After Videoland

AFTER ‘VIDEOLAND’

Callum Preston’s ‘Videoland’ in the ‘Joy’ exhibition at the Immigration Musum has been opening doors in my brain. The installation is a simulacrum of that suburban mainstay of the late twentieth century - the video store. It looks almost accurate, a little uncanny: VHS videos in their requisite categories line walls and aisles and browsers. Preston has created a logo and signage, right down to the branded carpet, but many of the cases still bear stickers from their original homes ( namely Video Ezy and Blockbuster - rivals again). The counter was unmanned. The TV screen behind it played an instructional tape about video-hygeine. There were even snacks - I’m not sure now if these were real - they made me remember how video store snacks were always overpriced and rarely what I actually wanted.

On the day I visited the installation, there were a couple of secondary school groups going through. As I lingered, reading the covers, sometimes getting flashbacks, I was half-listening to their comments. They hung around in merry clumps, laughing at the old world aesthetic. They talked about childhood films and weird parents and the ancient pre-internet Days of Wonder. I could see how a replicated video store could represent joy, but for me other emotions taking over. Solastalgia is Glenn Albrecht’s term to describe the feeling of distress that comes from environmental change. While it is typically applied to the natural world, it can also relate to the built environment, anywhere where a person’s concept of home is disrupted, changed or eradicated. Call it Nostalgia’s wounded cousin. Or, as Albrecht puts it, “the homesickness you have when you are still at home”. 

I was thinking about how video stores functioned as third places. In his book A Great Good Place, Ray Oldenberg defines eight characteristics of third places, including accessibility, being ‘neutral ground’; being conducive to conversation; ‘a home away from home’; having regulars who contribute to the overall tone; being playful spaces where banter is king. In my teenage suburbia third places were hard to find. Youth groups were too holy. The shopping centre could get expensive. Skate parks were unpredictable, and often attracted an unsavoury element. But video stores were an all-weather peak destination. I had memberships at several stores, trying to outrun my fines. The video store stayed open late, You could hang there for hours, alone or with friends. In those days of paltry funds, renting a video was a small happiness. It offered a similar dopamine hit to what I’d get from shopping. And it was a path to a kind of cultural capital. If the film was brilliant, this was a reflection of my impeccable taste. If it was terrible, it just gave me something else to be disparaging about.

The third place possibilities of video stores has been explored in film. Some attest to the concept, some subvert it. In Kevin Smith’s Clerks, careworn Dante serves at the convenience store while his loquacious sociopathic colleague Randall mans the video shop next door. If he’s not sleeping (“resting his eyes”) Randell’s finding new ways to repel his customers. When a woman asks for a recommendation he tells her he doesn’t watch movies. A young mum with toddler in tow, asking for Happy Scrappy Hero Pup is subjected to Randell ordering a string of porn titles from the distribution house. “You’re a clerk paid to do a job,” Dante scolds him, “you can’t just do anything while you’re working.” Randall responds by spitting water in a customer’s face before lighting out for Big Choice video where he can borrow beyond his own store’s limited range. 

In The Lost Boys when single parent Lucy finds work in Max’s video shop, it appears to be the perfect family-friendly environment. Max seems great, potential stepdad material. The night David and his metal-haired vamp cabal wander in off the boardwalk Max warns them away, but it’s all an act. The store is a front and Max is the head vampire, the baddest daddy of them all. 

Mike, the empath video store clerk in Michel Gondry’s Be Kind, Rewind is doing his best to keep business running smoothly, if at all. Then Jerry, his best-worst customer, becomes magnetised and accidently wipes the shop’s entire video collection. The pair resolve the problem by reenacting, remaking and renting out films from Ghostbusters to King Kong, roping in locals, getting increasingly elaborate and adventurous in their efforts. Eventually they have the full support of their community. They save the store, and generate a creative empire that has resulted in a flourishing of ‘sweded’ film festivals in real life. 

I have also been thinking about video stores as repositories of dreams. Mine and other people’s. I spent my twenties in the nineties working in books, music and video retail. I was poor in pocket but rich in inner life. The real me that the customer didn’t see was destined for greatness. Ambition was there, even if it was formless, and unproven. Many of my co-workers had similar yearnings. We were surrounded by other people’s creative output. This could be inspiring, or intimidating, but as long as there were bricks and morter repositories it didn’t seem so unbelievable that one day it might be our book or film or cd on the shelves. Once, during a late shift, a customer who I regularly chatted to asked me out. I felt thrown. You don’t understand, I wanted to say, this isn’t me. By which I meant I was not an agreeable automaton and my uniform was actually camouflage. I said something less articulate, and after that he got his videos somewhere else.

Video stores are third places and repositories of dreams, but also, they are dinosaurs. “Video killed the Radio Star” by The Buggles was the first music video played on MTV in 1981. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights narrativised the seismic effects of home video on the adult entertainment industry in the San Fernando Valley in the 1980s. For a little while, people thought laser-discs might become a thing. The first DVDs were released in Japan in 1996. In 2003, 35 percent of Australian households owned a DVD player. I recall a golden period of tech-in-transition, before smart phones, way before streaming. I was living in regional Victoria and my son was starting primary school. Weekly, we’d mosey down to the video store to borrow five DVDs for ten dollars. They were often the same titles week after week, but it was a mission, and it was a ritual. At the same time I was borrowing videos from Cinemedia online. Films I’d only read about would turn up in a brown box at my local library - another third place - and lo, the weekend was sorted. That video store, like all the others, went the way of all things, but maybe the tides are turning back. They said vinyl was dead. And flares. And low-rise jeans.

Like I said, the Videoland installation opened doors in my head. I am thinking about video store ghost-signs now. There are two in the north that I seek out whenever I’m driving past. They give me a warm and spooky feeling. There must be more. Now I am imagining a bigger project, a map of lost video stores, with personal stories and sad-faces to mark the sites. During the writing of this piece I found myself mesmerised by a digital map by V1 Analytics that shows the rise and fall of Blockbuster in the US. Electro music pumps and the stores twinkle twinkle like little stars. They spread until they nearly cover the whole map, and then - so fast you can hardly believe it - one by one they die.