I Thought Love Knew No Bounds

First comes love. Then comes marriage. Not quite. In our modern society, as Michel Foucault put it, “our epoch has initiated sexual heterogeneities,” and thus, our form of entertainment has progressed along to include more sexual heterogeneous situations.
So we come to “Clerks II,” which I am not too quick to call romantic comedy, but ultimately, its saturated ending makes it so. As Tamar Jeffers McDonald’s book, “Romantic Comedy,” says, “a romantic comedy is a film which has as its central narrative motor a quest for love, which portrays this quest in a light-hearts way and almost always to a successful conclusion.” Yes, there is a successful conclusion in the plot, but it is how it got there that makes it a not-too-generic, borderline radical romance film. Therefore, I am apprehensive to fully categorize it just as a romantic comedy, but not quick to say it is a complete radical romance on the levels of “The Graduate” or a sex comedy like “10.”
In Clerks II, our protagonist, Dante Hicks, is a fry cook at a fast food restaurant, on his last day of work, who is engaged to Emma, a controlling woman who "probably wouldn't have given [Dante] the time of day back in high school."

Emma and Dante.

As can be seen, Emma is extremely excited to be getting married to the underachiever, Dante, albeit, after she has "already played the field for a decade." In the film we find out that Dante had been working in a convenience store for a decade before it burned down, and is now working at a fast food restaurant at the age of 33. His marriage to Emma is ensuring that he leave the state of New Jersey to work at a car wash (owned by Emma's father), to live in a house (bought by Emma's parents). None of it is in the name of love.
Dante's boss, Becky, all the while, is pregnant with Dante's child, choosing not to tell him this because she simply chooses not to be open with him about it, not wanting to jeopardize his engagement to Emma.

Despite what it says, Becky is not ALWAYS Open

Becoming pregnant after a one-night fling with Dante, Becky remains tight lipped about her pregnancy throughout the day (the entire film takes place in one day). If not for this fact, Becky would ultimately be an independent woman who is aware of both her sexuality and freedom as a woman. In fact, I would suggest that both Emma and Becky are "postfeminists." As Chris Barker's book, "Cultural Studies," describes it, postfeminists "are not necessarily oppressed by dint of being women. Not all men are oppressors and it is unhelpful to understand gender relations in terms of 'men vs. women.'" To articulate, both Emma and Becky are in high standings in a socio-economic status, "the recognition of male loss and vulnerability" (Dante finding out he's fathering a child and Emma kicking his ass for finding out he's fathering a child that isn't hers), and finally "the understanding that women can wield sexual power."
Although it may seem like Becky has become what Simone de Beauvoir calls "just a womb," Becky's character is not debilitated by becoming pregnant with a man who is about to get married to another woman. Also, in opposition of de Beauvoir's statement, "[woman] cannot think of herself without a man." Becky does not tell Dante that she is pregnant until Dante confesses his love for her. This flips the tables again for what Barker has in his book which states "men are less inclined to verbalize emotions." Here, it is Dante who is confessing his love to Becky, while Becky never gave any inclination about her feelings, she describes her part in the affair as someone who just "fucks ugly, indecisive losers in the kitchen," but with a smile, of course.
Another subject the film takes into matter is that of sex and marriage. In the first thirty minutes of the film, Becky and Dante have a conversation about marriage that is more incline to the quote of Foucault. "I think marriage goes against our primal nature," "To be loved?", "[No], To fuck as much as possible." While Dante takes the role of 19th century conservatives who thought that sex and marriage "constitute[d] a sexuality that is economically useful and politically conservative," (despite not being too conservative himself), Becky's part in this dialogue goes from a "fact" Foucault had when he said, "this power [over marriageless sex] had neither the form of law, nor the effects of the taboo. On the contrary; it acted by multiplication of singular sexuality. It did not set boundaries for sexuality; it extended the various forms of sexuality, pursuing them according to lines of indefinite penetration." From this radical look at romance, the movie slips back into the more conventional by the end ensuring the romantic comedy ending.
As the plot comes to a climax, Emma discovers the affair between Dante and Becky during a sex donkey show at the fast food restaurant where they work, which was a gift to Dante by his best friend Randall.

A Donkey show for a going away party. Why not?

Emma accuses Becky of being a whore, kicks Dante in the balls and slams a cake she had baked for him in his face (maybe as a symbol that she won't bake like an idealized woman... and she won't get cheated on and stand for it either).
What leads this movie into the conventional is that ultimately, Becky decides to keep the baby and Dante, in the most unromantic of ways, proposes to her through the drive thru window, making it a radical proposal to a less radical trope.
With my arguments for and against "radical romance" and conventional romantic comedies, I cannot help to think that this movie would have been considered a radical romance had it ended as part one did with both women leaving Dante. McDonald wrote that a radical romance is "[self-reflexive] as a modern and more realistic form of romantic comedy in contrast to earlier [film] texts," which it Clerks II certainly is, but with all it's unorthodox plot points and characterizations, it just ends falling for a happy ending–which truthfully isn't always a bad choice.

Work Cited
Barker, Chris. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. Los Angeles: Sage Publication,
2008.
De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. 1949.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. 1870.
McDonald, Tamar Jeffers. Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre. London:
Wallflower, 2007. Pg. 9; 67