Movies That Stayed With Me: Clerks

It seems strange that I remember the day I saw Clerks for the first time. I don’t remember the date, but I remember my friend Brandon and me going to Blockbuster and renting Clerks and Swingers. This is pre-internet, so we only had the description on the back of the boxes to go by, so it was a gamble. At that time I’d never heard of either of them.

We’d gotten off work around 9 and went back to Brandon’s to hang out. He had a pool table and a small chill area, so we popped in Swingers and once that was done we watched Clerks.

Dante Hicks: 37! My girlfriend sucked 37 dicks!

Customer with Diapers: In a row?

We ended up staying up until 4 a.m. and watched both movies again.

Clerks might have been the first black-and-white movie I’d ever seen. I had a black-and-white TV as a kid, but I never thought of it as a real black-and-white movie experience—just the only option I had. At the time, I associated black-and-white with old, and to my 20-year old meant not good. Newer was better!

But Clerks changed my mind. I loved the story because it felt like my job. I was working in a record store and Dante’s issues were a lot of the same things my friends and I talked about. We talked about movies and music, girls and how big our problems seemed at the time.

The scene where they play hockey on the roof felt rebellious and something we yearned to do, but were still too scared to attempt. At the time, I hadn’t seen The Shawshank Redemption, but looking back, I realize I was a lot like Red—so conditioned by authority that I still felt like I needed permission for everything. I couldn’t go to the bathroom without asking my boss’s permission. [I blame years of school and teachers for making us ask to go, and then telling us no. You get used to just not going.]

That night changed how I saw movies. Clerks and Swingers weren’t just entertaining—they showed me that movies could be about real people, real struggles, and real conversations. They didn’t need epic battles or grand adventures to matter. Sometimes, just talking about life was enough to make something unforgettable.

My life wasn’t Star Wars – I wasn’t a Jedi and I wasn’t going to save a princess. But my life looked a lot more like Dante and Randal’s—real people struggling with the same things I was. Dante and Randle felt less like characters and more like friends I had yet to meet.