Copyright Polygon
“You fuckers think just ’cause a guy reads comics he can’t start some shit?” It’s a challenge that sounds like it could echo across any number of dyspeptic YouTube channels. But it was actually issued 30 years ago by Brodie Bruce, the Mallrats character played by then-retired pro skateboarder Jason Lee, who seemed to resonate most with the microscopic audience that went to see Kevin Smith’s follow-up to Clerks in theaters. The ostensible lead of the movie is T.S. Quint (Jeremy London) — yes, both leads are named after Jaws characters — and he’s the one played by a handsome and experienced young actor. Lee's Brodie was supposed to be the sidekick, but much like the scene-stealing Randal (Jeff Anderson) in Clerks, Brodie becomes the takeaway from Mallrats, in part by anticipating some major cultural shifts, for better and worse. Comic books weren’t entirely foreign as multiplex fodder in 1995; the biggest movie of the summer was Batman Forever. But the third entry in the popular film series was the exception that proved the rule: It was a big hit, but it was also the only superhero game in town at the time. Beyond that, Forever found its success in swinging closer to the 1960s Batman TV series than any recent developments in the world of comics. Marvel Comics superheroes, meanwhile, weren’t on any movie screens. Big screen representation or not, Mallrats trafficked in its love for all comics. Brodie does riff on DC Comics when he theorizes about Superman’s inability to have sex with Lois Lane. (One of Lee’s many perfect line deliveries: After explaining that this would require a kryptonite condom, Brodie appends this theory with a respectful, almost mournful “...but that would kill him.”) But he makes more then-esoteric references to Wolverine, The Thing, and Punisher: War Journal. Brodie, much like Smith himself, is a real reader and fan of comics, which wasn't nearly as mainstream in 1995. That fandom also helped power his very reason for spending so much time at the mall: the comic book store. T.S. is less interested, but the mall also serves as the location for a low-rent game show on which his very recent ex, Brandi (Claire Forlani), is appearing as a favor to her domineering father (Michael Rooker). T.S. hopes to win her back, which may involve sabotaging the show. Brodie, too, pines for the ex who has just dumped him: Rene (Shannen Doherty), who complains that he spends most of his time playing video games, watching videos, and maintaining his comics collection. (Which, to be fair, is true.) Today, the complaint would be that he has failed to properly monetize these interests with subscriber growth. But in 1995, it was genuinely innovative to see a comics-loving guy portrayed as more of a lovable, cocksure slacker than an ostracized poindexter, upstaging the movie’s designated Main Guy without resorting to outsized humiliation. (T.S. and Brodie take an equal number of punches before their respective triumphs.) The loudmouth nerd haunting the longbox aisles at the comics shop could also, in this telling, be movie-star charismatic, even if Smith does rib Brodie’s many moments of cluelessness, like mistaking the adjective “callow” for a compliment. Despite Smith lightly satirizing his stand-in’s tunnel vision, Brodie wins Rene back by doing almost nothing differently, making the mildest of concessions after the fact (he will introduce her to his unseen mother), and is instantly rewarded for his mouthing off on the game show that he and T.S. invade. He’s then given a gig hosting The Tonight Show, a perfectly absurd touch in the aftermath of the then-recent Leno-versus-Letterman wars; today, of course, there’s no such need to engage with old media. Regardless, the movie more or less predicts the platforming and mainstreaming of nerd culture, though few if any of Brodie’s successors would have Lee’s way with delivery. (Another great one: When he’s circling back to fixate on a child’s unsafe escalator practices, Lee murmurs, “That kid…” before ascending to his trademark loudness.) That’s part of why Mallrats is more convincing as a story about a comics nerd than it is about actual mallrats. Smith thanks both John Hughes and John Landis in the end credits for his movie, and Mallrats is clearly designed as a successor to both Landis’s comedy of anarchic spectacle and Hughes-style teenage antics. To some extent, it succeeds. Smith puts a great, prescient twist on the material by aging up his characters into twentysomethings, still engaging in this “make-up, break-up shit,” as T.S. calls it, at a less flattering (but not unrealistic) age. Smith movies make great hay of his interconnected universe, where everyone knows each other from high school shenanigans, local-legend statuses, and other townie ephemera. That’s something else Mallrats anticipates by serving as a companion piece to Clerks without sequelizing it: the linked nature of the MCU. There’s even a Stan Lee cameo, five years before the first X-Men movie. In a lot of ways, Smith’s loose, funny version is better than what became of the homeworky MCU, which ultimately shouted out Mallrats via Stan Lee's cameo in Captain Marvel. It's more in line with the chattiness of the Iron Man movies than the soapier later installments. (For that matter, its opening-credits renderings of characters as comic-book covers, drawn by real comics professionals, are a better tribute to the medium than most superhero movies manage.) One hitch in the movie’s stated premise, however, is that neither Brodie nor T.S. seem like guys who would spend all that much time at the mall. Smith makes up for it by giving Brodie lots of goofy, over-the-top knowledge of mall geography and financial information, emphasizing how little actual commerce he engages in, as he totes around a shot-sized cup for soda refills and gets chastised by his nemesis, “Fashionable Male” store manager Shannon Hamilton (Ben Affleck, giving his all to lines like “I have no respect for people with no shopping agenda”). That is certainly true to the spirit of what the mall was at that time, a social gathering place with stores, and even makes a case for mild, teen-comedy-style rebellion; despite his Apocalypse Now-referencing love for “the smell of commerce in the morning,” Brodie sees the mall as a public space, not an arena for capitalism, vexing the older authority figures. As with Hughes, it’s a temporary upending that more or less enforces (or at least acquiesces to) social order. And, moreover, it leaves the movie standing to the side of mall culture, basically turning it into the QuickStop from Clerks with brighter lighting and more sprawling square footage, losing any sense of working drudgery in the process. An expanded cut of Mallrats (not preferred by Smith, but released for the film’s 25th anniversary in 2020) goes even further afield from slackerdom, making it more clear that T.S. and Brandi, at least, are college students. Though the theatrical cut makes some passing references to school, it places all of the characters in a more liminal space between teen shenanigans and grown-up concerns. That’s where Mallrats works best, and also how it anticipates the Apatow boom of the mid-2000s and beyond. Smith applied the wackier side of ’80s youth comedies to slightly older characters; Apatow did the same with the more grounded coming-of-age components of those stories. Smith couldn’t have anticipated that his drawings of more shaded nerdery would eventually give way to countless revenge-of-the-nerds victory laps, without the tempering factors of self-deprecation and jokes that are more funny than not. Brodie Bruce may not have been the last time a geek making comics references would be endearing. Soon enough, though, it would no longer seem like a cathartic novelty.
