To be totally honest, there isn’t a writer who I’ve had as conflicted of a relationship with as Kevin Smith. If you jump to 2020, you’d think that I never liked him. After all, when was the last time that I said something nice about his movies? Sure I said that Jay and Silent Bob Reboot (2019) is his best movie in a decade… but it’s no masterpiece. I have fallen off on his podcasts ages ago, even if I feel the occasional urge to see what he is up to.
The truth is that I still respect the guy as the nerd who did good. Just look at his career. Everything he’s done has helped to legitimize and celebrate nerd culture. While I think he’s often too forgiving about comic book movies, his enthusiasm is endearing. I saw him hosting a special for The CW’s “Crisis on Infinite Earths” earlier this year and I felt like he had finally found his true calling. He loves asking those questions that fans have, creating these clever segments that reflect how much this entertainment means.
The saga of my falling out is one that is conflicting and now shockingly a little over a decade old at this point. I won’t go into it here, but I’ll just say that his post-Cop Out (2010) comments were something that I never fully forgot.
Instead, I thought that I’d share something more positive. The reason that I have a complicated relationship with Smith is largely because he’s one of the reasons that my career went in the direction that it did. It started with catching Clerks (1994) late one night and feeling like I had seen the most revolutionary screenplay imaginable. How could someone convey so much subtext and emotion underneath these mundane transgressions? How could a Star Wars (1977) conversation about The Death Star pave the way for smart business practices? This man was a genius, and to a teenager in 2006 it was cathartic. I love Clerks so much that I bought a joint screenplay with that and Chasing Amy (1997).
But the book that I will always cite as getting me into blogging is “Silent Bob Speaks.” By this point, Smith had joined social media and wrote these daunting diatribes on MySpace almost weekly, guiding me into finding a way to express myself on the internet (another key voice was Diablo Cody, though more on her another day). True, I never wanted to be as candid about certain things, but I loved how free his voice was. I personally think that something was lost when he transitioned to Twitter. Suddenly he had to be short and quippy. While he found a decent middle-ground with podcasting, I sincerely miss when his only outlet was a blog.
I think it helps that I picked up “Silent Bob Speaks” amid a frenzy of discovering his entire body of work. The entire Jersey Trilogy was enlightening, finding ways to make Catholicism and LGBT stories entertaining while delving into their themes. It was fun because at the time Jersey Girl (2004) was perceived as his only bad movie, and it’s only because of how refined and sentimental it all was. I miss those days because I could be more defensive about his work and feel confident that it wasn’t some grand delusion of obsession.
Those are the years that this book explores. For whatever reason, Smith was assigned with writing articles for various outlets over the course of his early career. As one of the groundbreaking voices out of Sundance, a leader of the independent film movement, it made sense that anyone would want to hear what he had to say. What follows were a handful of comical stories that reflect a young man discovering this world of Hollywood, a clerk from New Jersey who was obsessed with the output and couldn’t believe that he had any chance to have his say in the future of this medium. He wasn’t a technically proficient director, but he sure could tell a story.
What was it about these essays that spoke to me? As I mentioned, it felt like a small piece of a larger picture. I remember seeing the book around at various Borders Bookstores with him pointing out the window and yelling. It appealed to me because I felt like it held secrets. I had seen the films, but I wanted to know what this man had to say. What more could I learn from this man? That is why, through some irony, I bought it on a whim when I went to a taping of The Tonight Show in Burbank, CA back when Jay Leno was hosting. There’s no real symbolism behind this. It was just how things played out.
I remember how the book started out, reflecting Smith’s paralleled career to Michael Moore who was coming off of the success of Roger & Me (1989). With more of a career, he remembers observing his trajectory while Smith was about to ascend himself. Obviously, their paths would divert greatly after this occurrence, but there was again some genuine curiosity at this moment that made you recognize Smith as an everyman. A self-proclaimed “fat man” who was living his dream in these pages, and they weren’t glamorized. They were a bit seedy, having these underlying bumps on the road to any future success. He wasn’t afraid to be gross. It all helped him to seem genuine.
