A Short History of Collecting DVDs

I submitted this piece to the Chicago Reader on Monday.

A Short History of Collecting DVDs
A mere decade’s worth of innovation in the home video market has changed what it means to collect
11 January 2010

WHEN I was in tenth grade, I won a $250 gift card to Best Buy through a city essay contest. The awarding of the prize was held in the morning, and before my dad drove me back to school, I made him take me straight to Best Buy so that I could spend every dollar. This, of course, was in an age when “recession” and “Suze Orman” were not ingrained in the area of my brain where everyday decisions concerning the satisfaction of wants are made. Were I to stumble upon a windfall like a $250 gift card to Best Buy today, or even a $20 gift card to Chili’s that someone bought for me at CVS along with his cough drops, I would deliberate prudently as to how I could optimize the return on those dollars.

This prize, it turned out, became the seed money for what is now my unwieldy DVD collection. I bought about fifteen movies that day—movies that, to a mind exposed only to American cinema of the 1990s and later, were the greatest of all time: American History X. Requiem for a Dream. Dumb and Dumber. Jerry Maguire, once my number one pick. I did venture a little out of this territory to get The Graduate and also Citizen Kane, which I’d seen once on VHS after it topped the American Film Institute’s first “100 Movies” list. These films, along with the bare-bones Annie Hall that I’d previously bought at a Suncoast store for almost thirty dollars, formed the cornerstone of a library that I would drag with me each time I moved to a new place.

From 2002 to the middle of 2007, I only purchased movies that I truly enjoyed and wanted to be able to watch at will, like Being John Malkovich, the two Kill Bills, and Boogie Nights. This, I assume, was the most common intention when a consumer in the first half of this past decade bought a DVD: to own a certified classic, whether in his eyes or those of the international film community; a childhood memory, the repackaging of some indelible coming-of-age theater experience; or maybe a warm and fuzzy favorite, or a puzzle that had to be revisited. In short, DVDs were not meant to be watched once, and they surely weren’t meant to sit shrink-wrapped in a pile on a random side table at home with their $9.99 price tags intact.

But something happened in the middle of the decade, perhaps as early as 2002 for some people—but for me it was 2007, as I started my first full-time job and lived in my own place: home movies became ridiculously affordable. Consumers could blind-buy new releases, watch them once, and not worry about the inventorial consequences. A DVD is light, compact; its digital content degrades infinitesimally compared to the tape of a videocassette. It is a beautiful product, sure to be a cherished relic of the ’00s. No longer did you have to be a cinephile collecting Criterion laserdiscs to boast a decent film library. Digitizing home video has democratized film education in the same way that digitizing the production, post-production, and distribution of film (with flash-memory HD camcorders, video editing suites, and YouTube, respectively) has democratized filmmaking. Quentin Tarantino and some of his contemporaries famously learned their craft by watching myriad films on VHS, but it’s clear that our present technology makes it even easier today. Thanks to digital media, we can all learn film, and we can all make film.

After my final exams in 2007, I was looking for something to do in the downtime before commencement. Not one to participate in pub crawls, I found, on sale on Amazon, Fellini’s Amarcord and Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (the former an excellent reissue; the latter a sumptuous box set for less than thirty dollars!), and my world thenceforth was never the same. In a mere two and a half years, I blind-bought so many classic films through Amazon sales that I bloated my modest Jerry Maguire collection tenfold. I have amassed an inventory so large that a queue of movies was implicitly formed; I will be halfway to retirement before I can find the time to wade through all of them. And that’s assuming I stop collecting DVDs now.


I DID not expect that cessation to occur so soon, but it mostly has. With my very late adoption of Netflix two months ago, there has been another epochal shift in how I watch movies, in what it means personally to collect. At first, I bought the movies I loved. I would pop in my first DVD, Annie Hall, just to hear Diane Keaton sing “Seems Like Old Times” over the wistful final sequence. During the next phase of DVD buying, I acquired movies that I thought were canonical, significant enough to have to be referenced. Imagine the delight to my fledgling-moviegoer mind when I watched Raging Bull and found out that Paul Thomas Anderson had paid homage to its final scene in his own last shot of Boogie Nights. Equipped with my movie arsenal, I could compare “I’m the boss” to “I’m a star” immediately. But the Netflix paradigm goes further for me. I don’t have to reconstruct the film canon in my apartment. I don’t need the physical media cluttering my shelves to make straightforward comparisons. Furthermore, the ability to stream movies obviates the need to even insert a disc into a player, let alone to buy a disc. Netflix is there to collapse my DVD library into a virtual presence, a dynamic list of titles, a collection of bytes.

