Call It Cred

By the time my family got our first VHS player in 1983, the format was already well on the way to besting Sony’s Betamax in its quest to become the standard medium for home video playback. I can still remember the first movie we rented to watch on our new machine—Poltergeist; to this day, one of the few Spielberg movies for which I have fond, if youthful, associations. This was two years before Blockbuster opened its first store and the home video rental market was still largely dominated by local mom & pop shops like Erol’s or Jacksonville Video—complete with tantalizingly be-curtained “adults only” rooms—which generally levied a significant one-time fee for new members and often required the remittance of annual dues. Presumably these fees paid for, amongst other things, the comprehensive catalogues that were published by each store, which included a list of all titles offered for rent—sub-divided by genre—brief descriptions of the films’ respective narratives, and notes about content which may be found by some viewers to be objectionable: violence, language, nudity, sexual situations or adult themes. I can remember reading these catalogues as though they were novels, delighting in particular in the descriptions of the R or X-rated movies I would never be allowed to view.

Though the VHS cassette has essentially been replaced by the DVD (digital versatile disc) as the default medium for home video playback, these two media are not exactly analogous. This is partially due to their respective technologies and the fact that the DVD, as it’s proper name suggests, has many applications aside from allowing users to watch movies on their televisions. Moreover, consumers do not use DVDs in all the same ways that they use VHS cassettes. An obvious example of this is the recording of television programming. Though DVD recorders are now affordable, the advent of DVRs, such as TiVo, and services such as On Demand has fundamentally altered the ways in which consumers view the problem of conflicted television program scheduling. Another major way in which DVDs are used in a fundamentally different way than were VHS cassettes is the fact that people are more likely to opt to purchase DVD recordings of their favorite films, rather than simply renting them, wherein it was far more rare to find a large library of movies on VHS cassettes (excluding dubbed copies) in someone’s home. There are a couple of reasons why this is the case. The first is physical: VHS tapes are somewhat large and cumbersome in comparison to DVDs and it takes a large amount of space to store a respectable library of movies in this format. The second and more important factor in this phenomenon has to do with the agreements that Blockbuster Video made with movie studios, which were specifically designed to discourage consumers from purchasing movies on VHS outright. Originally, Blockbuster paid a relatively high price for each VHS cassette they purchased and consequently kept 100% of the revenues from video rentals. In the 1990s, however, a new arrangement was made in which Blockbuster paid a nominal fee for new video cassettes and then gave 40% of revenues from the rental thereof back to the studios. As a corollary to this deal, for the first year after a film’s release on home video, the studios charged consumers an artificially high price—generally near $100—to purchase the film; effectively limiting movies to the rental market for the first year after their video release.

I watch a lot of movies. I also have a significant, if not over-large, collection of movies on home video. According to an informal count of the titles in my library conducted during the early morning hours of Thursday February 21, 2008, I have 539 movies in DVD format—this figure inevitably excludes some small number of movies loaned out to friends that have been so long in returning that they have effectively been forgotten. Many of these films are long, multi-disc editions that were comparatively expensive to procure—a prime example of this is the newly minted Criterion edition of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 15 ½ hour late masterpiece Berlin Alexanderplatz (retail price: $124.95).

More than a handful of my DVDs are bootleg copies of foreign editions of films that at least at the time of purchase had not been published for the North American market—a copy of Bresson’s adaptation of Georges Bernanos’s Mouchette purchased on eBay in late 2005 for about $40. A substantial number of the rest are editions that are no longer in print and have thus escalated in value significantly in the time since they were purchased—a DVD of Juzo Itami’s Tampopo purchased second-hand at a Blockbuster Video location for $14.99 could now be sold through Amazon Marketplace for upwards of $100.

As someone who has taken a particular interest in movies—watching them, reading about them, thinking about and discussing them in a more or less systematic fashion—and has put forth the time and investment in acquiring a not insubstantial home video library, I inevitably have friends who wish to borrow one or more of my DVDs to see what it is I keep rattling on about—or, as may more often be the case, it is me who pushes the DVDs on to my unsuspecting (and often uninterested) acquaintances solely in order to have someone with whom I can talk about a particular work. I lend my DVDs out freely without any real regard to their value or scarcity, or the amount of time it takes to get them back.

