Along with all the raunchy humor, one endearing quality about Kevin Smith is how polite he is. It’s not in any artificial sense. He enjoys showing compassion and respect to others. That’s what came through to me when I caught his Seattle tour stop on October 17 on a rainy Saturday night at Benaroya Hall. It was a packed house. The fanboy demographic was very big, of course. And as polite as he could be about it, Kevin Smith was there to tell his fans that things were changing and he was growing up.
Like a charismatic high school teacher, Smith kept the ball bouncing as he reacted to his sometimes rowdy students as they posed questions to him. And, like an astute and generous performer, he just kept on giving, rolling well past schedule, on stage for nearly four hours. He made clear, it wasn’t easy for him to stop once he started. In some sense, he was looking for answers too.
His audience, he was most certainly aware, was made up largely of youth awaiting their place in the sun. First, he offered hope by saying that things run in cycles and that it is again a great time to be an indie filmmaker. And, as a leader among them, he went about connecting the dots of what it takes to get from one place to another. At one point, he stood at one end of the stage and said, “That’s me at twenty-one,” and walked across to about the middle of the stage and said, “And this is me at thirty-nine. That’s some distance from twenty-one and it’s hard to see back to that.” He was just beginning to explain where he sees himself and where he might go next.
At a crossroads, Smith found himself in a position where he could keep making the same type of movies he knows and loves or start to branch off in another direction. The show is all about this crossroads. As young and energetic as the audience was, they were also every bit as attentive to what Smith came to say. They’d heard it or read it before either on a Smodcast or blog or in collected writings. They just wanted to hear it from the man himself.
And they also came for the unexpected. One very good moment was when a soft-spoken guy with curly gray hair came, after many years, to thank Smith for some gifts he’d received from him regarding some connection between friends from long ago. It was all very fuzzy until the guy mentioned some names that Smith recognized and then went on to say that Smith’s best friend, Scott Mosier, had dated a girl the guy knew. Since Mosier is famously tight-lipped about his sex life, this got Smith’s attention for awhile. And, just as the moment was fading, the gray-haired guy asked if he could present Smith with a gift. Of course, this created a very odd situation. Smith said, for the sake of everyone’s safety, he’d have to ask him a series of questions regarding the gift. After that, the guy was finally allowed to deliver a gift-wrapped box. A few moments later, Smith, quite relieved, was happy to report it was a bottle of booze.
In good time, we reach what has become the turning point for Smith’s current career direction. It is triggered by a pretty girl in the rafters who passes over the Q & A rules of standing in line and yells out something about Jesus. Smith jokingly suggests this could be someone about to jump. Then she yells about how much she loves “Zack and Miri Make a Porno.” Her question: Why doesn’t Smith embrace this glorious box office failure? And so the window has been opened. Smith toys around with the question like a cat playing with a ball of yarn. Why, of course, he’s always embraced that movie but let’s now go about opening up a fresh wound and see what we may find. Suddenly, someone yells to the girl, “Show us your tits!” To this Smith scolds, “And you guys wonder why you don’t get laid!” Not missing a beat, Smith takes flight.
What happens next is nothing short of amazing. Smith treats everyone to a night at the theater as he beautifully does what amounts to a one act play. In it, he relates what it is that currently spins his wheels. Jumping off the tragic yet wonderful experience that was “Zack and Miri,” Smith talks about how the star of his movie, Seth Rogen, helped to turn him on to marijuana. Feeling pretty bad that he failed to make a hit movie with the rising star of director Judd Apatow, considered “the next Kevin Smith,” he gains some relief by getting stoned. As he slips into a stoner lifestyle, he happens upon a really cool Canadian documentary about hockey legend Wayne Gretzky. As he learns more and more about the exceptional life of Gretzky, he keeps bugging his wife about what he’s learned. She is not amused and starts to wonder if Smith is smoking too much pot. It’s a good thing to wonder about but , in Smith’s case, it seems to have opened things up for him. The writing is better. Even the sex is better. Of course, what works for Kevin Smith is not necessarily going to work for Joe Blow. Smith seems to acknowledge as much and doesn’t come right out and endorse drug use.
His main focus is Wayne Gretzky and how someone so exceptionally talented was also someone so generous. Like a true sports fan determined to make his point, Smith shares with everyone the remarkable fact that Gretzky is as well known for his record in goals as for his record in assists. His record in assists simply means those were goals he could have made but he opted to allow another team member to take the credit. It is a fact that profoundly moves Smith. It ties in with seeking peace through a more mellow attitude.
Things that would have bothered Smith before are no longer that important. What’s more important is taking stock of what you have and making sense of it. With that in mind, it’s interesting to see where Smith’s current Batman run, “The Widening Gyre,” is headed. In Smith’s universe, we have the regular old Bruce Wayne Batman. He’s a virile middle-aged man who would like to enjoy life with a girlfriend. He’d like to find time to be laid-back. In the upcoming Issue Three, Batman takes a dip in the ocean and he has a groovy encounter with Aquaman. Batman and the ocean are not suppose to mix. Aquaman is puzzled. Batman says it’s simple, he just wants to swim. “And what about those strange biorhythm vibrations?” asks Aquaman. “It sounds like, ‘Dee, Dee, Dee.’” Oh, that’s just Batman’s girlfriend yelling out her pet name for him while they’re having sex.
The handwriting is on the wall, really, when it comes to what Kevin Smith will do next. He is all set for the next chapter in his life and is gearing up for it. Much like Woody Allen did around the same age, he is saying goodbye to a certain way of making movies and he’s looking for ways to grow as a filmmaker. He has just completed, “A Couple of Dicks,” starring Bruce Willis. And he has “Red State” and “Hit Somebody” in the works. But what comes next? Well, maybe it will be his version of “Annie Hall” or something equally significant. Whatever the case may be, Smith comes across as someone with so much to give that he simply needs to prioritize and that’s what he’s doing and he’s letting everyone in to see at the same time. For someone who claims to have set the bar pretty low, that’s quite a challenge. Stepping back from all the fan feedback, Kevin Smith should always remember he’s already won and there’s nothing that’s going to change that. Maybe that’s what he’s learned from Wayne Gretzky.
For more information on all things Kevin Smith and his on-going tour, check out his site, Viewaskew. He may be coming to your town before you know it. And don’t forget the recently released collection of Smodcasts and the new expanded edition of “My Boring-Ass Life.”
The first graphic novel I ever bought was Death: The High Cost of Living. I was a teenage gothette just figuring out that there were all sorts of strange and wonderful things out there that I hadn’t discovered yet, and then one day my friend came to school with a little thing called the Death Gallery, full of these gorgeous pictures of this little goth girl that sorta even looked like me (if you squinted and washed out the color).
