On September 29, Netflix will cease to mail out DVD rentals, the end of a 25-year movies-by-mail operation that expanded people’s access to a world of movies and then, eventually, evolved into a streaming model that may have broken the entertainment industry entirely. That’s a lot of complicated emotions to pile onto one red envelope.
Cinephiles are already prone to romanticizing every aspect of the moviegoing experience. It’s no surprise that the kind of person (hi!) who still swoons over the Regal celluloid roller coaster and the soothing hum of the Focus Features logo would have a surplus of nostalgia for the era of Netflix DVDs now that its ending. But as much as these wistful feelings may simply be a product of nostalgia for my early 20s, the end of the Netflix DVD era means the end of a significant avenue of access to movies, one that cannot possibly be replaced by what we have now.
Just days before that September 29 deadline, I mailed back my final Netflix DVD, a semi-obscure documentary from 2006 called Small Town Gay Bar. A mid-aughts queer indie, it would never have been available at my local brick-and-mortar video store, which makes it exactly the kind of thing that drew me to Netflix in the first place. Back in the heady days of October 2003, living under the thumb of George W. Bush’s America, recently graduated from college but not yet gainfully employed, I took my first steps into the future and signed up for this buzzy new service that mailed you DVDs.
Netflix first came into my life as a conspiratorial whisper. “Have you heard about this business that will rent DVDs through the mail?” a friend said, like they were passing on a rumor about the secret location of El Dorado. The notion seemed to be, if not a scam, at least scam-adjacent. My experience with acquiring media through the mail was checkered with tape-trading for Tori Amos tour bootlegs and a mountain of unpaid debts to the Columbia House record and DVD clubs. But the no-frills promise of Netflix intrigued me: no due dates, no late fees, you kept a queue online, and when you sent one disc back (in a prepaid envelope, no less), you got the next one. I’ll admit, I expected the first disc to arrive in my mailbox broken to bits, but those little red envelopes proved resilient.
And by that point, Blockbuster Video—the same Blockbuster Video for which, 20 years later, I would be writing sonnets about how much I miss it—was seriously pissing me off. Despite the nostalgia it has since announced for itself—the tactile memories of a physical space, the soothing symmetry of those endless aisles—the Blockbuster of the early aughts increasingly dedicated all that vast shelf space to fewer and fewer movies. And 50 rows full of Attack of the Clones meant a lot of the movies people wanted to rent were no longer available. More and more, the benefits of Blockbuster were no longer outweighing the annoyances—due dates, late fees, having to leave your house to get there.
So enter Netflix, which by the time I hopped on board was already six years old. Founded by Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings in 1997, Netflix was almost as old as the DVD format itself. Since 1998, according to the company, it has mailed out more than 5 billion DVD and Blu-ray rentals to subscribers across the US. A monthly subscription plan began in September 1999, and the company was off to the races. Famously, in 2000, the owners tried to sell their business to Blockbuster for $50 million, but hubris intervened. The company went public on May 23, 2002…days after I graduated college, with no full-time job and a lot of time on my hands.
Along with the announcement that Netflix’s DVD service would be ending came an offer to download your complete rental history. I jumped at the chance. Surely my earliest Netflix rentals would offer some kind of tarot-esque window into where my present-day taste now resides. I eagerly scrolled to the bottom of the list to find that my first DVD rental in October 2003 was…the second season of 24. Followed by the first season of Queer as Folk (US). Have I been the problem all along? Is my Netflix rental history a microcosm of the American public turning away from the artistic grandeur of film and toward the cheap thrills of TV?
No, thank goodness. I kept scrolling and found what I was looking for: a treasure trove of the absolute most forgettable, transient, mid (complimentary) indie movies you could imagine. Do you remember the Edward Burns/Rachel Weisz/Dustin Hoffman con artist movie Confidence? Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia Plath in Sylvia? Jason Biggs and Christina Ricci in Woody Allen’s Anything Else? Val Kilmer as porn legend John Holmes in the grimy-as-hell Wonderland? This was an era of bliss! No way was my western New York market getting these movies, and Blockbuster was too busy stocking an entire wall of Bruce Almighty to hook me up.
It wasn’t all forgettable trash, though. That first year alone, I acquired a comprehensive education from a wide range of interesting films, including but certainly not limited to Peyton Reed’s Down with Love, Jane Campion’s In the Cut, François Ozon’s Swimming Pool, John Sayles’s Casa de los Babys, Errol Morris’s The Fog of War, Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, and Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini’s American Splendor. There’s absolutely no way I would have ended up in 2023 writing about film festivals and podcasting about obscure Oscar failures if Netflix hadn’t gotten me access to Capturing the Friedmans and Veronica Guerin.
Joe Reid
Source link
