One of my most vivid childhood memories occurred in a video store: at the ripe age of eight, I fell to my knees in despair in the check-out line at my local Blockbuster in Ocala, Florida upon hearing that all the store’s copies of Return of the Jedi were checked out. Already dancing on pins and needles after just watching The Empire Strikes Back for the first time, I’d have to wait a least another whole week to find out if Han Solo made it out of his carbonite prison dead or alive. Clearly, that was more trauma than my overly-obsessed and impatient little brain could handle, as my other memories of this time are fuzzier; I remember the tapes I chose to rent, often the same one or two over and over again (the 1987 Barbie and the Rockers animated special was a repeat hit for me), far more than I do the space where I obtained them.
I couldn’t tell you the last time I stepped foot in a video rental store. Which makes it an odd coincidence that in less than a week after watching Alex Ross Perry’s archival documentary Videoheaven, I visited two. On a lengthy road trip across the west coast, I first checked out Scarecrow Video in Seattle, renowned for being one of the largest (if not the largest) video archives in the world. Looking for individual titles throughout this two-story treasure trove fast became exhausting and overwhelming, so I zeroed in on the specificity of the sections said titles were sorted in to. Action (Bang!) broke down into Bikers, Blaxploitation, Chop!, Rednecks, Truckers, and Vroom. In the Drama room, I beelined straight for the small but mighty pre-Code section, that was populated with numerous movies I hadn’t even heard of before, much less seen. A few days later, at Movie Madness in Portland, Oregon, I was astounded by how popping the store was on a random Wednesday night in July. The checkout line was steadily populated with customers, many of whom recognized each other, and greeted the clerks like old friends. Movie Madness has some additional attractions beyond renting tapes— it’s also part museum of movie props the shop’s owner acquired over the years, ranging from James Cagney’s tap shoes from Yankee Doodle Dandy to one of the enormous stone lions seen in the Xanadu mansion in Citizen Kane, and there’s a microcinema in the back that hosts actual film screenings and gatherings— but their selection is just as lovingly and uniquely curated, from a huge shelf at the front boasting copies of every single winner of the Best Picture Oscar to a cult movie section (apparently I thought the “White Trash” subsection was funny, as that’s one of the only things I took a photo of), to a section of films associated with upcoming screenings at the stunning Hollywood Theatre nearby, illustrating what’s become a necessarily symbiotic relationship between independently owned operations who are in the business of things that lately seem to reside on the precipice of extinction (in this case, theaters and physical media). The experience made me incredibly envious that I don’t have something similar back home, but also grateful and weirdly proud to witness— from the outside, anyway— these places thriving as preservationists, entertainment sources, educational resources, and pillars of their respective communities. It felt so much more precious and pertinent than the video store of my childhood.
Unfortunately, such places are hard to come by these days. Videoheaven opens with a scene from director Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet, a 2000 adaptation of Shakespeare’s play set in contemporary New York City. And it’s a pivotal scene at that: the one where the titular character (played here by Ethan Hawke) delivers his famous “To be, or not to be” speech. In the speech, Hamlet contemplates death, weighing its release against the unceasing misery of life. The words brought to life by Hawke are unchanged from the centuries-old play. But as Videoheaven points out, the setting of their delivery is unique. Here, Hamlet’s recitation occurs in a video store, his eyes glazing over the movie cases on the shelves as he aimlessly wanders up and down the aisles. The timing transforms it into a prophetic moment, equating the space with the afterlife at the precipice of the DVD boom that would signal the beginning of the end for videos, and subsequently, video stores, as film ownership supplanted film rental. That Perry’s analysis is narrated throughout Videoheaven’s sprawling three-hour runtime by Maya Hawke—Ethan’s daughter, who also notably shot to fame playing video store clerk Robin on the Netflix series Stranger Things— adds a fascinatingly meta and intergenerational layer to the sequence that works in tandem with the film’s argument about past and present, fiction and reality, constantly existing in dialogue with each other.
