Kevin Smith’s debut film Clerks was good. Really good. Smith was an amateur when he made it, but it works within the context of the piece. He chose the right story to make his very first movie with. I was sort of stunned when I saw Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and the “Clerks” cartoon series, where Smith saw them as shallow one-note characters. I guess that they always were, but it sure didn’t seem that way when we were watching Clerks. I think that part of me always thought that I was just seeing Dante and Randal as they were that day, and tomorrow or the next day they may act a little different. I certainly don’t think that Dante would have been as whiny as he was if he wasn’t working on his day off. I wish that Clerks was just Smith’s first film and his next pictures were not anything like it. That he showed some sort of learning curve, and moved on to make a slasher movie or a film noir. He went on to make Mallrats which I have only seen a little of, and doesn’t seem that much better or worse than anything else he made post-Clerks. And then he made Chasing Amy. Smith does the same thing that David Gordon Green recently did with All the Real Girls. Having done something that we haven’t seen before, he does something that we have seen way too much of.

Movies like Chasing Amy are a dime a dozen. Every young filmmaker’s first instinct is to make a movie just like it. It’s like Green and Smith are saying, “Now that I have finally made my first attention-getting debut film, let me get down to what I really want to do: a creatively bankrupt, flatly autobiographical romantic comedy.” Of course, movies like this are popular among film buffs because it’s about them. Most of the people who go to movies regularly also play video games, read comic books, listen to music and are saturated in media in general. They are also single but date, having recently conquered high school and probably college and are enjoying post-adolescence before settling down with a wife, kids and even a career. I get it, there is certainly a sense where I’m part of it, and I know that many of the readers of I Viddied it on The Screen can be described in some part by the above. It’s not as much that I object to the content of Chasing Amy, mind you, I object to the fact that it’s so pre-digested. So damn simple. Kevin Smith is regarded in much the same light as his contemporaries Quentin Tarantino and P.T. Anderson in that he has developed a solid cult of followers that puts up websites praising him and buy all his DVDs and comic books and follows everything that he does. I have P.T. Anderson fever and strangely enough Quentin Tarantino fever (strange given that as good as Tarantino’s films are, Anderson’s have been consistently better). I even rented Death Rides a Horse and the Richard Gere remake of Breathless ‘cause QT liked them. Ai yi yi! But Smith, Smith I don’t embrace. He doesn’t like movies; he is unable to talk about them, to deconstruct them, like Anderson and Tarantino can. There is a distrust of genre in his work; he doesn’t identify with cowboys, gangsters, Frankenstein’s monster, et cetera. Tarantino obviously does; he works in a genre but he makes personal films. You can detect it especially in his early stuff like True Romance and Reservoir Dogs and then again in Kill Bill Vol. 2. Anderson is a little trickier, and all of his films resemble the best of Tarantino in that he filters his own experiences, the experiences of people he knows, and his knowledge of film into his characters. That’s what artists do, isn’t it?!

Kevin Smith is not an artist though, and he’s not really a filmmaker either. I don’t get the pleasure out of Kevin Smith pictures that I usually get from movies. I have to conclude that they aren’t really movies then. Smith is a literal filmmaker; he doesn’t put any craft into his movies and he doesn’t make anything abstract. He doesn’t seem to have any control over what happens in his movies. Stuff in these pictures just seems to happen: the stoner/slacker aesthetic incarnate. Kevin Smith does not have talent. What he does have is charisma, oodles of it. People buy his DVDs for the audio commentary as much as anything else. He’s fun to be around. You want to smoke a bowl with him, I suppose. He may be the poor man’s Hal Ashby; he makes movies because he likes being on the set. But Ashby, at some point, announced himself as a bemused humanist. Kevin Smith has yet to really develop a point of view or a sense of values.

