I knew a guy in high school, his name was Massimo, but he had dreadlocks. Was he called Massimo McDonald or something? No, no. he's like I can't remember his last name off top my head, but it was very Italian. Are there many like Irish slash Italian like hybrid? That sounds horrible. Yeah, like people...
Speaker: Breaking out the calipers here. was talking about a hybrid electric car, you know, like a nice Hyundai. laian diet yeah you you need half spaghetti and the other, you know, the other half is on a corned beef hash or something, but Yes, that I would say is like probably the most common, I don't know, not to sound like ah like a eugenicist, but admixture among the racial stock of New Jersey or or one of them. it's It's a weird place in a lot of ways, New Jersey, because so many white ethnics and then you know ah more recently, a lot of like South Asians, a lot of East Asians come here. So you'll meet a guy whose name is Jack O'Driscoll, but he's you know ah Chinese or something. Yeah. Just because of how many successive waves of of immigrants have come to this place.
Speaker: But the narrative kind of tension point I was mentioning is there's a girl, he's dating, she's really loving. Literally, she brings him lasagna at work, which is one of the most like New Jersey-coated things I can imagine ever happening. um But he's sort of still in love with...
Speaker: This girl he dated in high school who did nothing but cheat on him and that will come back over and over again. And she is now, he finds out from a newspaper ad, which is so wonderfully 90s, she is now engaged to a quote, Asian design major. Which confused me because I wasn't sure if it was an Asian person who was a design major or someone who was majoring in Asian design.
Speaker: I believe it is the second, and I say that because, again, I think it is such a great example. Because I was this person, to be clear. like Someone who is from this kind of environment, so you know environment that involves a lot of ah a lot of the the locker room talk you might associate with like male culture of the ninety s and 2000s. But like you're interested in art and therefore are kind of dimly aware of the world of the university. you know Smith did go to film school. So I think Asian design there is like...
Speaker: the equivalent of when a conservative today talks about like, oh, they majored in Balinese dance at Hampshire College. like Yeah, like basket with him. Yeah, exactly. Underwater basket. Yeah, exactly. so I think that's his way of being like, oh, it's some effete university man who's engaged. is the authentic man who now must steal the girl away from or get her back from the effete man who's interested in... what's really reminiscent of, actually, is um if you've read Catcher in the Rye, maybe some of the listeners have, there's a scene where Holden is wandering the streets of New York and he meets up with this kid who he knew from school.
Speaker: Yes, he's ah a few years above him and he's re-into Buddhism. Yeah, well, and so there it actually is very clerks coded because he was sort of like, he would always talk about sex stuff with Holden. And so now Holden is older and wants to talk to him about the same. and he's totally uninterested. But all that Holden gets out of this kid is that he's now dating a Chinese sculptor who lives downtown. And like, to me, that character is basically who you should imagine as the Asian design major. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But of course, that sort of romantic thing leads very early in the movie to get back to the sexual transgression thing to, I think, a very funny scene where um they're talking about how many sexual partners they've had.
Speaker: And, you know, it's whatever number. And then she's like, well, I've only had sex with five or whatever. He's like, what do you mean only had sex? She's like, well, you know, you know I've done other things with a lot of guys. Excuse my language, ah listeners. But he says, well how many dicks have you sucked? And she goes...
Speaker: 36. And he goes, including me? goes, 37. thirty seven and so then, you know, she sort of leaves and he's chasing her out the door and he's going, my girlfriend sucked 37 dicks. And then, you know, there's like a guy coming in who's like,
Speaker: That's a lot. yeah Whoa, that's a lot. Or the scene later where the old man, this old man comes in to use the bathroom and he's like hey, sonny boy. He's like, you know, you gotta you got a bathroom I could use? And he's like, you're not really supposed to, but sure. Because that's Dante's whole character is that like he is passive and put upon continuously, which is interesting because it's a different kind of slacker than in the other, than a Linklater movie. like The slacker here is actually defined by his passivity. like There's a degree to which Smith wants him to escape that, actually.
Speaker: Yeah, and his girlfriend, Veronica, is constantly kind of persuading him to go back to college. Yes. It's like, oh, you're wasted here. You need to come. with And I can't remember if there's two specific Catholic colleges that i mentioned that seem very New Jersey. I can tell you this. They're both schools in New Jersey. So she originally goes to Montclair State, which is up by me in the kind of northern part of the state.
Speaker: But then she transfers to Monmouth, which is down by where they live, very close, to be close to him to try and get him... You know, because he's like, oh, you don't even have to travel. Like, you know, it's really easy. you can come on over. So like, yeah even that's what mean. It's so localized. ah Chef's kiss. But the old man comes in and he's like, hey, sonny boy. And, you know, Dante being put upon and kind of passive is like, sure, whatever.
Speaker: But he keeps coming back every time he get comes back for a new thing. He's oh, do you any loo roll? Can I get a loo roll out of the loo roll for sale? And then he's like, oh, can I have a porno magazine? you know as First he goes, can I get a magazine? And he's like, yeah, sure. He's like, what do want He's nah, the ones you got back there, Sonny. And he's like, the titty mags? They got the biggest boobs you've ever seen. you know and that was yeah Dante's like, whatever, just anything for quiet life. Yeah. Yeah, no. Well, and there's this scene early on that really epitomizes that, which is when a guy comes in, he's got a briefcase, and he's just hanging out, and all Dante is selling is cigarettes. At that time of morning, all anyone is buying is cigarettes and coffee, right? Oh, and it's worth saying...
Speaker: His catchphrase is, I'm not even supposed to be here today because he's supposed to have the day off, but he got called in and he's too much of kind of a coward to even say no, right? Yeah. And his boss has just disappeared. His boss says, I'll be in by noon. don't worry about it. Boss obviously never shows up.
Speaker: But this guy's standing around. People are buying cigarettes. And he goes... are you really buying cigarettes? He's like, yeah. He's like, about how many of those do you think you buy? How much do you spend a cigarettes in a week? And he's like, oh, you know, a hundred bucks. He's like, you're spending a hundred bucks so these death merchants can kill you. And then he takes out a cancer-ridden lung.
Speaker: Pre-prepared, yeah. Like, out of his briefcase. Yeah, like... brings it out and then they realize that he's a gum representative. Well, he keeps he keeps every like couple of seconds, he keeps subtly sliding in. You should get some, don't even know what it's called, like Frankie's gum instead. Chuli's gum, Chuli's gum. Have some Chuli's gum instead. It takes at least, it's like 20-minute montage. but well And who gets rid of him but Veronica?
Speaker: It's Veronica showing up. they get so like Dante doesn't even have the sort of like agency or self-confidence to even get rid of this guy. He's just getting steamrolled. Well, he's being pelted with cigarettes.
