Clerks Became a Place You Can Go

There is a point where fandom stops being something you watch and starts rearranging your life. For me, that point is apparently when I begin thinking about my sleep schedule more than a week before a movie screening.

I will be at Smodcastle Cinemas in Atlantic Highlands on September 25 for Clerks: Open All Night 3, the latest overnight gathering built around Kevin Smith’s Clerks trilogy. The official SModcast calendar lists the event from late Friday night into early Saturday morning. That is the basic event information. The more interesting part is that attending it requires something that watching a movie usually does not: preparation. You do not simply press play. You decide that this particular collection of movies is worth changing the shape of your night.

That small inconvenience is what makes the event interesting as a piece of fandom. Clerks began as a movie rooted so specifically in New Jersey that its ordinary locations became part of its mythology. The original film turned a convenience store, a video store and the experience of being stuck at work into a landscape people recognized. Three decades later, the film no longer exists only as something fans remember seeing. It has accumulated physical destinations, recurring gatherings and habits of participation around it.

Clerks became a place you can go.

That has been happening for a long time. The old View Askew site once promoted a “Reality Tour” built around revisiting landmarks connected to Smith’s films, with fans traveling to New Jersey to occupy the geography they had first encountered on screen. The impulse is familiar across fandom: stand where the scene happened, take the photograph, buy something from the place, tell the story later. A fictional world gains coordinates.

What makes Smodcastle different is that it is not simply a preserved filming location. It is a functioning theater where the fandom keeps manufacturing new memories. The point is no longer only to visit the site of something that happened in 1994. It is to show up for something happening now because of what happened then.

That is a subtle but important shift from nostalgia to ritual. Nostalgia looks backward. Ritual repeats. It gives people a date, a place, a sequence and a reason to return. “Open All Night” is already on its third numbered edition, which means the idea has moved beyond novelty. The title itself now carries an expectation: this is a thing the community knows how to do.

And what it knows how to do is slightly ridiculous, which helps.

Clerks is a movie about a shift. Dante is called into work when he would rather be somewhere else, and the day becomes a long accumulation of customers, conversations, grievances and small indignities. An overnight marathon turns the audience into a different kind of shift worker. You arrive at night. You settle in. Time starts becoming part of the experience. At some point your body notices that civilized people are normally asleep. The movies keep going anyway.

That does not recreate the plot, exactly, and it does not need to. Fandom does not always reenact the literal events of the thing it loves. Sometimes it recreates the texture. Clerks has always been unusually good at making time feel physical: waiting, working, talking, getting through the day. An all-night screening asks the audience to feel duration too. By the end, you have not merely watched a trilogy. You have been somewhere with it.

That distinction helps explain why physical fandom persists in a culture that has made media easier to access almost everywhere. The value of an event like this is not scarcity of content. It is scarcity of circumstance. You can watch a movie alone. You cannot reproduce the particular room, the collective fatigue, the laughter that lands differently at 3 in the morning, the person two rows over who has clearly been quoting Randal since 1997, or the strange intimacy that develops when a group of strangers agrees to remain in the same dark room long past normal operating hours.

The inconvenience becomes part of the credential. Nobody accidentally attends an overnight trilogy marathon. Nobody wanders into one because they had forty minutes to kill before dinner. You have to mean it at least a little. Travel, timing and exhaustion filter the room before the first frame appears.

That is where pilgrimage and ritual begin to overlap. Pilgrimage says the place matters enough to travel to. Ritual says the action matters enough to repeat. Open All Night does both. Fans go to Atlantic Highlands because the event is happening there, but they are also participating in a repeatable format whose meaning increasingly comes from having done it together.

Smith’s current calendar makes the contrast especially visible. He is on the road this week for “An Evening With Kevin Smith” dates in Green Bay, Milwaukee, Elgin and St. Louis before the calendar returns to New Jersey for Open All Night. The touring shows bring Smith to an audience. The Atlantic Highlands event asks the audience to come to a place that has become part of his creative ecosystem.

The geography matters because Smith’s work has spent decades turning New Jersey into both setting and connective tissue. The Library of Congress added Clerks to the National Film Registry in 2019, recognizing the film’s cultural, historic and aesthetic significance. That institutional milestone is one kind of legacy. The other kind is harder to archive: people still deciding that the movie is worth leaving the house for.

That second legacy is the one I want to watch in the room.

When RMN covers the overnight event, the movies themselves will almost be the known quantity. The more interesting material will be around them: where people came from, what they brought with them, which lines still detonate in a room after three decades, how many attendees have done this before, what stories they attach to the films, and what happens to a crowd when the clock becomes part of the performance.

I am also curious about the physical commitment because it is easy to talk about fandom as an identity and forget that identity sometimes has logistics. You buy the ticket. You drive somewhere. You plan the next morning. In my case, I am already thinking about adjusting my sleep schedule before the event because I would prefer my field notes not to turn into increasingly abstract observations about carpeting sometime around 4 a.m.

That preparation sounds silly until you recognize what it represents. A movie released in 1994 now has enough accumulated meaning that people will alter their routines in 2026 to spend an entire night inside its orbit. That is not passive nostalgia. It is participation.

The first stage of a movie’s life is simple: people watch it. If it lasts, people quote it. Then they collect it, revisit it, introduce other people to it and attach parts of their own lives to it. Eventually, in a few unusual cases, the movie stops being only an object and becomes a social location.

You can go there.

On September 25, for a few very late hours in Atlantic Highlands, Clerks will be one of those places.

EVENT NOTE

Clerks: Open All Night 3 is listed by SModcast for Friday, Sept. 25 into Saturday, Sept. 26 at Smodcastle Cinemas, 82 First Avenue, Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey. The official event listing currently shows an 11 p.m. start.

SOURCE NOTES

• SModcast: Clerks: Open All Night 3 event listing
• SModcast: current live-events calendar
• Library of Congress: Clerks selected for the National Film Registry
• View Askew archive: Stash Bash / Reality Tour
• Reporting note: This advance intentionally takes a different angle from RMN’s earlier Open All Night piece, which focused on the marathon schedule, Kevin Smith’s accessibility to fans and the audience-filmmaker relationship. This follow-up focuses on fandom as place, pilgrimage and recurring ritual.