Internet streaming of movies is one of the best bad ideas of the current age.
On the surface, it’s amazing. It’s convenient as all fuck. It doesn’t get more convenient. You can sit in your living room, drunk, stark naked, at 3 AM on Thanksgiving Day, and punch up a movie on your TV. You don’t have to look for a credit card. You don’t have to pay for everything that you watch. If you don’t like something, you can ditch it and look for something else at no extra charge. Doesn’t matter. It’s a buffet. It’s the perfect thing for our 21st century fucking lazy asses.
In 2018, we don’t have personal jetpacks and vacation spots on Mars, but we do have this streaming shit. It sounds like the future, to me. It would have blown my mind and everyone else’s mind back in the 80s.
But it’s not perfect. It seemingly can never be perfect. Movies come and go. The selection changes as rights and licenses expire. You can never count on anything being there. The majority of services aren’t even nice enough let you know when a movie is about to expire. It just disappears one day. Fuck you. “Love, Netflix”.
Depending solely on streaming for your movies is like living in a cheap apartment with a junkie who keeps stealing from your collection so they can sell it to a pawn shop.
Even worse, it killed the video store, which was beholden to none of this licensing shit. Your average Blockbuster in 1993 had a better and more diverse selection than Netflix has now. (I rented tapes back in the 90s from a Blockbuster in a shitty, hopeless Texas suburb, where Blockbuster was the #1 center of culture; the magazine rack at 7-11 was #2. And this store still had every Preston Sturges movie and The Seventh Seal and Sunset Blvd).
When we gave up video stores for streaming, we lost thousands of sources for movies scattered all over the map, many of them independent and willing to stock damn near anything and keep it around forever. We exchanged that for a small group of intensely corporate streaming services who have no interest in film history and who compete for relevance largely through their original movies and series. They don’t even seem to care about their film selection. Or, at least, they’re on their way to not caring as they become their own brands.
Now, I’m not here to crucify the person who streams. I’m a streamer, too. I use it, I abuse it. I subscribe to Netflix and Amazon Prime and Fandor and Shudder and Night Flight Plus… and Filmstruck, until it goes the way of the wooly mammoth later this month.
Yep, Filmstruck is saying goodbye. The coolest streaming service. The one that, along with Fandor, most seemed to be put together with genuine care. It dug deep into that huge Turner library and brought the fucking Criterion Collection, too, sometimes along with the disc supplements (commentaries, documentaries). If you like film history and don’t spend a few hundred dollars each month on discs, you popped a boner immediately at the very prospect of it. Filmstruck did this streaming shit RIGHT. It was the streaming service for people like me, who cleaned out the “Classics” and “Foreign” section at every video store from which we ever rented.
And later this month, just in time for the holidays, it’s going to die. And there’s nothing out there right now that comes even close to replacing it.
Some people are saying that this is a great argument for continuing to buy physical media in 2018 and I can’t say that I disagree. If I LOVE a movie–if it’s become a part of my soul, if I could watch it anytime–I always buy it in unstoppable, incorruptible disc form (Blu-ray preferred, but DVD and VHS are also acceptable if that’s all there is). I NEED His Girl Friday and Head and Spider Baby and Miller’s Crossing and Vertigo and Raiders of the Lost Ark in my life, no matter what Netflix or my internet provider thinks.
Meanwhile, other people are saying that this is a huge blow for the study of film history. These past films will now be all but inaccessible for younger generations. HOW are they going to see Citizen Kane NOW?!
Me though, I say that, in a way, nothing has changed. Twenty, thirty years ago, older movies, cult movies, and arthouse movies were much more difficult to see than they are now. You had to live near a good video store or a good revival house theater or you had to pay crazy mailorder prices for VHS tapes or laserdiscs or set your VCR to record something that was airing at 2 AM on a Wednesday.
Then, there are the days before home video when you had to go to a theater or be in front of your TV at the exact time of airing to see a movie–and those were your ONLY options.
Yet, all of the films from the past that film geeks still talk about managed to survive all of that. They survived because people (even if it was sometimes just a very small number of people) continued to talk about them and write about them (even without the benefit of the internet).
I love Filmstruck. I wish it wasn’t ending. This news hurts me. It sucks my balls from here to Bangkok (I live in Dallas, Texas, which is pretty far from there, so that’s a lot of ball-sucking).
But it’s also not the death knell of film history, as long as we KEEP TALKING ABOUT IT. Anyone can do it. I do it all over this website, and I’m not even that smart. This site is the product of a confused man who has no idea what he’s doing. And you can do it, too. On a blog. On a social media account. On a Youtube channel. Whatever platform you want. Talk about the movies you love.
That’s how you respond to the end of Filmstruck, I say. Not with consternation, but with enthusiasm about the films that interest you.
Because it’s not streaming services and corporations that keep films alive. Never has been. No, it’s people like us. Talking, Writing. Caring.
That’s it. That’s all you need. Seriously.
(That and maybe a good place to buy or rent movies. Or to renew your Netflix DVD account. In what I’m sure is no coincidence, they sent out a promo e-mail for it about three seconds after Filmstruck announced their closure.)