What works to Smith’s advantage, the thing that I think some people really like about his movies, is that you know that he is writing on his level. He never condescends to his audience; the characters in his movies are really exactly on the same plane as he is. The dialogue sounds written in the sense that nobody talks like that or thinks that clearly, but it certainly all comes from the gut and you sense that the characters view things in the same way that Smith does. In eliminating artistry he is also eliminating any defense he may have against critics. Smith is naked here. In saying that his characters are naïve or stupid, you are basically saying that Smith is naïve and stupid. Most films you can say something like, “Well, just because he writes a naïve or stupid character, that doesn’t mean that he himself is naïve or stupid." You can’t say that here; again, there is no artistry here, no coating, everything is direct. Ben Affleck’s Holden seems to be an obvious alter ego for Smith, but we sense that there is also a lot of Smith in Jason Lee’s Banky character and in Joey Lauren Adams’ Alyssa. Their arguments are too well-articulated; they seem to represent modes of thinking that Smith is struggling with or had struggled with. Smith is lucky in that he himself is pretty intelligent and very charismatic, and so the people in his movies are very intelligent and very charismatic. I guess I understand then how critics can find these movies to be refreshing.

Movies like Chasing Amy and for that matter About a Boy or High Fidelity all suffer from the same problem: they can only be as smart as the filmmakers. There is nothing that is unintentional about them, nothing that was put in subconsciously, nothing for us or the filmmaker to discover. And that’s really dangerous. Kevin Smith is not an expert on sociology, psychology, anthropology, politics, theology, family dynamics, race, gender or human sexuality. Thus any opinion he offers on any of the above is doomed to fail close scrutiny. There is probably some concept and series of facts that he failed to grasp in forming his perspective towards any of these subjects and he will be exposed as infantile and naïve.

I tried to review About a Boy for Epinions and I now hate the review. It’s just babble. I posted it on an AOL message board and the members just chewed my balls off, saying that it was a poor example of a review, that it failed the basic tenets of film criticism. I think about it occasionally, and it gets me scared to write reviews. Especially on stuff like Chasing Amy. I think I was being a bit of an asshole on the AOL boards. I have a difficult time “hanging out” with people, of coding things with irony, of talking about bullshit. It didn’t seem like they were taking things very seriously; people hung out there for years barely giving a hint of their perspectives towards sociology, psychology, anthropology, politics, theology, family dynamics, race, gender or human sexuality. I don’t know how they did it, but they did; they took no stance, they developed no real set values. I did, and of course in doing so I opened myself up to being torn apart. I’d wonder why necrophilia was immoral and never received very many good answers that challenged my preconceptions that they were broadly socialized into believing “it’s just not." I did all kinds of things, quite a few I’m not very proud of, but I couldn’t get past this barrier of “good manners," of “political correctness." I was not very well-liked. One woman in particular, who sometimes uttered banalities like in reference to cancer “I hate that disease," filtered my posts, which she would then criticize at length when other people read them. One time I used the word “nigger” and she said that she would have been offended if she read me using the word. The message seemed to be that strong opinions and open-book thinking were to be discouraged, exclusively for the reason that you can easily be exposed as naïve or infantile by those in the know. I had a hard time on those message boards. These lengthy self-indulgent essays seem to satiate me more. I can even keep up with a message board once I blow my load on here.

Most of my review of About a Boy and High Fidelity was about this AOL message board as well; in those cases I saw the characters of About a Boy and High Fidelity to be symbols of everything that I hated on the Message Boards. Now with Chasing Amy I see Kevin Smith to represent my martyrdom. The movie is all open-book thinking and strong opinions. It’s endearing in a sense.

The film’s premise has produced a lot of controversy: Holden (Ben Affleck) falls in love with his lesbian best friend Alyssa (Joey Lauren Adams). Alyssa ends up changing sides and having sex with Holden. My thoughts on this are rather complex. First, I really loathe the idea that homosexuality (or heterosexuality) is genetically determined. It seems to infer that homosexuality is a genetic mutation (it can’t possibly be inherited, could it?). Homosexuality then seems to form a connotation similar to that of Down syndrome or autism. The homosexual becomes a freak of nature, God’s mistake. Being gay seems to be seen as a curse under this model, as an albatross around their neck. “Why would I want to be gay,” the genetically hardwired to be homosexual will ask, “gay is a terrible thing to be!” The homosexual cannot hope to be anything but “other” under such a framework. At best, the belief seems to invite condescending liberal compassion (“I’m so sorry that you were born homosexual”). At worst it seems to justify that old blowhard position of homosexuality being the disease, and AIDS being the cure. The self-cleaning oven of evolution cleaning out the dead weight of the species, those unable to breed and continue the race. Ugh. The “scientific research” that I’ve seen on the subject reminds me of the stuff I’ve seen on why the Negroid race can jump high and is intellectually inferior to the Caucasoids, not to mention William Sheldon’s connection of body types with criminality.

