Invoking the Holy Trilogy

In Kevin Smith’s Clerks. (The Comic Book) (1998), Randal Graves observes to his lifelong friend Dante Hicks that “Star Wars is probably the biggest thing that ever did or ever will happen to our generation.” ¹ Smith asserts that his age group had “a childhood affair with three movies that were the cinematic equivalent of a prepubescent first marriage.” ² Star Wars fed into Smith’s personal values, identity, and creative output: “a de rigueur Star Wars conversational dissection or homage became one of the leitmotifs of View Askew’s body of work.” ³ The first dozen years of Smith’s directorial output are dominated by six interconnected films—Clerks (1994), Mallrats (1995), Chasing Amy (1997), Dogma (1997), Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001), and Clerks II (2006)—that constitute the transmedia franchise of the View Askewniverse or Askewniverse, after Smith’s production company. In addition, the franchise includes Clerks: The Animated Series (2000) and a number of comic books, in particular Clerks. (The Comic Book). The many references to Star Wars act both as a means of defining Askewniverse characters’ self-identities through their consumption of popular culture and as a form of advertising—unpaid labor for Lucasfilm. I will examine the nature of this labor within the Askewniverse as it depicts twenty-somethings in a variety of ways earning a living within late capitalism.