I saw Kevin Smith’s Clerks II recently. Yes, I know, what was I thinking? I swear I was dragged to it kicking and screaming.
Warning: I’m going to give away a part of the ending, so don’t read the rest of this post if you want to go and see this movie. Actually the ending is so puke-ily predictable that reading this spoiler won’t really make a difference, but I just thought I’d warn you, just in case.
The movie is about the day before the main character, Dante, gets married. He works in a fast food restaurant and his fiance is about to take him to a nicer life. Meanwhile, it’s clear that there is some unresolved sexual tension between him and his boss, “Becks”, played by Rosario Dawson.
(Furious sidebar: Rosario spends much of the movie wearing a zipped-up hoodie and glasses, though you may notice in the posters she is placed upfront, and photographed in such a way that her breasts are bigger than her head. And she’s making a Paris Hilton face. From this we can learn that Kevin Smith is so enlightened and sensitive and pro-woman that he makes his main female character intelligent and attractive based more on her personality than her looks. At the same time he has no problem exploiting the body of his female lead in the poster, just to make sure that the film pulls in moolah.)
Becks spends a lot of time talking in Kevin Smith’s stilted dialogue about how she doesn’t believe in romantic love, and how she never wants to get married. She’s happy to have sex with multiple people and she’s comfortable in herself. She’s not a sexual object, she’s a sexual actor. Now, considering that a female character who functions for her own reasons, and not as a vessel for a male character, is somewhat rare in mainstream Hollywood movies, the character of Becks should be great. Except you have a sickly feeling that something is going to go horribly wrong.
And it does.
In the final scene of the movie the drippy Dante presents Becks with a wedding ring. Does she throw it in his face, enraged that he hasn’t been listening to all the things she’s told him about what she really wants, and who she really is? No, of course not. She leaps into his lap (through his car window, not easy) and says, “What took you so long?” Of course there is no explanation as to why this fierce young woman has, overnight, dropped all her values.
This is because Kevin Smith knows that when women say that they don’t want marriage and babies, it’s just an adorable ploy that a true wily romantic male will circumvent. It’s just because these poor girls are confused. The entire film is like one giant wink between Smith, and all the knowing men in the audience. I mean, how could any woman not want a man to condescend to her for the rest of her life and tell her what she really wants? Remember, no doesn’t really ever mean no. No means yes, but don’t say that out loud if you are a frat boy. It’s only okay to say if you are a sensitive film director who obviously can’t possibly be misogynist.
This comes from the director whose greatest hit is a movie about a lesbian who not only falls in love with a man, she falls in love with Ben Affleck. I should’ve known better.
Insert strangled screams, sounds of hair being ripped out, vomiting, etc.
