Thanks, Kevin, PART II: Different Counters, Different Escapes
Dante Hicks, Calvin McShane, and the Choice You Don’t Know You’re Making
When I left off in Part I, I said that Dante Hicks and Calvin McShane were two guys stuck behind different kinds of counters—one literal, one metaphorical. Clerks II gives us the next stage of that comparison, and it’s where their paths start to diverge in ways that say a lot about class, clarity, and what we think we want from life.
Dante and the Cage He Didn’t Know He Wanted
Clerks II is a movie about escape—that’s what it pretends to be about, anyway.
Dante is convinced he needs to get out: out of Jersey, out of retail, out of the Quick Stop ruins, out of the life of “wasting potential” everyone keeps accusing him of.
Florida is supposed to be the answer.
A house, a career, a life plan, Emma’s vision of adulthood.
But the truth is that Dante doesn’t want any of it.
He just doesn’t know that yet.
Randall knows.
Becky suspects.
The viewers see it coming.
Dante, as always, is the last to figure it out.
His whole arc is about realizing that the life he thought he should want was just another cage—one built from respectability instead of convenience store shelving.
When he chooses to rebuild the Quick Stop with Randall, he’s not settling.
He’s recognizing the shape of his own happiness, even if it looks small from the outside.
He escapes the cage of other people’s expectations by stepping back into the life that actually fits him.
Calvin and the Cage He Tried Not to Notice
Calvin’s version of this moment comes in The Age of Unbecoming, the point where he finally admits what everyone else saw years earlier: the music career he dreamed of isn’t going to happen.
But unlike Dante—who realizes he doesn’t want the escape hatch he’s been offered—Calvin realizes something heavier:
The only way his dream might have succeeded was if he’d gone all in.
And he never did.
Because going all in felt irresponsible.
That’s the ache of it.
Calvin didn’t give up on his dream—he prepared for its failure.
He built the safety net his family asked for.
He hedged.
He split his life between the thing he wanted and the thing he was told was practical.
And practicality, as it tends to do, won.
When the lottery money runs out, Calvin discovers what Dante never had to:
Even the safety net has a cost.
He has to rebuild his life in the very direction he feared was waiting for him all along.
Dante runs from practicality into the life he didn’t know he wanted.
Calvin runs into practicality because the life he wanted never had a fair chance.
One escapes the cage.
The other finally admits he’s been standing inside one the whole time.
The Question That Haunts Both Stories
Dante’s question is simple:
“Why didn’t I see what I wanted sooner?”
Calvin’s is harder:
“Was I wrong for wanting something else in the first place?”
That’s the quiet tragedy of The Wake of Expectations—and the place where Clerks II unexpectedly becomes its thematic sibling:
Both men think they’re choosing one life over another.
But it’s only afterward that they understand what that choice meant.
Dante learns he was running toward the right life all along.
Calvin learns he was running away from the right life (at least, the one he thought he wanted) without realizing it.
And in both cases, the cage—literal or metaphorical—wasn’t inherently right or wrong.
It was just the place they finally learned to tell the truth to themselves.
Where This Leaves Calvin*
The lingering question for Calvin is the one Dante never has to face:
Is the practical cage a cage at all… or is it a life he can grow to love?
Is the life he ended up with not the one he would have chosen, but maybe better?
That’s the tension that carries Wake into A Pleasant Fiction: a man realizing the life he lives is meaningful not because it matches the dream he once had, but because of the people who fill it, the responsibilities that shape it, and the love that gives it form.
Dante builds a business with his best friend.
Calvin builds a life around everyone who made him who he is.
Different counters.
Different cages.
Different escapes.
But the same lesson:
Sometimes the life you end up with isn’t the consolation prize, even if it feels that way at first.
It just takes a little more living to realize that.
Javier
*One quick note for readers following the full Calvin arc:
In this essay, I’m talking specifically about Calvin at the end of The Age of Unbecoming — the younger Calvin who recognizes that his musical dream isn’t going to happen but hasn’t yet made peace with what that means.
His fuller realization doesn’t arrive until Chapter 13 of A Pleasant Fiction (“How Do You Keep the Music Playing”), when he finally understands the role that dream actually played in his life. As he puts it there:
“Sometimes it pays to be yourself. Sometimes things serve a different purpose than you initially envision. Sometimes you can’t see how things are connected until later.”
That’s the older Calvin speaking — the one who finally sees what the younger Calvin (and Dante, and most of us) can’t yet:
that a dream isn’t wasted just because it takes you somewhere you didn’t expect.
© 2025 Chapelle Dorée Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved. This content may not be reproduced, distributed, or modified without permission.
