Working-Class Hero: ‘Clerks’ at (Almost) 30

Clerks (1994)

2024 will mark the 30th anniversary of the release of Clerks, Kevin Smith’s black-and-white, made-on-a-shoestring debut about a pair of sharp-tongued, underpaid store clerks struggling to find their way through the trials of young adulthood.

That impending three-decade milestone seems almost unthinkable for a movie that once felt so modern. Clerks was the Easy Rider for Generation X — it perfectly encapsulated not just the feeling of being young, but the insular spirit of being young in the early 90s: the disaffection, the isolation, the boredom, the longing for meaning. That narrow relatability necessarily whizzed right past most of the movie-going public at the time, but it struck its target audience — laser-specific as it was — dead in the heart, and the rest was history. Clerks became a cult classic that would launch (and overshadow) Smith’s career, influencing countless films that would come after.

Of course, that same au courant vitality can be a difficult, perhaps impossible, thing to conjure up today, and that Clerks drew its elemental potency from such a precise historical moment is exactly why its impact is so hard to explain to those who weren’t around at the time, or who just didn’t care. Younger people are likely as weary of being hand-waved away from history with the phrase “you had to be there” as their older peers are of having…