Need to catch up on the films of Michael Haneke or Jacques Audiard? Rent them all! Aching for a season-four marathon of Punky Brewster? Not a problem! (No, there’s nothing wrong with Punky Brewster. TV on DVD is a marvel unto itself. There’s an episode of The X-Files called “Triangle” that I’ve been dying to see since its first air date in 1998; TV on DVD and Netflix make it possible.)

The digitization of media extends beyond my favorite realm of film. Advances in digital music collapsed a CD and record collection into a pocket-sized iPod filled with mp3 files: long gone are vacations encumbered by a flipbook of CDs, a disc player, and enough AA batteries for a hurricane preparedness kit. The Amazon Kindle and other e-readers are poised to try the same for books and print media. But there are portentous implications and difficult questions that come with all this digitization. It’s still hard for me to imagine the obsolescence of the tangible book, the extinction of dust jackets and deckle edges, the fading magnetism of a well-designed trade paperback. But if we ever get there, what can adequately succeed the first edition/first printing of a book, a form of media that has survived so much longer than the DVD will? Will it mean anything to have a Kindle edition of Philip Roth’s latest novel downloaded on release day versus ten years after? I have been buying Pynchon first printings on the chance that my grandchildren will inherit them and think I’m cool. My coolness won’t be on display with an undifferentiated e-book.

For the music industry, in which the transition started long ago, circa Napster days, we might wonder what has become of the conception of the album as a cohesive musical whole. But sadly the album has been dying for a while, as the current business model revolves exclusively around producing a hit single. Look at a list of the number-one singles in any of the past few years and grasp the shrewd efficiency of making money this way: I find it hard to believe that it actually took more than twelve minutes to concoct “3” or “Right Round.” And nowadays the album—that antiquated, lofty notion—can be retooled with “deluxe” or “platinum” editions after the fact to promote a new single not in the original studio release. So what remains of the integrity of the album? Do we really need an upgrade, upgrade of I Am…Sasha Fierce just so that somebody can cash in on her slapdash Lady Gaga remix? Picture Bob Dylan releasing Blonde on Blonde – Deluxe Edition just because he had visions of Rihanna that he wanted to add as a bonus track.


AT THE beginning of the decade, we are on the precipice of what may be an extraordinary expansion of our digital media. Already corporations are coming to grips with the financial ramifications. Warner Bros. recently struck a deal with Netflix to delay the rental availability of its titles by one month. How that will increase the revenues from their home video sales, I don’t know. I don’t really need to watch The Hangover the day it appears on Blockbuster and Best Buy shelves. I think distributors simply need to stop worrying and love what is actually an astonishing innovation, and a boon to anyone who loves film. It is an inexorable transition.

There will always be the theater to enjoy that communal moviegoing experience, which Manohla Dargis described recently in regards to Avatar. (I’m proud, for instance, to have screened Antichrist at the Chicago Film Festival, just to have shared in the “experience” of genital mutilation.) And there will also be physical media like Blu-ray or its successors for those who cannot accept anything less than the highest quality at home, unless we can develop the technology to affordably stream the huge amounts of data contained on these discs, too. Incidentally, I am still collecting Criterion DVDs and Blu-rays, which are lovely anyway, “Watch Instantly” be damned.

But my dream is that, by 2020, I will have the option to stream all of my home movies. Film lovers around the world would be able to access some global digital repository to watch The African Queen or Pather Panchali or the restored Metropolis at three in the morning if they wish. We will have made a copy of the corpus of film history from museums, universities, studio vaults, and art houses and pasted it into our homes.