In Videoheaven, Blockbuster––to take after Thom Andersen––plays itself. Now deep in a pop-cultural-scholarship phase inaugurated by his last feature Pavements, Alex Ross Perry has made a generous, absorbing three-hour essay film-cum-documentary on nothing else but video-rental stores, those fabled and most benign of places. That is the loveably niche subject, but like the best examples of those brick-and-mortar venues, it contains multitudes: closely inspired by academic Daniel Herbert’s acclaimed media studies text Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store, Videoheaven is the ne plus ultra consideration of this topic to date, dispensing large portions of information and close analysis entirely through a combination of film and TV excerpts, occasional pieces of archive, and voiceover from Maya Hawke (who appears in some of the former, along with her dad). Born in 1984 and coming of age in the early millennial period, Perry is declaiming that this was his generation and this was what mattered. It was magnetic tape and clumpy boxes, yes, but through rose-tinted shades, they look burnished in gold.
Exciting pre-premiere chatter pitched Videoheaven as Perry’s answer to Thom Andersen’s epochal Los Angeles Plays Itself, whose impact on film appreciation and understandings of urban psychogeography is still being felt. It didn’t reach that plateau for me (a hard ask either way!), not quite turning your impression of the subject matter upside-down or beckoning that we reassess beliefs long taken for granted––even Pavement was subjected to this treatment in Pavements. Still, it’s always lucid, sophisticated, and amusing, where we never question its demand on our time––for the decade Perry spent whittling away at it with editor Clyde Folley, those 180 minutes flow crisply. It doesn’t succumb to repetitions in its arguments, though the eclectic array of them sometimes contradict one another; this also attests to the highly personal (but never narcissistically autobiographical) narration composed by Perry––a highly articulate thinker’s stream of consciousness. Don’t anyone’s intricate, fast-unspooling thoughts tangle themselves occasionally?
With passages from media obvious and essential (Body Double, Clerks, The Watermelon Woman), welcome yet more unexpected (massive chunks of Seinfeld and Friends), and the more novel, but most insightful (crappy noughties indie flicks, Troma movies, I Am Legend), Perry creates a petri-dish of cultural mores and compulsive social behaviors, all glimpsed via roomy, over-lit master shots of shelves, sticky counters, and cardboard standees. Hopeful first-daters, snotty clerks, and embarrassed porn consumers are all here. And they’re North American without exception, an assiduous observation by Perry of these spaces’ fictional recreations: with the home-video player and video cassette emerging in the ’80s as new bastions of American consumerism, no wonder they’d be heavily pushed (and perhaps propagandized) in its popular media.
Of course, the fortunes of cinema exhibition (but not so much in tandem with commentary on contemporary films) are mentioned in counterpoint: in their new competitors––often the jewel of a suburban strip mall or, for the independents and Mom and Pop’s, city street––was more portable entertainment to consume, rewind, and rewatch. Blockbuster’s monopolizing, censorship-purveying, and variety-decimating tactics are well-known from criticism of this cultural mode in the ’90s, though Perry pleasingly doesn’t continue piling on this clichéd target. Frequently, depictions in the assorted mainstream media texts themselves don’t attest to what meaningful community spaces and marketplaces they could be. Whether it’s grown-ups (be they Kate Winslet in The Holiday or Homer Simpson) shown as immaturely shunning adult content and sexuality in their choices; the clerks (rather the minimum-wage movie scholars) with a sincere passion for what they do, belittled; and the indie store incorrectly taking the likely place of a Blockbuster whose registered trademark they couldn’t license––for Perry, the movies couldn’t even depict this key part of their value chain correctly. It’s not quite a metropolis’ vital urban geography and minority culture erased, as for Andersen, but the continuity in visions is clear.
And then all this will crumble into the void, a ghostly space of absence. VHS defeated Betamax but couldn’t vanquish DVD, whose primacy in the ’00s ended with them going from status symbols to landfill fodder. Now all content is absorbed by the Cloud, which has maybe allowed film and filmgoing culture to fall back in love with 35mm and large-format projection, their high-spectrum resolution unquantifiable in lines of pixels. Videoheaven embalms a world of choice, and greater sociality, that was once the cutting edge of modernity and now is history; so it goes. But as the film’s sucker-punch final line confirms, it matters to commemorate it––not because the video “era” was great. It matters because it was a chapter of American life.
Videoheaven premiered at the 2025 International Film Festival Rotterdam.