One of the many running gags in Life In Hell has to do with Akbar and Jeff, a couple of large-nosed humans (maybe) in fezzes who have a hut and keep periodically changing the business they operate within. Akbar and Jeff are business partners and also sexual partners, their ongoing relationship quibbles being one of the most enduring features of Groening's comic creation. They are identical twins (maybe) and therefore incestuous lovers. That, or they are clones and also lovers. Their mutual attraction is the one thing about them that's entirely indisputable, despite the comic's initial claims to ambiguity on the matter. According to a documentary I saw many years ago, Groening came up with the idea of using two indistinguishable characters as a means of recreating the kinds of discussions he was having with his girlfriend at the time because he wanted the interplay to be neutral, so that it wasn't clear which character was meant to represent whom in the relationship (his girlfriend's response: "You think you're Akbar but you're really Jeff."). According to the same documentary, the character design was based on Groening's own hideous attempts, as an aspiring cartoonist, to recreate Charles M Schulz's Charlie Brown (hence the zigzagged t-shirts). Now that I think about it, the title "Charlie Brown in Hell" has quite a striking ring to it.
The video rental store spoofed in the above ad for Akbar & Jeff's Video Hut (first published in 1985 and reprinted later that year in the compilation book Work Is Hell) is now a relic of a bygone era. We're currently living in the age of subscription streaming where, in lieu of a weekly pilgrimage to a damp-smelling brick and mortar building, we access everything at the click of a button within the comfort of our own living room (I say "we", but actually I'm a twisted hipster deviant who prefers analog media, wherever possible). And yet, as we've discussed, there is no escaping our past, or the possible futures it might once have suggested. Every time you browse Netflix for a movie to stream, the ghost of Blockbuster Video paces up and down your living room like Casey Affleck's character in the film A Ghost Story (David Lowery, 2017). Blockbuster (along with all the mom and pop rental stores that Blockbuster gleefully cannibalised) has been absent from the cultural scene for long enough to have passed the point of mere obsoletion and to have entered the realm of nostalgia. This article by Natalie Degraffinried notes that 2018 saw "a sudden and concerted resurgence" in fond reminiscing for the Texan-born video rental chain, which at its peak had over 9000 stores worldwide, but as of 2019 has dwindled to a single store in Bend, Oregon. As examples of the renewed interest in this near-extinct property, Degraffinried cites, "a popup in London only offering Deadpool 2, the appearance of a store in the first Captain Marvel trailer (which is set in the ’90s), all those stories about the last Blockbuster," and attributes it to "the inclination to pounce on stories about the “last” of things as we suffer and posture through the endless churn of capitalism." That, and the whole slippery nature of hauntology. As the distance between the present and the Blockbuster era increases, we feel the pressing urge to hold onto what only continues to fade into memory, and perhaps we're also a little curious as to how life would be if Blockbuster were still with us and dictating our home entertainment options. Personally, the last time I set foot in a Blockbuster was in 2003 (and only because I really, really wanted to see Donnie Darko, having missed its theatrical run), yet I'll admit I did feel a strange sense of emptiness walking past an abandoned Blockbuster in early 2014, to which some wry individual had affixed the notice, "For your nearest Blockbuster, set your time machine to 2012". Sometimes, just knowing that something isn't there any more can be terribly unsettling, even if you hadn't paid attention to it in yonks.
