Thanks, Kevin, PART III — What Randall and Calvin Both Realize at the End

In the first installment of this Kevin Smith appreciation trilogy, I drew parallels between Calvin in The Wake of Expectations (especially Becoming Calvin and Growing Pains) and Dante in Clerks. In Part 2, the comparison shifted to The Age of Unbecoming and Clerks II.

Now, in Part 3, comes the deepest parallel of all: the way Clerks III reframes the entire Clerks universe in much the same way that A Pleasant Fiction reframes The Wake of Expectations. Both works are told by older storytellers looking back, reinterpreting the lives they once chronicled through younger eyes, and finally saying aloud what they couldn’t have understood the first time.

Randall’s Revelation

At the end of Clerks III, Randall finally sees the truth: He thinks he’s been making a movie about himself—his frustrations, his worldview, his profane philosophy of life behind the counter.

But the film is really about them.
About him and Dante.
About every dumb argument, every rolled eye, every quiet act of loyalty that made the grind bearable.

His revelation carries emotional force because of the biographical truth beneath it. Kevin Smith wrote an entirely different version of Clerks III years before—but he rewrote the film after the heart attack. After the night he nearly died in the parking lot of a comedy club. After the moment he was forced to confront the meaning of his own life.

Surviving changed his perspective.
And the story changed with him.

Dante had always been the younger Kevin’s avatar—anxious, aspirational, working through the tensions of becoming an adult. But post-heart-attack Kevin couldn’t speak through Dante anymore.

He saw himself in Randall.

The abrasive wildcard he once imagined himself to be had matured into someone else: a man trying to understand the life he’d almost lost. So the point of view shifts—not as a narrative trick, but as a biographical necessity.

The older Kevin needed a different narrator.

Calvin’s Version of the Same Truth

By the end of A Pleasant Fiction, Calvin reaches a parallel destination—but his shift is vertical, not lateral. He doesn’t move from one character to another; he moves from the younger self who lived the experiences to the older self who survived the aftermath.

If The Wake of Expectations is narrated by a young man still trying to become someone—chasing an imagined ideal of himself and his relationships—then A Pleasant Fiction is narrated by the version of Calvin forged by the deaths of the people who defined him.

Not a man imagining who he might become, but a man uncovering who he actually was.

The deaths of his parents, his brother, and his friend did not just alter his circumstances; they altered his consciousness. His memories became archaeological. His desires became contextual. His reflections became communal rather than individual.

He realizes his story was never his alone.
It belonged to everyone who helped shape it—those he loved, those he lost, those he misunderstood, and those who misunderstood him in return.

Where Randall learns his story was always shared, Calvin learns that identity itself is a collaboration. A mosaic of inherited angles, borrowed emotions, and mirrored experiences.

He doesn’t lose himself in this realization.
He simply stops mistaking himself as a solo act.

What Film Suggests, Fiction Can Inhabit

Film can reveal connection through a glance, a cut, a shared silence.
But prose can inhabit that connection. It can spiral through memory, double back on itself, linger in the contradictions that define us.

Clerks III gives us Randall’s revelation in the moment it occurs.
A Pleasant Fiction lets us live inside Calvin’s internal echo as the understanding unfolds over chapters, griefs, and pages of reflection.

Cinema captures the spark.
Fiction sustains the burn.

Life Doesn’t Stay in One Genre—So the Story Can’t Either

Here is another parallel that reveals itself only when looking at the long arc rather than isolated works: the tonal evolution mirrors the emotional evolution.

The early stories—Clerks, Becoming Calvin, Growing Pains—are comedies of youth: chaotic, profane, absurd. Arguments that feel existentially important because youth hasn’t yet revealed what actually is.

Then comes the middle movement.
Clerks II and The Age of Unbecoming expose the grief of outgrowing the selves we once hoped to become. These are comedic works, yes, but the humor sits beside earnestness, regret, and recognition.

And finally, the last movement:
Clerks III and A Pleasant Fiction—works that place humor beside mortality, loss beside sarcasm, grief beside wit. Not to soften the edges, but to tell the truth.

Because life doesn’t honor genre boundaries.
It never has.

Humor persists even in grief.
Grief deepens humor.
The people we miss most were often the same people who made us laugh hardest.

A long life produces a long story, and a long story cannot stay in one register.

The Collective Self

When Calvin accepts that his story was never his alone, he’s not relinquishing individuality. He’s finally acknowledging that identity is porous—shaped by every relationship, every misunderstanding, every inherited gesture or borrowed belief.

Randall memorializes Dante through film.
Calvin memorializes everyone through language.

Both acts say:
Look how much of me belongs to you.

The Perspective That Death Demands

This is the core parallel between Clerks III and A Pleasant Fiction: both works were shaped by storytellers who had stood face-to-face with death—one directly, one relationally—and emerged unable to tell their stories the old way.

After that kind of confrontation, you don’t return to your earlier voice.
You don’t return to a younger narrator.
You cannot.

Dante gives way to Randall because Kevin Smith is no longer the man who wrote Clerks.
Young Calvin gives way to older Calvin because I am no longer the young man who drafted Wake decades ago.

The narrative shifts because the narrator shifted.
The tone shifts because the life behind it shifted.
The genre shifts because truth requires it.

You think you’ve been telling one story your whole life—
until death forces you to look again
and you finally see the story you were actually living.
And that story is no less funny, no less painful, no less joyful than the first draft.
It’s just bigger.

Thanks again, Kevin — and my heartfelt condolences on the passing of your mother.
R.I.P. Amazing Grace.

Javier

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