Be Blind, Rewind
An Ode to the Video Rental Store
Growing up, Friday nights were a big deal in the Jones household. After dinner, my dad would inevitably ask the question that I had been waiting all day to hear: “Wanna go rent some flicks?” (My dad always called them flicks). He, of course, knew the answer as well as I did. In small-town America, in the days before the Internet and its heaving tsunami of “content” crushed us all like grapes, the video rental store was the most exciting place to be. We’d pile into the car, drive over to “Video Visions” (our local mom & pop) and spend what seemed like hours poring over the racks.
Sometimes you were there for the latest blockbuster (good luck finding a copy) and sometimes — usually due to a lack of any other good option — you’d take a chance on whatever looked cool (it was in this way that I first became acquainted with many cinematic legends — everyone from Jackie Chan to Mel Brooks). You might not leave with what you came in for, but you always left with something.
Going to the video rental store was exciting, in a way that I imagine younger generations will never understand. It had it all: the thrill of the hunt, the surprise of discovery, the connection to a larger world then only dimly felt, and — barely appreciated at the time but perhaps most meaningful now — it was an opportunity to share an experience with the people I loved (and love), however modest it might have been.
Ask anyone who waxes nostalgic for the (mostly) vanished video rental store, and you’ll probably hear a story not all that different from mine: misty-eyed recollections where a personal longing for the past is so inseparably intertwined with an appreciation for an extinct physical space that it’s hard to tell just what, exactly, one is longing for. Is it the place we miss? Or is it ourselves as we used to be?
This is, of course, the welter of nostalgia in a nutshell. It’s not just a feeling that comes and goes, a pleasant memory that we occasionally pull from the dusty recesses of our minds, admire, and then put away. Nostalgia is a living thing, something that endures and evolves, an intricate, interconnected mental whorl that is no less isolated in the mind than any other desire: it informs, and is itself informed by, everything that makes us who we are. As such, cross-contamination is endemic: places we associate with happy memories become more than just the stage on which those memories occur, they become alive in their own right, as much as any friend, pet, or loved one — a safe harbor grounding us inexorably to our own past.
Physical spaces have meaning, and losing them is hard. Even strangers might weep when a family’s house burns down, but who mourns — really mourns — for the “going out of business” sign, besides those whose lives are directly affected? We sometimes forget that even the humblest locations can be, for the right person, as impactful as those traditionally assumed to be the most imbued with meaning.
And what place could be humbler and more representative of that cherished (and recently departed) day-to-day than the video rental store? For an entire generation of families, it was the thing — consistent, fun (even when arguments ensued over what to rent) and so frivolous in the moment that it was easy to forget that you were making memories at all. It was the furniture of the world, of your world, and then — seemingly overnight — it was gone. And so was a part of you.
Forgive me if that sounds maudlin, but there it is. And with all due respect to those who weep for the loss of the video store (and count me among their number): people who claim to miss renting movies the old-fashioned way don’t really miss late fees and double-cassette VHS copies of Titanic (at least I hope they don’t). What they miss is the experience of being there, of being safe within the shelter of their own past. And what they really want to remember is the story of their life as it’s already been told, a story whose every beat is known, whose every line can be mouthed by heart. It’s their own movie they want to re-watch, because it features the characters they love: sisters and brothers, moms and dads, best friends, and, of course, the star of the show: a happier version of themselves, or at least one less burdened by time.
I should take pains to say here that the above is only an accusation if being human is an accusation. Nostalgia in itself is not an evil thing, nor is longing for one’s past. Both are, instead, inevitable consequences of having lived. “Don’t live in the past” is a cliché, and a silly one — we are our pasts — if we didn’t live there we wouldn’t live anywhere. A better interpretation of that old chestnut might be “Focus on the good stuff, but don’t dwell too much on what’s gone” — whether good or ill. Equally hard to do, but this formulation at least has the virtue of standing on firmer ground as a philosophical pose.
Given that, there seems little harm in pining for the old days of the video rental store, any more than there’s harm in pining for any departed experience. Talking about it, asserting its inherent superiority, obsessing over its details, lamenting its loss — these are all perfectly healthy ways of keeping a memory alive, and they are certainly the preferred conversational currency among the video rental store’s present-day admirers. Memorials, even mental ones, are powerful, and dwelling on one’s own melancholy can — to a point — be cathartic, healthy even.
