Line #5 YMMV/Clerks


1	* AluminumChristmasTrees: The Quick Stop is still open today. The RST Video next to it is shuttered, but all the tapes and other signage can be seen inside the abandoned shop, collecting dust. Fans of Creator/KevinSmith see it almost as a pilgrimage to visit it.
2	* AndYouThoughtItWouldFail: The first public screening of the film at IFFM was a complete disaster. The theater was deserted, with an audience of twelve, ten of whom were cast and crew, leaving Smith humiliated and heartbroken. Fortunately, one of the two other audience members just happened to be journalist Bob Hawk, who loved the film and set into motion bringing it to the attention of the Sundance Film Festival and, eventually, Creator/MiramaxFilms.
3	* CultClassic: What basically amounts to an expensive, glorified home movie gained a surprisingly large fanbase and helped launch an entire film universe and a staggeringly successful media career for Kevin Smith.
4	* CrossesTheLineTwice: A day in the life of two blue-collar workers wouldn't be complete without some particularly blue jokes.
5	** Dante telling Veronica that he's willing to have sex with a vegetable (as in a paraplegic person) because "[[BlackComedyRape they put up the least amount of struggle]]."
6	** A real-life video store clerk reading off a list of [[RefugeInAudacity increasingly vulgar porno titles in front of a mother and child]]? Worthy of termination. Randal doing this while seeming to forget that the mother and child are there? Funny. The list [[OverlyLongGag just going on and on and on?]] Hysterical!
7	** As [[spoiler:the old man]] who died jerking off in the bathroom is carried out by the coroners, his massive RagingStiffie is still clearly visible under the white sheet covering him.
8	** To a certain extent, Caitlin accidentally having sex with [[spoiler:the old man's corpse]]: while the act itself is treated seriously, the audacity of Dante's serially unfaithful girlfriend trying, for once, to be faithful and still ending up having sex with someone else, that someone else being a [[spoiler:grim]] BrickJoke, is too insane not to be funny.
9	*** Dante freaking out over the possibility that someone in the bathroom raped his girlfriend? Not funny in the slightest. Randal's reply, "I thought [[ExactWords she said]] ''[[ExactWords she]]'' [[ExactWords did all the work]]"? Wrong, but funny.
10	* EnsembleDarkhorse: [[ThoseTwoGuys Jay and Silent Bob]].
11	** The customer who asks "In a row?" when Dante finds out about his girlfriend's sexual history.
12	* HarsherInHindsight:
13	** The part where Veronica and (especially) Dante berate each other over their sex lives was played for laughs in this movie. However, in ''Film/ChasingAmy'', Holden has a similar reaction to Alyssa when he finds out about her previous sexual experiences[[note]]mostly on the fact that Holden wasn't even the first guy Alyssa had sex with[[/note]], which was played entirely for drama and is why their relationship ultimately didn't work out. And that was in turn based off of Creator/KevinSmith and Creator/JoeyLaurenAdams' relationship.
14	** Caitlin is last seen being taken away in an ambulance. Her actress, Lisa Spoonauer, was the first cast member to die. Not only that, but the coroner informs Dante that Catlyn will need years of therapy after [[spoiler:fucking a dead guy]]. Spoonauer spent the rest of her life after the movie undergoing chemotherapy for a chronic illness.
15	** Randal calling Jay a junkie is a dig at him being a stoner, but it becomes less funny when you know that Creator/JasonMewes struggled with heroin addiction for many years.
16	** During their confrontation in the video store, Caitlin tells Dante that she wants to focus on her career, rather than simply go right from college into an early marriage and (presumably) motherhood. Lisa Spoonauer, her actress, gave up on a career after discovering she had a chronic illness to become a full-time mother until her death.
17	** Remember the infamous alternate ending where [[spoiler:Dante gets killed? [[Film/ClerksIII Smith succeeded in killing him off 28 years later]]]].
18	** Honestly, the entire film becomes this when you know [[spoiler: Dante and Randal will continue working shitty customer service jobs well into their 40s, that Randal will suffer a heart attack, and Dante will lose his wife and child before passing away in middle age.]]
19	*** Similarly, Rick Derris chiding Dante for his health and supposedly being out of shape when [[spoiler:Dante ends up dying to a heart attack before he even reaches 50.]]
