How it happened that our house filled up with videos that no one ever wants to watch is a mystery to me. I didn't buy any of them. I don't know what most of them are.
As a rule, I don't buy videos -- but not because there are not videos that I would like to see again and again. It's a fantasy of mine that somewhere in the organized domestic world that so constantly eludes me, there's a shelf that contains my favourite movies. In the interior-design magazine that I inhabit in my mind's eye -- oh, the window treatments; oh, the water elements; oh, the homemade chutneys -- this shelf is the kind of intelligent, if slightly whimsical collection that will convey an accurate and, by the way, extremely flattering impression of my tastes to some snooping visitor.
Let's see: Dr. Strangelove, The Bicycle Thief, The Godfather (Part One), Casablanca, Withnail and I, The Dead, Besieged, Hud, Some Like It Hot, La Dolce Vita, Lawrence of Arabia, Naked, Day for Night, Gilda, Night of the Iguana, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Eddie Izzard Live, Rashomon, Divorce Italian Style, Magnolia, Burnt by the Sun, Amarcord, Galaxy Quest.
My objection to having videos around is not one of aesthetic principle. My penchant for minimalism has its real source, I have to admit, in my minimalistic bank account. I'd be only too pleased to have a few good movies at hand -- anything to avoid another trip to Blockbuster.
No, I'm afraid my thinking on this issue, like my thinking on most issues, is more prosaic than I'd like to let on. I don't buy videos for the same reason I don't buy livestock. I like Holsteins as much as the next person. We just don't have the room.
There's no room on the shelves, and in the closets, and on the floor, and under the beds, and on the windowsills of our house for videos that we might like to own. Inexplicably, this is because we own so many that we wish we didn't.
Unlike the books that end up on the bookshelves of a house, the videos that end up anywhere and everywhere around here do not assist in improving one's image. So I've noticed. If, for instance, you fall asleep on page 10 of a book, and then file it on your living-room bookshelf for eternity, everyone who sees it there will, for some reason, assume that you have understood, indeed you may well have memorized, everything that John Ralston Saul had to say.
Videos have quite the opposite effect. The videos that hang around a domicile tend to be the kind that make residents appear more stupid than they actually are. Even if you've been having your own private Andrei Tarkovsky film festival all week, even if you've been painstakingly studying the editing in The Rules of the Game or Last Year at Marienbad, you're sunk if you let your guests see the detritus gathered around your VCR.
For instance, the cover of Dude, Where's My Car? that a visitor will find between the phone book and The Silver Palate Cookbook when trying to find a spot to put a drink down, will be taken at once as the high-water mark of a household's cinematic standards. (The actual video, like all videos, is not in its cover and will not, therefore, ever be found again by anyone who, God knows why, expresses an interest in viewing Dude, Where's My Car?)
I can mark my past by the books that I possess. These are the ones that I did not read at university and, over there, those are the ones that I didn't read since I graduated. I may not know them very intimately, but I claim them as my own. That was the year I wanted to read Gunter Grass. And that was the year I had every intention of reading Don Delillo.
The same is not true of videos. Was there really a time in my life when I thought, or somebody I know thought that I might think, that the Dave Nichols Art of Barbecuing video would be a useful possession for me to have? Perhaps that's what people did in the eighties -- sit down and watch a movie about how to barbecue before going outside and engaging in the fine art of throwing a great, bloody slab of meat onto a grill. If true, I can only be grateful that I can no longer remember anything at all about my 30s.
And so, for me, the advent of DVDs comes as a breath of spring. In fact, as the seasons begin to converge indistinguishably on one another, it may be that the advent of DVDs actually is spring. My enthusiasm for them has nothing to do with a better picture or better sound. It has to do with hope. It has to do with renewal.
A new technology -- like rebirth, like resurrection -- promises us that we are not doomed to suffocate slowly under the weight of a pile of videos that no one can explain much less bring themselves to organize.
It's the great cycle of technological life. Every few years some cadre of clever Japanese electronic engineers will come up with some new format, and the possibility of order will return to us once again. We can throw out the old, and bring in the new. And for a short while -- until the new gets old again -- we can believe that we're getting somewhere.