Posted by Hasek at acc2a741.ipt.aol.com on June 29, 2002 at 16:28:07:
In Reply to: My theory. posted by BrianLynch on June 29, 2002 at 14:38:53:
: Why it was originally there---Dante was having the worst day of his life. How could it get any worse? Oh yeah, for him to die. Pretty sweet, but...
: Why it was taken out---over the course of the movie, you LIKE Dante, and you certainly don't want to see the main character die at the end of something that ISN'T a dark comedy.
Sometimes life is about watching people you like die. If a film is to be more than mere entertainment and an actual work of art, then showing people things they don't want to see but need to see goes with the territory.
Seems to me that the point of the movie as it was originally written was to show us the life of this guy who couldn't make up his mind about what to do with himself, whether to shit or get off of the pot to quote a line from the movie and his death at the end showed us the consequences sometimes of putting off major decisions for too long. With Dante being killed at the end the movie can be seen as a cautionary tale warning against perpetual slackerhood, but without his dying what is the message of the movie? That sometimes being a slacker for years is okay cause you will get an infinite number of chances to make things right in your life. No doubt that is true for a lot of people and hey Kevin Smith did eventually make it out of the convenience store to become a big Hollywood director so you can't say it's not true to life, but it still lacks the hard hitting message of the original screenplay and makes it possible to dismiss Clerks as just a series of disjointed comedy sketches as many critics have.