Videoheaven is partly based on Daniel Herbert’s book Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store, a nonfiction work that examines not so much the medium of video, but the spaces— and by extension, the social interactions— created around the medium. The visual nature of film is essential to Perry’s expansion on Herbert’s original piece. In Videoheaven, Perry culls from dozens of movies (and some episodes of TV) to illustrate how the evolution of the video store’s depiction on screen from its humble origins in the mid-1980s to its last gasp in the early 2010s is a reflection of the arc of its real life lifespan. The doc is divided into several chapters, the first most closely hewing to the objective facts and figures nature of Herbert’s book, the rest revolving more around Perry’s decidedly more subjective analysis. There are some real world nostalgic commercials for chains like industry titan Blockbuster and Hollywood Video utilized here and there, as well as news clips expounding on the video boom, but Perry largely uses clips from narrative movies (and a few television shows, ranging from Seinfeld to Frazier to South Park) to illustrate his points. The chapters may largely be thematically divided— one segment focuses on how adult video rentals transported peoples’ private lives and desires into the public sphere, while another tracks the increasingly centralized role of the video store clerk, and the impact their often overbearing personalities had on the store patrons— but the overall film moved forward chronologically. Perry notes the video store’s first major appearance on screen comes in Brian De Palma’s 1984 thriller Body Double, in which Craig Wasson’s struggling actor Jake Scully ventures out to a Hollywood video store in search of information on Holly Body (played by Melanie Griffith), a porn actress he realizes while flipping channels is the woman in the window across the way he’s been ogling. Jake is taken to an area at the back of the video store, where he enters into the world of adult filmmaking, and finds himself at the epicenter of a Frankie Goes to Hollywood music number whose status as reality or fantasy is subject to interpretation. This sequence, as Perry points out, equates perusing the aisles in search of your next cinematic journey with danger, adventure, and sex.
Body Double is a glossy, star-studded auteur production. The next clips Perry cuts to however, is another 1984 movie featuring key scenes in a video store: Gorman Bechard’s Disconnected, a grainy, low-budget slasher in which a female video store clerk leaves her boyfriend for a stranger who may or may not be a serial killer on the loose. Here, Perry points out how the dialogue in a scene where a man casually flirts with the clerk is one of the first on-screen depictions of the space as a center for social— and potentially romantic— interaction. Seeing these two clips next to each other is a precise indicator of the wide range of material— some the biggest blockbusters imaginable, others nearly forgotten gems— Perry pulls from throughout the film, and just how pervasive the video store became across all levels of media at this time. He (along with some incredible organizational work from editor Clyde Folley; look no further than his layering of a clip of Jack Black singing the score from Driving Miss Daisy in a video store in The Holiday alongside Jack Black reenacting Driving Miss Daisy to replace a tape in his video store in Be Kind Rewind) structures the film so that the abundance of clips and their often repetitive nature hammer home many of his key points for the audience all the more thoroughly. When he illustrates early in Videoheaven how tapes of and posters for films from Troma Entertainment commonly pop up in the background of video stores in movies— or how other movies from the studio making the movie you are currently watching will serve as so much window dressing— after a while, you pick up on it.
But that repetitiveness is also a stumbling block for Videoheaven. Across its nearly three hour runtime, Perry makes his point again and again. It’s hard not to appreciate the wealth of information, but after a while, it starts to feel like the film’s length is only to justify the bevy of material at his disposal. I don’t know that a shorter, punchier film would have been more effective, however, beyond possibly holding the attention span of the more casual viewer for longer. But for filmmakers, cinephiles, and those looking to scratch a nostalgic itch, Videoheaven is equal parts smart analysis, history lesson, and tribute to the communities that formed around these spaces. Perry demonstrates this best in the segment centering around the aforementioned Be Kind Rewind, a Capra-esque comedy from 2008 and written and directed by Michael Gondry in which a video store clerk and his friend start remaking every movie in the shop’s inventory using whatever cheap equipment and supplies they have on hand after one of them becomes magnetized and accidentally erases all the tapes. What begins as a desperate effort to save the store morphs into an activity their entire community comes together to participate in. The ultimate argument is that while the video store itself may or may not survive, its role in inspiring film production perpetuates the medium’s survival. Perhaps that’s true. As Perry points out, many now-acclaimed filmmakers, such as Quentin Tarantino, were video store clerks in their formative years; Perry himself once worked at Manhattan’s Kim’s Video, whose staff also included the likes of director Todd Phillips. Perhaps this is all just an overly sentimental reading from a generation nostalgic for a time when they had a dedicated place where they had so much of cinema’s past and present available at their fingertips, not floating around on a streaming service, but physically in front of them– heaven, as the title suggests. But Videoheaven is so earnest, I buy into it. And when I visit one of the few remaining independent video stores today, like Scarecrow or Movie Madness, I wholeheartedly believe it.
Videoheaven is now playing at the IFC Center in New York City, and begins a nationwide theatrical rollout on August 6. Runtime: 173 minutes.
Katie at the Movies 