I’d see movies, comedies, and I loved ’Animal House’, I loved all the John Hughes stuff, but I never saw me and my friends totally represented.

Smith is describing a formative gap he felt as a young moviegoer: mainstream teen and college comedies (from broad farce like *Animal House* to the more emotionally observant John Hughes films) entertained him, but didn’t mirror the specific texture of his own working-/middle-class, suburban New Jersey friend group. The remark helps explain his impulse to make films like *Clerks*—stories built from vernacular speech, local hangouts, and the everyday aimlessness of retail and service work. In that sense, the quote is less a critique of those earlier films than a statement about representation as recognition: seeing your own life on screen can be the spark that turns a fan into a storyteller.