As Kevin Smith’s career has evolved, so has our nostalgia for earlier iterations of the filmmaker, whose name was once synonymous with indie flicks like Clerks and Chasing Amy. But with each new phase comes a begrudging escalation in that nostalgia: we once longed for the man who gave us Jay and Silent Bob, then became weirdly sentimental for a time when Kevin Smith gave no fucks about film criticism (even if that meant admitting we once owned a Silent Bob action figure), and eventually got to a point where we dearly missed a time—any time—before Kevin Smith was famous for just talking a lot. Which brings us to the latest phase in this cycle, in which we are reminded of The Tweet and thus a wretched thought comes to mind: what if we could go back in time and tell our young and incredibly naive selves to rent Wes Craven’s New Nightmare instead of Clerks? Perhaps we may have never been exposed to such cursed content as this:
The Tweet elicits a distinct feeling of imminent nausea that can only be described as “a visit from the ghost of barf’s future.” Smith later backtracked and tried to blame the tweet on his wife, like when your dad tells your mom it’s not his porn, he just found it under your mattress and was he supposed to throw it away and be wasteful like that, think of the baby turtles, Karen, seriously. And yet, Smith refuses to let The Tweet die, even though it was allegedly made up by his wife as the result of some lost bet, which is maybe the most dumb and unbelievable excuse invented by men, after “I just tripped and my dick fell into her, Karen, I swear.”
You may not realize this, but today is the 10th anniversary of The Tweet. Don’t worry, Kevin Smith will never let you forget this thing he felt compelled to share:
We could spend hours dissecting The Tweet to discern the most offensive phrasing—is it “her clit/brown/taint-area” or “pwns my dick”? Perhaps, dear reader, it is the unholy combination of the two. In any case, Smith would do well to heed the advice of a character in a film with which he is undeniably, extremely familiar. To paraphrase: Let The Tweet die. Kill it, if you must.