On Video

Happiness. Musty, unrewound, slightly sticky happiness.

As much as I love my new neighborhood, the one place where it does suffer is in its lack of a good video store. Or any video store, for that matter. There used to be a Hollywood Video, wedged in between LIQUOR and the nail salon outside the Market of Choice, but it recently closed, and is now just an empty storefront, haunted by the ghosts of a thousand 12-year-olds trying to discreetly rent Showgirls.*

*I watched some of Showgirls on Pay-Per-View in the hotel room in Spokane, and maybe it was the absinthe I’d just drank, but it was sort of amazing. A guy bones a chick in a swimming pool, and he makes it look both feasible and enjoyable. If I owned a company that installed pools, that would be our commercial – just the pool sex scene and then our phone number.

Chances are you know exactly what I’m talking about, because Hollywood Video is closing up shop all over the place. The Internet’s relentless march of destruction has already singlehandedly destroyed print journalism and the professional pornography business, and now video stores are next to be thrown into the dustbin of history.

I mean, it makes sense. Video stores are just buildings full of things to look at while you sit on your ass doing nothing for two hours – the only problem was that you had to get off your ass to go to the video store in the first place, and now Netflix has eliminated that step. If necessity is the mother of invention, laziness is totally the father (and I assume, given his slothful nature, that he’s behind on his child support payments).

I’m particularly fond of Netflix Live Streaming at the moment because they haven’t gone through all the legal hurdles to get exclusively good, famous movies on there, so there’s still an awful lot of obscure arthouse stuff and mindless trash being made widely available to bored people with too much time on their hands. Protip: Stay away from Antichrist unless you want to see Willem Dafoe ejaculate blood.

But for all its convenience, Netflix will never be able to recreate for me the very experience of going to a video store. There’s a sort of excitement about it, being able to see all the titles around you, being able to meander through the store if you don’t know what you want to watch or hurrying to grab a new release before they run out of copies.

When I was 9, I went down to American Family Video and grabbed the last copy of Beetle Adventure Racing for the Nintendo 64 a split second before some other kid. He pouted as I strutted up to the counter to pay, vindicated, having won a race before even plugging the game in. That’s the sort of thing Netflix can’t give you – scarcity, competition, making children cry…

Incidentally, kid, if you’re out there, Beetle Adventure Racing sucked, so… You’re welcome, I guess.

Come to think of it, I’ve got all kinds of fond memories of American Family Video. I was a fat kid, and the half-mile walk to that video store was about the only exercise I ever willingly attempted.

Alexander and I had probably spent a combined total of well over a day just wandering up and down the aisles, arguing about what French kung-fu movie we were going to get or daring one another to rent Legends of the Kama Sutra. The staff never seemed to care – even then there was so little business that they didn’t mind the two seemingly homosexual 12-year-olds running around quoting The Fifth Element.

I remember the clunky old plastic VHS cases – blue for new releases, vomit orange for older titles. When DVDs first arrived on the scene, American Family set aside one shelf for them – the DVD section, comedies, dramas, and horror movies all mixing together. Over the years, the DVD section grew like a cancer throughout the entire store and then killed it shortly before I went to college.

When the store closed, they had a huge sale to get rid of their stock – I picked up Punch Drunk Love and Road to Perdition for something like $6 total. They were even selling the shelves for $20; clearly the owners were still sort of bitter about the whole venture and wanted to get rid of anything that would remind them of the fact that they’d spent the last 25 odd years running a video store.

Now the same thing has happened with Hollywood Video, which will leave Blockbuster as the last man standing until the rental industry finally goes completely under. It’s like the Titanic – the band kept on playing right until the end, and I’m sure if anybody wanted to rent a DVD of Hitch to watch on the long wait in the lifeboat there would be a guy in a blue shirt and khakis waiting to give him a copy.

It was one of the great disappointments of my life that I never worked at American Family Video – or any video store, for that matter. I’d always assumed that I’d wind up working there, based on my love of movies and the fact that I pretty much grew up in that place.

American Family Video was the childhood sweetheart who I intended to marry but never did, and then when I come back to town years later and try to look her up, it turns out she’s dead.

Man, that sounds kind of like a country song.

…Yeah, I’m going to open up GarageBand. Something’s happening here.

Truman Capps thinks ‘Piano Man’ would’ve worked equally well if it were written about a video store.