The thing that appealed to me was something that I recognized him in myself. Like most teenagers, I spent my weekend going to the movies and watching TV shows. I consumed this entertainment, though I always felt like there was some divide between writing and the personal. While I was aware of autobiographies, it took until Smith for me to realize that you could write about pop culture in relation to yourself and have it mean something greater. I had yet to discover Chuck Klosterman or Nathan Rabin. Smith was showing me a world where everything was up for discussion, and that you can go off the old adage “I like this because…” and turn it into a story. Not a review, an actual story.
Picking up the book for the first time in years, I am reminded of how quickly I blasted through those pages in 2006. It felt like he was speaking directly to me, telling stories about why he didn’t like Reese Witherspoon and how he got gipped by a hooker when he realized that Smith was a very common surname. There are discussions of him meeting his wife, of filming Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001) and Jersey Girl. There is a whole cult to these pages that have only become more apparent in the decade since. His transparency is appealing because even if he’s talking about interviewing Tom Cruise, he’s doing it from a perspective that is not unlike our own.
If I can get personal for a moment, there was always something encouraging about Smith as an icon. It’s something that makes sense to nerd culture because they tend to suffer some weight issues. As someone who has suffered from similar problems for most of my life, it was exciting to feel seen, that there was this man, unashamed of his weight, who was praised for his writing. He was respected for what he had to offer the world, and his ability to make these insightful, successful movies gave you the sense that things would work out for yourself.
It may be why I was happy to learn a few years ago that he finally became skinny. As much as I looked at figures like Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill getting into shape as signs that I too could be healthy, there’s something even greater about Smith. He clearly had a greater issue achieving this, and you can find it in his two-part essay here on his morbid obesity. It’s one of the few moments where he became vulnerable in ways that he rarely has. He gave you insight into his own fears, a look at mortality that he has thankfully come out the other side on top of.
To be totally honest, it’s difficult to totally pin down the impact of this compilation without just reciting stories that you should read for yourself. They are surprisingly focused, much better edited than his later books like “My Boring-Ass Life” and “Tough Sh*t: Life Advice from a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good” (a book so bad that it’s the only Smith book I’ve given away). “Silent Bob Speaks” came before he was self-aware and creating a brand that has become more confrontational and vulgar. I get that there’s an audience out there that enjoys these stories, and good on them. I believe that Smith still has a passion for his work. Still, I’m on the side who believes that, as a filmmaker, he is an example of the failed auteur, who got too lost in his own work.
Though if you look at his career as a whole, there is something inspiring even in his lesser work. He still has fans and is able to draw a crowd. He is the definition of an independent filmmaker, able to find ways to build an empire around something that is authentically his own. What’s amazing is how much mileage he’s gotten out of these slacker characters, how many catchphrases he’s spun from people who are better known as entertainment consumers than protagonists in major stories.
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That may be what I love most about his work. Even if he works with people like Ben Affleck, he’s still appealing to his own perspective. He’s also not afraid to admit his faults, and sometimes that comes with frustrating stubbornness. Still, everything about him as a person seems warm and welcoming, and I love how he welcomes his fans into his life and the process of making his work. There are hundreds of examples I could’ve used for this post, but nothing distills what made him initially appealing quite like “Silent Bob Speaks.” It’s still edgy in all the ways you’d expect, but there’s a focus that his other work lacks.
It was a starting point for me, asking me to consider what else I had in myself. Over the 14 years since first reading it, my tastes have evolved and I’ve become my own voice. Still, I wonder what would be different if I never saw writing about pop culture as an outlet of self-expression, reflecting how art informs the human condition. To me, that’s one of the most interesting angles for a story. Why do we dance when a song comes on? Why does a movie make us cry? These complicated ideas all started because I read him going long on Mulholland Drive (2001) and trying to make sense of this madness. Small things were unlocked in those pages, and I am forever grateful.
This is why I’m thankful for what he gave me, even if I fear that I have in other ways outgrew his need. The jokes no longer hit as strong as they used to. Maybe it’s because I’ve become more passive about comic book movies, but his world doesn’t interest me as much. This isn’t to say that every now and then I’ll check in and smile, realizing that he’s still following his dream and seems genuine about every step of it. Even if I think he’s a failed auteur, there’s very little about his life that’s bad. He seems happy, and that’s something that we should all try to be in this day and age.
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