Conversely, my library contains no more than nine (9) films in VHS format. None of these cost me more than $10 to procure. Most of them, in fact, were had for $2 or less and a couple of them were totally free. The technology of this format is such that the image and sound quality are considerably diminished when compared to their counterparts on DVD. The format does not allow for any of the wide range of features—variable sound and commentary tracks, optional sub-titling in a variety of languages, choice of aspect ratio, historical and critical documentary features, archival interviews, et cetera—that we have come to view as our birthright with the advent of the “Special Edition” DVD. Limits in recording capacity mean that longer films must be split amongst two or more cassettes (admittedly this does happen with some DVDs, though the incidence is comparatively quite rare). One cannot instantly jump to a particular scene with a simple push of a button, as one can with DVDs. Shit, you even have to rewind the fucking things, for God’s sake.

And yet, I will only loan out one of my VHS tapes to the more trustworthy of my companions. In the rare case I do loan one out, it is only with exhortations that they be coddled during their use and returned at the earliest possible convenience. I get a little hyper when one is out of my sight for more than a week. What could explain this? Scarcity partially accounts for it, as some, though by no means all of the VHS cassettes I own are either currently out-of-print, or are unique to the point that they were never in print in the first place (more on this later). Fragility also plays a role; just about everyone who has any experience with watching movies on VHS has witnessed the consumption of a tape by the VCR. These factors are logical and seem pretty self evident, but they do not, on their own, wholly account for this discrepancy. The fact is, this seeming disconnect from a sound assessment of the real value of the individual articles comprising my home video library stems from a nebulous aesthetic of socio-cultural elitism. Simply put, the ubiquity of the DVD has given to the lowly VHS cassette something it never had of its own accord, namely cachet. To put it another way, the possession of obscure or scarce films in VHS format lends to their owner an aura of street credibility.

In order to illustrate this assertion, I will present you with a hypothetical scenario. It is your day off and you walk into your neighborhood coffee shop with the intention of planting yourself at a table and spending the next four hours really digging in to that copy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason you have been promising yourself to read for the last year. You pay for your americano, seat yourself at an open table when suddenly you notice two very attractive members of the opposite sex sitting alone at separate tables, each reading a copy of Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep—perhaps your favorite novel of the immigrant experience in America. Each of these individuals has, in their turn, acknowledged your presence and your obvious intelligence by pointedly gesturing toward your Kant, making eye contact with you and briefly smiling. Assuming the two are roughly equally physically attractive and equally smartly dressed, how do you decide which to approach, or, in other words, is there some other criterion by which you can make a qualitative differentiation between the two? It occurs to you at this point that though both of them happen to be reading the same novel, their respective editions of the work are markedly different. The reader to your right is reading a pristine copy of the currently available Picador trade paperback edition with the cover graphic depicting a cirrus filled sky—the receipt from the local Borders store sticks out from amongst the pages. The reader to your left, on the other hand, is reading the long out-of-print Avon Press mass-market paperback edition with its rounded corners (!), fire escapes abutting aging tenements and yellowed pages with the marginalia of past readers still intact—the same text, indeed, but hardly the same book. A book of this nature is the sign of a true bibliophile and was probably got for seventy-five cents at a local used book stall, if not fobbed off the bookshelf of a past lover. The difference between the two books and their respective readers is one of street cred—its abundance in the latter and its utter lack in the former.

Indulge me in sharing another anecdote, this one wholly actual, in order to further demonstrate the merits of this argument. In April of last year I had the opportunity to attend a screening over two days of Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. The breadth, scope and completeness of this film are such that I feel it wholly beyond my meager powers to effectively write about it. This was undoubtedly the singular cinema-going experience of my life. Thus, I was inordinately gratified to learn that The Criterion Collection planned on publishing one of their full tilt special editions of this masterwork later in the year and I purchased my copy the day it was released.

