ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Augustine Dalton is an award-winning local filmmaker, and a graduate of The Evergreen State College. He currently resides in Olympia, WA.
I'm nine years old in the back of our black Chevrolet Trailblazer. The Movie Trading Company, a small chain native to Dallas and now a Blockbuster subsidiary, was a Valhalla for me as a kid. My parents are going to this outlet in south Dallas because the rental fees and selection are better than the aforementioned dominant chain even though there's one of those much closer in Cedar Hill.
This is my Chuck E. Cheese, my Six Flags. I want to go to the back wall and gawk at the color-coded symmetry of the Simpsons season boxsets; I want to look at that collector's edition of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial that has about five discs for some reason; somehow I doubt that I'm going to sit through all eleven season of M*A*S*H, but I still like to look at them and admire the bonus features. I want to look at the horror section, full of abject cinematic dogshit I'd never heard of and that even back then I knew would probably be lousy in more ways tedious than enjoyable. The Movie Trading Company – which still exists as a chain even if the flagship location my family and I frequented in the aughts is now defunct – was only one of many such spaces that facilitated this burgeoning fascination. When traveling, I liked looking at the DVD selection at any given Flying J, Love’s, or TravelCenter of America (TA) – the latter of which, in my youth, had incredible physical media selection (in addition to having the best damn arcades on the highways). At age thirteen when I first began shaping my lifetime musical preoccupations, I spent what is – in hindsight – a comical amount of money on CD’s at Hastings. This Texas-based media store is also gone now.
In those days, our cups ranneth over. It felt intuitively like a ripoff for a studio to release a DVD that had fewer than three hours’ worth of behind-the-scenes supplements. To my young mind, the DVD didn’t represent just the same films I could very well see on cassette tape in a higher fidelity; the DVD was the elevation of movies from something to be watched to something that could, and should, be studied. And study I absolutely did - those audio commentaries gave my young ears insight into how directors approach every stage of production, whether it was David Fincher explaining his technique for Se7en, Eli Roth explaining the logistics of gore effects on the unrated version of Hostel or the track for Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday where the filmmakers riff on the movie entire time while audibly getting wasted. The generosity that franchise put into its physical media at one time can't be overstated, by the way; the "Script-to-Screen" special feature on the DVD-ROM of Freddy vs. Jason taught me the fundamentals of script formatting at the inappropriate age of 12. Sure, all this may at first sight read like the nostalgic bloviating of a pretentious Pacific Northwest filmmaker who had no life as a kid - it is! - but consider the following: in the early 2000s, Fox Studios put a promo on their DVD previews (directly following the FBI warning) showcasing the extravagance of their home media releases. Intercut with a montage of everything from The Thin Red Line to Doctor Dolittle, the Discount Don LaFontaine narrator boasts thunderously about the assets of their studio’s DVD releases, listing them off with the assistance of impact booms, looping late-90s techno which sounds straight out of Sega’s House of the Dead and rotating on-screen text:
Unbelievable features! Deleted scenes! Documentaries! DVD-ROM! Director & actor commentary! Full 3-D cutting edge menus!
This promo is still viewable on YouTube at over 52,000 views. Why does this matter beyond its curiosity as a bit of aughts ephemera? Because it’s something studios used to be interested in because audiences were interested in it. This wasn’t the exclusive jurisdiction of film dorks. The motion picture – and the new technology that enabled a casually keen study of its construction, processes and inner workings – was still the king, the coolest artform you could brag about participating in. The world now, a brutal score later, has moved on from this. Film fans just watched in bafflement as a Mad Max film struggled to turn a profit. Many people, anecdotally, hardly go to the movies more than annually, if that (high prices and a marked post-COVID deterioration in cinemagoing decorum are certainly factors, though this could warrant its own homily altogether). People aren’t going to the movies because the movies are being devalued from the top down – more on that in a moment. Don’t think that only the underground indie artists are taking a lashing from this; 28 Days Later…, one of the millennium’s best and most well-regarded horror films helmed by an Oscar-winning director, is currently functionally inaccessible on steaming and Blu-Ray alike. Zach Cregger’s Barbarian, an immensely popular 2022 release and easily one of that year’s most purely entertaining films, only very recently secured a future physical media release. So, beyond the obvious, what happened? Why, in 2024’s supposed renaissance of supposed convenience and media ubiquity, are there so many great films in high demand that are nearly inaccessible by legal means? What happened to movies? And what happened to the way we interacted with them?
There is refuge in depots of physical media like Seattle’s beloved Scarecrow Video. Such spaces are curated by those who fundamentally love the artform - much more so, in fact, than the people who manufacture the artform at its most lucrative levels. It's a temptingly easy fallacy to saddle the blame for this situation on the TikTok-rotted masses, bled of all curiosity and empathy that serious artforms require from their spectators. But the reality is that this rotten fish reeks from the head down. The film industry has been purloined at the highest levels by people who no longer care about the medium. Key to this cynicism is that film no longer exists as a paramount artform because, to them, film is only one more format in which Content might be delivered. Content here is an audiovisual sludge encompassing many forms and in which no form earns any special primacy over any other – YouTube Shorts, movies, soulless tech-douche A.I. slop, TikToks, television shows, reaction videos, podcasts and vodcasts, Minecraft streamers. Sublime or shit, they are all (treated as) equal now. Is there any possible interpretation where the dethroning of movies as our great cultural behemoth and the death of the physical platform can be found to be uncorrelated?
The world moves on. Nobody mourned the fax machine and indeed maybe nobody should. This issue goes deeper than the technology itself. The culture industry's tacit declaration of war on physical media is not just a consumer inconvenience for obsessives like me nor is it a mere pragmatic acquiescence to technological inevitability - it's another hideous triumph of pencil-pushing Excel-jockey risk aversion over human creativity.
Now, there's obvious pitfalls to all this rhetoric. Don't mistake this entire plea for some cheap technological nostalgia. Don't mistake this for some fetishization of material commodities. Don’t mistake this as some sentimental harangue about the movie rental section that every Albertson’s used to have. Don't mistake this for some Facebook boomerpost about the halcyon days of landline phones and Blockbuster (as a matter of fact: fuck Blockbuster and every monopoly like it). This isn't even exclusively about Seattle's beloved Scarecrow Video.
This is about art curation as a common good. This is about the preservation of tactile, tangible spaces intended for the celebration and exploration of humankind's greatest artform and about recognizing why it deserves primacy. It’s about taking back our cultural touchstones and not allowing them to slip into the æther just because it helps some line go up. Our greatest cultural treasures are not fax machines.
You can donate to help rescue Scarecrow Video from closing here:
https://scarecrowvideo.org/sos