XXX. An Archeology of the Video Store… by Kwasu D. Tembo
What happens to the surviving devotee? Here it is not possible to speak of a missing corpse in the strict sense, for there has not even been a death. An inscription found in Cyrene nevertheless tells us that a colossus could even be made during the lifetime of the person for whom it was meant to substitute. The inscription bears the text of an oath that settlers leaving for Africa and the citizens of the homeland had to swear at Thera in order to secure their obligations to each other. At the moment they swore the oath, they threw wax kolossoi into a fire, saying, “May he who is unfaithful to this oath, as well as all his descendants and all his goods, be liquefied and disappear” (Vernant, Mythe, p. 69).
-Agamben, “An Archaeology of the Oath”
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“The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and our future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.”
― Borges, The Library of Babel
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“In one of the key scenes in Alfonso Cuaron's 2006 film Children of Men, Clive Owen's character, Theo, visits a friend at Battersea Power Station, which is now some combination of government building and private collection. Cultural treasures - Michelangelo's David, Picasso's Guernica, Pink Floyd's inflatable pig - are preserved in a building that is itself a refurbished heritage artifact. This is our only glimpse into the lives of the elite, holed up against the effects of a catastrophe which has caused mass sterility: no children have been born for a generation. Theo asks the question, 'how all this can matter if there will be no-one to see it?' The alibi can no longer be future generations, since there will be none. The response is nihilistic hedonism: 'I try not to think about it'.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
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Time has been the subject of numerous movies over the years, since it is one of the most difficult things to manage in life. Time became a difficult issue for Bill Murrary in Groundhog Day, since the same day repeated itself over and over again. The character had no control over time, and so could not control his life. As an AM, you must be able to quickly resolve all issues related to time and attendance tracking. The goal of this Achievement is to teach you to manage time and attendance for your BLOCKBUSTER store.
- Blockbuster Video: The Starmaker Series: Assistant Manager, Developed by Tim Hicks and Michele Eby
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Somebody I revere greatly said to me recently that I watch things “seriously”. There was a rebuke in it. As if to suggest that my viewership is not fun, the reason being that I am unable, perhaps to a chagrined shame, to split my attention between more than one screen and more than one set of dialogue. I asked myself, sighing, shaking my head: But I’ve three hearts and only one screen*. So isn’t the film meant to simply be watched? Or is it now, in our accelerated time where attention is always - Also at a deficit, that it’s not enough to simply watch a film to watch a film, that the screen and what’s beamed on or through it is but one surface upon which the rule of our petty surplus enjoyment must bounce? Do I have to keep silent or watch in secret to save what little enjoyment in view remains to me - screen it to screen it, so to speak? Are some oaths only kept in silence?
Language games aside - and not to sound dramatic - but I swore an oath to cinema a long time ago now without even knowing it. It took place in the video store. The content of that oath, the obligations made, the feelings of wonder and shock and peace that shuttled back between screen and self turned me into a devotee of the form. True faith, they say, is active. Ceremony. The ritual of tracking, the image clearing, like prognostications fine tuned through Delphic sulfur. A seance of a scene conjured out the static. The ritual of rewind, the difficulty of skipping, going back in the time of the narrative, just as much as the fast forward, an imprecise alchemy of old silver and new polyester and plastic, a deceleration despite the angry bees inside the Moses-like tablet of the VCR, working hard to spin the loading gears and capstans, the motors and levers and guides without breaking the loading-arm this time, and the thousand times before, though the cheap plastic barely held. The feeling of a violation when the enthusiasm of repetition runs over and rips through the reel lock, mixing up the symmetry of the reel’s supply and take-up, the tape pulled apart by the magnet of your desire to see…
At first, the etiquette and rules of viewership - “be kind, rewind” - were established in what was for me a hallowed place. I learned how to watch in there. How it felt to watch, the sentiments of the screen - put up, let out, and hidden - all at the same runtime, captured and released at the same framerate. To see dreams, in all their horror and beauty, absurdity and hysteria and histrionics, on a screen. To appreciate the kraft of light on dust through the little void of the dark space between CRT and photos received, tube to eye to body and soul, a wormhole. A chapel perilous. A dream machine.
