Or I can allow for serendipity — movies appear in my mailbox that I barely remember adding in the first place. I can play a kind of guessing game around what precipitated a particular whim. Was it Jeanne Moreau’s obituary? A retrospective at MoMA? The site’s regularly maintained “forthcoming release” page, which I checked religiously? During the service’s glory days, you could easily sort movies by country of origin and display them in chronological order. The Criterion Collection was in there, sure, but so was “Alien³.” You could add not-yet-available movies to a special “saved” section when you’d missed the theatrical release or before an old film existed on DVD.
The choices were broader but my options were narrower, because on my subscription plan, I would have only four movies available to me at any given time. When I visited homes that subscribed to every streaming service from Amazon Prime to Disney+, I felt paralyzed by the surfeit of possibilities, like Robin Williams floored in the coffee aisle in “Moscow on the Hudson” (available, yes, on DVD.com). As the psychologist Barry Schwartz documented in his seminal book, “The Paradox of Choice,” more is, in fact, often less — having too many options can send us into a tailspin.
I started on Netflix’s DVDs 20 years ago, while I was dating the man who became my husband, an early customer of what was then known simply as Netflix. This was well before streaming led the company to spin off DVD.com like a discarded training bra, a source of shame to what had become an entertainment behemoth. He allowed me into his account the way a boyfriend offers a spare dresser drawer. Tentatively at first, I added movies I wanted to watch to his queue. Soon I was working the list, pushing my choices ahead of his. “Did you delete my Buster Keaton?” he’d ask while I pretended to clean out the refrigerator. As happens with any long-married couple, we eventually worked it out in that I essentially took over the account and he moved on to more advanced technologies.
There is a cost to clinging to products and services as they shuffle off into obsolescence. Like a mom-and-pop video store with a desperate “Everything must go!” sign in its window, the service starts to decline as employees are laid off. On DVD.com, the “coming soon” feature disappeared a few years ago and the responses to my forlorn emails to customer service essentially said, “Yeah, sorry.” Like a half-empty shelf in aisle 4, the new “user interface” eliminated the drop-down menu of foreign movies by language; the once assiduously updated “new releases” became a vague “new and popular.”
When the portable DVD player that I perched on the elliptical machine in my basement petered out after 12 workhorse years last winter, I excitedly ordered a new one. “Surely it will be better than the old jalopy!” I told myself. But companies have few incentives to upgrade dying technology. My replacement DVD player offered fewer amenities than its predecessor. It mutters out movie dialogue reluctantly, barely exceeding the swooshing sounds of the elliptical treads.