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Illustration by Marley Allen-Ash
Since I quit streaming, I’ve been watching more movies.
I got a DVD player.
“DVDs?” people say, “but aren’t those passé?” Well, if they are relics of a time gone by, there sure are a lot of them. The Toronto Public Library catalogues more than 21,000 movies alone. Add the TV shows and documentaries on DVD, and the total jumps to around 55,000.
And aside from the big library and the nostalgia, I’ve found I like the waiting.
Streaming has taught me that waiting is a nuisance, a glitch, the tragic consequence of a poor internet connection. DVDs are teaching me old habits: waiting makes me purposeful. There are no rash decisions when watching a DVD. I’ve discovered I find this practice of intention, regardless of the movie, satisfying in itself.
It starts with choosing a movie. If it’s a new movie I’m after, I wait for it to be released on DVD. When it is, I join the library hold queue – sometimes, a line of hundreds (apparently I’m in good company!). Eventually, I get to the library, pick up the DVD and walk home to set it up.
I wipe the fingerprints off the disc (unless I clean the disc, the movie won’t run. It’s the grimy truth). I place the disc in the player, which whirrs and clicks.
And then I watch the previews. I can’t skip the previews. These trailers have become, to me, crucial context for watching the feature presentation. They are historical artifacts, contemporaries of the feature movie, advertisements canted to the ideal audience member. Previews divulge interests of the era: quick talk, political paranoia, leather pants.
Maybe previews are the closest a DVD can get to a streaming service’s algorithm of informed “suggestions.” But DVD previews, as keen as they are to sell, must perform a more profound persuasion. The mere click of a button won’t cue up this new interest. I must instead remember the title, return to the library and repeat the waiting process.
After enough delay: the movie begins. By the time I’m watching the movie, it’s been days, sometimes months, since I’ve decided to do so. No matter. It’s finally happening.
But once the movie starts, there’s no promise it will finish. The slightest of scratches on a DVD, it turns out, can pause a movie – permanently. An hour into my viewing of Moulin Rouge, for example, the screen froze – a horrifically sudden stop in what had, until that moment, been unabated frenzy and fireworks.
That was months ago. Is it a shame I still don’t know how the 2001 film ends or how Jim Broadbent concludes Like a Virgin? Or is it a gift to reckon with the obsolescence of an object – loved or hated by so many before me, so many who did find out how the song ends?
Playing library DVDs makes me aware I’m not alone. We are the DVD devotees: see our smudges, scratches and spills, the box corners we smashed and lost.
Handling a DVD reveals the eerie reality of digital media: I can’t handle it at all.
In the DVD I read an encounter between people but also – as I add my own fingerprints to the disc – between the DVD and me. When I am presented with an object that can be lost, broken or damaged, I am called to handle it with reverence.
It’s this mutual touch, both between previous and future borrowers, DVD and me, that has complicated my “watching” of movies. I’m now watching movies in three dimensions. In rejecting instant streaming, I’ve become attuned instead to the immediacy of people around me. My community includes, yes, the anonymous people laying down their fingerprints. But the library enables exchange, too, with the people I know. I can follow through with recommendations from friends, family and strangers. I’m no longer stumped by what’s online (and how much a monthly subscription costs to watch that one movie).
To share art, to admit something made you laugh, cry or think and to extend the hope this movie will do the same for me – is a generosity I accept with gratitude and gravitas. To recommend a movie, after all, takes courage. Giving a recommendation makes people, or the things they like, vulnerable to critique. I’ve been moved not just by the movies friends and strangers have shared with me, but also by their willingness to share them at all.
Because of the delay inherent in DVD borrowing, people know they can’t recommend new movies to me. Instead they recall movies they saw long ago. They probe their pasts. And I begin to know the people through their film recommendations.
Is it a coincidence the DVD preserves the fingerprint – that identifier we take as synecdoche for a person? Or that the underside of the disc is a mirror? In its very properties the DVD disc – witness to encounter – poses the same questions movies do: Who are we? Who am I?
I’ll answer these questions, if ever, by watching more movies of the kind that have weight – the same kind, of course, for which I’ll wait.
Claire Lloyd lives in Toronto.
