In an era of entertainment abundance, I’ve been watching less and less. The streaming environment has become tedious. It feels that there is both everything on and nothing on.
That all changed for my family when we got an exciting new device in our home. It doesn’t respond to voice commands, but we are totally in control of it. We can see deleted scenes and director’s cuts. We can watch the end credits all the way through. You might have heard of this magical machine. It’s called a DVD player.
For years, I’ve been a loyal, if not quite eager, participant in the streaming revolution. I’ve stayed subscribed through price hikes, bundling, studio mergers and the reintroduction of ads. I am willing to stick through all this, at least as long as Mike White keeps making new seasons of “The White Lotus.” I get that we now inhabit a golden age of, to borrow a phrase, home box office.
Fifteen years ago in The Times, I read an opinion essay about the shadow work created in the digital age. The argument went like this: Technological innovation was meant to empower the consumer through efficiency and convenience. You could pay bills online! You could book your own travel! In reality, it meant that tasks formerly performed by trained professionals were offloaded onto us, with minimal (and now mostly A.I.) customer support.
The shadow work we do online — paying bills, booking travel, making doctor appointments and so on — only grows in complexity, requiring outside authenticators, urgent text codes and verification emails, not to mention innumerable strong passwords instead of fun puns on the name of the family dog.
Watching TV used to be an activity so passive that a potato could perform it. Now, when we get booted from a platform — because of an update or an outage or just because it’s Tuesday — I’ll stand in front of the screen stabbing the QR code on my phone. I’ll enter my Gmail address via remote control three times over. If I’m not around, my husband will dig up the password I wrote down six months ago, which is now almost certainly obsolete, because some data-hack alert caused me to change it on the fly, panicked that a bad actor — and not the kind you find on IMDb — might gain access to my Hulu watch list on the dark web.
And despite all the data they’ve mined from me, tech platforms don’t really know what I want to watch next. I’ve missed real curation. I want fewer but better choices, and ease of access, especially for comfort viewing.
So last month, after several aborted attempts to make our streaming accounts acknowledge our marital bond, my husband retrieved a decade-old DVD player from a bin of dusty tech in our basement. He brought it upstairs and plugged it in. (Plugged it in!) It was simple to connect, or it must have been, because my husband didn’t send me any expletive-filled texts.
I like that our DVD player is neither smart nor intelligent. You put in the disc, and the movie appears. Instead of searching for Wes Anderson’s “Rushmore” — and finding it on Prime, only to learn that I have to pay to rent it, and even that would require reinstating my lapsed Prime account, which would require reckoning with my many feelings about Amazon — I can put on the Criterion Collection DVD of “Rushmore” I acquired two decades ago and spend my mental energy on Bill Murray rather than Jeff Bezos. (Speaking of the Criterion Collection, you know why all the celebrities who visit the Criterion Closet look so happy? It’s because they’re surrounded by DVDs!)
One of the perks of being a pack rat (and having a basement) is that I’ve saved all my mix tapes, CDs and DVDs. We have three seasons of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and a box set of “The Wire.” We have the BBC’s “Bleak House” and A&E’s “The Jewel in the Crown.” We have “The Dark Knight,” “Up,” “Monsoon Wedding,” “Bend It Like Beckham,” “Parasite” and a two-disc special edition of “A Room With a View.” Now — or rather, again! — we can watch them with the press of a button.
To be clear: I am not a Luddite. I have no interest in giving up my smartphone. I use a running app. I listen to audiobooks made available to me by Libby and Spotify, via Bluetooth earbuds. I’m not an analog fetishist either. I mean, yes, we have started collecting vinyl again, but I don’t want a VCR. I had one the first time around. The tapes take too long to rewind.
Last weekend I put on my DVD of Ang Lee’s “Eat Drink Man Woman,” a film I adore but hadn’t seen in years because none of the services I pay for offer it. I’m not going to claim that the act of placing the disc in the tray and watching it slide into the machine counts as meditative, but it does create a certain sense of ceremony. Once the movie was underway (and we remembered how to turn on subtitles), I felt reluctant to pause it. I was catapulted back to a time when the DVD player was the height of technology, when owning movies in the home was a tangible joy and acquiring one was an investment in my future happiness.
My son, who is 12, has lately been asking what we thought the future would be like when we were his age. My cranky response is, “Well, I didn’t think it would be so hard just to watch TV!” Instead, we tell him about the existential hopes and fears of our youth. And to balance out the heavy stuff, I cued up the first two “Back to the Future” DVDs, which he found both hilarious and informative.
The first one highlights all the cutting-edge gadgets we grew up with in the ’80s (“Is that a Walkman?!”). The second one introduces a late-1980s vision of 2015. There are flying cars and hoverboards, self-fastening sneakers and voice-activated home screens. There’s also a flashy holographic cinema house, from whose marquee a shark emerges to engulf Marty McFly in its jaws.
Those filmmakers didn’t predict an entertainment era defined by consolidation, global scale and wireless rentals for $3.99. But they did get one thing right: We still love being swept away by a movie.
Looking at my shelf of films and series, title by title, I feel connected to the self I was when I first encountered them. I saw “Eat Drink Man Woman” for the first time at a movie theater in Hong Kong in the fall of 1994. I was about to move to Taiwan for six months, and the movie, set in bustling Taipei, gave me my first vivid glimpse of what life there would be like. Mr. Lee’s film became as much a memory of that chapter of my 20s as my actual memories. I have watched it many times, and I plan to watch it many times more.
My DVDs are all time capsules now, even the recent ones. And I no longer need to remember a password to enter my own past.
Radhika Jones is a former editor in chief of Vanity Fair and a former editorial director of books at The Times. She is at work on a memoir about reading, and writes a newsletter on literature and culture.
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