Speaker: Yeah, literally. straight And they're they're they're I think they're yelling like death merchant or murderer at him while he's just standing there. And it's it's this wonderful fusion of like...
Speaker: the slacker as victim, but also as sort of like, it's it's his fault. Like at no point has he done anything to stop this at all, nor has he ever probably considered like the ethics of selling cigarettes to people. Like he just wants to make minimum wage and like go home and play hockey. Like that's all he wants to do.
Speaker: You know what I mean? It's beautiful. ah Should we talk? We should say, we should place this right. So the the first film is, what, it's 1994. Yeah.
Speaker: And he's what, about 22, 23? Yeah, he's very early 20s, yeah. Yeah, and then by the second film, we're at 2006, and he's about what, 32, 33? Yeah, he's in his 30s, looking a rough 30-something, I will say. Yeah, early 30s, yeah. Well, they keep calling him a hideous chud in the second movie, which is, you know. Yeah. I mean, this is like one of the most concerning things about the film is actually he's quite good looking in the first film. Like, he's not like a bad looking guy in the first film. They just keep calling me a deus judge. yeah be To be frank, by the second film, he kind of is a bit odd looking. Yeah, the age has not been as good to him as it might have.
Speaker: Which is bizarre because, and this is a good segue for two of the characters who are kind of most beloved, which is Jay and Silent Bob, played by Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith himself. And Jason Mewes, who, by his own admission, has lived a life of, like, drug addiction, like, you know, crime. Like, he's a real, he's a man from the streets. Like, looks pretty much fine in the second movie. He's not aged at all. No, and so you're just like, wait, something went wrong here. Like, the guy who's on the straight and narrow, you know, aged, and the guy who's not didn't. But,
Speaker: Jayden Silent Bobber, this is again what I mean about this like faux art house thing, which is so telling, right? Because we talked about Slacker as like the origin of the Gen X indie, right? And then Miramax comes in. This is a Miramax film.
Speaker: Yeah, Harvey Weinstein, unfortunately, very involved in both, yeah. Yes, noted Candace Owens interviewee Harvey Weinstein. um They... and Bob are, for all intents and purposes, like the Greek chorus of this movie. Like they stand outside of the place and they offer like brief commentary on things that happen as people come and go um and are basically comedic relief aside from that.
Speaker: You know? It's like Smith's doing these little... it's It's this moment of like Gen X self-conscious artistic consciousness. Like Slacker, as an origin point, almost doesn't feel that way. Whereas Clerks, to me, really does feel like an attempt to do something, quote unquote.
Speaker: And Jay and Silent Bob are bizarrely, i think, one of the means of trying to do that. Even if as a chorus, they're not like, they're really just comedic relief. Like, I don't think they actually fill that role well, but I think it is the role that they're slotted for. Yeah, I mean, I think that's also a salience of like, if you've ever worked a minimum wage job in one place, there are just like people you can't get away from. Yeah.
Speaker: Like either colleagues that you work with or people who work in the shop next door, as is the case with Randall right at the start, or yeah, people who like keep coming into the shop every day because it's a habit they've built up, or yeah, people who just like hang out on the street and like that's the bit street they hang out on. And like, because you're there for eight hours a day. Yeah. build up this inescapable relationship with these people you would like otherwise ever like interact with.
Speaker: And there's something like both quite painful about that and also like yes kind of human and heartwarming. like It's like a forced communitarianism in a sense of like, no, you will get to know these people. and and and Well, and it is funny because that is both in the movie, I think, portrayed positively and negatively, right? Because on the one hand, yeah there is this desire for Dante to get away. And this will become more important in the second movie where really that is the question.
Speaker: There is the desire for him to get away and do something with his life. But on the other hand, you know, Randall... which is his friend who works at the video store next door and is constantly also at the convenience store. And then Silent Bob, who's Kevin Smith, who, based on his name, you can tell is quiet most of the movie, but delivers always sort of like the advice at some point in a Kevin Smith movie that like lets you know what you're supposed to be thinking, right? He does this in Chasing Amy, one of his other movies. So like those...
Speaker: bit players, those sort of like losers are also the source of wisdom. So the community is actually like valuable, you know what i mean? For what it is, even if it's not ideal in various ways.
Speaker: Yeah, I think, I mean, and and there are sort of three lines for so many those films, right? I think they're in Morats as well. Yeah, they are. They obviously, Jay and Bob, Silent Bob Strike back. Are they in Dogma?
Speaker: They are. They are Dogma. Yeah, I remember them. They do battle with Satan himself in Dogma. Dogra is an incredibly Gen X. Oh, well, here's... it Okay, this is something that's worth talking about that is also very Gen X about Kevin Smith.
Speaker: His religious arc is, to me, a version of a religious arc for Gen X that is distinct from the Boomer version that we we talked about a while ago on this season, you know, the sort of like personal improvement stuff, the hippie stuff, the meditation stuff.
Speaker: Kevin Smith starts, if you watch the ends of his movies, this is true for Clerks, it's true for Mallrats, Chasing Amy... They all end with thanks to God.
Speaker: And there's always a reference to Catholicism in the movies. So like, you know, there's a, what does he say? Like, I would never do that. I was raised Catholic for God's sakes. Like, you know, these are, I think that's what he says about the blowjobs thing. Actually. He's like, I was raised Catholic. You know, and what I don't know about this.
Speaker: you know Sort of like the Ritchie character from Summer of Sam in a way. like There's still this... But then, here's what happens. And this, we can blame one of my least favorite celebrities. Seth Rogen is responsible for this transition.
Speaker: i am My understanding is that somewhere around Zack and Miriam make a porno, I think it is, Kevin Smith got really, really into weed. And this coincided with his no longer... And listen, I'm not... judge Whatever. His becoming less religious, that's that's his deal. I mean, I'm just reading this in sociological terms.
Speaker: But I will say that is when his movies start to get increasingly bad, in my opinion. And also, he starts to really take... Like, a lot of the... ah aggressive trans, transsexual, aggressive sexual stuff, transgressive sexual stuff, kind of loses whatever had been keeping it in check.
Speaker: And that is when you get like, have you you know that famous tweet from him about how much he loves his wife? No, I've not seen this tweet. Oh, I will, um I will read it. I want to say if you're listening with children,
Speaker: I would recommend putting in some headphones. But here it is. This is from 2009. two thousand and nine Oh, God. Zach and Miri make a porno is from 2008. this is right after this transition.
Speaker: and Ten years in, and we bone like we're cheating on each other, all caps, with each other, a decade plus, and her clit slash brown slash taint area still pones my dick.
Speaker: Oh, my God. Please don't clip that. Pones my dick.
