Back in the old days, the world had movie theatres. One screen per building, one movie at a time. The place sold out. In our parents’ time, in the heyday of Hollywood, films were released in batches, and the screenings changed a few times a week to accommodate the big producers’ large catalog of new product.
Nowadays, the new movies come out on Friday a few at a time, and most of them are horrible. Still, we have movieplexes with 20 screens (or more), and on opening night they’re packed, too. Once the freshness dies, we wait for the movie to come out in another form, like on pay cable or DVD.
I’m going to miss DVD when it dies. Like I miss the videocassette. When we look back on how recorded media has changed from the 33 rpm record to cassettes to the (relatively short-lived) 8-track tapes to CDs to cyberspace downloads, it’s enough to make your internal memory (brain) explode.
Along with the turnover in media goes the fate of the video store. It’s strange to me that people are increasingly turning to more impersonal forms of entertainment rather than actually interacting with a person at a store. Not so long ago, we had video stores like Erol’s, Hollywood Video and Blockbuster easily accessible to everybody. I especially remember, with fondness, the Movies Unlimited store. Now there was a store run by people who knew movies (they do mail order now, along with a wide audience of cable channel TCM’s fans who want to collect classics). Today, stores are shutting down and turning to mail order services like Netflix.
My Blockbuster just shut down earlier this month, but the owner turned me on to their mail service, and I love it (I don’t intend to turn to the Netflix dark side). I get deliveries to my mailbox with no restricting return policies. Sure I can watch movies in my pajamas without having to jump into the car to return the movie by midnight, but with my time schedule it’s the delivery convenience that sold me on this new idea.
No matter what, I refuse to approach a kiosk like that carmine colored souped up ATM in front of the pharmacies and grocers that spits out rentals like a vending machine. Talk about impersonal. One even sprang up just yards from that ill-fated Blockbuster, and folks flocked to it. There is something kind of creepy about that to me.
In the movie Dune, humans became so dependent on machines to do jobs for them that they fell into apathy and were subdued by enterprising men who formed alliances with those machines to take over the world. We are seeing a society grow more like that frightening archetype, as we gravitate more toward internally gratifying amusement that seals you into pressing buttons and putting earphones on to block out the rest of the human race. There is another Blockbuster within five miles of home, so I’m visiting there now (I didn’t tell you that I can return my movies to the store instead of mailing them, and get another movie on the spot). Kicking and screaming into the death of video rentals go I.
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