Be Kind Rewind

Jed's Video was as sacred to me as the marshes and backyards and train tracks of my hometown. The store changed locations once but was always within reach on our bikes, a journey that involved a perilous crossing of the four lanes of Route 12. The second location was better, being near to the tasty hot dogs of Wiener Take All. They wouldn't rent the R-rated movies to you, but you could look at the cover boxes all you wanted. The horror movie boxes had the best, most gruesome pictures, and since they were verboten I was doubly fascinated. They would let you take out PG-13 movies (even before you were thirteen!) and so we rented Tremors and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and Critters 2* again and again. Once a dangerously curious friend swiped his parents' rental card and he and I managed to obtain Faces of Death. I still remember riding the bus the next day feeling rather ill and a rare sense of regret. (I only just today learned that much of the footage of actual human deaths is fake.)

Video rental culture died with VHS. During the summer I spent jockeying tapes at a Blockbuster Video (Jed's and its friendly neighborhood kin had been muscled out by the evil rental corporations; Blockbuster owned my labor but never my allegiance) the VHS liquidation was underway. The well-loved cardboard videocassette boxes with their thumbed and curling corners, stuffed with creaking Styrofoam inserts, were daily replaced by sterile plastic DVD cases that snapped and pinched. There is a satisfying weight to a sturdy VHS tape, a mild pleasure in the way a pile of them will clatter and click. By their substantial mass they seem more important, less disposable. Walking out of Jed's with a tape — a particular black box that had somehow been located by the clerk among the millions of identical black boxes behind the counter and withdrawn just for you — you felt that you had been entrusted with a valued object, and you pedaled quickly home.


* The best of the Critters series, as everyone knows. Contains a mind-blowing scene of copious naked boobs. PG-13??