Maybe I’m just biased into sociological thinking, but this genetic predestination business just plain rubs me the wrong way. There doesn’t seem to be anywhere to go when you argue that sexuality is genetically predetermined. It makes sex and sexuality really boring. The whole “genetically determined sexuality” movement is meant to counter the belief of the religious right that homosexuality is a moral choice or a condition that can be cured. As far as counter-movements go, it’s a rather primitive one. Sexuality and religion are two sides of the same coin to me, and again showing my sociological bias, I see them as essential but for lack of a better word “fragile." Sexuality and religion are about finding a place where you are comfortable, where you fit. Anybody who feels bad about being gay, perhaps trying to find a mean between their sexuality and their faith, will either: give up on religion, give up on being gay, or find a religion that accepts their homosexuality. Something is eventually going to give. I think that everybody is essentially bisexual; we’re a clean slate until we find a place where we fit in. If genetics plays any part in any of that, it’s not nearly as large as it’s being made out to be. (Doing some light research I’m thrilled to see at least some gay writers reject the gay gene. Check this guy out).

Do people choose to be gay? Well, do they choose to be Catholics? Eh, kinda sorta not really. Can you convert people to be gay or straight? Can you convert them to Christianity, meaning true faith and belief in Christ the Savior? Eh, kinda sorta not really. That’s really something that you need to find on your own, isn’t it? I am certainly putting myself in that framework. I AM hetero, but I don’t think that I am that way because I am genetically hardwired that way. In fact I think that trivializes me sexually. And so on the subject of Alyssa sleeping with Holden, the fact that she does it all supports and fails to counter my feelings on the subject. It could certainly happen. Chasing Amy is smart about sex, and sees it as a lot more than trading genetic material.

Why, it makes sure to ask, does Holden want to have sex with a lesbian? What does lesbianism mean to him? He says that he is in love with Alyssa, and Alyssa says that she is in love with him. The idea driving Holden, and Smith, is that all lesbians are really hungry for a cock underneath. We can certainly criticize the premise on a very superficial level, just in the sense that Smith found it necessary to tell this story and in his telling these sorts of stories he is fulfilling a macho male fantasy. It’s a necessary evil, a necessary one to any romantic story. We all want to be thought of as “the one” that does it for them. Again it’s primitive and superficial to attack Chasing Amy for possessing an ideal. Let’s look at that assertion a little closer; all lesbians are hungry for a cock underneath. When Holden’s friend Banky says it, it’s a macho line; he is only thinking in terms of animal lust. But as I think I have inferred, sex is never ever only about animal lust; it always comes down to the socio-psychological needs of place and comfort. Holden gets upset when he finds out that Alyssa has been with other guys in high school and college. Lots of other guys, in threesomes. He wanted to believe that he was the only one.

Now, earlier in the film both Holden and Banky take Alyssa to task for saying that what she does is actual sex. Fingering and cunnilingus, that’s foreplay isn’t it, real sex is penetration. Alyssa doesn’t buy it. She thinks that the focus on penetration is without foundation. Penetration is still an issue for Holden, however, and since Alyssa doesn’t seem to have experienced it, he sees her as still a virgin. It’s even better than a virgin; she’s a lesbian, which makes her foul-mouthed and sexual but essentially pure and untouched by men. Holden idealizes her lesbianism, which is why she's suddenly a whore when he learns that she had been with other guys. This aspect is touched upon by Holden’s gay friend Hooper, and Holden seems to understand it; he’s aware of it. You can’t attack Smith for this, but you may be able to attack him when it comes to what motivates Alyssa to change from men to women to back to men. We learn that her parents were always away while she was in high school, implying that she was actually looking for intimacy through the gangbangs. Obviously that wasn’t what she got from it. Alyssa begins to view penetration as violent and ultimately exploitive, and turns to lesbianism which she finds to be far more intimate. Holden becomes the very first man she can trust, who she can really be herself around. And so lesbianism develops a halo of purity for Alyssa also; it’s a baptism. She’s washing the taste of cock out of her mouth, isn’t she? This is problematic of course in that Alyssa is clearly idealizing lesbianism in the same manner that Holden is, and so that seems to be the way that Smith seems to view lesbians.

