Dipping a toe into the online stream

I’ve been told by some people that it can take up to a year to adjust to retirement. After a couple of months, I still feel a bit disoriented, or perhaps distracted would be a better word. I don’t miss work, which is no surprise, but I haven’t found a comfortable rhythm yet. In fact, I seem to be stuck at the moment in an odd state of lethargy mixed with unfocused urgency. What exactly should I be doing with all the time that’s now at my disposal? Other than spending hours playing countless games of solitaire on my laptop while watching YouTube clips about how rapidly the world is descending into chaos? It even seems to take an effort to sit down and watch a movie, though pre-retirement I was sure I’d finally watch all the great films which have been sitting untouched on my shelves.

That’s actually part of the problem. Now that I’m home full-time, I really feel the weight of the collection that fills my apartment. With almost four-thousand DVDs and another four-thousand Blu-rays – actually the number is quite a bit higher because these include hundreds of box sets – it’ll take me years to get through the ones I haven’t yet watched, even if I stop revisiting ones I’ve already seen. So right now I’m going through a process of rethinking my relationship to these objects, the essence of which is trying to let go of my attachment to “the collection” – that is, the idea that what I own in some way defines who I am. Who am I trying to impress with the range of movies I possess?

Sad to say, the two people who might appreciate my eclectic tastes the most have both passed on: Dave Barber, the venerable programmer of Winnipeg’s Cinematheque, and Howard Curle, the passionate teacher of film studies who was committed to imparting his profound love and deep knowledge of cinema to hundreds of university students every year. Both of these close friends drew on my collection over the years to help them with their own work, but no one now needs that kind of resource. Friends still occasionally come over to watch a movie, but much of what I own is of little interest to them.

So I need to look at this from a different angle, disentangled from my sense of who I am. I need to get back to watching movies for my own enjoyment rather than as a way of constructing an identity … and let’s be honest, boosting my ego. It doesn’t matter to anyone else what I watch, so I shouldn’t be approaching this as a chore. If something doesn’t engage me, I don’t need to force myself to keep watching out of a sense of duty. (This sense of obligation – the sunk-cost fallacy – goes back at least to my teens, when I firmly believed that if I started reading a book I must stick with it to the end no matter how bored I was or how much I disliked it.) So step one is accepting that it’s okay to turn a movie off if I’m not engaged.

The bigger next step is to divest. I expected this to be really difficult, but strangely in its first stages it’s proved much easier and less painful than I anticipated. I’ve begun to remove movies from my overloaded shelves – so far, almost six-hundred DVDs and Blu-rays combined (the number of actual movies is higher since there are quite a few box sets included). In a way, it seems to be getting easier as I go because, although I’ve only made a slight dent so far, the less crowded the shelves look, the more relieved I feel.

The bigger problem is what to do with the ones I’ve now boxed up; I’ll try to trade in some of the more interesting ones at my favourite store, but he’s not going to want to give me credit for this kind of volume (which will be much higher by the time I’ve done even a first pass). Because I do still feel a sense of attachment, I’m reluctant to simply dump them at a thrift store. And, although it might prove to be profitable, I don’t have the patience to try to sell them on eBay or something similar. For now, they’re packed in boxes stacked in the corner.

There’s an ancillary part to this process; for years I resisted getting into streaming, preferring to possess a physical copy of any movie I wanted to watch. Looking at what’s on my shelves – including all the disks still in their shrink wrap, a disturbing number of which I’m no longer interested in or can’t even remember why I bought them in the first place – there are too many which, even though they’re “part of the collection” and thus indicate something about me (now or in the past), I know I’m unlikely ever to watch again. So if it seems likely that a single viewing will suffice, why not save money (and space) by streaming it. After all, that’s pretty much the equivalent of what watching movies was before home video arrived at the end of the ’70s. You’d see a movie in the theatre or on late night television, enjoy the experience, and then move on.

Luckily I have a friend with his own Plex channel and if I want to see something I can submit a request and usually within five or ten minutes it’s available. In the past few months, I’ve streamed more than six dozen movies and TV series; the drawback is that many of these are things I wouldn’t previously have bothered with if I was only watching something I was willing to buy, so there’s a risk that Plex could become another time-consuming black hole like YouTube. As with all things, this is a challenge to my rather weak impulse control.

And strangely, I haven’t written about any of the movies and shows I’ve streamed because, illogically, the manner of watching them somehow disqualifies them for that kind of attention. If I were to psychoanalyze this point, I might consider that the blog has evolved in parallel with the collection and reflects and reinforces the sense that what’s on the shelf and what I watch is an analogue for my identity … which in turn would explain why, as I watch more cheap exploitation movies, I tend to preface my comments with apologies in an attempt to establish a little self-serving distance from “unworthy” movies. This conflict becomes foregrounded when I go back to re-read earlier posts where I might have been more thoughtful and gone into greater depth in writing about films by Orson Welles or Stanley Kubrick or Andrei Tarkovsky.