Speaker: So, I mean, I think there is something kind of Gen X in that movement. What I mean is, if you're raised Gen X in New Jersey as a Christian of some kind, odds are you were raised in like at least a nominally Catholic environment where you were maybe going to church on holidays.
Speaker: And in the early Kevin Smith movies, that does actually run through. Like, he's playing with religion. He's questioning it. you know I'm not claiming he was ever a trad or anything like that. But he does represent a certain kind of like...
Speaker: vibes-based New Jersey Catholicism that is still very much alive and well. And I think Gen X is the first generation where you really get searching away from that. And what he finds is, think what a lot of Gen X guys find, which is just like telling really dirty jokes. That sort of being a kind of... And that was always there, right? Like it's in Clerks, it's in Chasing Amy, it's in Clerks 2. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But any sort of cap on that totally goes out the window and you get a tweet like that instead of, you know, the sort of more, the jokier version that we got, that we get in these earlier films.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think clerks and clerks too are both laced with sentimentalism that makes the the sort ribald sexual jokes stomach yeah like less annoying and less teenage. um i Even in the second film, interestingly, I noticed in the first, ah Dante is, yeah, there's maybe some references to Catholicism, but with the second film, he's wearing like a big Celtic cross.
Speaker: Yes. Like prominently, like you know? And yet he's still fucking his colleague, his boss even. all That's very New Jersey coded. He's still having pre-marital sex with his boss. on And cheating on his fiance. Yeah. While wearing this massive... like and yeah Which is quite like, to me, it's quite... little simple but bad but like It's quite Mexican. like Having spent quite a bit of time in Mexico, it's quite a Mexican coded thing. So I was quite surprised to see like an Irish...
Speaker: i well I think it's a culturally Catholic-coded thing in in a big way. Well, and you know what's funny is in Clerks 2, and to be clear, like we'll talk maybe talk a little about the plot and stuff, but ultimately these are kind of just like funny movies, so the degree to which we should share all the jokes. The through line of plot for both films is that he he at some point in both films, Dante has a conflict between two potential women. Yes. love and trusts That's like the only, and he has to choose between them, and that's basically it.
Speaker: Yes. And so in the second movie, Jay and Silent Bob have converted to evangelical Christianity, which is such a nice touch. Because like you're right, they wouldn't become Catholic because that's sort of what they know. like that's At least in my world, that's how it works. like And this is true actually in a lot of Latin America too.
Speaker: like If you get really, really religious, a lot of times that's identified with evangelicalism. not with Because Catholicism is such a cultural force that you can affiliate with it without necessarily being the most... like in you know like theologically indulgent person imaginable, right?
Speaker: So if you want to really become guy for a religion, you go evangelical. And it's so funny because they're still dealing drugs, but they're using it as an excuse to talk about their conversion to evangelical Christianity. And to me, that joke is so culturally Catholic-coded, where it's like, these guys found religion, they're still exactly the same, and of course they're random evangelicals now. Yeah, so I've faced Catholic Mima Council on Instagram that a Catholic church is a picture of, I don't know, a basilica in Rome or whatever. It's like an Orthodox church and it's a picture of St. Vladimir the Martyrs in Moscow and it's like a Protestant church and it's a picture of a strip mall, which is offensive to me as when you grew up in it. As a Presbyterian. Yeah, as such an Episcopalian dropout or whatever, but It is quite funny, like, from a kind of Catholic point of view. like, these idiots just, like, go and, like, pray in, like, a strip mall.
Speaker: Well... And no, and I think it's very telling. Something I love that is also sort of very New Jersey ah gen X coded. Because but I guess what I'm really trying to get across about this Gen X element is like, there is still this attachment to some of these cultural norms. And I think you see this even in like certain Gen X politics now, whether it's the liberal version of the obsession with like the political norms of the US or the conservative obsession with... um well, we didn't speak Spanish all the time when I was in school. you know these are Things are just done this way. you know We have to do things in this way.
Speaker: It's, of course, the scene where they have to go to a funeral for a girl who has died. And, excuse me, they go to this funeral. And you don't see inside.
Speaker: But all we find out is that Randall somehow knocked the casket over. And so they're being chased out of the funeral home. And to me... The wake. The wake is the moment, often open casket, where you go in, you kneel in front of the casket, the casket's hands are wrapped in a rosary, sometimes sometimes you kiss the the corpse, that's pretty common too.
Speaker: that is a That is a very… i'm just looking at absolute bafflement. Like the wake is it is in some ways like more important than the funeral, I would say, and like the kind of cultural Catholic. well We don't even have wakes. What what is wake? It's where you all get around the corpse and you cry and you kiss the corpse and and stuff and it's fine. mean, you don't have to do that part, but you kneel, there's a kneeler in front of the corpse. Yeah, so I have to ask that the the that the open casket, that's not like a thing in my... co like No, that's... Is that is that like just a particularly American thing? is that Catholic thing? I don't know. I mean, as someone who's really only ever been to Catholic you know wakes and funerals, i I don't really know, but certainly it's common here in the religious and sort of cultural sphere that I grew up in.
Speaker: No, we just stick them in the ground, man. You don't want to see that. Get them in the ground. But my my point is, like to me, there's something very telling about here's it there's something, it sort of demonstrates his attachment to that norm yeah by having the thing that Randall upsets be knocking over the casket such that this corpse, which is sort of being cared for and attended to in this particular way, tumbles out and then they have to escape, you know, like they're inmoky in Smokey and the Bandit or something and drive back to the convenience store. Yeah, there are like a bunch of like kids in like the seats just chucking rocks at the car. Just throwing stuff at the car, yeah. Yeah, I i do kind of want to talk about the the sex stuff a little bit because... No, no, because I was thinking about... like We've talked about this before. the degree to which when we were growing up
Speaker: the acceptableness of a certain kind of like raunch that I think after Me Too got kind of toned down because it turned out that it wasn't just, you know, jokes in a lot of cases. Yeah, i mean, like, there is a direct domino effect between donkey fucking Harvey Weinstein and, you know. Yeah.
Speaker: Harvey Weinstein's letting that be in the movie. You know what I mean? Even I was watching the Netflix, like, P. Diddy documentary recently, And, you know, all this bad stuff is happening. It's all over the music. Like he's talking about it in certain songs, like over the beginnings of songs and stuff.
Speaker: And there was this like, just a tolerance that I think especially, i mean, it really starts probably around 2011, 2012, but certainly by the moment of Me Too gets, you heavy pushback.
Speaker: And I think sometimes the Gen X... tolerance for that, has they've they've they've proven less tolerant than some other groups in that respect.
