Kevin Smith: Officially a Douche

It’s a rare day that I use my position to speak negatively, but I’d be shirking my responsibility if I didn’t weigh in on Kevin Smith’s recent public meltdown. You can follow the mile-markers, but, in a nutshell, Smith went bananas on Twitter in an incredibly unprofessional manner, accusing all film journalists (not just unpaid bloggers) of being corrupt and biased. He also stated that no film critic will ever be able to see another of his films without paying.

There’s a lot I have in common with Kevin Smith. We’re both from Monmouth County, New Jersey, we both were around during the independent film boom of the 1990s, we both like to reference pop culture and/or religion and we’re both obese. When I meet people who don’t really understand what I do, there’s a good chance they’ll say something like, “you must love Kevin Smith.”

I don’t love Kevin Smith. I’ve never truly liked any of his movies. Not even Clerks. I had (and maybe still have) a vague respect for Clerks for the quixotic nature of its creation, but the fundamental truth about Clerks is that its success can be attributed to the dumb luck of right place and right time. Perhaps this is why Kevin Smith is such a monumental idiot. As a lover of comic books, he recognizes that his origin story is not based on anything he did, just circumstances, and he's never been able to deal with that.

Clerks was made at a time before digital video, which meant that it actually took a little effort to make a movie. The film sprung up just as “grunge” and “indie” and the D.I.Y. aesthetic were strangely marketable. At its first screening at the Independent Feature Film Market in New York (a market I would cover as a young turk working for an independent NY producer) most people in the sparsely filled theater walked out, but a shrewd businessman and “film consultant” named Bob Hawk recognized something salable and championed the film. That’s how Kevin Smith was born.

For a time it was very much in the vanguard to support the notion that anyone could make films, that the studios were ogres who just didn’t understand art or the needs of the people. In time, though, audiences recognized that Smith just didn’t know what the heck he was doing. And hiding behind the shield of “populist” was really just another way of saying rank amateur.  (Soviet propagandists were also "populist," but their filmmaking also had craft crammed into every frame.)

Smith’s recent screed declared that he will no longer allow critics to see his films without paying, and that he would rather let 500 random people on Twitter see and review his films. This is preposterous on a number of levels, but I’ll argue about one point close to my heart: seeing movies for free.

If it is your job to see and review movies (cush job though this may be) it is not wrong to see these movies for free. Does a bus driver pay for his own gas? No. Gas is provided to the bus driver, even though his job is cool enough to just drive around in a bus all day.

Kevin Smith will always be something of an albatross for me. Every time I meet friends of the family or folks who don’t pay much attention to movies, he’s the guy I’ll be asked about. However, I will cease my usual polite “eh, he’s not my cup of tea” and speak the truth: “he’s a gargantuan douche.”