I once read Tim Burton described as “Baby’s First Director.” This wasn’t (entirely) a slam on Tim Burton. For many film nerds of a specific generation, Tim Burton taught them what a director was, and lead them, unavoidably, to the auteur theory. The auteur theory states that a film’s “author” is the director, and that any worthwhile filmmaker will have all of their films feeling like they are made by the same person.
All Tim Burton’s films are unmistakably made by Tim Burton. To a ludicrous degree. They all feature the same riffs on gothic horror, the same spirals, the same mediocre-to-bad storytelling abilities, the same colour scheme, the same intense fear of the suburbs, the same “too precious and beautiful to survive” male protagonists, the same score, and (increasingly irritatingly) the same damn Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter. Whenever you watch a Tim Burton film, you feel that all of this sprung fully formed from the mind of one man.
Which is rubbish, really. Films are intensely, wildly collaborative mediums. No one person is solely responsible for any single frame, let alone a whole movie.
But because Tim Burton’s signifiers are so intense, so glaringly obvious, it makes him very useful for young film nerds to latch on to, and think, “that’s what a director is!”
Hence: Baby’s First Director.
Tim Burton was not my first director. Of course I went through an embarrassing and shameful Tim Burton phase in my teen years. Hell, to be completely honest I am still going through an embarrassing and shameful Tim Burton phase ("Frankenweenie was surprisingly enjoyable." "Big Eyes has some interesting ideas that don’t quite come together, largely because of Christoph Waltz’s completely incongruous and inexplicable German accent." "Amy Adams is good in it though." "It’s no Ed Wood but it’s worth a watch." "Seriously, I know Alice in Wonderland was awful, I’m not blind, I just think his later films have gotten undeservedly rough receptions based on the fact that every single person in the world went to see Alice in Wonderland, paying extra for terrible 3D, and it’s now colouring everyone’s opinion of his whole career." "The guy released a feature length black and white stop motion animation in 2012, what more do you people want from him?")
"Seriously. It's no masterpiece but it's a lot of fun." "You should check it out." "I've gone on too long like this already."
But Tim Burton was not my first director.
I wish Tim Burton was my first director. There is a certain street cred to having Tim Burton be your first director. You can say things like, “oh, you like Tim Burton? Don’t worry, I used to be an idiot too.”
My first director was Kevin Smith.
Yep.
I was fourteen years old when I saw my first Kevin Smith movie, and it changed my life. That is one of the most embarrassing true sentences I could ever possibly type. Particularly as the film in question was Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
JaSBSB felt like nothing I had ever experienced before. It was the first film where I could feel the thinking behind the movie. It was the first movie that made me think about the fact that every single film that has ever been made has been deliberately and intentionally created, by other human beings. It forced this realisation on me by being just so… constructed. The constant fourth wall breaking. The deliberately overwritten, artificial dialogue. The writer/director also being the star. The fact that it’s a movie so blatantly and reverentially about movies. And not just about movies. About the process of making movies. It was mind-blowing stuff, and I was exactly the right age and disposition to have my mind blown by it.
The fact that it is absolutely terrible does not take away the astonishing effect it had on me.
The sexism. The homophobia. The terrible acting. The gratuitous use of awful cameos from celebrities nobody even cares about. The feeling of bad-Saturday-Night-Live-sketch-dragged-out-for-two-interminable-hours that so many American comedies had at that time, whether they were based on SNL sketches or not. The general shambling unfunniness. The fact that really I could just have been watching two hours of Bugs Bunny cartoons and it would have achieved most of the same goals, except the Bugs Bunny cartoons would have been much funnier and the acting would have been more believable.
PICTURED: An overly stylized cartoon with facial expressions imperfectly rendered and exaggerated to the point of total, grating unbelievability. PICTURED RIGHT: Bugs Bunny.
Who wore it better?
None of this mattered to me at the time, in a way that it all matters to me now. Similarly, the things that seemed so revolutionary to me at the time don’t matter to me now at all. If I wanted to watch something crazy, free-wheeling, and largely-plotless that explores the toxicity of celebrity culture with a bunch of fourth-wall-breaking non-actors, I’ll watch A Hard Day’s Night, thank you very much. Or I’ll accidentally spend four hours watching terrible emotionally needy teenagers trying desperately to vlog their way to fame on YouTube. You know, whichever.
Regardless of the film’s quality, the shock to my system has reverberated throughout the rest of my life, in ways both large and small. It completely changed the way I thought about film. It taught me what a director is, and why that is important. It was a useful, necessary jumping off point for me to explore the wide world of cinema.
I, you know, just kind of wished I had jumped off a little earlier.
I spent so much of my teenage years watching Kevin Smith films. Thinking about Kevin Smith films. Talking about Kevin Smith, and the films thereof. Smoking weed because I wanted to be cool like Jay and goddamn Silent Bob, the two lamest people in cinema. Desperately trying to get obsessed with Star Wars because Kevin Smith told me I should. Watching his unbelievably pointless DVD specials, which were less stand-up comedy and more a sad fat man saying boring things until everybody told him to stop.
All because of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. All because I saw it at the exact right millisecond in my life for it to have that effect on me.
And here’s the thing: there were warning signs.
The very next film he made after Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back was Jersey Girl, a romantic comedy so terrible it basically ended Jennifer Lopez’s career, despite her only appearing in the movie for all of about five minutes.
Why yes, Larry King did say, "Terrific!" What, about Jersey Girl? No, of course not, he's not an idiot. But he has said it, presumably. He is a person. He's said lots of things.