Speaker: like Their ability to overcome the unacceptableness of that thing. And listen, like I think Kevin Smith seems like a great guy. I'm not like accusing of anything. I'm just saying he is an opportunity to think about that spirit as it manifests in the generation. Because his mood like there's a scene in Chasing Amy, um which, have you seen that one, Sam? i have, a long time ago, but yeah. i love I love Chasing Amy, which is a woke movie, by the way.
Speaker: I've been on Letterboxd. I have seen it, but that is the wokest movie a working-class white man from New Jersey could have made in the 1990s. It is simply the case. Fight me. But anyway, that in that movie, there's a scene where ah the two main characters, it's Ben Affleck and Jason Lee.
Speaker: Their names are Holden and Banky, respectively. And Holden is at the train station with Banky. He's sending him off to a comic book convention in Boston. Can you tell that I know these movies a little too well?
Speaker: And he goes off to go talk on the phone with Alyssa, the main female sort of love interest of the movie. And he comes back and Banky, who has packed a bunch of porn magazines in his bag, is showing them to a child who I believe has played...
Speaker: Forget who it is. It's someone it's someone like actually... like i think it's a famous kid. I might be wrong. But anyway, showing it to this kid and he's got a bestiality magazine. He's going, and then Black black Beauty couldn't take being written anymore and wanted to do some writing of his own. And then Holden just like grabs the back of a shirt and pulls him out. like That is the kind of... like We're not just talking about, i don't know, a slight ribaldry, as you put it earlier, Sam.
Speaker: Like, Smith, and this certainly would have been true in the milieu I grew up in, is very comfortable with, like, the kinds of jokes you might now associate with, like, a discord that a person who does a school shooting comes out of or something. Like, it's yeah they've been relegated to a much ah much smaller... But I don't know if they have. I feel like...
Speaker: I feel like it might be the circles, where the sort of fey, PMC, bloodless circles we run in. because Well, I mean cultural acceptability, though. You're definitely right that like at a at a popular level, that still exists. I was going to say, the amount of like, you know, this is a bit of a trajectory, but you'll be in the pub and some guy who's like ah a brickie or something in England will be like laughing at his phone. He'll be like, oh, so funny. And he'll like show you his group chat with all his other like brickie mates. And it's, it's you know, it's like...
Speaker: Incest is like Taiwan. Yeah, that's no, that's like, yeah, no. I mean, i think you're you're right. No, you're you're definitely correct. I think, though, that if I wanted to think about this generationally, like we talked about this with Gen X and race a little bit, how they're the kind of like colorblindness.
Speaker: Once there was a desire at the social level to talk about that, basically, colorblindness wasn't enough, um that, you know, there are kind of forms of oppression that can persist, even if that's how you think you're seeing the world.
Speaker: And we talked about how Gen X reacted negatively to that, a lot of them, in part because they many of them grew up in what they did think of as a colorblind world, right? And I think this is something... Yeah, we saw that in like kids, for instance, yeah. Yes, it's definitely in kids.
Speaker: um To some extent, we talked about it with with Charles Pinion in Twisted Issues, Yeah, and there's something similar in Kevin Smith where like the kind of like male locker room talk, the kind of like raunchy male sex stuff, that's like quite openly shared with the female characters. like It's not something that has to be like sequestered away for like fear of blowback or fear of offence. And in fact, in Clerks 2, the sort of secondary love interest or the primary love interest, out depending on how you want to construe it, Becky...
Speaker: Rosario Dawson's character. Yeah. Who is a mixed race, very gorgeous woman. um Who's a love interest of Dante. She's just like coded. And it this is very genetic. She's coded as like kind of a bro.
Speaker: Like she can like, you know, like bat as well as the boys. Like there's no like division of like, they're not like hiding their like grossness from her. And she's kind of not hurt hiding wherever she is from them. It's very open. Everything's kind of out in the open.
Speaker: Yes. And like even the donkey fucking scene, you think that in a film written by someone in Gen Z or a Millennial Generation, she would be the one who would take moral outrage at that, right? She'd be like, this is objectifying. She wrote the Lisa Simpson character, the moral voice. But no, she's like objective. She's like, oh that donkey's got a massive cock. Like she's kind of enjoyed it. She's like getting into it.
Speaker: Well, that's what that's that's exactly it. Like what happens in that scene, but everyone who comes in, even the police and fire department who break it up because Dante comes back and sees that there's ah smoke inside, which is actually from the fog machine that has been brought by by Kelly, who's part of this donkey show. um And he's like, oh, there's a fire. So if he calls and he goes in and of course not a fire. It's a, it's show, a cabaret, if you will.
Speaker: And they come in and yeah, they obviously like arrest them, but they come in like, like their eyes are gigantic. They're like, like they think it's, it's a spectacle. I mean, it's truly, ah it's truly a spectacle for everyone involved. And to your point, Sam, the fact that she is not white is never brought up in the movie at all, which I think is very telling, right? Like, Yeah, there's It's in entirely colorblind as a movie. Yeah, there's no... And that's that's kind of what I mean about, like, Kevin Smith, and and he's, you know, he's pretty lived out now, but he's, like, kind of always already been woke, but, like, at the stage that is available to him at a given time.
Speaker: So, like, I feel like if he made that movie now, it probably would have a little bit more about that. But at the time, much like with Chasing Amy, he sort of is doing the colorblind thing, I think, as an expression of his, you know, like...
Speaker: Whatever. Okay. Who cares? like the The white woman in that movie is is the bad one. you know His other love interest whose name I can't even remember because she's so insignificant. Who, I do need to add, the whole reason that he wants to get with her is because she's rich and her dad owns a car wash in Florida, which would allow him to move and take over a car wash and get out of New Jersey. And when she shows up to like...
Speaker: you know because it's his final day at work, to be like, hey, congrats, we can move. I think the cake just has a big New Jersey with a line through it. like just like It's like an anti-New Jersey cake. So she is very much coded as this like inauthentic betrayer of roots.
Speaker: And that is one of the more interesting things about Kevin Smith, like the return to the roots in the age of globalization, like the interest and obsession with the place of New Jersey.
Speaker: I mean, Kevin Smith's been reading Michael Sandel's Tyranny of Merritt, clearly. Before it even published. I think he's been reading Simone Weil's The Need for Roots, which was, I believe, addressed to Charles de Gaulle. So we can imagine that Charles de Gaulle and Kevin Smith once read the same Kevin Smith is a crypto-communitarian. He's a crypto-gaullist, yeah. Yeah, crypto-gaullist, communitarian thinker. He's really into, like, um what's the other guy called? Charles yeah. Charles Taylor. Yeah, Charles Taylor. Alistair McIntyre. Yeah, he's...