The video store was a Borgesean library. It was a room in which people silently, reverentially albeit excitedly, studied. They studied the posters, the rhizomatic connections between the colors and lines, skin and felt, of Rock With Barney and Demolition Man. They found new disciplines in sections demarcated with laminated plastic and Windows ‘95 clipart, the gradient of which read ‘World Cinema’, whose top shelf was crowned by Sembene and Shuster, Mambéty, Chin, Chan, and Uys. They refined their tastes, holding a folio containing a performance-poem by Diane Lane, a technicolor dance by Run Run and Runeme Shaw, a masterpiece by Fellini, a spell by Kurosawa.
The children clutched the images that would come to wallpaper their idols. After watching Spider-man Unlimited or Batman: Beyond or Silver Surfer: The Animated Series, they’d know the future, the kinesthetics of superheroes and action figures to come. The video store made slow connections, made clairvoyants. It made doors, openings, exposures to exposures. We found our dreams in there. We found the dreams of others too, scattered in stacks, in rows, box after box, brick after brick, a pearlescent sheen of underdisc, a road to Oz or Wonderland, El Dorado or Xen-La, the outer blue of the back of the theater or the living room where the screenshine is dimmest, “there where the air thinner” .
It was like being taken to church. I couldn’t refuse. If I did, I’d have to default to the seniority of my sister and watch Titanic again. I’d have no say in what Chinese food we’d eat with our viewing - like treading water, worship works up an appetite - or what pizza we’d have, if we were lucky. There was such a clear association with company and comradeship and family in that place. The video store was a shared experience.
It was also a luxury. It accompanied a treat, as much as it was a treat itself for we congregants and parishioners. A gift given by my mother, holding down multiple jobs, fatigued. Because of her, the video store was a special place, an expensive place. Just under ‘frequent-enough’ to not have a costly membership. A gift of the unforeseen, seeing the unlooked for. In that hallowed place of surprise I found The Craft and The Exorcist, Waiting to Exhale, Set it Off, The Arrival, Deep Impact, A Bug’s Life, Schindler’s List, Godzilla, Armageddon, There’s Something About Mary, Tarzan, The Full Monty, Liar Liar, Men in Black, Space Jam, Twister, The Rock, Independence Day, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Notting Hill, Star Wars I, The Sixth Sense, Leon: The Professional. They all found me, agog and willing, eager to hear and see and feel. Scriptures, travelogs from the strange farawaynear lands of the absurd, the heartheavy solitudes, the un-pinnacled vaults of the imagination.
It was from the video store that my cousin, a purveyor of holy writ moonlighting as a babysitter, asked my sister and I in hushed tones “have you guys seen The Fifth Element?” We shook our heads no. He made us popcorn. We watched in utter silence. Afterwards, I stood on the balcony of my aunt’s apartment, looking out over Bedford Gardens complex, past the soccer pitch, the pools, the palms, tennis courts and boom gates, down to the base of the tower at Bedford Centre where I knew the video store to be, on your left, the first thing you see when you enter, tucked away opposite the dry cleaners who still do business today. The sun was setting over it. The halo made it look like a temple. My heart soared as I swore a silent oath, as I felt myself commit to the medium. I smiled with tears welling, quietly, brimming with wonder. Quietly, the soul I once had said to the screen: my dreams are yours forever.
Then it was a binder. The library, the room was gone. The plastic tablet, not stone or emerald but holy still, was now rounded. A little flat world designated with three new and more symmetrical letters - VHS transmutes to DVD. The video store was now an ex’s brother and his talent for piracy. The range became a catalog of his taste, ersatz and Canadian and ostensibly more mature, I was told. Or what his mother, S***n, with a pleasant smile, intense green eyes, and dark sensibilities, requested. Super Troopers and American Beauty, Gladiator, X-Men, Shrek, Finding Nemo, The Last Samurai, Bruce Almighty, more Matrix, The Da Vinci Code, Casino Royale, Pirates of the Caribbean, Ocean's Eleven, Ice Age, and Butterfly Effect; dreamstreams I skipped wading into and flung myself into instead - repeatedly - Minority Report, Lost, Heroes, Deadwood, and Lord of the Rings, over and over and over again.
