You may not believe this but the movies Banshees of Inisherin (written/directed by Martin McDonagh) and Clerks 3 (written/directed by Kevin Smith) are both practically and emotionally of a piece.
(No, Clerks 3 is not an allegory for the Irish civil war, nor do you need to watch Banshees from that lens either… I mean, I didn’t.)
Past both movies being “auteur driven”1 affairs by writer/directors who were lauded ealy in their careers (For Smith it’s Clerks, for McDonagh it’s In Bruges), and had pivots that received complicated and mixed feelings (for Smith it was Jersey Girl, a much maligned but suitably charming rom-com-ish story about being a parent, and Three Billboards… for McDonagh, a movie I haven’t seen, with a cast as loaded as Jersey Girl’s was, about racism and cops in small town America that was kind of Crash adjacent in some circles) for movies that were tonally different than that they had become known for, and as such had brought them to the dance.
Banshees and Clerks 3 both had very different journeys out into the world. For McDonagh, whose last movie which may have seemed trite and or dismissive to some, still received not just a Best Picture Oscar nomination but wins for Best Actress and Best Actor, it was a matter of a man on a hot streak making another movie.
For Smith, whose movie making career never rebounded from Jersey Girl (for many reasons), Clerks 3 was more akin to making the original Clerks than making Clerks 2. And while Banshees seems to have caught the eye of the ponderous, and considered world of the cinephile and the high art seaker2, Clerks 3 seems to be broadly seen as a curio from the golden age of Miramax3, or on closer viewing the revanant of the dead promise of mid-90s American indie movies.
Or to put it even more frankly, one is on the cusp of the future, the other is a piece of the past.
And yet, they are emotionally, and thematically of a whole.
Allegory, metaphor, and analogy aside, the core of both movies is contentious male friendship, the story of two friends bound together by geography, familiarity, and the loathing of feeling handcuffed to an idiot.
In both sets of friends, one aspires to more out of life, more depth, and more humanity, while the other is content in the mundane, the familiar, and the rote. The strain, the suffering, and the conflict that comes out of both, especially as the contented friend persists in loving them, albeit in their or naive and selfish ways, takes both movies from the comical to the grim, even while both movies are propelled by absurdity.
While male friendship is lauded in film it is rarely ever discussed on its own merits. Male emotional intimacy is often used as a starting point to discuss homoeroticism, mainly due to the lack of centering queer stories is mainstream movies, and what is lost in that is the conversation around what is happening, not what is representational through a different lens.4
Both movies explore isolation and vulnerability, what our friends give us, and what they take away from us when friendships end, especially if those friendships are the most meaningful relationships in people’s lives.
This is how the hierarchy of romance and sexual relationships as the peak of human intimacy5 tends to delegitimize the anguish that characters face in the loss of friends or friendships, and the devotion that friends can share… even when as in these movies it becomes one sided and destructive.
This is more prevalent regarding male friendship, given society’s exceptions of men, male feelings, and what it means to be masculine, and both movies tell a stories of yearning in their characters that have nothing to do with sexual desire. Both movies are patently un-sexy, and are the stories of people craving more, or yearning for their own identities in the face of the friendships and lives they’ve been caught in, and of people yearning simply to not be alone, and to keep the best things in their lives.
These movies are not mirror images of each other, in Banshees the discontented friend strives to create art and to play music with others, to separate himself, and in Clerks 3 it is the more idiotic of the two that tries to create something, but in the latter that act of creation isn’t an act of liberation or escape, it’s just an evolution of his same old shit.
Ultimately all relationships are a question of sharing space, and the more space you share, the more you begin to share a life in meaningful ways. And from that intimacy comes the blurring of where your story ends and their begins, what is yours and what is theirs in what you share.
It’s in the emotionally bloody question of what happens when this falls apart, simpler to talk about and broadly easier to understand if these were romantic couples, where both movies shine.
When a relationship ends, either through divorce, breaking up, drifting apart, being friend-dumped, it is the ending of a shared life, and we call the end of life death. Even when literal death does not factor in, relationships die, and both Banshees and Clerks 3 stare into that face of death, because different as these movies may be, that is the face that stares back.
(I recommend both of these movies very highly. Banshees is not for the faint of heart, and Clerks 3 is very much for the Kevin Smith fan.)
The concept used by people that want to ascribe too much credit to one person for what is always a collaborative effort, believing that film is a director’s medium because his (it’s usually he, auteur theory people love to talk about great men) vision is what guides and defines everything so he’s god. Like most if not all art theory it isn’t without its merits, but it’s both exhaustingly limiting, and really does tend to come from the most exhausting movie people.
There’s no such thing as “high art”. The concept of high art is part of hte deep seated classism that underlines American society while we all pretend it doesn’t exist. There’s bad art. There’s shitty art. There’s no such thing as low art.
Miramax, the movie studio run by sexual predator Harvey Weinstein, was responsible for Pulp Fiction and any number of other 90s indie movies, helping to define the American movie landscape to this day.
In literary and artistic discourse male friendship is never seen as enough. You can’t simply love your friends without also wanting to fuck them, and if you don’t want to secretly fuck them then your feelings lack weight or value, and the lack of meaningful conversation about male friendship and vulnerability in and of its own merits isn’t helping the loneness crisis in our society. The assumption that male friendship is easy, or a given, is another example of how the patriarchy hurts men, and the valid need for queer lens and readings, when they become the only lens or the accepted “this movie is about closeted men” narrative (and no this isn’t just me talking about Top Gun this happens a whole lot), can truly diminish and erase the already fraught world of male friendship.
Which Smith has long used in a self-aware way to joke around about his characters, and how so may of his movies, at least his most well known and celebrated ones, focus on mundane male emotional intimacy, lending to character refering to each other as hetero life partners, or discussing who would be what if they were in queer relationships with each other.