I miss old video stores. You could just go in, browse around, pick out a film, and check it out for less than five dollars. The main drawbacks were that the new releases were always checked out, you were limited by the scope of your store’s library, and you could only check out something like three or four at a time. Still, that could get you through the night. Heck, just browsing was part of the fun! If you found a place that had been around a while, that had an extensive library, who knew what treats you might discover in their inventory. You also had people, movie nerds of all sorts, who you could discuss movies with at the counter.

Now, a movie is in the theater for three weeks. When will it stream? Maybe next week, maybe as part of a subscription to a streaming service, maybe you have to pay more — on top of the streaming service fee, which is on top of the fee to get wifi or whatever that gets the streaming part into your house. The worst part are the old films. “Old” meaning anything issued more than say three-five years ago that was not a blockbuster. “Old” meaning out of style, unpopular. Want to see a semi-niche film starring Tom Hardy as gangster twins? Only a handful of streaming services carry it and for a price. Want to see a film issued when your great-grandparents were still alive? Nope. Hell, want to see Nope?

A digression: There were many times that I could not afford cable, but I did have a VCR or CD-ROM on my computer so I could rent movies as I chose, so after the overhead of the device, it was just the film. My first VCR was on loan from a friend, Karl Bernard. For Christmas, Santa brought me a VCR, it may have been a hand-me-down, but it worked. I didn’t have cable until I had a roommate insist on it or unless it was part of the rental package. Those were olden times, too.

The closest I can get to that experience now is the actual library. The loan lots of films, sometimes even stream them. That’s how I saw the recent Interview with a Vampire. Otherwise, that was another channel subscription, another indefinite wait until one of my or my sorta-step-daughters’ subscriptions carried it.

This all sounds trivial. I read, escape read. I write. Another person in my writing group marvelled that I have four notebooks going. (That will go in my “Does she have ADHD?” file.) I do other things. Still, I love stories, and films are stories with multiple dimensions. They can be art, and even when they are not, they give shape to feelings, to ideas, to archetypes that speak to people. In the wake of my mother’s death, I became friends with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I wasn’t particularly interested in them before, or even since, but at the time, they spoke to me. (Confession: Since it came out, I feel Agatha All Along, especially the Lilia storyline.)

Films are also a business, I know, but access to anything now seems to be a road with more and more toll booths and blocks. The road could be education, it could be information, it could be health care, it could be simply books or movies. We all need to make a living, but somehow, the harder, longer, more most people work — even running the toll booths — more and more booths pop up with no relief.

Maybe I should go watch Squid Game? Of course, wouldn’t it be ironic if I found out that I now had to pay extra to watch it?