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Osman Briseno
Netflix brought the movies to you, and with the mailed rentals came a whole other culture. It was a pressure, getting your queue in line. (Yes, I know that means getting your line in line.). The way the service worked was that you could only keep out so many movies at a time. You had to watch or send back a movie before getting the next one, and you might have been in a different mood when you listed it than when it arrived. How many of us had aspirational queues? How many of us watched intense, artistic or experimental films that we might not have finished otherwise just to be able to send them back and get the next disc of "The L Word"?
It isn't just the end of a culture that the ceasing of the Netflix DVD represents. It's also a lack of access. As behemoth as Netflix's streaming service is, it doesn't have everything. As soon as the shuttering of the DVD service was announced, fans took to social media to bemoan the movies about to be lost to us. The Daily Mail ran a list of movies that aren't available on streaming anywhere. One DVD fan told CNN, "He's determined to finish seeing every film listed in the book '1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die' with the help of Netflix. 'I absolutely would not have been able to find all of those movies if not for the Netflix DVD service,' Colin McEvoy said. 'I only have four movies left to go.'"
I will never forget when "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" left Netflix.com. My comfort watch, the show that was always there, was suddenly not always there, not easily. You can't count on streaming to have the shows and films you want. You can't count on streaming at all, to be affordable, to work. Slate wrote in a piece earlier this year, "What if streaming goes away?"
There's a reason why adult Van (Lauren Ambrose) owns a video store in Showtime's "Yellowjackets." The cozy store is called While You Were Streaming, a pun on one of Van's beloved Sandra Bullock films, "While You Were Sleeping," whose story she tells to the girls in a pivotal moment when they're in the woods. The video store and its tangible medium is a way to hold to the actual good parts of her youth, before trauma. It's a way to hold on, period.
Alison Stine is a former staff writer at Salon. She is the author of the novels "Trashlands" and "Road Out of Winter," winner of the 2021 Philip K. Dick Award. A recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), she has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, and others.
Copyright 2024 Salon.com, LLC. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited. SALON is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark of Salon.com, LLC. Associated Press articles: Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
The company has announced it's officially ending its DVD rental business after more than two decades. "On September 29th, 2023, we will send out the last red envelope," Netflix said in a tweet. "It has been a true pleasure and honor to deliver movie nights to our wonderful members for 25 years."
Brendan worked as a culture writer at The Week from 2018 to 2023, covering the entertainment industry, including film reviews, television recaps, awards season, the box office, major movie franchises and Hollywood gossip. He has written about film and television for outlets including Bloody Disgusting, Showbiz Cheat Sheet, Heavy and The Celebrity Cafe."}), " -0-11/js/authorBio.js"); } else console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); Brendan MorrowSocial Links NavigationBrendan worked as a culture writer at The Week from 2018 to 2023, covering the entertainment industry, including film reviews, television recaps, awards season, the box office, major movie franchises and Hollywood gossip. He has written about film and television for outlets including Bloody Disgusting, Showbiz Cheat Sheet, Heavy and The Celebrity Cafe.
The end of an era is upon us. On April 18th, Netflix sent out a tweet which read, "On September 29th, 2023, we will send out the last red envelope. It has been a true pleasure and honor to deliver movie nights to our wonderful members for 25 years. Thank you for being part of this incredible journey, including this final season of red envelopes."
That news brought two reactions from movie watchers. You were either surprised that their DVD service still existed and that in 2023 anyone still rents DVDs, or you were heartbroken because one of our last sources of physical film media is on its way out. With that might mean the end of so many indie and foreign films that cinephiles have depended on Netflix to provide them.
In 1998, when Netflix first started their DVD mailing service, video stores were still very popular. The internet was in its early days, and we were years away from streaming. Netflix served a two-fold purpose. They were obviously convenient. If you wanted to rent a movie, but didn't have the time or energy to browse through Blockbuster, you could hop on Netflix's website, add movies to your queue, and within a day or two it would show up at your door. You could get one, two, or more at a time if you wanted and keep them as long as you wanted. Goodbye, late fees.
The other great thing about Netflix was how stacked their selection was. Blockbuster was sure to have about every popular movie you could think of, but what if you were looking for a hard to find horror movie or a foreign film? You could drive around to other video stores, even going to other cities if you were desperate enough, or you could browse Amazon and eBay, hoping to find some bootleg copy or one being sold for an astronomical amount. Netflix, however, had thousands of titles, from the newest releases, hard to find classics, and movies so rare most people had never heard of them. They allowed anyone to affordably and easily explore their film fandom in deeper ways. It opened us up to film history. For example, you could be a slasher fan and rent every Halloween and Friday the 13th movie at Blockbuster over and over again, but with Netflix, you could dig into the smaller but just as important movies like Madman, The Burning, or Black Christmas. The same went for classic film and foreign film buffs.
Even when Netflix introduced their own streaming service in 2007, which eventually blossomed into there being just as many streaming services as TV channels, the DVD service was still there, slowly shrinking in subscribers but not in content. They were still a film-obsessed fan's dream come true, especially as video stores quickly disappeared. Now Netflix's DVDs weren't just an option, they were the only option. Redbox was out there, but their limited content was reserved for new releases and a few popular slightly older films.
A huge demographic has teased DVD renters for not letting go of the past; however, it's not just a past technology that they're reluctant to let go of but the past itself. The loss of Netflix's DVD service worries many that we will lose so much past art as well. It's not even just older movies but how we used to present them up until very recently. So many streaming movies don't have special features or audio commentaries, a move that makes little sense. These behind the scenes looks at our current popular films and explorations into how they came to be can often only be found on DVD. Streaming gives us new art, but no stories to go with them. We get the finished product, but no look at the artist.
Many have spoken out about what Netflix's DVD service means to them. Nora Zuckerman, the show runner for Poker Face, which airs on the Peacock streaming service, tweeted this week, "You might ask who is still getting DVDs through Netflix, well... I am. The vast selection has dwindled over the years, but it has been a resource for movies (classics, foreign, or just the odd outlier) that are not streaming. I will miss my red envelopes."
It's not just so many smaller movies that we're losing with the end of Netflix's DVD service. Streaming movies aren't accompanied by trailers either, unless it's to promote something on that service. With DVDs, like in movie theaters, films were accompanied by several trailers that played before the movie. In most cases you could just skip them if you wanted, but many of us watched them, wanting to know what other movies were coming out. The majority of film watchers only go to a movie theater a few times a year, but we'd watch rented DVDs dozens, maybe hundreds of times. That's how we found out what was going to be out there soon that we might like. Of course, some will say that DVD watchers need to adjust to the times and go to a trailer website or watch them on YouTube like everyone else, but it was damn near romantic to pop in a DVD and know trailers were going to play first. It was also exciting, not knowing what the trailers were going to be.
That romanticism of anticipation has been lost with the rapid decline of physical media. We've already lost VHS and DVD boxes, picking them up at a video store, looking at the photo on the front, reading about it on the back. With Netflix DVDs, while we no longer had the boxes, we still had the anticipation of requesting a movie, having to wait for it to arrive, checking our mail to see if today was the day it arrived like a present from the post office. That's soon to be gone.
In September, we lose access to so many old and hard to find films. We lose access to so many voices, not just from times past, but even present day, as directors have their voices silenced by a lack of commentaries and featurettes. The art of film is quickly fading. More and more, a movie is a button we push, fed to us on our phone, or played on our TV while we're on our phone. We half-consciously consume it, then move on to the next, without stopping to savor what we just had. It's a loss for all, whether you're someone who grew up on video stores and doesn't want to let go of those little discs, or a little kid who might never get to fully experience how a move should be felt.
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