The film he made immediately after that was Clerks II, which I saw in the cinema the weekend it came out. Saturday night. If my two friends and I had not attended, there would have been three people in the cinema, all of them by themselves. By the time that film got to the scene of a man trying to have sex with a donkey, and then that continuing to happen for about twenty minutes, I should have given up on Kevin Smith.
I should have chucked his DVDs in the garbage.
I should have vowed to never smoke weed again.
I should have thrown out my collection of terrible comics Kevin Smith inexplicably wrote for Marvel in the late nineties.
Ha ha ha, remember when these were considered prestigious? No? It's just me? Oh, okay then. I'll... I'll just be over here... in the corner... Nah, I'm fine. Don't worry about it. I'm not... I'm fine. Seriously. Just... just... eh, you know. It's... it's just...
But I didn’t.
He stayed in my mind. Burrowed deep. Making me refer to myself, even then, as a “Kevin Smith fan.”
He’d made a couple bad decisions. But he was just trying to work out his next course of action.
And hey! Then he made Zack and Miri Make a Porno! See! I knew it. I knew he still had it. Critically acclaimed, starring the biggest comedian of 2008, and giving Elizabeth Banks a good role, back when we were all still saying, “Elizabeth Banks is great, she just needs the right role. Hollywood doesn’t know what to do with female comedians, always casting them as the girlfriend or the love interest.”
Remember? Remember when we were all saying that, about Elizabeth Banks? Before we all started saying it about Anna Farris? Right before Bridesmaids came along, and everybody realised women could actually headline comedies that were, you know, good? But by that time Elizabeth Banks and Anna Farris were both stuck in this girlfriend-wife-love interest rut that they will never escape from, just because they both came along about four years too early? Remember that? Ah. Good times.
And sure. Elizabeth Banks was technically still playing the “love interest.” And sure, it was the first Seth Rogen starring comedy to not make over $100 million. And sure, a lot of the critical acclaim seems, in retrospect, to be mostly along the lines of, “it’s not as bad as Jersey Girl!”
But it restored my faith in Kevin Smith. At a time when I really, really wish my faith in Kevin Smith had not been restored.
And then, as if down from the heavens, came Cop Out, one of the worst movies ever made, to permanently destroy my “Kevin Smith fan” status. Cop Out is a film that features the laziest performance of Bruce Willis’ career, which would be impressive if it wasn’t so unbelievably boring. It features some of the worst dialogue in any film, ever (I went to IMDB to get a quote to illustrate this point, but I just… I couldn’t do it. I was having flashbacks.) It was so terrible it made me think, “oh, maybe Tracy Morgan is playing a toned down version himself on 30 Rock.” Cop Out meant I could enter my twenties unencumbered by all of the sad, pathetic baggage that comes with being a Kevin Smith fan. It also meant that I officially stopped caring about Kevin Smith right at the time that he began his podcasting empire, which was fortunate because I don’t want to think about how many endless hours of my life I would have wasted listening to Kevin Smith prattle on every single day for hours at a time. Instead I get to waste my life listening to the incestuous self-congratulatory world of American indie comedy podcasts. Which is better, I suppose, but I am well aware that I am going to look back on myself in ten years’ time and think, “what the hell were you doing? Was it really necessary to listen to that many podcasts where people complain about bad Nicholas Cage movies?” (Apparently, yes. Yes it was.)
To be fair to myself, not ALL of these update on a weekly schedule.
But I digress.
Kevin Smith served an incredibly important service to me at a specific time in my life. He made me feel less isolated. Less alone. A part of a community of like-minded individuals. He made me feel like my total inability to apply my intelligence to anything of any use or worth wasn’t a character flaw, but an attribute. He made me feel like not only could I be snarky and surly and mean-spirited, but I should be those things. That it was my duty to be those things. It was a valuable life mission to be those things, as often as possible, to as many people as possible.
So, yeah. There were positives and negatives.
I feel like acknowledging that past is important. I am who I am today, for better or worse (largely, to be fair, for worse) because I went through that phase. But I am through it now. I have let go.
I suppose the point I am trying to make is this. Items of popular culture do not change. A book, or a TV show, or a movie, or a song, are the same now as they were the first time you first experienced them. But you are not. You are now a different person than you were then. It is only natural that you would have a different experience. Something you loved becomes boring and unwatchable. Something you found tedious becomes emotionally heartfelt and true. Something you thought was okay pretty much remains at that level, but maybe the reasons why are a bit different now or something.
Try not to hold on to the things you have outgrown. You don’t need to stay obsessed with something just because you liked it when you were a young idiot. Let it go. That cartoon you got up at 6.30am every Saturday morning to watch? It was garbage. That book you read seventeen times when you were twelve? Rubbish. That punk band that electrified your mind when you first listened to their debut album in your parents’ living room, trying to work out that exact sweet spot where you could play it as loud as possible without your parents coming in and telling you to turn it down, thus ruining the vibe? Tedious.
And that’s okay. Pop culture is made to be disposable. Feel free to dispose of it.
Go ahead. You know you want to.
Postscript, just so we are all abundantly clear and upfront: Yes, obviously I am aware that this is the most hypocritical thing I could possibly write. A man who just spent 2,000 words talking about bad movies he loved when he was a teenager telling everyone else they need to chill out on the nostalgia is, quite frankly, absurd. Obviously, in those last three paragraphs, every time I said “you,” I meant, “I.” I am the one who needs to stop doing all of those things. You are probably fine.