He was doing a job I don’t think he received enough credit for in that house. That house was like a theater full of Booths and Lincolns. Paranoiac and tense. Silent terse suppers. Bodkin quips and niceties like bacon-wrapped scallops brined in cyanide over bladed strawberry, walnut, and spinach salads. But in the basement, whether or not they had fingers resting or pressing on hidden hair triggers, they all watched and laughed and shared the plastic butter popcorn, split the clodhoppers evenly, allowed a comment or remark with a lazy chuckle, and for the span of the runtime, nobody got hurt.
And when everyone went to bed, walking backwards out the door to the entertainment room, lest they were shot or stabbed in the back, my ex and I remained and turned that little theater into something else. It spoke both for and through and at us. Enchanter and escrow. It said what we could not say to one another. It showed what we feared show one another. It gave us a language and model for oath-making and oath-keeping. And so with the aid of the other binder, the one against the far wall under her brother’s bed, the blue of the screen silvered our bodies as the muted scenes watched, in reversed scopophilia, our attempts to be silent as we felt, in ourselves, that the watchers were still somehow being watched. Watched to see if we’d follow the lead of the scene and perform half seated, half-carpeted oaths to never be or become like those who left with trigger fingers and bloody backs, angry, doubtful dead folk walking. No, not us. We’d committed to watch, to feel, to recreate. The screen as our witness. In the wash of the high pitched whine or squeal of the otherwise silent set, as enormous and momentous as Kubrick’s monolith, horizontal in the flyback, I was transformed — all deflections un-yoked, ferrite beads hissing as the deflection circuits screamed their silent scream of silver-blue fire. The mute button revealed a choir. A chorus of sighs and electricity, an uncanny version of night crickets x800 slower. We became aware in our seeing and being seen. We awoke, mind and body both, and, naked, were displayed in a little lake of liquid crystal in an entertainment room in a wealthy suburb called Langford. And in the pressure and warmth and depth, we were Blue Velvet and Century of the Self and Control. We were 8mm, Vanilla Sky, Crash, Natural Born Killers, Mulholland Drive and Eyes Wide Shut. We were Betty and Diane, and Rita. We were fiction and documentary. The agents of the screen, the tablets and disks, watched us change as they receded from view, hidden behind a bitten shoulder, ribboned through a haze of tousled hair. We were Jeffrey. The screen was Dorothy Valens.
Then it became a circuit. I worked with my friend Z___ in a video store for a long summer. It was called Sunset_____. Fitting, in so many ways. Ourselves, along with another theater major who worked with us, were the last to work there before the couple that owned it folded. To this day, I cannot help but wonder if we were not the cause. I think of all the mistakes we made, what bad employees we were. The unbalanced till, always 70 odd dollars short or over. A failure of improvised mental arithmetic always led me to make up spurious promotions to complex requests. An overture of “hey, um, so can I rent the first four discs of The Wire season 3 on my Dad’s account, then um, can I put 75 cents towards renting Transformers for a week? Also is that disc-uh, yeah, the second one - back in? People are talking about Battlestar and I don’t wanna be left behind so…” would have me respond by saying, “you know that today is free DVD rental day, right? Yeah, you only pay late fees if they’re overdue”. Or how I’d give my visiting friends free bags of popcorn, candycups, or Redbulls if they’d play us an improvised ballad on the acoustic one of them was bound to be carrying. Sometimes, it’d be accompanied by a beatbox. Or how I’d take a copy of Daredevil or Constantine or The Jacket or Powder Blue or The Machinist or Lucky Number Slevin from the 1$ bin from time to time. In that place, my overbrimmed enthusiasm made me a “ Kalevra”, a “bad dog”.