Speaker: Well, kind of makes sense. like and that's the a yeah That kind of like rooted sort of social Catholicism is, yeah, it's so sure it's there, isn't it? But I think it's also telling because it gives you an example of, and I do think this is real, like around the United States and probably the world, even at the imperial core, so to speak here,
Speaker: Globalization, as much as it did have all sorts of effects on you know wages, job opportunities, so many things, it also did not fully destroy. i think it would take the internet to really ramp this up.
Speaker: the idea that you belonged to a place. I mean, the the concept of the townie, right, for example, is that's very much who Kevin Smith is making movies about and has mostly continued to make movies about with, you know, some changes. im Like he now, like I said, he owns the convenience store. He owns the building next door for his podcasting empire, which is his main thing now.
Speaker: um He now owns a comic book store in downtown Red Bank across from the music shop Jax that serves as the building where the main characters live in Chasing Amy. like He is now Red Bank.
Speaker: you know He is now sort of, and he has genuinely invested it back in the community. And there is something like pre pre-digital about that kind of obsession to me. like I'm not saying that there aren't local donors and things like this, but that degree of obsession with the place one is from does feel pre-digital. He didn't grow up on Discord. You know what I mean?
Speaker: Yeah. And it is interesting that between the two movies, the first movie is kind of like the internet's there, but like in the same way that you say, like, you know, only like a thousand people actually live through the sixties, like the nineties is the also the rise of the internet. But for most people, it's very peripheral still. yeah and obviously And obviously most of the main characters are still reliant on like newspapers and phones um in the first film. But by 2006, the internet is like really prominent. Like there's a dot-com billionaire that they went to school with who they hate.
Speaker: Played by Jason Lee from Jason Amy. Yeah, he comes in and they sort of have a yeah confrontation of their own failure. It's this quite successful guy. And then it there's this younger... but that there Well, we should say that this is one of the films that actually bridges into the millennial generation because their younger co-worker, he was, what, 19 at the time? Elias. Elias, he's great. I mean, his his like facial mannerisms are just so odd.
Speaker: So odd. ah Yes, so he'd been born in 1987, so peak millennial. So two things here. One is that, of course, they use the internet to order Kelly and the Donkey Show. So Kinky Kelly and the Stud, I think it's called. um But here's the thing, right?
Speaker: ah Elias is important because he allows us to think about one of the other, i think, key... It carries from Gen X through millennial, I would say, cultural points and points, which is like nerd and geek culture. yeah Kevin Smith's characters love arguing. Like in the first movie, there's a relatively long argument between Dante and Randall about whether or not it was ethical to blow up the Death Star the second time. Because there may have been contractors still working on it who cannot be said to be accountable for what it is that is the Death Star is being used for. then it's interrupted by a guy who's like, I'm a contractor.
Speaker: I had a job and it was at, you know, i don't know, Fat Tony's house, this mob boss. I did not take the job because I understood that a contractor needs to be responsible for their clients. If I go there and I'm killed, that's on me.
Speaker: So those guys are responsible if they're on the Death Star. Like- they knew what they would do it exactly exactly and it's it's insane but it it it it is this attempt to represent like what these kinds of guys actually would have been talking about yeah they're all like kind of like comic book guys in some way Yeah, well, even with the video, I mean, Randall works at a video store, which there's another kind of amazing scene there, which is different people trying to order movies, but in really stupid ways. So, like, you there'll be sort of a valley girl come in, and she's like, what you guys have? And, you know, literally, he puts a tinkling sound effect, and he's like, do-do-do. And there are a of arrows pointing to the new releases just out directly behind her. Or the mom who wants an order put in for a Barney tape or something. And Randall's on the phone and is ordering just nonstop porn films.
Speaker: He's like, Yeah, can I get one Black Bulls 2? Yeah. One, you know, one white on rice. i got And then at the end, he's he's like, yeah, and one, you know, Barney's Adventure.
Speaker: Thank you. You know, and the mom's just saying, they're like horrified. a ga yeah Just this this understandable service worker, just like, hatred of the consumer. you know like All they do is come in and cause chaos. The guy who comes in is checking every egg to find the perfect dozen eggs. And then someone else comes in is like, oh, yeah, must be a guidance counselor at a school.
Speaker: For some reason, it's always them. And I was like, oh, man. um But to your point about the nerd thing, like you brought up the fellowship of the ring the um Lord of the Rings in the second movie. like The whole debate is, which is cooler, Star Wars or Lord of the Rings?
Speaker: Which is like it almost like a JX versus millennial yeah nerd culture face-off, right? Yeah. Yeah, and then Boomers would be, you know, a lot of them would have read Lord of the Rings, I mean, in the 60s.
Speaker: So there's also that, right? There's kind of another generational challenger. And Elias... represents the sort of... Because nerds love making distinctions among nerds. And I think all this important because as I've said multiple times, we live in the revenge of the nerds world. like If you understand the Elias character or the Jason Lee character in Clerks 2, you understand Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, in in my opinion, or like you know Palmer Luckey or whatever. So Elias is the uncool nerd. right He's the one who believes that his girlfriend...
Speaker: And him can't have sex because what is what is it? Yeah, her parents put in, again, excuse my language, these are Kevin Smith movies, deposited pussy troll ah into her into her nether regions that cannot be, it goes out when she turns 18 or 21 or something, I think. 21, yeah. Yeah, then they're allowed to have sex. But we should say, importantly, Elias is like an evangelical homeschooled Christian.
Speaker: Yes. he's like a He's the equivalent of the J.N. Silent Bob characters now, even though they don't interact like particularly much. I mean, it's important also that this film was set in 2006, which is like peak Bush, right? It's two years off Obama being elected, so we're we sort of mid-term, second term of Bush.
Speaker: This is like deep Bush territory. Well, you're right, and it's pre-financial collapse. So one of the things that's interesting is you can still have them be kind of slacker characters who get by. like That's an important thing in these movies, right?
Speaker: They're fine. like Their lives are boring. Their lives are involved involve a lot of dumb stuff. But like they're living... they they they never talk about their lives as being financially difficult. Yeah. It's always about ambition. There's like spiritual need to do more, but it's never about, I need enough money to do more things. Yeah. That's not like a sense of shit. I can't afford a house. I can't afford rent. Like, um,
Speaker: this is not sustainable. I can't i need more money. I have to find something that pays more. Yeah. I like the ability to spend 10 years. It's Dumas. Francis Fukuyama coming in. You know what I mean? like It's it's the it's the the human need for a certain kind of like mission or ambition that draws at least Dante out of the convenience store and then to Florida or almost to Florida in the second movie. But it can't be that strong in the sense that he's kind of unhappy...