Several weeks later, two of my very close friends—both of whom are also great admirers of Fassbinder’s work—showed me the gorgeous, complete 8-cassette VHS edition complete with seven of the eight cloth covered slip cases, which, when placed together, depict an image of the historical Alexanderplatz with the film’s title embossed in gilt Teutonic lettering that they had procured from the video store at which one of them works for some ridiculously paltry sum (maybe ten dollars?). On a practical level, mine was the superior edition in a multitude of ways: the respective image quality cannot reasonably even be compared, my DVD edition includes three supplementary documentary films and the Philip Jutzi’s complete 1931 adaptation of the novel from a script penned by Alfred Doblin himself. And yet I felt somehow inadequate when faced with their prize.

My own collection of films on VHS is small enough to warrant an inventory thereof:


Rights, Respect, Responsibility
Our Boys
Zero for Conduct
Bunuel’s Wuthering Heights
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (R-rated version)
Drowning by Numbers
Rosetta
Shoah
Orson Welles’s Othello


The first two films have a particular sentimental value for me as they are two of the films in which I was featured as a performer. Rights, Respect, Responsibility was the first film for which I auditioned and subsequently the first film in which I was cast—though I was not cast in the role for which I read. It was a short film produced in the aftermath of Terrible Tuesday in New York in 2001 for distribution to public television stations and school systems in order to teach youngsters tolerance toward people’s differences in general and Muslims in particular. I played the role of Kevin, a ruthless high school bully who incessantly badgers and beats upon the South Asian Muslim entrant into our erstwhile lily-white community. Our Boys, on the other hand, is a short heist film, which was written by a fellow student from my scene study workshop and produced on the ultra-cheap-and-quick in a diner in northern Utah owned by this same student’s aunt. Zero for Conduct (Zero de Conduite) is the legendary short film by the French master Jean Vigo about an anarchic uprising in a French boarding school, which was a primary influence on Lindsay Anderson's If . . . I saw this film at the Janus Films retrospective at Lincoln Center and found to my delight that it was still available in VHS format and could be got for $15 through Amazon.com. The subsequent four films—Bunuel’s Wuthering Heights; The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover; Drowning by Numbers; Rosetta—were picked up at my neighborhood Hollywood Video location as part of their liquidation of their complete stock of films on VHS for about $2 each. Though each of these movies made for a fine score in its own right (although learning upon arriving at home that the copy of Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover was the R-rated version, with more than thirty minutes of footage excised was something of a disappointment), it was the discovery of Greenaway’s Drowning by Numbers—a film I had rented on a VHS some years earlier and which I still consider to be Greenaway’s most effective movie but which is inexplicably unavailable in any format in the North American market—which had me jumping up and down and hooting through the aisles at Hollywood. The final two films in the list were picked up at the same Delaware rental shop at which my friends procured their copy of Berlin Alexanderplatz. Finding these particular films was no easy task, as they were tucked away in a room quite literally stuffed with VHS films, which represented the inventory of a sister store that had recently closed down. My friends and I spent nearly an hour picking through the stacks and stacks of cassettes (arranged in no particular order) trying to find the best combination of movies to purchase—these were offered at $2 per cassette or three for $10. I found the copy of Shoah quite early in our search and was glad to be able to forego purchasing the $150 New Yorker Video DVD set of the documentary. As the entire film comprised five cassettes, I needed to find one other movie in order to make a neat two sets of three tapes. I kept saying to my friends that I hoped I could find a copy of Welles’s Othello. The store was getting ready to close and I had decided on a copy of George Romero’s Martin, when Monique pointed out a stack of boxes and asked if I had looked through them. I hadn’t and immediately upon poking my head inside, I saw Orson Welles's black face staring right back at me.

More films will undoubtedly be added to my VHS collection over the years. Unless somebody steps up and puts it out on DVD, I predict I will pick up a VHS of Max Ophuls’s The Earrings of Madame de . . . within the year. Even as the collection grows, however, the older tapes will begin to decay, lose their images or otherwise become unwatchable. As consumers begin to move en masse from standard DVDs to Sony’s high definition Blu-Ray discs over the coming years, the technological inferiority of the VHS cassette will inevitably become more apparent. Yet with this increasingly apparent inferiority will come an inversely proportional rise in their emotional-aesthetic cachet.