20	* HeartwarmingInHindsight: Near the end, during the scene where Jay and Silent Bob help Dante overcome his dilemma between staying with Veronica or going back to Caitlin, Jay says that he too had some girlfriends but all they wanted from him was drugs. Come Film/JayAndSilentBobStrikeBack and Jay would get a girlfriend who really did love him for him and not just for his drugs.
21	* HilariousInHindsight:
22	** [[UsefulNotes/BillClinton Fellatio doesn't count as sex, eh?]]
23	** On the commentary featured on the DVD, [[Creator/KevinSmith the director]] says that the Music/SoulAsylum video on the DVD is the [[Film/ClerksII closest thing to a sequel]] that the film would ever get.
24	** Meta: Jeff Anderson refused to read the list of porno titles in front of the mother and child, so the scene was shot in close up with [[ReactionShot Reaction Shots]] added. Creator/JuddApatow, considered to be Kevin Smith's SpiritualSuccessor, has since done numerous movies where characters shamelessly curse in front of children.
25	** Randal's monologue on the destruction of the second Death Star in ''Film/ReturnOfTheJedi'' included the statement that storm troopers don't know jack about installing toilet mains. Then ''Film/TheForceAwakens'' gives us Finn, a storm trooper who worked on Starkiller Base (the SpiritualSuccessor to the Death Star) in sanitation. This means there might be at least one storm trooper who knows how to install a toilet main after all.
26	*** In the same scene, when Randal poses the possibility of independent contractors still being on the second Death Star when it was blown up and questions if they were innocent lives lost in a war they had no loyalty to either side of, a customer joins in on the conversation and expresses NoSympathy, firmly stating that they ultimately were helping the Empire and knew the risk involved, stating their deaths were their own fault. In ''Series/TheMandalorian'', a pilot tries to act like the lives lost on the Death Stars were innocent people murdered in cold blood while the galaxy cheered their deaths, and he also gets NoSympathy for his MoralMyopia.
27	** Iced coffee has become far more popular since the film was made, so new viewers will likely just be confused at someone expecting it being included among the other idiot customers.
28	** After numerous hints in later films that Jay is bisexual, his spending his first scene loudly proclaiming that he’s only into women comes off a bit like a SuspiciouslySpecificDenial, and “I’ll fuck anything that moves!” as a FreudianSlip.
29	* HoYay: Randal towards Dante.
30	-->'''Randal''': Oh, hey Caitlin? Break his heart again this time, and I'll kill you... Nothing personal.
31	-->'''Caitlin''': You're very protective of him, Randal. You always have been.
32	-->'''Randal''': Territoriality. He was mine first.
33	* HypeBacklash: Has appeared on several "Most Overrated Films" lists.
34	* IAmNotShazam: Every single poster for the film seems to imply that all five characters featured on the posters are "clerks", when only two actually are.
35	* ItWasHisSled: Silent Bob speaks, and has the most profound line of the whole movie.
36	* JerkassWoobie
37	** Dante clearly has a lot issues, some in his control, some not, but it's hard to sympathize with him when he takes so little initiative to do anything about it outside of just bitching.
38	** Caitlin's ultimate fate can be seen as a [[DisproportionateRetribution very extreme retribution]] for her infidelity: as callous as she was with Dante's emotions, she didn't deserve to [[spoiler:be traumatized for life from accidentally fucking a corpse]].
39	* NarmCharm: You can forgive a lot of the film's flaws, maybe even find them endearing, when you remember that it was made on a budget of less than $30,000.
40	* NightmareFuel: The alternate ending, where some random guy robs Dante at gunpoint, then ''shoots and kills him.''
41	* OnceOriginalNowCommon
42	** As Creator/RogerEbert described in his review, most of the jobs you saw people working in movies circa 1994 were {{escapist character}}s like cops or lawyers, not average guys working at a minimum wage job, and making [[MundaneMadeAwesome an interesting movie]] about average guys who worked those jobs and sat around all day [[ContemplateOurNavels navel gazing]] about [[SeinfeldianConversation pop culture and relationships]] was highly impressive. It ended up inspiring nearly every indie comedy for the next two decades until, by TheNewTens, it was seen as achingly pretentious.