Speaker: in the first film, which is 10 years prior. and And yet, you know, Kevin Smith makes the choice stylistically, structurally, whatever, to have him still at the convenience store. Kevin Smith seems to think that that's bad. like yeah Like, he seems to think that, like, that ambition is unnecessary, which is funny because then you can read him as sort of like a Fukuyama antagonist.
Speaker: Like, you know, that he's he's repressing. Because, you know, Fukuyama's argument is that there's this... I mean, he's getting it from Plato. This sense of human spirit that emerges and that sort of can't be totally contained, no matter the level of material comfort, right? Yeah, his thesis around The Last Man is that even in like the the best of all possible, in the kind of pan-glossian best of all possible worlds,
Speaker: at the end of history when we've got perfectly liberal capitalist democracy and everyone's kind of middle class, like, there's going to be a need for, like, at some point after however many decades, people will get bored. They'll need more. They'll need conflict. They'll need struggle. We need World War Oh, yeah. We should say it as of recording. You know, World War III, who knows? Yeah, it could be. You know, we wish you all the best. Any listeners in the Middle East. Yeah, death to England.
Speaker: Death to England. Well, you know. Just happy to be included. But ah yeah, I mean, it's funny though, because that you can read these two movies, because this is not really Triple Ink leaders movie, but in the you can read these two slacker films as almost like rejoinders to that. Like, no, you might feel that, but it is better for you to just find satisfaction in your community as it exists, with the friends that you've made, with the places you get to go.
Speaker: Yeah, and there is something very Gen X about this. like um but i think we were discussing off-air once. like ah A lot of what you would consider millennial bands are actually, the members of those bands are actually Gen Xers. So like Blink-182, My Chemical career Romance, Bowling for Soup, whatever. All of those bands have some 41.
Speaker: Most of those band members were born in the late 70s. They're actually Gen X, not millennial. And if you look through their music videos, which I grew up on, you know um they're all obsessed with high school. Yeah.
Speaker: Like, these are people who are, you know, what, I mean, the the height of pop punk in, like, the early 2000s, an emo, like, would be millionaires, multi-millionaires, most of them. Maybe not bowling for soup, I don't know, but, like, most of them been multi-million pound recording contracts, like, lives completely transformed, and they're entirely hung up with high school.
Speaker: Yes. And... I don't think that's a feature of like pop culture now so much. No. and In fact, it's something I'm well aware of because i because of when I grew up, I'm actually sort of like a big fan of the high school movie like as a genre.
Speaker: um And they are pretty rare productions now. I mean, they do exist, but they're there they don't kind of flood the market in the way that they did in the early 2000s. And you know what's funny?
Speaker: You made me think about a band that my wife is a gigantic fan of, but that is mostly known for one song to like broader society. And that's Fountains of Wayne, who did Stacey's Mind. They're you know of this kind of era.
Speaker: They're born actually even earlier. I think they're born in like the late 60s, but really don't come to prominence until much later. But they're from New Jersey, right? so they're like very early X people.
Speaker: And if you listen to what I think is probably their most famous album, or at least the one I know the most songs from, which is Welcome Interstate Managers, it is an album almost entirely—it's the one Stacey's mom comes from.
Speaker: It's largely about like interacting with the workplace. It's a kind of office space style movie. And these are guys, you know, who represent like the very beginning of of Gen X. Smith, as a guy who never becomes like a white collar worker, right? Like he's like a shithead kid, goes to film school. His first movie blows up when he's like a young man. and then he's just in Hollywood. He never experiences that.
Speaker: But he's kind of doing the same thing. He's writing about what he knows, right? He's writing about the world that he is forced into by dint of where he's born. And then in the other case where it is that, you know, many people end up working.
Speaker: And I think that in the fact that he wants to like tamp down on that, that the most, that sense of need for ambition, it betrays a kind of like a valorization of the slacker, but also it just a kind of like happiness with the end of history.
Speaker: Like it's ah it's a movie that we can see as actually being somewhat content with the realities of the end of history, both of them really. Yeah, and I why necessarily is there, I mean, if we are living in the economic, which we aren't now, but at the time, right, like the 90s and then the early 2000s, if you are living in economic conditions where you can effectively have a fairly stable life and like,
Speaker: you know not wealthy, but comfortable life working as a convenience store clerk, why wouldn't you? I think Smith's question is, like why why wouldn't you do that? yeah well That's obviously not a question we can pose now, because it's it's just like the the asset inflation of the last 15 years or whatever has just made that unfeasible.
Speaker: But it is a question that yeah can be asked prior to 2008. And I should say that we have another clerk character Resident Evil, right? Mm-hmm. um In Army of Darkness, he's also a clerk.
Speaker: And yeah interestingly, as we've we've sort mentioned before within the John Dolan episode, yeah he's not presented you know he's a bit schlocky, he's a bit nerdy, but he's not presented in any sense as a loser. and He's actually like presented as a highly capable, quite quite charismatic person. um And I just feel like that's an impossibility post maybe 2008.
Speaker: You just made me realize that's very interesting, which is this period, and I'd have to look at the exact numbers, but certainly it picks up after 2008. And I would imagine is something true, basically, as soon as deindustrialization starts. What sector grows? The service sector.
Speaker: So there's a sense in which, i like putting in all these clerks, what's that? The service sector is like innately bifurricated, right? So like the service sector doesn't have that kind of like upper working class, unionized job, which is like...
Speaker: Yeah, it's an employment, you're still like subservient, but you're earning like enough to support an entire family, right? like The service sector bifurricates into... Actually, it's it's shown really well in Clerks 2. You get the the sort of like tech consultant but millionaire who's doing really well, and then you get the service worker clerks, And they're both technically in the service sector. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: But not in a... Yeah, but, you know, like, actually, it's interesting to look at that moment because what is the actual discussion about? The discussion is about he comes in He's come in explicitly to make fun of them because he's heard that they're working there. He, like, sold some shitty website and now he's, you know, worth a a bajillion dollars.
Speaker: And they're like, oh, well, you know, do you remember? And again, this is Kevin Smith. I'm not saying this. Kevin Smith is saying this. Do you remember when you, for like a high school team or something, had to put a hot dog in your ass and walk with it? And if it fell out, you had to put it back in and keep walking? And I think he has to like eat the part that falls off or something. Like I forget what the exact... the way it is is, but then he's like, oh, so you remember that? They still call you like hot dog walker or whatever. And, you know, you can see that he's sort of fuming. And it's this moment of like the height, the service clerk at the, you know, the, the Randall and Dante characters get their a revenge by looking to high school, which is exactly what you're talking about. And the tech guy is embarrassed, but is also like, well, now I have a bajillion dollars. So, you know, who cares? Right. So like even there high school enters the equation, but, I do think it it makes sense to set it with clerks because if you have a growth in that sector, both through consulting and because obviously ah what remains, and you get rid of a lot of industrial jobs, but people go into work in hotels and restaurants and the sorts of things that, you know, continue to exist in most economic climates, you know, regardless of sort of the rest of the economy. um And then, of course, new things that get invented like...
