I Wish I Knew How To Quit You, DVDs

There’s an early scene in 27 Dresses where the two main characters, Jane and Kevin, take stock of Jane’s overflowing collection of bridesmaid dresses. In Jane’s apartment foyer, all 27 of the dresses — some poofy, some bedazzled, some acceptable and some downright hideous — fight to break free against the closet door. Kevin is incredulous. He can’t understand why Jane dedicates an entire closet to these dresses, most of which she’ll never wear again. This is NYC, after all — a real estate nightmare where every inch of space is hard-won.

But pragmatic Jane has a reason. It doesn’t matter that she loses the space. It doesn’t matter that she’ll never wear them again. Each dress is a memory, and each holds sentimental value. That’s not something that can be thrown away.

If you trade the dresses for DVDs, I am Jane and my friends are Kevin, not-so-silently judging my ever-growing collection that feels obsolete in the era of streaming. But I love DVDs. I love having them at my beck and call, I love the extra features and the forced trailers that take you back in time, and I love having a physical collection of my favorite shows and movies. My apartment is adorned — and honestly decorated — with shelves upon shelves of DVDs taking up that coveted NYC space. It’s my personality tangibly on display.

A few fellow enthusiasts of physical media have published similar thoughts: Peter Suderman at Vox extolled the virtues of DVD picture quality, which still beats that of even the best streaming content available today. Matt Goldberg of Collider found the cracks in the streaming landscape, where some of the highest-rated content of decades past can cease to exist. I’m not a technical person by any means, so for me the draw is more emotional.

Like Jane, each entry on the shelf is a memory. My seasons of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia are synonymous with the Thanksgiving night my brother and I spent relying on the FX comedy to keep us awake for Black Friday shopping. My DVD of Zoolander was a Secret Santa gift from my best friend and is the basis of our friendship. The copies of Arrested Development still have Blockbuster (RIP) stickers on them as an homage to the closing video store that I bought them from. The box set of Lost is a physical embodiment of how I met my roommate. The various Bollywood films are in my possession simply because I stole them from my parents’ collection (sorry, mom and dad).

Those who argue against collecting have a point: streaming has made just about everything (even the movies and TV you haven’t seen yet) available at any given moment. I get that — after all, this is a website focusing on and celebrating streaming content, and I love that I can turn on Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon to find almost anything that comes to mind at my fingertips (literally). With my body comfortably sinking into the cushions of the couch, the ability to just press a button sort of makes me feel like Harry Potter waving his wand at the TV and yelling “Alohamora!” Add that to the fact that my apartment is small and crammed for space, and there seems to be no reason to buy a DVD anymore.

In 2018, bingeing is the modus operandi. As a culture, we’ll choose a quick fastball instead of week-to-week dramatic buildup nine times out of ten. And in that, we’ve subconsciously chosen streaming as our vehicle. Streaming has even been credited with turning cult hits into major phenomenons. When Breaking Bad premiered on AMC in 2008, it saw modest numbers. But Heisenberg and the series slowly gained an audience due to its accessibility on Netflix, and new seasons began to premiere to record numbers; the final season saw almost 6 million total viewers, doubling the previous season’s premiere. It’s a recurring theme — some industry veterans observed a similar pattern with CW’s Riverdale this past year.

So, for the purposes of this discussion, let’s agree that streaming is awesome and holds a legitimate place within the current landscape. Still, I hold a candle for DVDs, especially when it comes to art that I love. At any given moment, there’s a season of TV or a film in my Amazon cart, and I’ll usually opt for watching things off of my physical copy when given the chance. When I moved in with my current roommate, I found out that she had never seen Friday Night Lights — my favorite show of all time. Unacceptable. So I pulled out my box set of the hit drama even though it was streaming on Netflix at the time, and popped each disc into my player. It was our weekend ritual over a home cooked brunch and we still took part in binge culture by watching a set of episodes each day, but our breaks were to switch discs instead of pausing when Netflix judged us for spending five hours straight on the couch.

More than rewatching one of my most treasured shows with one of my most treasured people, I found renewed joy in holding Coach Taylor, Smash, and Vince Howard’s faces on discs in my hand and in hearing the haunting theme song play over the main menu. Having the DVDs means that I can revisit Dillon, Texas anytime I want and discover new details via deleted scenes and special features that I’d never get in another format.

Mourning the death of physical copies isn’t a new sentiment, as they are one of the last vestiges of my childhood. There’s an emotional aspect of physically owning something, of feeling like part of its legacy is your own — it’s why I still prefer to buy books instead of hopping on the Kindle bandwagon. Holding a DVD case in my hand, reading the synopsis on the back, and sliding the disc into the player makes my viewing feel intentional. Fast-forwarding through the commercials of “upcoming movies” and delving into the special features creates a special bond with the material that streaming doesn’t offer. The truth is that watching something on DVD has a different kind of memory and emotion attached to it, though it’s more about the extra stuff than it is about the content itself.

The reason I remember that scene from 27 Dresses so well is because (surprise!) I own the DVD and have watched it a countless number of times since I forced my brother to gift it to me for one of my birthdays. I still laugh at the absurdity of the context, I still swoon during “Bennie and the Jets,” and I still feel betrayed by the bitch who broke Jane’s heart and cut up her mother’s wedding dress. I can recite dialogue from this movie as if it were my own. But even as a superfan in the years that I’ve owned this film, I have intentionally not seen all of the special features because every so often when I pop that disc in, I get a chance to learn something new about something I love. There’s no replacement for that.

Radhika Menon (@menonrad) is a TV-obsessed writer living in New York City. Her work has appeared on The TV Addict, Brown Girl Magazine, Breadcrumbs Mag and Syndicated Magazine. At any given moment, she can ruminate at length over Friday Night Lights, the University of Michigan, and the perfect slice of pizza. You may call her Rad.