 Home movies |
| On Friday, Netflix is shutting down its mail-order DVD service. Customers who still receive physical DVDs can hold on to the ones they have. “Please enjoy your final shipments for as long as you like!” the company wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. I misread this as “Please enjoy your final shipments for as long as you live!,” a chirpy and morbid send-off, conjuring images of a devoted Luddite breathing his last in a room littered with faded red envelopes and dusty remote controls. |
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This is not a eulogy for the DVD. I stopped receiving DVDs by mail more than a decade ago with little remorse. Or at least I think I did. I tried recently to access my complete Netflix viewing history only to discover that all DVD data is deleted 10 months after your subscription ends. Now I’m left with just my streaming history, which begins in 2009 with “Party Down,” a show which, for many reasons, feels recent and very much of the streaming era. |
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If I’m forlorn about anything, it’s the lost data. I can’t remember a single movie I watched on DVD from Netflix. I remember the first rentals my parents brought home to play on our hulking faux-bois VCR (Billy Wilder’s 1960 film “The Apartment,” “A Little Romance,” with Laurence Olivier and a teenage Diane Lane). I remember borrowing the comically gigantic laser disc of “Koyaanisqatsi” in the college library and renting “Say Anything” from Tower Video in the East Village. |
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These movies, these moments, are the pegs that threads of memory wind around. Who I was, what I did, how I felt at a moment in time. I rented Jim Jarmusch’s “Down by Law” from Kim’s Video, then I went and got steamed eggs at a cafe. I can see the video on the cafe table. I remember the winter coat I had. I wish I could recall the Netflix rentals, summon the memories that accompany them. |
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For a short time, Netflix had a feature that I loved called “Netflix Friends.” It allowed you to share your queue with friends and to see their star ratings for movies they’d watched. I remember adding ratings and comments to movies I’d seen before the launch of Netflix, so I could recommend them to friends. |
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Netflix canceled the Friends feature in 2010. I wish I’d kept track of each movie I watched and the ratings I gave them. Why did I give away the information? Why didn’t I save what could be a log of prompts to help spur memories of other eras, an archive of how I spent my time? |
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At the end of each year, the filmmaker Steven Soderbergh posts a list of everything he watched and read in the previous 12 months. I’ve been envious of this record, but for whatever reason, maybe because my intake seemed so feeble compared to Soderbergh’s, I’ve never kept a list of my own. That changes now. I downloaded my Netflix streaming history and plan to do so for all the streaming platforms that allow it. I’ll log my viewing in a notebook, be my own data collector, the custodian of my own cultural history. |