Clerks: 'Over the Counter' Culture and Youth Cinema

This study of Kevin Smith’s debut film breaks new ground by exploring how Clerks sits at the intersection of political and cultural trends relevant to alternative youth cultures in the early 1990s.

Clerks (1994) was born of and appeals to a specific youth subculture, with the multimedia ‘View Askewniverse’ developing out of the film’s initial release. Drawing on existing texts and movements such as Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1991), Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X: Tales for an Accele...