"Akbar & Jeff's Video Hut", which predated Blockbuster's rise to the top of the rental chain food chain, evokes the banality of the video rental experience, but throws an oddly sinister undercurrent, with the assertion that, "Staying at home watching rented movies on TV is your safest entertainment value." There's something about locking ourselves up in our own living rooms and shunning contact with the wider world that Groening posits here as anti-social, and indicative of a creeping distrust and suspicion of our fellow human beings. The message is clear - hide, from what's out there, whatever that might be. Of course, this is something that's only intensified with the rise and dominance of streaming. After all, to rent a VHS you actually had to leave your home and spend some time in the company of like-minded souls, but the streaming process allows you to skip that process altogether. Adjust to a diet of takeout pizza and Just Eat delivered junk and you may never even have to leave the house again. The Video Hut also offers a bleak vision of the entertainment business model, with its emphasis on choice where none effectively exists. The manner in which the Hollywood machine here keeps burping out teen sequel after teen sequel calls to mind George Ritzer's theory of McDonaldization, which argues that human beings are creatures of habit and as such we tend to gravitate toward more of the same. One of the key principles of McDonaldization is predictability - a trip to the rental store offers a social experience (albeit less so than a full theatrical experience), but any social experience also entails an element of risk. You know what you're getting with a chain store like Blockbuster (since they all look more-or-less the same), but you can never be sure who exactly you're going to run into, or that another eager customer won't have snapped up the last copy of your desired title just before you. The rental experience minimises the risk by enabling us to get away as soon as we've made our selection (compared to the theatre, where I might have the misfortune of being seated next to a nosy popcorn rustler of a couple of hormone-spewing lovers for the entirety of the experience). Streaming, meanwhile, bypasses the whole messy element of having to interact with our fellow humans, and ensures that we don't have to worry about titles being out of stock (although the workings of the entertainment business model will inevitably limit the selection of titles on offer). In the fifth edition of his book The McDonaldization of Society, published in 2008, Ritzer notes that the very principles that enabled Blockbuster to become "the McDonalds of the video business" were beginning to turn against it, as more efficient options came along. Ritzer accurately anticipated the rise of streaming in noting that, "Alternatively, instead of trekking to the video store, people can just turn to the proper channel and punch a few buttons to obtain a desired movie." (p.68) Why waste precious calories?
So what is is that people miss about the brick and mortar rental experience, exactly? Is it the thrill of browsing, of stretching one's legs around the shop floor and never knowing what you might find or which like-minded souls you get to spend a few fleeting moments in the company of? Obviously, there's something to be said for tangibility. It has a warmth and presence that you cannot simulate just by pounding a few buttons. I will go a step further, however, and propose that a huge aspect of the rental's appeal came from that unspoken sense of inter-connectivity. Something that you'll certainly never get from the streaming process is the sensation of being a link in a very specific chain. Each individual cassette you rented had a history, and a future. Assuming that you didn't have the luxury of being the first ever customer to get your hands on it, others will have taken that tape into their abodes before you, the VHS lines and sweaty finger marks along the case being remnants of their mutual interest and enthusiasm for the title in question. We might think we're isolating ourselves from the rest of the world by grabbing our selection and making a dash for it, but in actuality these tangible items are keeping us all connected. It's a story that we all unwittingly add to; as patrons to our local video rental store, we each play a collaborative role in the tape's gradual wearing down through repeated usage. We each may only see a fragmentary glimpse of that process, but we are all bearing witness to an object's journey through the passage of time. The tape returns to the store, never entirely the same for its time under our roof, be it the addition of an extra VHS line where we hit the rewind and stop buttons in rapid succession, or a few extra finger marks upon the spine of the casing. Where do we go if we want that kind of experience today? Your local library for a dog-eared copy of Wuthering Heights, I suppose.
The colleague I brought up in my previous post was unimpressed by my VHS hoarding habits, warning me that "Stuff decays." He's quite right of course. Stuff decays. People decay. Everything decays. Decay is a part of life, and to watch the process in action is to see time in action. It's a beautiful thing in its way.
A handful of stray observations:
- Among the titles listed in the Kiddie Korner is Animal Farm (John Halas and Joy Batchelor, 1954), an animated adaptation of George Orwell's Aesopian political allegory about the rise of Stalinism. The film has historical significance as the first British animated feature film (barring a couple of animated army training pictures that were not commercially screened), but is otherwise unremarkable. It's not a terrible film, but it has the turgid feel of something made largely to give frustrated literature teachers an additional teaching tool when covering the book, although they would have to apologise for the revised Hollywood ending (the reality is actually far more unnerving; the film was funded by the CIA as an anti-communist tract, and the CIA apparently insisted on the changed ending). I assume the joke here is that Animal Farm isn't exactly what you'd deem traditional kiddie fodder (despite its deceptively innocuous title), and any parent who rents this as a substitute babysitter is potentially going to have some explaining to do afterwards. That being said, one of the pitfalls the 1954 adaptation is that it clearly was heavily influenced by the Disney model (despite being a very un-Disney story), and we get a ton of incongruous comic relief sequences with cute baby animals. It's probably still an ounce too dark for most small children to handle, but this is a very sugar-coated version of Orwell's story nevertheless (albeit less so than the 1999 version, the single saving grace of which is that Snowball speaks with the voice of Sideshow Bob).
- You probably didn't need me to point this out, but An American in Paris is a Hollywood production.
- If I ever reach the point where I'm nostalgic for Lovefilm, you know that I've lost it.
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