God, Science & Hygiene

What is perhaps the defining moment in Alex Cox’s Walker (1987) comes just over half-way through the film, when two employees of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Accessory Transit Company pay a visit to Ed Harris's William Walker, erstwhile American filibuster and President of the Republic of Nicaragua, and inform him that Vanderbilt, Walker’s patron and the instigator of his Nicaraguan project, has not been paying what he owes for his company’s exclusive concession for overland shipping from the Atlantic to the Pacific through Nicaragua and propose starting a new company, which would offer Walker a more favorable deal. Responding with accusations of treason to his lieutenants’ suggestions that, distasteful though this development may be, they owe all their victories—indeed everything they have—to Cornelius Vanderbilt and reminding them that the newly adopted Constitution grants him the power to do as he wishes, Walker declares that he will not only revoke Vanderbilt’s concession, but that he will further commandeer all of his ships, rendering them the property of the Republic of Nicaragua. Moments later, we see him walking along the beach with a member of the American phalange (Walker’s Immortals), with whom he shares the following exchange:

“I cannot help noticing, sir, during the time I’ve spent with you that you’ve betrayed every principle you’ve had, all the men who supported you. May I ask why?”

“No, you may not.”

“I’m still not clear on what exactly are your aims.”

“The ends justify the means.”

“What are the ends?”

“I can’t remember.”

By playing fast and loose with notions of time and history, Alex Cox and Rudy Wurlitzer achieved something approaching the prophetic with Walker. Produced in Nicaragua at the height of the brutal Contra War, Walker was an explicit critique of American involvement in that conflict. But by filling their historical satire on the history of American expansionism and the notion of Manifest Destiny with technological and historical anachronisms—a Newsweek magazine cover featuring a photograph of Walker with the headline “Nicaragua’s Liberator,” a U. S. military helicopter arriving in the burning city of Granada to evacuate all American citizens, a Mercedes sedan speeding past the carriage of the executed Nicaraguan president’s widow—Cox and Wurlitzer were able to emphasize the cyclical nature of history, indicating that flights of cultural elitism and imperialism all share the same characteristics, whatever their historical moment.

Early in the film, shortly after their arrival in Nicaragua, Walker instructs his Immortals that, “as of this moment, we do hereby under God become citizens of Nicaragua.” He continues, “It is our mission to introduce into the family of enlightened and civilized nations a new sister.” To an American viewing this film for the first time in the early years of the twenty-first century, it is difficult not to see shades of George Walker Bush’s messianic crusade—is there any other word for it—to democratize the Middle East. What makes both of these men truly dangerous, rather than simply contemptible, is their respective insistence that they are driven by causes nobler than a desire for wealth or power. This is exemplified in an exchange between Walker and Cornelius Vanderbilt, who, upon hearing of Walker’s attempt to colonize the Mexican states of Sonora and Northern Mexico, summons Walker to meet with him.

Vanderbilt: Does Nicaragua mean anything to you, Walker?

Walker: Nothing at all.

Vanderbilt: Nicaragua’s a fucked-up little country somewhere south of here. This worthless piece of real estate controls the overland route to the Pacific. I now control all transportation in Nicaragua. But in order to continue to do so I need stability.

Walker: What’s this got to do with me.

Vanderbilt: What I need is for some man to go down there and take over. I want that country stable. I want it done now. They tell me you’re a clever man, Walker. Doctor, lawyer, surgeon. All that Renaissance rubbish they talk about these days. Well? Can you handle the job?

Walker: That’s not the issue. I plan to get married. Start a newspaper.

Vanderbilt’s Assistant: Then you would be wasting one of life’s golden moments, sir. It is not every man who is offered the chance to have a country of his own.

Walker: Walker’s goals involve a higher purpose than the vulgar pursuit of personal power.