43	** Production-wise, a presentable-looking feature made by a group of novices getting materials and using equipment on $30,000 was an impressive feat in 1993, and part of the acclaim it received was for the consensus that it was ''as'' good as it was in spite of this. In a day and age where any reasonably talented person could make it for half that amount using a smartphone and a home computer (as was the case with ''Film/{{Tangerine}}'', produced only 21 years later, and ''Film/{{Unsane}}'', released 24 years later), it seems like overkill.
44	* OneSceneWonder: Silent Bob.
45	-->"You know, there's a million fine-looking women in the world, dude. But they don't all bring you lasagna at work. Most of 'em just cheat on you."
46	* SignatureScene:
47	** Dante and Veronica's argument after the former found out the latter had fellated 37 men is remembered for being one of the funniest scenes in the movie. This scene in particular was what convinced Harvey Weinstein to distribute this movie, essentially kick-starting Kevin Smith's movie career.
48	** The scene where Dante and Randal play hockey on the roof of the Quick Stop is one of the most notable moments in the film and has been called back to in Smith's other works.
49	** Randal's epic ReasonYouSuckSpeech toward Dante for his HolierThanThou attitude to his cashier job is considered a good climax to the movie.
50	* {{Squick}}: Caitlyn's "encounter" in the Quick Stop's bathroom.
51	* StrawmanHasAPoint: While Randal is correct to accuse Dante of blaming others and refusing to take responsibility for his own actions, he ''does'' still do things that Dante is well within his rights to be mad at him for: he peer pressures Dante into closing the store to go to a wake, then gets them thrown out for knocking over the casket, gets Dante slapped with a fine for selling cigarettes to a minor (because he was reading a porn magazine while manning the counter, no less), antagonizes multiple customers and eventually breaks up with his and Veronica's relationship, the last of which he considers to be doing Dante a ''favor'' (though by that point, he could have just assumed that Dante was flat-out admitting that he'd never take personal responsibility for it. Compounded with Randal being an idiot, you can't blame him ''too'' much for making that assumption, even if he had no business doing what he did).
52	* UnintentionalPeriodPiece:
53	** People who work in convenience stores are now no longer aimless slackers, because the wages from the job cannot support anyone by themselves without being supplemented by another job or welfare.
54	** The film's entirely {{grunge}}/alternative rock soundtrack. Nuff said.
55	** The scene where the Chewlie's Gum salesman incites the customers to abuse Dante shows the time period's zealously-PC attitude, especially as public opinions on smoking suddenly swung towards negative in the wake of hard-hitting public-health awareness campaigns showing its effects on the human body.
56	** Gatorade is shown in glass bottles. In the early 2000's, the Coca-Cola Company switched to plastic bottles.
57	** The video store Randal works at is stocked wall-to-wall with VHS tapes. Obviously.
58	* ValuesDissonance
59	** Randal's appalled reaction to Dante's story about two of their male classmates getting married, calling it "frightening," "lurid," and referring to homosexuality as a "deviant lifestyle". In 1994 (well to be honest, most of the 20th century as well as the 2000's) heterosexual men being repulsed by and mocking homosexuality was generally accepted, while openly expressing this sentiment today is not.
60	** Invoked with Dante's attitude to his own sexual history versus his girlfriend's. He's angry when he finds out how many dicks Veronica has sucked, but rapidly loses the moral high ground by retorting "This is different, this is important!" when she points out that she didn't get that mad at him for having sex with 12 previous girlfriends.
61	* ViewerNameConfusion: Randal's name is correctly spelled with one L, not two, but many fans still add the extra letter.
62	* {{Wangst}}: {{Lampshaded}}. Dante does this all the time, to the point where Caitlin comes to visit him specifically because she knows he's probably spent the whole day agonizing over the wedding announcement. It's even implied that his self-pity is entirely the result of his refusal to get over Caitlin, a girl he dated in ''high school'' whom he has every reason not to care about any more. By the penultimate scene, Randal has finally had enough of Dante whining about how rotten his life is while also nothing to improve it and tells him to get over himself.
63	--> '''Dante''': And you know what the ''real'' tragedy of all this is? '''I'm not even supposed to be here today!'''
64	--> '''Randal''': '''OH, FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU, PAL!''' [...] "I'm not even supposed to be here today", you sound like an asshole!
65	* WriterCopOut: The original ending where Dante gets killed by an armed robber. Kevin Smith openly admitted that he only did that because he had no idea how to wrap up the story and was happy to have been talked into cutting it.

Context YMMV / Clerks