What remains of the video store today is a boutique novelty. Unless you happen to live in a neighborhood hip enough to indulge in cinephilic nostalgia (but not hip enough to drive rents outside the means of Roger Corman DVD rentals), video stores are an artifact of memory, a relic you’ve either trapped in amber yourself or inherited through sepia-tinted facsimiles of the Ways of Old Home Entertainment. For anyone burnt out on streaming’s broken promise of infinite access, it’s easy to look back at brick-and-mortar rental stores with bleary eyes. Alex Ross Perry’s Videoheaven, a sprawling, filmic ode to the video store 10 years in the making, is an unabashedly indulgent and reverent examination of the ways in which rental stores were borne into and persist in our collective consciousness. It never steers away from nostalgia, bias, and discursive theses, but its greatest strength — and there are many — might rest within its democratic, if deliberately compromised, objectivity.
Videoheaven is a documentary absent the traditional talking-head and primary-footage staples of the form, instead composed exclusively of hundreds of clips of video stores in movies and punctuated with a handful of archival news reels and commercials. The video store plays itself — consider it a Histoire(s) du Cinéma drenched in head cleaner. That means Perry’s movie, narrated by a pitch-perfect Maya Hawke, is less a document of the rise and fall of the video store — though that’s in there, too — than how our appraisal of home media informed its portrayal on the screen.
And vice versa. Videoheaven explains that video stores, following the commercial debut of the VCR in the late ’70s, wouldn’t have had the chance to find their image reflected in film until at least 1977. Still, it only took a few years for the depiction of home video to curdle. Movies like Videodrome and Body Double opened the veins of tapes and video stores to find elements illicit and lurid, and in the case of the former, even malicious; The Lost Boys would draw that connection further, from the lives of adults to the idle time of children. Cronenberg and De Palma aren’t particularly conservative directors, but the influence of their day-one documents of the VHS would set a precedent for video stores as breeding grounds of sex and violence, one that found a welcome, if unfortunate, mirror in the Satanic Panic of Reagan’s American media. Videoheaven traces video stores’ lineage from objects of Republican derision to ubiquitous, social third places to the crumbling collateral of late capitalism, all replete with countless evidence among hard drives overflowing with movie footage.
Videoheaven is loose with its theories — the stigma film put on store clerks, the shame and allure of the adult section, the conservativism of horror’s betrothal to home video — but its sheer breadth renders it a thoroughly convincing mythology. Perry pulls playfully from the high and low spectrum of anything once rentable, from low-budget indies (Video Violence) to Troma (Toxic Avenger III) to high-brow (Hélas pour moi) to Hollywood hits (Last Action Hero). We watch the full, capitalistic rise and fall of the rental store: its inauspicious and independent beginnings in movies like Speaking Parts, the ascent to Blockbuster saturation that made video stores a common set piece in Seinfeld and Frasier, and the eventual return to dust with late-aughts death rattles in Watching the Detectives and Good Dick. Perry allows himself every indulgence along the way, and even his most brittle arguments (e.g., our distasteful representations of video stores may have led to their downfall) feel compelling against his bibliographic arsenal.
At 172 minutes, Videoheaven is a weighty commitment and a risky gambit among audiences outside of physical media revivalists, genre film champions, and really, most people born after 9/11. The movie is willfully pedantic and repeats itself frequently (sometimes reusing lines verbatim); it underlines its ideas in triplicate, not just turning over each stone but rubbing its fingers in the soil until it cakes dry. But all that bloat is a feature, not a bug, and one that doubles as a refreshing rebuke against streaming’s equation of movies with content.
The physical borders of a brick-and-mortar rental store acted as something of a canon: titles could only end up on a shelf by way of implicit curation, capitalistic or otherwise. Entering a video store demanded a breach of the private act of home media consumption by the public sphere and risked the judgement or appraisal of peers and clerks alike based on the quality of your selection, but the ability to pluck a title from the shelf and drag it to the counter meant someone had deemed it worth watching. Streaming’s boundaryless convenience may have sanded the rougher edges off movie nights, but what once seemed a new meritocracy has been rendered an algorithmic, diluted, and inconsistent scroll; the bargain bin has vomited across the aisle, and if it seems like there’s nothing to watch, you might be right. Videoheaven’s depth of material mirrors the delightful paradox of the video store’s inherent limitations: the choices are finite but worthy, the opportunities for discovery endless.
Alex Ross Perry has long worn his cinephilia on his sleeve: He’s a veteran of the storied Kim’s Video and Music, appears frequently on three-plus hour episodes of the Blank Check podcast, and casts a growing shadow across the NYC indie film scene. A former film clerk and working director has a pass to be precious about the video stores that fueled his obsessions, but Videoheaven is less a love letter to the form than an act of rigorous devotion. Rental stores stood to suggest that movies deserved your attention, and however caustic they may have been, the communities they fomented extended the reach of a tape or DVD into a sprawling ether, one that might have found an end in an argument at the counter, a first date, a thumbs up from a cool older brother. Videoheaven’s curiosity is as dense as the shelves of a Hollywood Video, its three hours another chance to walk down the aisle and figure out what to watch.
DIRECTOR: Alex Ross Perry; DISTRIBUTOR: Cinema Conservancy; IN THEATERS: July 2; RUNTIME: ddd
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