Videoheaven

by Mike McGranaghan

Alex Ross Perry’s documentary Videoheaven is porn for people who have fond memories of video stores. The Queen of Earth and Listen Up Philip director spends nearly three hours meticulously dissecting the rise and fall of VHS/DVD rental establishments. The time could not pass more quickly. He operates from a fascinating premise, i.e. that because such stores are now extinct, the best accounting we have of their existence comes from television and movies.

Narrated by Maya Hawke, the doc is made up entirely of scenes from films and TV shows set in video stores, with occasional news clips thrown in. On a surface level, Perry details how the VHS boom started and how rental stores proliferated during the 1980s. He also explores the corporatization of them in the ‘90s, thanks to chains like Blockbuster and West Coast Video that ran the mom-and-pop stores out of business by homogenizing the experience of renting a movie.

That in itself is compelling. Videoheaven goes much deeper, though. The culture created by video stores is dissected, including the role of clerks as tastemakers. The psychology of renting – that is to say, choosing a movie based on its box art or a clerk’s personalized recommendation – factors in, as well. The point is that video stores started a whole new type of social space for people to interact in. A stranger might tip you off to a good movie or snatch the tape you wanted to rent right before you reached for it. There was a sociological component at play that is lost in the streaming era.

An entire portion of the movie is dedicated to the adult sections of video stores, those tiny back rooms separated by a curtain or a door. Pornographic films were suddenly easily accessible to the masses, who no longer needed to brave a seedy porno theater for kicks. It’s remarkable to think about today. In what mainstream, family-oriented store could you now enter and walk out with pornography?

Aside from analyzing the culture of video stores, Videoheaven zooms in on how they were portrayed in media. The businesses were often the launching pad for romances, with an awkward employee falling for a customer. Clerks were portrayed as being obnoxious and/or snooty in their opinions. Since horror cinema boomed in the ‘80s, video stores became places where evil could occur, as in 1988’s Remote Control, where aliens try to take over Earth by using a mind control-via-VHS technique. Mining fear from the antiquity of a videocassette in The Ring brings that idea more up to date.

The number of film and TV clips presented here is extraordinary. You get everything from Death Wish IV: The Crackdown to Last Action Hero, Seinfeld to Stranger Things. Lots of Troma clips, too, as the independent studio’s name has become synonymous with video stores. Seeing this footage provides endless entertainment, and Perry’s elegantly written narration, which Hawke flawlessly delivers, stimulates the mind.

With video stores gone, our only true link to them is how we see them onscreen. Videoheaven is a glorious three-hour excursion back to the past, as well as a fitting eulogy for a time and place that shaped so many of our lives.

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