What I can’t deny is that my relationship to the collection and watching in general has evolved. I’m attracted to the trashy exploitation, but when I make the effort I still appreciate more substantial exemplars of cinematic art – which is one reason that I appreciate my monthly delivery from Criterion with one of two review copies of the latest releases; these force me out of complacency (or is that mere laziness?), the external pressure to be more serious bringing me back every month to that original intention to reflect something of my (partially illusory?) identity to my readers.

My increasing use of streaming raises the question of whether what I buy – and all too often these days don’t watch – is no longer a true reflection of who I am? Is the easy, casual (and free) access to Plex pointing towards a more accurate image than the one I’ve been trying to project? Or does none of this have anything to do with who I am as a person? With that in mind, let’s take a look at what I have actually been streaming.

Series

I’ve resisted getting sucked into committing to multi-season shows which, if it turns out I like them, would eat up enormous quantities of viewing time. (Which is why, despite the urging of friends, I’ve never watched a single episode of The Sopranos or Breaking Bad or Mad Men.) But a limited series which tells a single, self-contained story can draw me in.

The Terror (2018), adapted from Dan Simmons’ 2007 novel about the disappearance of the Franklin expedition in the 1840s, was given a lavish 10-episode production from Ridley Scott’s company, but tends to get bogged down in repetitive character conflicts until the trapped ships are abandoned in the sixth episode and the conflicts expand as the arrogant British colonizers confront the indigenous people and a supernatural manifestation of their resistance. Unfortunately, the CGI monster is poorly designed and becomes more ridiculous than frightening. Producers have attempted to expand this into an anthology like American Horror Story, but I haven’t watched the second series which is set in a Japanese Internment Camp in the ’40s; the third series is due this year.

Much more satisfying is Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass (2021) which evokes Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot with a richly detailed, multi-character story about an isolated community slowly being taken over by an evil entity which is gradually revealed to be an ancient vampire. Flanagan, a master of horror storytelling, does his best work here, with finely-developed characters, heaps of atmosphere, and some unexpected narrative twists.

Archive 81 (2022) begins promisingly, but became less satisfying as it played out. The set-up appealed to me – a media restoration expert is hired by a mysterious man to salvage a collection of video tapes damaged by fire; these were shot by a film student working on a documentary about the residents of a New York tenement. As each tape is cleaned and its contents revealed, the technician discovers disturbing secrets about his own past and a connection with a Satanic cult. The story is solid, but the execution is uneven and grows irritating.

Despite J.K. Rowling’s apparently irrevocable plunge into vicious bigotry, I nonetheless continue to read her mysteries (written as Robert Galbraith) about the detective team of Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott; the characters are engaging and the mysteries elaborate, though later volumes have suffered from the bloat which eventually overtook the Harry Potter series. Perhaps because of Rowling’s problematic public image, the BBC have been adapting the books since 2017 in short mini-series; the first three books got only two or three episodes, while the next three, reflecting the increased length of the books, each run four episodes – hardly enough to cram all the narrative in. Nonetheless, the fifth series, Troubled Blood (2022), does an excellent job of condensing the best book in the series, necessarily losing a lot of narrative detail while nonetheless conveying the essence of its cold case story. The sixth and most recent series, The Ink-Black Heart (2024), actually improves on the book to some degree by stripping away a lot of really irritating material and narrowing the focus, although, like the book, it suffers from its climactic revelation that the killer is a peripheral character we’ve barely seen.

The spectre of Jack the Ripper once again haunts London’s East End in Whitechapel (2009), though unlike the excellent period series Ripper Street (2012-16), this is set in the present-day as a detective begins to suspect that someone is recreating the Ripper’s crimes in every detail. As usual, the cop runs into obstruction from his superiors, jeopardizing his career prospects. I’ve only watched the first three-episode series, but may eventually check out the three subsequent seasons.

I had high hopes for Devs (2020), since all eight episodes were written and directed by Alex Garland, and for the most part it satisfies, though unexpectedly its larger canvas somewhat diffuses the clarity of a film like Ex Machina (2015). A programmer begins to investigate a top secret division in her company after her boyfriend disappears in mysterious circumstances. Building on the current rapid expansion of dubious AI developments, Garland gets philosophical about the nature of existence and the fundamental structure of the universe (or multiverse).

I discovered the animated series Archer (2009-23) in 2014, binged the first four seasons quickly and bought each subsequent season when it came out on DVD – up to season nine, that is, after which the physical media stopped. While the quality of the series remained high, the final two seasons I watched on disk suggested that the creators might have run into a problem sustaining the original concept – seasons eight and nine were stand-alone stories rooted in genre pastiche (’40s noir detective and rugged action-adventure). And then my access stopped and I essentially forgot the series … until I came across the final five seasons on Plex and proceeded to binge again. Season ten continued the genre pastiche with a story set in space, but season eleven finally clarified what had been going on: each of those three seasons had taken place in Archer’s head while he lay in a coma, but season eleven has him wake up to a changed world and the final four seasons see him struggling to reassert himself in a context of changed team dynamics and a different corporate environment. The series sustains its verbal and visual invention through to a satisfying conclusion, managing to avoid the creative exhaustion which eventually dilutes so many animated series which don’t know when to wrap things up.

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With more than five dozen features to consider, I’ll pause here and continue in my next post.