My friend Kevin, What Have Ye Done?
It’s difficult to explain the importance of Kevin Smith’s movies to someone who didn’t grow up in the nineties. He made movies for a demographic no one made movies for at the time: directionless, late blooming teenagers and young adults raised on a steady diet of television and mainstream movies. I know, every fucking studio is making movies for this demographic nowadays, but it wasn’t always the case.
What made Kevin Smith’s movies different is that not only his movies were for us, but they were about us also. They were a very GenX-y art form that questioned the validity of traditional models and championed existential values like friendship and personal responsibility. His films stressed the importance of defining success for oneself and, most important, understood that popular culture operates as a connective tissue between us all. That films, television, comic books and whatnot were a way to bring us all closer together.
Needless to say, I love Kevin Smith. His movies played a pivotal role in my life. He’s one of the two directors who made a movie I’ve seen more than a hundred times: Mallrats. This is not a hit piece on him in any way or at least, it isn’t meant to be. I still love the post-heart attack, vegan stoner Kevin Smith. My brain is still struggling to accept the fact that he’s skinny now, but my man turned his life around and became healthy. Somewhat.
I’m happy for him.
No, this piece is meant to investigate why Kevin Smith’s movies radically changed over the last decade. I’m not going to use the s-word to describe them because they’re all quite different from one another, but I believe we’ll collectively agree that Jay & Silent Bob Reboot sucked ass. If I want to write about this it’s because I believe what happened to him is complicated and not entirely his fault. No, weed did not kill his creativity and no, social progress didn’t just pass him by. Kevin Smith CHANGED and we’re going to examine why.
Kevin Smith, View Askewniverse and the film market
Kevin Smith became famous through a series of interconnected low brow comedies referred to as the View Askewniverse. The films share recurring locations and characters, notably goofball dealers Jay & Silent Bob who are played by his friend Jason Mewes and himself. As highlighted in the documentaryClerk. (which is very much an attempt by Smith to tell his-side-of-his-own-story), it was not even a smooth ride then.
At first lionized by critics for his gritty black-and-white debut Clerks, Smith was subsequently thrashed by the same people who made him for Mallrats. Presumably because it wasn’t in black-and-white and didn’t directly address’ Generation X’s job market anxieties. Critics missed the fact that Mallrats was a better movie about the same type of people, but whatever. It has been vindicated now.
Throughout the nineties, Smith created a strong demand for this type of comedy. He also started writing Daredevil comic books for Marvel, which will matter further down the line.
Now, it’s normal for any artist to fear getting pigeonholed into a particular type of art. To be condemned to create the same thing over and over again. Smith’s first attempt to break from the View Asknewnivese was his 2004 romantic comedy Jersey Girl. That didn’t work out for many reasons: 1) it came out on the heels of the Bennifer, Gigli fiasco saga 2) it felt a little outdated in its era. It was very much a 90s comedy released in 2004. 3) Most important, it was just-a-movie. It’s a concept that is important to Smith and if you’re a Smith fan, you understand that. But it was not what the market wanted then and it is still not what the market wants now.
In Smith-ian terms, just-a-movie is a movie you’re supposed to watch to entertain yourself for two hours and then move on with your life. It’s very much a product of the video store mentality. It’s what you did in a certain era. But the film market had already moved beyond that. Television was already starting to gain some ground in 2004 with The Sopranos, The Wire and Lost currently airing and movies were targeting different audiences. If you look at the highest grossing movies of that year, you’ll see: Spider-Man 2, Harry Potter & The Prisoner of Azkaban, The Bourne Supremacy, The Day After Tomorrow, but most important Shrek 2 and The Incredibles.
Big studios had already moved on his turf and just-a-movie wouldn’t cut it. He needed to knock it out of the park with a more ambitious project, but it was never really in his DNA to do so. He could’ve also brought Jersey Girl to television, but you can’t blame someone in 2004 for not knowing what would happen later in the decade.
Same goes for his 2008 comedy Zack & Miri Make a Porno. I don’t think it was a bad movie, but I don’t think it was a good movie either. It just belonged in another era. It’s a film very much in the vein of American Pie, which came out in 1999. Expectations towards cinema were starting to shift. Indie (or indie-like) filmmaking was getting pushed to the margins. The movie also lacked a distinct sense of an identity, like Jersey Girl did. I watched these two movies in the 2010s because I didn’t know Kevin Smith made them when they initially came out.
So, there was probably a frustration build-up on Smith’s part here, which is understandable. Moviemaking is a business where you’re only allowed a certain amount of misses before studios write you off. It probably didn’t help his relationship with studios and distributors either.
The part that 100% isn’t Kevin Smith’s fault
Let’s be honest: pop culture nerdom suddenly became cool when movie studios started making superhero movies. The audience Kevin Smith cultivated with so much love didn’t need movies about them anymore because the entire studio system started catering to their needs. These questions about the future also resolved themselves as his audience grew older and more stable. Smith BRILLIANTLY addressed these in his 2006 movieClerks II, where the odyssey of Dante and Randal comes full circle, but there was nowhere to go from there, really.
That’s why it would take Smith thirteen years before making another View Askewniverse movie, which would turn out to be awful.