Walker’s reference to himself in the third person here and throughout his occasional voice-over narration to the film provides a window into the messianic madness that drives him. Perhaps the most lucid account of Walker’s character comes from Dona Yrena Corral, who remarks to her husband upon hearing Walker address his Immortals, “Clearly this is no ordinary asshole.” Walker of course ended up accepting Vanderbilt's offer, but only after his fiancée succumbed to a cholera epidemic.

There is also something of a strange amalgamation of Vice President Dick Cheney and Iraqi National Congress head Ahmad Chalabi in Peter Boyle’s corpulent and malevolent Cornelius Vanderbilt. One only need hearken back to the secret energy commission meetings of the early years of the Bush presidency and their recommendations for regime change in Iraq, months before 9/11 and the ensuing hysteria over Iraqi doomsday weapons, to see the Cheney connection. Moreover, we see in Walker’s riding to power in Nicaragua on Vanderbilt’s back only to betray him once he achieves his goals an echo of Chalabi’s role in feeding the CIA the apparently falsified evidence that led us to invade Iraq and his eventual arrest and disgrace after the fall of the Ba’ath regime.

The ironies of the notion of Manifest Destiny and its reliance upon the inherent superiority of civilized cultures over backwards indigenous populations are played to great effect in Walker. After subduing the Nicaraguan conservatives and establishing the American phalange’s control over the country, Walker is offered the presidency of the country. At the advice of his chief lieutenant, Byron Cole, he declines the offer and instead proposes that he head the Nicaraguan military—nominating a Nicaraguan aristocrat, Don Corral, to the presidency. When Walker learns that Corral along with other Nicaraguans are plotting to remove him and his phalange from the country, he has Corral arrested, charged with treason and executed. Shortly after assuming the presidency, Walker's voice-over narrates a scene showing the streets of the Nicaraguan capital. As Walker declares, “Walker’s Immortals initiated various cultural and civic reforms, including the construction of a theater in the traditional European style,” we see the various members of his phalange raping, beating and pillaging the city’s inhabitants.

All of this heavy socio-political commentary could easily become bogged down in its own moralist fervor, were it not for the film’s brilliant humor and dazzling visual cues. Cox’s film is heavily indebted to the westerns of Sergio Leone and especially Sam Peckinpah for its tight close-ups, impressive vistas and its occasional bursts of balletic violence. Moreover, the comic pairings of the members of Walker’s Immortals provide an important counterpoint of levity to the films more serious themes. As one phalange member says to another, “I brought you down here to the Paris, France of Central America and you’re behaving like you’re still in some hamlet in the woods.”

The film's historical cycle is brought full circle in Walker’s speech to the crowd of Nicaraguans gathered around him as the city of Granada is besieged by Vanderbilt’s armed opposition:

“You all might think that there will be a day when America will leave Nicaragua alone. But I am here to tell you, flat out, that that day will never happen, because it is our destiny to be here. It is our destiny to control you people. So no matter how much you fight, no matter what you think, we’ll be back . . . time and time again. From the future, if not the present, we may expect a just judgment.”

Rule Britannia

ahem . . . so this is the first of what one perhaps hopes will be many future posts about mostly movies, probably, but undoubtedly also some books and other interesting topics. Please feel welcomed to comment or make any suggestions. I would also like to mention and thank my friend and colleague Brandon for his encouragement and advice (oh yeah, read his blog too, he's a pretty perceptive fellow). In any event, enjoy.

There is a certain strain of English satirical cinema, exemplified in the films of Lindsay Anderson as well as Peter Medak's adaptation of Peter Barnes's The Ruling Class, that seems almost paradoxical in the way the films give in to every temptation for the farce to stray into the realm of the ridiculous and yet seem all the more brilliant for it. This tendency reached its apogee in my mind with Anderson's Britannia Hospital (1982).

