Academic

Since last week I've been cheering Blockbuster's bankruptcy--I'm old enough to remember Friday nights wasted in a line snaking up and down aisles, and its selection was always pitiful.  I'm a huge Netflix fan.  But a WSJ article yesterday foretold some collateral damage from the rise of the DVD, i.e., the demise of the independent video store.  This is a departure I'll lament.  The article also triggered some reflection on how changes in movie delivery technology affected the evolution of my relationship to movies.  Look below the fold for Usha's Cinematic Enjoyment Evolution.

Stage 1, the Dark Ages: dominated by mainstream Hollywood fare, delivered via multiplexes--scratch that, there weren't any multiplexes back then, just movie theaters--and Blockbuster Video stores.  I was an innocent who referred to "Mel Gibson' Hamlet" when the movie came out, not "Zeffirelli's Hamlet".   Hey, I was in high school!

Stage 2, the Age of Discovery: In college I worked at a campus video store.  I worked the early afternoon shift and got to watch a video as I helped a handful of largely hungover, and thus passive, customers.  As a bonus, I received a "shift video" at the end of the work day.  This was the core of my movie education, such as it was, and inspired in me a passion for independent video stores.  It was also possibly the best job of my life.

Stage 3, the Age of Enlightenment: Post-college found me declaring that I couldn't live in a town unless it had an independent video store and independent theater.  Happily, Madison WI and Charlottesville VA qualified.

Stage 4, the Age of Netflix: I love Netflix.  I love its flattening affect.  Foreign films, indies, obscure classics, all available anywhere the good old USPS delivers.  It blew Stage 3's rule out of the water: I could get almost any film, at any time, all thanks to the transformative effect of the fantastically mailable DVD.  Longtime readers of the blog know I'm a luddite (status update: still no iPod or iPhone).  But this technology changed my world.  Sidenote: I teach a case study of the Netflix IPO and in the highlight of my career as a practicing attorney I actually participated in a phone call with Netflix's CEO.  I believe I said, "yes"  followed by "uh-huh."  Glory days.

Stage 5, the Age of Parenthood: After our daughter was born, my husband pointed out, increasingly stridently, that Netflix DVDs were collecting dust on our entertainment center.  It was hard for me to let go, but I have suspended our membership, accepting the reality that we just aren't watching movies regularly anymore.  Plus a Netflix membership was hard to justify when there's a great independent video store literally 2 blocks away.  And with pallid, unhealthily skinny clerks in funky glasses, laminated homemade cartoon posters depicting the fate of late-returners, and those employee picks that feel like windows into strangers' hearts, it still feels like home to this law professor.  The threat of closure will only make visits that much sweeter.