DV De Profundis

Over the weekend, I was alerted by a couple of movie board threads to a $5.98 DVD sale going on over at Deep Discount DVD. I followed the links, signed up, and spent a bit of money... Then I saw references to an MGM "Buy 2 Get 1 Free Sale," so I poked around a bit further and -- after several attempts to get my shopping cart organized (damn, DDD is a hard site to navigate!) -- I spent at least twice as much again. In the end, as I surveyed the damages, I noted that maybe half of what I ordered I already own in some form or other: VHS pre-record, off-air recording, laserdisc. This is what letterboxing and anamorphic transfers will do to you, once you develop a taste for them.

Besides acknowledging in the back of my mind that I'm essentially paying through the nose (even at sale prices) for titles that weren't done definitively the first time around, I found myself wondering, "What am I buying all this for?" I'm already well over my head as regards things to watch, even in things that need to be watched within the next few weeks. So why do I spend so much money on titles that I know will be put into bankers' boxes to sit around unwatched for an indefinite period?

The title of a documentary about Martin Scorsese once asked the question, "All this filming -- is it healthy?" Maybe not, but at least filming is an activity and a potentially lucrative one. Certainly a lucrative one for Mr. Scorsese. So let me top that question with a more pertinent one: All this watching -- is it healthy? Unless you do your watching on a treadmill, or unless you already spend most of your waking hours on a real or figurative treadmill, probably not.

But what I'm really pondering here is not so much the watching (because who watches everything they buy on DVD?), but rather the compulsive collecting aspect. I have a lot of DVDs, and probably you do, too. And few of us have our collections because we work so hard that we have a loads of leisure time coming to us. I have a valid reason to be acquiring all these titles, because it's the business I'm in; as a video magazine publisher/editor, it's good to have an archive... but I know in my heart of hearts that's not what it's all about.

When I was six or seven years old, my mother married a man who, a week or two into their short-lived marriage, sold every toy and comic book I owned in a yard sale and used the money to get drunk. When I was sixteen years old, I made the decision to leave home and, for various reasons, I could take with me only what I could carry. Aside from clothes and other essentials I could fit into two suitcases, I had to leave all my belongings behind -- my FAMOUS MONSTERS collection, my movie posters, and some complete runs of numerous Marvel Comics titles, not to mention family photos. So, twice in my early life, I suffered the loss of everything I ever owned. Once it was taken from me, the other time I had to marshal the strength to walk away from it all voluntarily. I don't need a psychiatrist to tell me that therein lies a good deal of my compulsion to have and to hoard from this day forward.

I suspect that all of us who are compulsive DVD collectors are working through feelings we grew up with, and not necessarily ones allied to personal circumstances such as I've described. For example, there's this persistent worry that we need to grab these movies while they're available, because who knows when (or if) they'll turn up again? That worry goes all the way back to the 1950s for some of us. To a degree, it remains a reasonable argument because there are many foreign titles, for example, that turn up once on DVD and seldom if ever appear on cable and never on commercial television. Having them is a way of ensuring that these titles will be available when we, or someone close to us, needs to see them again. But considering that, say, CITIZEN KANE is now frequently shown on TCM and other stations completely uncut and commercial-free, that it's easily found on disc in video stores for rental, why do so many of us need to own it? If you stop to think about it, the only valid answer to this question is that, someday, at some ungodly late hour of the night or early hour of the morning, we might feel the need to see CITIZEN KANE right now. I guess that's the impulse that all DVD collecting boils down to: we want these titles in reserve for the time that might come when we'll need to see them right now.

And the sad truth is, no matter how many times we buy it, none of us really owns CITIZEN KANE -- or anything else we have on DVD. We'll all be buying it again on Blu-Ray, and whatever other newfangled format(s) should follow in our lifetimes. Because, no matter how many times we've bought CITIZEN KANE, technology will be forever dreaming up new ways in which we've never seen it.

Hey gang, it gets even more pathetic. If a miraculous new service were offered to all cable subscribers tomorrow, allowing us to watch any movie (and I mean any movie, in any language, in its correct OAR) by request for a reasonable fee, and if this service was secure and guaranteed to remain available for the rest of our lives, how many of us could bear to part with our collections? In fact, let's up the ante: since this is just a daydream, what if the service was free for the asking? How many of us could bear to "have" only what we could watch at a given time?

This, I think, is a profound question. Because the root of DVD addiction is that, through the act of regularly buying these discs, we have trained ourselves (or been trained) to feel that we must own everything we watch. If we don't own it as we watch it, we feel resentful -- don't we? -- as though we're not getting our full money's worth. I believe this is one of many reasons why theater attendance is falling off, and perhaps the only psychological one. Is there a soul alive that doesn't run a tape or burn a disc while watching the latest offering on Pay Per View?

I'm the last guy who would willingly surrender his DVD collection, but as I continue along this strange path of acquisitiveness in life, I do sometimes think of what's in my attic, still in shrink-wrap, and calculate how many trips to Europe, how many adventures, I might have had instead.

I've seen CITIZEN KANE at least 20 times.

I've never been to Europe.