The ostensible story told in Britannia Hospital concerns the preparations for a visit by Her Royal Highness, Queen Elizabeth to celebrate the hospital's 500th anniversary. At the same time, in the hospital's ultra-modern Millar Center, Professor Millar, who can be said to be the film's chief villain as well as, perhaps, its protagonist, readies for the demonstration of a discovery he describes as "man remade." Not to be undone, enterprising television journalist Mick Travis, played, as he was in Anderson's If . . . (1969) and O Lucky Man! (1973), by Malcolm McDowell, schemes his way into the hospital in order to film a documentary about the goings on therein.

A key point to understanding Britannia Hospital that could easily be missed or just misconstrued is that it is, while unswerving in its satire, an anti-political film. As the opening credits roll, shots of the hospital's facade are intercut with scenes of shouting demonstrators marching on the hospital grounds holding placards proclaiming "No Privilege in Pain" and otherwise protesting the hospital's admission of well-to-do private patients. As an ambulance speeds up the drive, demonstrators stop it, reminding the driver that there are to be "no admissions except by union dispensation." When it becomes the clear the patient has but minutes to live, the ruffians begrudgingly allow the ambulance to pass and as the dying man is wheeled into the emergency triage area, the workers and nurses at the gate allow the patient to perish when they realize it is time for their mandated break. That the hospital is a metaphor for the dying British Empire hardly needs to be said, however, that filmmaker seems to bear equal contempt for the forces socialist "revolution" (can it really be a revolution if you are simply replacing one class of elites with another?) as for the decrepit remnants of the imperial past .

Britannia Hospital is also a movie about movies and amply shows Anderson's love for films, even when he is lampooning them as ruthlessly as he does in this one. The conventions of the horror genre, particularly its Frankenstein mode, are held up in the scenes of the birth and subsequent dismemberment of Professor Millar's reconstituted man. Further, the casting of Mark Hamill as the journalist Red, a hashish smoking proto-Beavis, seems to be no accident. The set design and staging of the scenes inside the Millar Center were pulled right out of George Lucas's Death Star playbook. Moreover, Hamill's shouts into his remote microphone when realizes that they have lost contact with the now-dead Mick Travis recall with great hilarity Luke Skywalker's frantic paging of his droids from the depths of the Death Star's trash compactor. And in what is perhaps Anderson's most salient statement of his own thoughts on the cinema, as Red's partner Sammy realizes that the city is exploding around their broadcast van, he responds by picking up a camera and climbing out of the van while exhorting to Red, "Come on . . . Let's make movies!"

It is both a supreme irony and utterly fitting that the film's defining moment is the speech delivered by the malevolent Professor Millar in preparation for the unveiling of his "revolution in mankind." As the forces of revolution burst through the doors of the Millar Center in a manner reminiscent of the blood pouring forth from the elevators of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, they take their seats amongst the gathered luminaries (Her Royal Highness not excluded) to hear Professor Millar adumbrate the technological achievements of the human race while he laments that "alone among the creatures of this world, the human race chooses to annihilate itself." He continues:

Man breeds as recklessly as he lays waste. By the end of the century the population of the world will have tripled. Two-thirds of our plant species will have been destroyed. Fifty-five per cent of the animal kingdom and seventy per cent of our mineral resources. Out of every hundred human beings now living eighty will die without knowing what it feels like to be fully nourished, while a tiny minority indulge themselves in absurd and extravagant luxury. A motion picture entertainer in North America will receive as much money in a month as would feed a starving South American tribe for a hundred years. We waste, we destroy and we cling like savages to our superstitions. We give power to leaders of state and church as prejudiced and small minded as ourselves who squander our resources on instruments of destruction while millions continue to suffer and go hungry, condemned forever to lives of ignorance and deprivation . . . it is because mankind has denied intelligence . . . Only a new human being of pure brain can lead man forward into a new era.

It is at this point that Millar unveils Genesis, a giant, squishy, flashing brain, which speaks to the audience (a la The Wizard of Oz) until it gets stuck on its words, skipping like a scratched vinyl album as the film blacks out. Anderson seems to be acknowledging in this moment a point made by Brandon in a follow-up comment to his recent post about the HBO series The Wire in that the world is indeed a fucked-up place, one fraught with dangers, while also reminding us that none of these is perhaps so dangerous as those who believe they have the solutions to the world's problems.