But can things get unhealthy? What about the folks who take things to extremes, like building rental store replicas in their basements (yes, it’s a thing)? Or the collectors who are currently drowning in more old VHS tapes than they could expect to watch in three lifetimes? It’s hard to say. Certainly, these uberfans are edge cases, and only they (or their loved ones) can judge as to whether their obsession with the past has crossed the line into unnatural fixation. What’s not in question, however, is that theirs is a compulsion made possible by the material excess of American capitalism, where the physical objects of the past are not past, but are still readily available. Far from just wistfully remembering these spaces as they once were, devotees of the video rental store can now physically recreate it, either as monument or tomb, depending on your disposition. In any event, a past that you literally can’t let go of can be, well, harder to let go of.
I dwell so long on the subject of nostalgia because, like record stores or malls or arcades or any other popular communal space that those of a certain age assert were better, or more genuine, or more human, or whatever else, it’s clear that any talk about inherent value cannot ignore the emotional connection that many people had with those spaces. Again, acknowledging that fact is not the same as asserting that these emotional connections are inconsequential, or even that they serve to unfairly mythologize something unworthy of impartial appreciation (the “rose-colored glasses” effect). No human object or place can ever be divorced entirely from human beings’ connection to it; we’re not perfectly rational robots, and perfectly rational calculations simply don’t come into play.
That said, this essay isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about whether we, as a culture, actually did lose something — something tangible — with the demise of the video rental store, and whether those people who have no memory of the place, and will never experience it the way that it was, are poorer for it. So, here’s the question: putting aside nostalgia (as much as we can) were video rental stores objectively “better” than today’s digital landscape of stream-everything-on-demand?
The answer is complicated. There was a time, before national chains like Blockbuster and Hollywood Video devoured most of their market share, when mom & pop video stores ruled the rental landscape (and in nowhere burgs deemed too insignificant to host a chain store, they continued to do so well into the new millennium). Local movie rental places varied widely in selection and staffing, but what they usually offered were proprietors and employees who could speak knowledgably about their product, which typically occupied smaller floor spaces, and might even be curated (to an extent) according to the tastes of the owner. If you were lucky (and this was by no means a given) you got a passionate film fan behind the counter who you could get to know, and who would offer you the kind of recommendations that can only come from someone in love with the movies. All the machine-generated “Because you liked…” recommended lists and five-star reviews in the world can’t compare to a human being behind a counter and right in front of you, gushing over some new release, hidden gem, or forgotten classic.
The local joints, in other words, existed on a human scale. And while that would seem to be a disadvantage — particularly when it came to selection — it was actually what made them special. The floodgates to what seemed like every piece of media in existence that the coming of online streaming opened up at first seemed to be a good thing, but then we all learned charming phrases like “analysis paralysis” and quickly realized that, no, we weren’t the algorithm-crunching computers on the other side of the screen who existed to shovel art down our throats with a digital backhoe.
Once companies figured out how to make media consumption a competitive food-eating contest, it was probably a foregone conclusion that things would get out of hand. It’s a central tenet of capitalism (it has to be) that “more is better” — but that isn’t always the case. Before Netflix (and the multi-headed hydra of streaming monstrosities which it helped birth) your local video store might well be all the filmed media you could reasonably access outside of TV or the local movie theater — there was not some enormous vault of unlimited choices you could find across town, or even order through the mail (Netflix’s first, more palatable incarnation). And even if there was, your choices were easier not just because there were fewer options at a given time, but because most of your options were hidden.
Even though far more movies have been released on VHS than DVD or Blu-ray, pre-internet, they were hard to access, or to even know about. No one was walking into a small video store in Topeka asking for a copy of Tales From The QuaDead Zone, because no one (outside of the people directly involved in its creation) knew about Tales From The QuaDead Zone. If ignorance wasn’t bliss, it was at least a balm — back then, something as ostensibly simple as picking a movie to watch didn’t involve endless research, or scrolling through Netflix’s mind-numbingly awful UI, which seems to exist for the sole purpose of ensuring you never discover anything worth your time.
It’s telling indeed, that my now long-shuttered mom & pop video store — occupying a space of probably no more than six hundred square feet — would almost always provide me with a movie to watch. Part of that was necessity of course (as mentioned above, what else was there?) but there was seldom a time when I went home empty-handed, or frustrated. Now, with access to more movies than I could have dreamt of in those days, I often find myself scrolling through endless on-screen lists before giving up and turning off the TV altogether. Is it too easy? Do I feel less obligated to make a choice because I didn’t leave my house — let alone my couch — to peruse the virtual stacks? Or is my poor lizard brain simply overwhelmed, like the psychologists tell us? Whatever it is, making a choice in the age of streaming is something of a nightmare. We never realized then just how paradoxically expansive limitation could be.
