Good Riddance

John Swansburg at the Boston Globe writes an elegy to the passing of the video store...

The demise of the independent bookstore has been augured for nearly a generation now, the inevitable casualty of behemoths like Borders and Barnes & Noble, online booksellers like Amazon, and ultimately, so we're told, of the universal, digital library imagined by Google and various techno-visionaries.

The more imminent demise of the video store, meanwhile, has merited only occasional notice, mostly in the business pages. Yet something important is being lost here, something that isn't going to be replaced by rent-by-mail outfits like Netflix, video-on-demand services, or newfangled delivery systems like the Disney-backed MovieBeam. Though it may never have acquired the cache of the independent bookstore, for people who care about movies, the video store is just as vital an institution.

Video stores aren't just a place to grab a movie. The halfway decent ones-in other words, not Blockbuster, which is almost entirely given over to new releases, the so-called back wall-are places where the enthusiasms of the cinephile find a home. The theater is a place to see movies; the video store is a place to be among them-and to be among other people who love movies.

Oh please. In a town like Boston, I'm sure there were a couple great video stores. But Richmond never had any - well, they had one like he describes - and the owner was so mercenary he insisted on charging an annual membership fee well past the time everybody else had gone to free memberships, and his rental fees were higher than everyone else in town. He went out of business years ago - long before Netflix started up...

These new, more direct delivery mechanisms have their benefits, of course. Thanks to Netflix, provided you've got a DVD player and a mail stop, it's now possible to live in upstate Idaho and still be able to sample the complete works of Bernardo Bertolucci.

Exactly the reason they are so successful...

But the problem with on-demand is selection-at least for now, it isn't much better than your average Blockbuster, limited to a tiny fraction of all the movies ever made. Netflix, on the other hand, has unbeatable selection (some 60,000 titles), but it's not exactly on-demand: It takes a couple of days for the movies to get to you by mail, and Tuesday's high-minded desire to finally see ``The Bicycle Thief" may not last until Thursday, when you've got a low-brow hankering for ``Gone in Sixty Seconds."

Yeah - that's a real unique problem that you never had in video stores. It's not like you ever went to the store to rent something and either they didn't carry it or it was checked out...sheesh...besides, you should have seen Bicycle Thief in college...

Yet even a place like Photographics...still nurtured my appreciation for film. Long before I'd ever heard of auteur theory, the store's Hitchcock section had me thinking about the role of the director. And, as in a good bookstore, I made accidental discoveries that are only possible while browsing (and can't be replicated with a web browser). Cutting through Westerns en route to Action to rent ``Lethal Weapon 2" for the umpteenth time, Clint Eastwood, gazing out from the faded cardboard cover of ``A Fistful of Dollars," catches my teenage eye.

So let me get this right - his big discoveries in his dream videostore were Hitchcock and A Fistful of Dollars? Wow, it's not like you can find those at Blockbuster. This reminds me of the grousing in academia when the computer based library catalogs came along. The big beef was all about the "accidental finds" one encountered when thumbing through the classic card catalog. The same thing just couldn't "be replicated with a web browser." Nonsense. And I'll bet there are very few academics who would want to go back at this point...



Sidebar: We held onto our card catalog here at work for so long that eventually the Smithsonian took a cabinet from it for their collection because there were so few left in the world.

So I make do with my Netflix account. But I miss my old video stores, and I worry about what the fall of these lonely forts will mean. Going to the movies was always a shared experience, and at least in the age of the video store, we still had occasion to brush elbows with other people who had decided to spend the night watching a movie.

Oh man, the last time I talked to some stranger standing next to me in front of a display of videos, he went haywire at my suggestion that Blade Runner had influenced a lot of anime, got in my face, told me I was stupid because "Anime is from Japan and Blade Runner was an American movie..." and then the freak followed me around the store for 20 minutes trying to debate the issue with me...



Blade Runner - 1982



Akira - 1986



Cowboy Bebop - 1998...but I digress...

Apparently, John Swansburg is the Deputy Editor of Ideas at the Boston Globe. I'd suggest he get some real ideas instead of these hackneyed "the world is changing and I don't like it" musings...