Late fees, accounts, balances, snack stock. The scene was a circuit of local business and commerce. We were Romantics back then. To us it was still an august house, a dream machine. We’d sworn oaths we intended to uphold, you see. We’d try and set an atmosphere. Something wonder-ful and strange. Prefuse 73 or Nujabes and Fat Jon on the Samurai Champloo OST playing over the tin-y speakers hidden precariously in the ceiling. But there’s panting and burping and strange sounds on the former. There’s urbanity on the latter that ran askance the ears of Mr. X or Mrs. Y’s eminence grise, looking down their glasses at us as they requested Amadeus for the 17th time. So we’d watch Bright Star and Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid, Flame & Citron, and The Last Unicorn over and over. And during my shift, especially when I was alone, I’d walk up and down the short squat corridors of that little node of the infinite library, the very idea of the video store, the database, the subscription service and their respective keep of audiovisual imagination. I’d gently run my fingers over the shelves, looking at all the scriptures I should have read but didn’t, the one’s i’d recognize, feeling both guilt and longing for the one’s I should be able to remember, the images I should have seen and stored, in and through my eye, chased at lightspeed, onto the unceasing program of my kopfkino. “There’ll be time”, I’d tell myself. “There’ll be time to fulfill your oath”. But then it became clear that there won’t be time. That all time is is running out.
We became feeder belts in a circuit of accelerated consumption for the sake of social capital. To see and to watch changed from experiencing something to knowing what happened. Single viewings turned seasonal. An addict’s rush to acquire more and all. The screen bifurcated, triangulated, metastasized to encompass all surfaces - screen and soul, not a hair’s difference between them. Late fees now mattered in a different way. You’d see it then and now, though common, in their eyes. The sentiment of the megachurch built atop the ruin of the crypt - When it’s my turn, I’m going to watch all this shit while I look up details about production, what people are saying, and the juiciest Rotten Tomatoes reviews, and talk about it confidently so that I can be seen, from my speedrun through runtimes, roughshod through what were once the slow hallowed halls of the video store, slow scenes captures in long takes, as the sujet supposé (sa)voir.
Well. I could conclude by proselytizing about the current forms of this circuit - with letterboxd or wordle or Kermode (who, along with Mayo, I admire) or video essays or streaming square in my sights. But I’ve done this. I’ve built a fledgling career on the attempt to do this with something resembling scholarly acumen. Or I could do the lazy thing and end with a pun (people like puns) or some kind of wry signoff. But I think you and I would both agree that the sun has already set over those ruins of a form. Either way out, you still might find me, I’d wager, on the banks of the Stream holding vigil, watching Dr. Mabuse in silence via YouTube on my phone, an apostate waiting for the big sleep to come. Because oaths are only broken in death.
* “A new survey of 19 TV producers and showrunners shows that there is excitement for opportunities provided by having viewers use a second screen while watching their favorite shows — but primarily as a tool to drive viewers back to the content on their TVs. That is among the findings in the second part of a two-part study conducted jointly by NATPE and the Consumer Electronics Association. Part one, released earlier in January, found that almost half of those who use a second screen (a computer, tablet, smart phone or other device) have tried synchronizing their content experience to live TV viewing. The second part includes feedback from consumers about want from the second screen experience, showing 48 percent want information on a shows storyline and characters and 46 percent want additional background on the episode. The producers interviewed for about half an hour each for part two of the study include Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad), Anthony Zuiker(CSI), Damon Lindelof (Lost) and Caryn Mandabach (Nurse Jackie). While they see great opportunity in the second screen, they also see challenges beginning with the need for additional money, people and other resources to create high quality content that works with two screens. “Most respondents say there is not enough time, talent or funding at this point to give the second screen the attention it and the audience deserve,” says the latest study research, “and they struggle with using technology to create an immersive experience.” There is another concern — that real-time viewing on both screens will pull attention from the primary content being delivered. The study found they don’t want to leave viewers with a disjointed experience, which could hurt the brand.” Alex Ben Block, “TV Showrunners Lack Resources to Invest in Second Screen Engagement”, The Hollywood Reporter, 2014.