That said, Kevin Smith managed to preserve his brand in that period by moving to public speaking and podcasting. He basically became his own product, which I have conflicting feelings about. I was a huge fan of An Evening With Kevin Smith and An Evening With Kevin Smith 2: Evening Harder. It feels very much like having dinner with a successful and charismatic friend who is telling you stories about his work. I would pay to sit in an auditorium and listen to Kevin Smith’s stories for three hours. I’ve done it with Henry Rollins twice and loved it each time.
But I have the same problems with his podcast that I have with every podcast. Such regular programming of Kevin Smith content relies on his personality and sense of humour more than it relies on his experiences. It is the experiences that I like personally SEEN through his own charismatic, humorous worldview. But that’s me. I’m slightly burning out on podcasts and am looking to preserve my perception of my heroes by any means necessary. Smith is obviously doing good for himself and good on him if he isn’t cheapening his brand.
I’m aware this is unfair criticism
Whether he keeps making movies or not, Kevin Smith will remain in popular culture because of his self-branding efforts. I always stress the importance of having a second act to your career and Smith created that for himself. Ultimately, it’s all that matters.
Red State and the part that is (kind of) Kevin Smith’s fault
The "downfall" of Kevin Smith as a director started with the release of his first horror movie Red State, in 2011. Let me get this straight first: Red State is a good movie. It’s not great, but it’s good and it was very much before its time. It contained many ideas that would later be better exploited in contemporary horror movies, notably by Ari Aster. Red State obviously mattered a lot to Smith. It probably mattered too much.
The inflexion point of Smith’s tailspin in public opinion was very much the Sundance Film Festival auction controversy. According to Smith, self-distributing was always the plan. Other sources say that he really freaked out after the lukewarm reception after the first screening and decided tell the entire industry to fuck off. So, he decided to host a fake auction for distributors where he would buy his own film for twenty dollars. He also went on a lengthy rant against the industry, accusing distributors of lying to moviegoers and whatnot.
Given his recent history of hits-and-misses, it’s understandable that Smith was pissed and emotional. It’s also understandable and commendable to a certain degree that he wanted to take responsibility for his own success and the idea of hosting an old school film tour was original. In other circumstances, I’m sure it would’ve worked better. But after Smith’s rant, everyone was pissed at him, including film media. Once again, you can get away with such hostile behaviour but the end product must be unassailable. Red State was not. I mean, it’s much better than it was made out to be, but unassailable it wasn’t. He was ripped to shreds by critics and self-righteous film nerds and the film never really had a chance.
It’s right there and then Kevin Smith said "fuck it" and started making film solely for his friends and himself. He first retired from filmmaking for three years before returning as some kind of contemporary Tromaville guy. Films like Tusk and Yoga Hosers aren’t nearly as terrible as they were made out to be, but they were released way outside the cultural context that made Troma successful: cheap production, straight to video, etc. It’s not what people wanted from movies in the 2010s and it’s especially not what people wanted out of Kevin Smith. They wanted to "make up for his transgressions". Not to literally become them.
This culminated in the tragic Jay & Silent Bob Reboot where characters from the View Askewniverse congregated to tell literally THE SAME JOKES FROM THEIR RESPECTIVE MOVIES as some sort of metastatement on reboot culture in Hollywood. For the last ten years, Kevin Smith’s movies have been very much driven by his desire to employ people he loves and his burning hostility towards Hollywood and it affected the quality of his work. These feelings are relatable. But Kevin Smith personalized a problem that is systemic at its core. Hollywood people didn’t suddenly started thinking he was stupid and untalented. His art receded from the dominant culture and slowly became more marginal and instead of consolidating his voice, Smith raised both middle fingers and decided to become EVEN MORE marginal.
Jay & Silent Bob Reboot started production exactly one year after Kevin Smith’s heart attack and was meant to be one giant fuck you to death, but it ended up being a fuck you a lot more than that. It ended up being a giant fuck you to everyone who’s changed since the nineties and who were genuinely moved by the end of Clerks II where Dante and Randal find and accept their place in the world. This was not View Askewniverse. It was the corpse of View Askewniverse being paraded around like it was still alive.
I love you Kevin, but I fucking hated that movie. It’s not a knock against you, no one’s perfect and everyone’s allowed to drop the ball sometimes. I just hope Clerks III is better.
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Where does Kevin Smith go from there? He has a couple options: 1) Never making movies again and live the happily ever after as a podcast host and film-centric public intellectual 2) Self-finance his further movies through his other professional activities (and perhaps through Kickstarter, like Jeremy Saulnier did?) and find a more contemporary version of his own brand of humour to start over from. Being the self-aware genius that he is, I’d be curious to watch a television show starring his own family or something. 3) He can continue doing exactly what he is doing now.
Unless Clerks III is a disaster of Jay & Silent Bob Reboot magnitude (and I don’t think it will. It might be bad, but not THAT bad), I think Kevin Smith can do more or less what he wants and history will be kinder to him than we are. The overall quality of his film is better than he is given credit for even if he’s shown signs of creative decline over the last two decades. He’s not a bad filmmaker. He’s just heartbroken and started making movies out of spite due to one particularly cruel commercial failure. The one where he tried to reinvent himself without the help of anybody. He did reinvent himself, but not quite in film. Kevin Smith doesn’t HAVE to do anything different than he’s doing now, but he should. He should not let his failures dictate his future.