Speaker: HR compliance positions or you know all sorts of things that involve interactivity with clients. Highest HR employment in the world, baby. At least higher than the European America. with we I've said it. I've said before, i'll say it again. This is socialism.
Speaker: This is weird. Keir Starmer is ensuring everyone has a job as an HR professional. And again, I'll just put it out there. I think there's a lot of things being said about him right now that I don't think are very fair. A lot of pictures being put out that make him look kind of sweaty and maybe like he's not a particularly attractive man. And that's, I mean, that's just fucked up. I think they should treat him.
Speaker: He was, he was a good looking man in his in his youth, I will
Speaker: Don't edit that out. I want that on the record. In fact, ah you you're going to want to clip that and put it at the beginning of the episode just ah so that the listeners are left guessing. Who could it possibly be?
Speaker: We should do, um he was part a documentary called Mook Libel, which was like a very Gen X, It was like ah almost like a Michael Moore-style documentary about two people who were on trial for libeling McDonald's in like 1999.
Speaker: ah And were like very much like anti-WHO, not WHO, sorry. WTO. Robert F. Kennedy. to into at least And and yet a barrister is a youthful ki star That's amazing.
Speaker: So we we should cover that. And I guess in the UK, because the libel laws are so much stricter, there probably would be a case for that in a way there would never be in the US. Oh, cool. Yeah. So anything we say is purely satirical and an allegation, never a, you know, we're not making any concrete claims about anything here.
Speaker: Well, I'm making, the one concrete claim I'm making is that Keir Starmer is beautiful and that he's bringing socialism to the UK. And I don't think that's libelous. I think those are both positive things. We should close soon, but I just do want to briefly come in on the um on the geek thing again because I really do, like, I'm not, i'm I've mentioned this several times. Maybe during the millennial season, I would, like, do an episode on this. Like, Gamergate, right? Okay, this moment where, like, I remember being, a you know, I was a gamer in a certain sense. I played a lot of World of Warcraft in the late aughts.
Speaker: And like, it was its own kind of like nerdy, self-contained thing. And you could take it really far. You didn't have to. You could dip your toes in and play Call of Duty or whatever, or you could, you know, go all the way.
Speaker: And Gamergate really happened because of the beginnings of that industry getting big enough and attracting enough new people that the kind of codes of conduct that people were attached to no longer could be universalized. Like women who played video games didn't want big-breasted anime girls and everything. You know what i mean? They wanted female protagonists. They wanted other kinds of video games.
Speaker: And now we live in, you know for me, like the domain of the video game person. I mean, what what is a streamer but a sort of corollary version of a video game guy? It's everywhere. I mean, all of my kids at one point or another have played Roblox. Some of them still do.
Speaker: you know To quote Rol Grello, these children, none of them are my own. I don't mean my own biological children. I mean my students. Video games are ubiquitous and the kind of geek culture that comes with them has transformed but is now substantially more ubiquitous. And I think the millennial generation is where you fully get that breakthrough.
Speaker: But the sort of old dons of that movement are Gen X guys like Kevin Smith. The guy who has been on YouTube since like 2010 who like... who is like you know I don't know, just over 30 years old at that time, and gave like ranting commentary, kind of like the angry video game nerd or nostalgia critic or someone like this. like These are the origins of YouTube culture like as it exists now.
Speaker: And they're Gen X guys who are obsessed with the same shit we're seeing in this Kevin Smith movie. So he is he's presaging like what happened. I don't think he knew that. But like now we all have that conversation. but Those kind of conversations about like Star Wars, Lord the Rings, whatever, these kind of like co-worker conversations, i think at the time are branded in a very... sort of like One is being slightly subcultural, geeky, and loser-coded. Obviously, by the time you get to, gosh, I don't know, 2015, 16, talking about like the Avengers fucking universe around the water cooler at work is like incredibly normie-coded, right? Yeah.
Speaker: Yes. like we've moved through it we yeah we've we've got We get to a point years after Clerks where yeah this is all wind fears One of the reasons I wanted to do Clerks is because I've been obsessed with that transition. like Being able to find these earlier examples where liking a thing that you will like in 10 years' time is subcultural or coded in a strange way.
Speaker: But like now it's it's meaningless. like We live in the revenge of the nerds. I remember, and maybe I've mentioned this in the podcast before, maybe I haven't, but I remember knowing like nerdy guys when I was... you know Because I was i was playing ah video games. I was doing the occasional board game, whatever.
Speaker: ah who would get mad that like the MySpace girls would wear the glasses with not no lenses in them, like big nerd glasses, as like a sexy thing.
Speaker: they were like, that's stolen valor. that's she know like How dare you? you know that's That's not cool when I do it. um And i I don't think Kevin Smith has that spirit. He's a generous, woke man, as I mentioned earlier.
Speaker: But i do think that he represents one side of the Gen X coin on the nerd thing. And the angrier nerds are the ones who got into the Gamergate stuff, who to this day are, you know, I don't know, doing like Nazi anime girl avatars on Twitter or whatever, you know, just like that's the other side for a younger generation. So yeah. i Anything you are wanted to add, Sam?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, Jay from Jay and Silent Bob, if if you if you want to drop your skincare routine. but I mean, you know what? I do have a little little notice to put in here, which is that First of all, Jason Mewes, who plays Jay, just seems like a ah fascinating guy. like he he really does know what to do with the camera, even though as far as I know, he had never been on camera before this movie.
Speaker: I do really recommend watching at least the first of these. The last thing I'll say, in keeping with this Gen X kind of situation, is Kevin Smith creates the View Askewiverse, which is sort of the world of his movies.
Speaker: There's a guy whose name is escaping me off top my head, Scott Mosher. So Scott Mosher... is kind of a co... I think he's a co-producer of the movie, is a big part of that world.
Speaker: He ends up making a movie with a guy named Brian Johnson, who is like very much like staple Gen X comedian man from... like He worked at the comic book store that ah Smith ran.
Speaker: He was on Impractical Jokers, I think. He's also from New Jersey. They made an insane movie that I don't even know if I recommend, but is worth knowing exists, called Vulgar, that is about a 30-something loser who works as a birthday clown and becomes a murderer. And like...
Speaker: it It is like the dark version of everything we have spoken about today, where it's like about a loser, but it's about it's about going postal, basically. It is literally the Joker before the Joker. like that He did the the movie we know as Joker before you know that actual film came out. And so that is the other side of this coin, I feel like. Kevin Smith is the kind, nice side.