In a sense Blockbuster and the other corporate chains that came to dominate the movie rental market in the 1990’s were the precursor to streaming’s collapsing vista: they offered a much larger selection, but one which presented only the illusion of choice. Worse, Blockbuster’s corporate model favored “family-friendly” films, so the horror movies of the 80’s (especially some of the more risqué ones) were suddenly nowhere to be found on store shelves, as were any films that might so much as hint that humans reproduce sexually. It was familiar corporate duplicity– a money-grab meant to appeal to the largest possible audience and avoid any hint of controversy (which might hurt the brand) under the guise of “family values.”
What massive chains like Blockbuster and Hollywood Video ended up giving us was convenience at the price of humanity — reducing everything to an anodyne nothing that pushed bland mediocrity in an effort to please the widest cross-section of people. Gone were the wild-eyed video-clerk lifers, and in were uniformed wage slaves (often high school students working part-time) who were, in true capitalist style, alienated from their work, no longer “belonging” to a human-focused organization (often a literal local family), and instead becoming the mere stewards of a gluttonous continent-spanning behemoth, interchangeable cogs in the corporate wheel.
It’s not a little ironic that Blockbuster itself is now the object of nostalgic affection — for most of us at the time, it was the lame corporate boogeyman come to destroy local business (and local individuality). It’s further proof that a positive intimate association with a place counts for far more than what the place’s real, temporal existence might have objectively meant, or what it represented to others, who might not have been so fond.
The digital revolution killed Blockbuster, of course, but if streaming at last broke the back of corporate censorship, it did so at a cost. While it’s true that it is now possible to easily find many of the obscure or banned titles that disappeared from view with the coming of corporate rental stores (or which were difficult to find at local shops) it’s also true that many movies — particularly many from the VHS-era which never made the jump to DVD — will never be found on streaming, or likely anywhere else. Your opinion as to the tragedy of this fact will likely depend on the depth of your appreciation for cheesy 80’s mega-schlock, but it’s worth noting: there’s actually a lot missing from streaming services’ seemingly limitless catalogs. Add to that fact the worrisome features of digital ownership and the sometimes-ephemeral stay of movies on any one service, and streaming begins to feel less and less like a safe harbor for cinematic art and more like another corporate-controlled chain store.
But it’s also important, particularly for those who never knew it, that we don’t overstate just how amazing the mom & pop movie rental store really was. Although “cool” (i.e., well-curated) video stores certainly existed during the heyday of the independents, they were rarer, and almost always in larger cities. And even there, people were after what they’re still after today — the massive blockbusters or the cult hits that have been rubber-stamped by enough critics to seem appetizing. To hear some tell it, you’d think the average video store in the average town was a monument to world cinema, a cineaste’s wet dream come to life, a place replete with racks of Kurosawa films or a whole wall devoted to the French New Wave. Some might have been — a fact that indeed argues for the inherent superiority of the mom & pop model — but most were simple money-making concerns, whose owners were (justifiably) mostly interested in what they could move — big blockbusters, action, and horror (to say nothing of that private little room just past the curtain in back).
The simple fact of the matter is that most people aren’t adventurous, or particularly demanding, when it comes to the movies they watch. For most of us, movies are escapism, not art, and that’s OK. As film theorist Rudolf Arnheim noted, “film is a medium that may, but need not, be used to produce artistic results.” But for fans of film who love and appreciate that medium as art as much as entertainment, there has always been an acute awareness of a (perhaps necessary) tension between corporate profit and artistic expression. In a creative sense, it is the fear that challenging, weird, or avant-garde creations are inevitably swallowed up, repressed, or stripped of their soul and reduced to dull, mass-market adequacy. In the sense of access to that art, it is the observation that large corporations concerned only with profit cannot, by their very nature, ever be worthy stewards of cinema’s blurry, wild edges, of the works more at home in the soul than in a crowded multiplex.
For a very brief period, when mom & pop rental stores ruled the world, the force of corporate control over this one aspect of human expression seemed at its weakest. It was to be short-lived (it always is) but it was, in its humble way, profound. In the VHS era in particular, a small studio who invested in eye-catching cover art stood as much chance of being picked up and watched as the studio movie stacked next to it — they were not yet banned by Blockbuster or buried by streaming. It was a time when the weirdos weren’t just living next to the millionaires, they were competing with them, and, sometimes, they were winning.
Rose-colored glasses aside, it was a time worth remembering, and worth celebrating.