The best defense against this charge is the Rashomon/Kane defense, last seen in the lack of Solaris elements in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Smith is unable to mine the material for all of its possibilities, in this case a divided definition of lesbianism, but if he were to do so the picture may become too dense. It’s really pretty thick the way it is. Some lesbian viewers may fault the film for not representing their experiences, or for portraying a woman who seems to be “waiting” in lesbianism. (I suspect that Alyssa may argue to me that she falls in love with the person and not their sex or gender. I don’t buy that for a minute, just as I don’t buy people who say they don’t see color. It’s the whole package. What you do with your femininity or masculinity et cetera. I’m probably setting up a straw man here, but that needs to be acknowledged.) Again though, Chasing Amy is a terribly character-based and personal film. We can’t fault Holden or Alyssa for how they view their sexuality. I don’t think we can do so with Smith either; again, it doesn’t seem like he is preaching to us as much as he is doing some serious introspection and thinking out loud.

Watching the film for the second time, I’m more taken back than ever to the famous Jaws scene, where Banky and Alyssa, meeting really for the first time, compare scars inflicted during oral sex. The dialogue itself is a whole lot of fun, but what interested me the most was the flirtation that was going on between the two of them: Banky the male chauvinist pig and Alyssa the progressive feminist lesbianism. Smith doesn’t really see either of them as posers; he makes them smart and self-aware, philosophical and passionate about their position towards sex. It would have been interesting if they slept together, or at least it wouldn’t be entirely out of character for either of them. They would do it first out of simple curiosity and maybe even adventure, a chance encounter with the enemy, and then THEY become the ones who fall in love and he becomes the one who gets pissed about her background, et cetera. He can discover that he’s not much of a pig, he really falls for the girl, and she discovers that she isn’t much of a lesbian. That certainly would have been a more daring choice. Holden is such a snooze. Alyssa must fall for him because he is so terribly non-threatening.

Post-Kill Bill Vol. 2, Smith’s obligatory pop culture references feel very tired. I laughed at the Showgirls reference, but the famous opening scene where a black militant goes on about the racism of the Star Wars trilogy and his new comic book “White-Hating Coon” was funnier when we weren’t in on the joke. There is another aspect of the picture that is kind of disturbing. Smith seemed to make the film to show how much he loathes his fans. The comic book geeks that bother Holden and Banky are obnoxious little turds. Casey Affleck, who was 22 at the time, plays a pissy fan that is credited as “Little Kid” in the credits. Holden and Banky’s comic is “Bluntman and Chronic,” which we discover later in the film is modeled after Jay and Silent Bob. The comic is said to consist of a lot of “fart and dick” jokes, because that's what sells. Holden says he wants to make something personal. He does, at the end of the movie, make a comic book called “Chasing Amy.” Chasing Amy is designed to show that Smith is grown up that he is superior to the Jay and Silent Bob universe. He said goodbye to it for good with the obvious, exhausting Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, of course, easily his very worst movie because he was cynically giving what us what he perceived we wanted.

Now, I haven’t seen Mallrats or Jersey Girl, but I know that the former has been attacked for being stupid and exclusive and the latter was attacked for being banal and mediocre, that there was little indication that Smith made it. As he doesn’t have much filmmaking talent or interest, he seems to be forcing us to choose between bad cinema (Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back) which is Smith’s idea of entertainment, and no cinema (Chasing Amy) which is his idea of art. (Dogma was supposed to be his masterpiece, the synthesis between the two camps, and it is a bizarre bizarre abortion of a film. Politically correct and neutered when it could have been something fierce.) Chasing Amy is certainly something different but I don’t see it as progress. (Smith is an infamously avisual director and Chasing Amy is actually much, much worse-looking than Clerks. I think it’s attributable to the fact that Clerks' black-and-white photography and limited locale cover up the click-and-shoot style. It’s grungy in a good kind of way.) I do wish that Smith’s fans would work a little harder to keep him from getting too big for his britches. Just because you want to go with Smith for coffee and cigarettes doesn’t make him an auteur.