Speaker: And the other side is the like, I don't know, they probably don't do this in UK, but the bumper sticker that says like, I was raised by the darkness. Or no why am I doing Joker for the Bane quote? Or it'll say, why so serious?
Speaker: right like I literally passed a car with a giant bumper sticker that said that the other day, and I guarantee you that guy is Gen X or maybe Elder Millennial. That's terrifying. There is that other side um that Kevin Smith is related to, but not the same as. and ah Yeah, it's just worth considering. like Yeah, Kevin Smith is hope posting.
Speaker: Yes. He's anti-Thumos posting and he's hope posting. Yeah, he he's like light lights light hope posting or something. I don't know. Yeah, exactly. He's he's what the the girls maybe they would call yeah light slacker. you know Instead of they have light academia and dark academia, there's light light slacker, dark slacker. He's light slacker. Yeah, he's like, just have fun of your friends, man.
Speaker: Yeah, and there is something kind of – he's grill-pilled. He really is if we want to go back to that idea. I'd end on one last question, which is obviously New Jersey is physically at least close to New York City, but maybe not spiritually. I'm just wondering, because the film, in some ways it feels like it could be set in the middle of Nebraska, right? These are people are very alienated from the cosmopolitan centre.
Speaker: yeah like They feel peripheral. And yet, I imagine they're what, like an hour's drive two hours drive away? Probably like an hour to an hour and 50 minute train ride, roughly the same. Yeah, so they're like close to the city.
Speaker: like So what what how is it like what is the psychogeography of like being that? I mean, guess it's like maybe like close like people who who like live in Essex and never leave Essex to go to London.
Speaker: It really depends on the person. I would say the way it works a lot, in my experience, is lot of teens go into New York for various things, right? So like, we should assume that at some point, Dante and Randall have gone to New York City. And certainly, if you watch Chasing Amy, a lot of that movie takes place in New York because they're constantly going back and forth.
Speaker: um But it is also true that there is a certain kind of person who, once they settle down in New Jersey, either doesn't go back because they're afraid of New York, they think it's 70s New York, or they think it's Summer of Sam, basically, or kind of only goes for like very bizarre, almost touristy special occasions.
Speaker: Like when I was a kid, my family was that kind of family. When I was a kid, my family took a limo to the Times Square Applebee's or TGI Fridays, I can't remember which it was, for a meal with my grandmother to then just drive back in a limo. like That is the degree to which it was like an event to go to this particular place.
Speaker: So it really just depends. like I think they probably are like aware of what's going on in New York to a certain extent. ah They've probably been there, but it's not...
Speaker: like a huge part of their lives probably. It's only when you become like Holden and Banky and Chasing Amy where you're like an artist of some kind that I think you have like good reason to be going in and participating in like New York culture more broadly. That makes sense.
Speaker: Yeah, because I think that's the interesting thing compared to like if this was set in Nebraska or Utah or something, right? Like you're not having to constantly make the choice to disengage or not engage with that culture. Whereas when you're in New Jersey and you're that physically close, you kind of have to like actively...
Speaker: and consciously, like repeatedly make the choice not to be there. Yeah. well And that makes it more of an interesting film in a way to me. well It's also interesting because if you think about like Slacker, for example, in Austin, like that's a movie with a lot of movement. like It really makes Austin seem gigantic, like you need a car to get around, which probably is true.
Speaker: ah But in this movie, first of all, he almost keep he keeps everything basically on site for both movies at the burger place and at the convenience store. But there are also movies just about like just regular kind of New Jersey suburban communities where people can walk around or they can drive. like Both are kind of available to you.
Speaker: The reality is that that convenience store is just off of a highway. I say highway. It's like two or three lanes. It's not like a gigantic highway. It's like a local sort of major road kind of situation. But... There are houses right across the street from that convenience store.
Speaker: Like directly. If you just turn that camera around, it's just a suburban neighborhood. But then you go like two minutes in the other direction and you're on like a highway with like a mini golf course and stuff. So like New Jersey is just very bizarre in that way.
Speaker: So I think it reflects that. Like they don't need to go anywhere because like everything is kind of accessible with or without car. I mean, obviously car helps. But whereas in Austin, it's like, we got to go around, we're picking up this person, we're going to this person, they get in a car, now we're at this house, you know, you get tossed around a lot. geographically, they feel very different. And I wonder if that does add to Smith's desire to like stay there. Because don't know, New Jersey, always the suburbs here were mostly built before the idea of the suburb.
Speaker: So there's something a little more old fashioned and walkable, generally speaking about our suburbs, ah than would be the case in most of America. So it creates its own kind of Yeah, like it's it's on the wrong side of the Appalachians for like true sprawling car. Yeah, or even like if you go down, like I remember um visiting my in-laws. They don't live here anymore, but they did stuff in Charleston, and they'd moved into this town home.
Speaker: And it was just every single townhouse was the same. And it was just kind of in the middle of like a developed swamp. And you had to like go down a road to get there, just off of another road that didn't have anything on it, but like a circle K. And you were like, you know, 15 minutes from like Maine, Charleston. and I was just like, this seems like hell.
Speaker: It's just like a row of identical buildings in the middle of a swamp. There's nothing. like You may as well be living in the country. ah It would at least be aesthetically more interesting. And we do have some of that here, but it's much, much, much less common.
Speaker: So that's a plug for New Jersey. Come visit. ah The Garden State. It is. it is gen We got some beautiful nature. Go to the Pine Barrens. Go to the the top of the Appalachian Mountains touches the top of New Jersey, so you can finish the trail up here if you like. um can you Can you finish off the pod with, who founded New Jersey? Why is it named after Old Jersey? What's going on? I think, I can actually look it up. I'm not 100% sure, but I think it has to do with where the first like governor was from or like had previously held some kind of position in might be the ah the answer. But let's find out.
Speaker: No, I don't want the prehistoric thing. oh here we are. During the English Civil War, the Channel Island of Jersey remained loyal to the British crown and gave sanctuary to the king. In the Royal Square in St. Helier, St. Charles II of England was proclaimed king in 1649.
Speaker: forty nine And then basically when they were handing out these charters and grants, he gave it to Sir George Carteret. We actually have Carteret as a city near here.
Speaker: And Lord Berkeley of Stratton. who is not a particularly good-looking gentleman from this painting I'm looking at. And so basically, they were it was named in honor of the Royalists because Jersey had been loyal to Charles ah during the period of the Civil War. Disgusting.
Speaker: Oliver Cromwell could never, obviously. um But all right. Yeah, thanks, Sam. Thanks, everybody. Come to New Jersey. Bye-bye.
