Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Alex Ross Perry
Narrated by: Maya Hawke
My memories of video stores and the VHS era are of the love/hate variety. As a child in the '80s I had to be dragged out of video stores. They were the most exciting places on Earth, and even before my family owned a VCR I would hang out in their cramped aisles, perusing the boxes and imagining what delights lay on the tapes behind the counter. Back then video stores were small businesses, but they were crammed full of movies. They had an alluring seediness, and as a child visiting a video store felt like you were intruding on the world of grown-ups (if you're of a certain age, you likely saw your first pair of boobs on the back of a VHS box). Things changed in the '90s when corporate behemoths began to put the "mom and pop" stores out of business. These chains had acres of floorspace but a limited selection, overly focussed on carrying 200 copies of Jurassic Park to the detriment of the sort of movies budding cinephiles had been drawn to in the stores of the '80s. By the '90s I had become all too aware of the poor quality of VHS, with its butchered pan and scan presentations, so when DVD arrived I ditched video without any room for sentimentality.
With his exhaustive (and at times, a little exhausting) film essay Videoheaven, writer/director Alex Ross Perry charts the cultural impact of video stores and arrives at a similar conclusion, mapping a journey form sleazy '80s excitement to 2000s apathy via '90s commercialism. Aside from a brief prologue that details how VHS went from a niche format in the '70s to changing the landscape of movies in the '80s, Perry's film isn't concerned with the real world evolution of the video store but rather its portrayal in movies and TV shows.
Maya Hawke - who portrayed a video store clerk on that most nostalgic of Netflix shows, Stranger Things - narrates from a script by Perry that also draws on Daniel Herbert's book 'Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store'. Perry and Herbert's insights are laid over clips of video stores as seen in mostly American media. Perry recognises that video stores were often portrayed as lurid spaces in early depictions, barely separated from sex shops, staffed by weirdos and frequented by oddballs. Some movies posited video stores as a front for criminality, which was indeed the case in the early days (I once worked in a video store that was a money laundering front for the Yiddish mob). When we think of '80s movies we associate the decade with blockbusters, so it's easy to forget the damage VHS did to the box office. Perhaps this explains why movies of the era, from Videodrome to Remote Control, viewed the video tape with suspicion.
When the doc gets to the '90s the perception of the video store has completely changed. The giants have moved in and video stores are now family friendly. They've become the new town square, the place where you're most likely to bump into your neighbours. In media they no longer hold a fascination; they've simply become a location as quotidian as a coffee shop. 90s comedies deploy the video store as a space ripe for awkward social interaction, often focussing on the "back room" with its selection of adult titles. And then there's the video store clerk, painted as an elitist snob who mocks the tastes of their customers, recommending Bergman to a customer who wants a copy of Con Air.
By the end of Videoheaven's three hours, at the point where video stores are rapidly fading in the late 2000s, there's little feeling of nostalgia. This is just another cultural phenomenon that eventually ate itself. A few stores remain today but they're in cities large enough to support what is now a hipster niche. Such stores function as much as museums as commercial entities, offering a glimpse into a past we took for granted. Perry's doc isn't aimed at the kids who never got to step inside a video store but have inherited a secondhand nostalgia through the likes of Stranger Things, but rather for those of us who lived through the era, those of us who have mixed feelings about its evolution and ultimate demise. It's a eulogy for a moment in pop culture that took its last breath just over a decade ago, but which really died much earlier when cinephilia and choice gave way to soullessness and commercialism. Nonetheless, I came away from Perry's film with a feeling of sadness at how capitalism took away something that once brought me so much joy. I wonder if I had been a child in the Blockbuster '90s, with its limited selection of titles, rather than the Mom and Pop '80s, with its abundance of horror, kung fu and sex comedies, would I be sitting here writing about movies now?
Videoheaven is in US cinemas from July 2nd. A UK/ROI release has yet to be announced.
