Kevin Smith tackles this theme more openly than other artists. The Red Bank, N.J. resident has made five “New Jersey movies,” excluding his pre-Clerks work and Jersey Girl (because their narratives are not locale-dependent.)
The first three movies, Clerks, Mallrats and Chasing Amy, are not a continuing narrative so much as distinct portrayals of suburban ennui. Characters are quirky and intriguing, but real enough to ground the movies: convenience store clerks, comic book artists, lesbian comic book artists, stoners and mallrats form a familiar cast. All of them are bored so they antagonize “the man.” The end product is characters who gloriously wallow in their Jersey-ite tedium.
As Mallrats’ tagline asserts, “They’re not there to shop, they’re not there to work, they’re just there.” The characters in Mallrats are reminiscent of harmless Romero tropes in Dawn of the Dead, but unlike Romero’s vision, trouble does not come to find you — Smith’s characters create it for themselves. Sure, the mall authorities provoke them a little, but they push back just as hard. Mallrats is a model for the Garden State: it may not be paradise, but we like it, so don’t bother us.
But what about New Jersey-ites who do leave? What about those souls who try to find peace elsewhere? Smith deals with this question in Dogma and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Dogma is a religious odyssey about sundry pilgrims returning to Red Bank, Smith’s center of the universe. God’s Jersey-ites are scattered in this film, but all find their peace one way or another on the Jersey Shore. It is enough to make a local teary.
Jay and Silent Bob, however, depicts a road trip in the opposite direction. Go West, young stoner! But forced out of the comfort of the convenience store, Jay and Silent Bob find nothing but emptiness and lies. (”I hate how fake Hollywood is.”) Only upon their return — along with a new lover, a chimp, and Morris Day and the Time of “Jungle Love” fame — does the dynamic duo quell the turmoil in their hearts. It is apropos that the movie ends someplace “real,” someplace with substance: the Jerz.
