By Alice McIntyre
Kevin Smith’s “Clerks” (1994) is one of my comfort movies, for sure. It chronicles the misadventures of Dante (Brian O’Halloran) and Randal (Jeff Anderson), two minimum-wage retail clerks in New Jersey. After being called in to cover another employee’s morning shift, Dante has a series of encounters ranging from inane to mundane: he’s pelted with cigarettes by a gum marketer’s anti-smoking mob, subject to the antics of neurotic egg-graders, berated for wise-cracking, and more. All the while, Dante laments, “I’m not even supposed to be here today!”
During the film, Dante and Randal also have longform discussions on issues ranging from the fate of independent contractors on the Death Star to sex, relationships, and work. In this context, Randal’s lackadaisical contempt for annoying customers, overbearing bosses, and the distasteful in general serves as a foil to Dante’s constant worries and self-doubts—often to significant comedic effect.
Above any other plot points or memorable characters, I think that “Clerks” is a movie about, well, jobs. “Bullshit jobs,” specifically. The late anthropologist David Graeber defined “bullshit jobs” as “jobs which even the person doing the job can’t really justify the existence of, but they have to pretend that there’s some reason for it to exist.” The case of the convenience store clerk, while not precisely aligning with Graeber’s criteria for a “bullshit job,” is similar in some core respects. It’s mundane, passive, and historically outmoded. Realistically, all tasks within a convenience store aside from maintenance could be automated for the purpose of efficiency. There are a number of instances where this is already partially or fully the case, with ever-more sophisticated vending machines being developed and “autonomous retail” slowly coming to prominence. So why do clerks still exist?
The answer, beyond “it would be really goddamn weird for an entire store to just be a computer,” is that without “bullshit jobs” and bullshit-adjacent jobs a capitalist economy has little to stand on. Millions would be put out of work if widespread automation of entry-level, menial and mostly-worthless jobs vanished. They would lose their capacity to pay rent, let alone purchase valuable and costly commodities. This would bring the economy crashing to a halt (see: “Crises of Overproduction”), and so “bullshit jobs” must stay and proliferate in the name of continued profit generation.
Randal seems to recognize the problem of “bullshit jobs” in some capacity. In one of the movie’s final scenes, he remarks:
“…You like to think the weight of the world rests on your shoulders, like this place would fall apart if Dante wasn’t here. Jesus! You overcompensate for having what’s basically a monkey’s job. You push fuckin’ buttons! Anybody could waltz in here and do our jobs. You’re so obsessed with making it seem so much more epic…Christ, you work in a convenience store, Dante! And badly, I might add. I work in a shitty video store, badly as well. Y’know, that guy Jay’s got it right, man. He has no delusions about what he does. We like to make ourselves feel so much more important than the people who come in…Well if we’re so fuckin’ advanced, what are we doing working here?”
This self-awareness is undercut, however, by an inability to see past existing social relations, to conceptualize a future in which a “monkey’s job” has ceased to be necessary. Randal’s conclusion is instead that a) Dante should stop whining about his bullshit job or put his money where his mouth is and quit already or b) if the two of them had any sense, they’d be more like the weed-dealing lumpen duo of Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Kevin Smith), content to loiter outside the store and listen to loud music without a care in the world. Dante, on the other hand, simply complains without end.
In both cases, the two are afflicted with the perennial disease of “capitalist realism,” defined in short as the widespread sense that “…not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” The same problem affects even the most ostensibly radical film about “bullshit jobs,” Mike Judge’s “Office Space” (1999), wherein the protagonist’s post-corporate dream is just another form of wage-labor, only in the building trades as opposed to a cubicle. At least Milton got a trip to Mexico.
My lame political conjecture notwithstanding, “Clerks” holds up well almost 30 years later and deserves its cult status. It’s funny, timeless, a valued component of my small VHS collection, and is currently available for streaming via HBO.
Verdict: Gas Station Slurpee/10. It hits the spot.
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