One cannot talk about the New Flesh without acknowledging the larval sac that birthed it. As much as my eye is turned to the future, I’m of a generation that will always have one foot firmly planted in this idyllic past we all imagine. The place we all started to learn the language of media, the place that captured our imaginations.

The retail video outlet.

As I write this, Blockbuster, once a giant in the retail industry, is barely clinging to life. In Canada, the very brand name may disappear forever any day now, licensing revoked by a struggling head office looking to bankrupt its former sister chains and scoop up their remaining assets for pennies on the dollar. Corporate raiders trying to pick a carcass clean before it disappears beneath the sands of time.

I once said I couldn’t wait to dance on the grave of Blockbuster. Part of that was driven by my dislike of the monopoly power the company managed to achieve, part of it by my opinion that we were getting ripped off by a business whose days were numbered the minute broadband adoption in North America climbed above 50 percent.

Most of it, though? It was because of Bandito Video.

Bandito was the biggest video store in the reasonably small city I grew up in. Now, I’m told they had other locations, so it was likely some sort of small chain someone was trying to parlay into some regional Blockbuster-style success story, but as far as I knew back then, it was the neighborhood video store.

They had a huge selection, and stocked all kinds of off-the-wall stuff you just didn’t see at a lot of other places. Bandito is where I got BLACULA for the first time. CHOPPER CHICKS IN ZOMBIETOWN. DRILLER KILLER. They had a great horror section, and I vividly recall spending hours in there looking at those incredible VHS covers that promised contents so lurid, so mind-blowing, you couldn’t help but take the tape home with you. They had movies you couldn’t get at other video stores. I recall that my first encounter with ERASERHEAD was due to a rental from Bandito.

They used to give you free popcorn to browse the store with—like the browsing was an integral part of the rental experience, which really, it was. Chewing through bags of popcorn as you’d search for that one movie you’d been trying to chase down for ages, you checked every time you went because they’d special-order stuff if you asked for it enough, and you never knew what you’d find on the shelves sometimes.

Then one day, we heard Bandito had been bought out by Blockbuster. The lights went out one day and the “Under Construction” signs went up. A short time later, the place was reborn in the blue and yellow of the world’s most successful video chain. Inside, there was no more free popcorn, and Bandito’s stock seemed to have been totally replaced.

No more ERASERHEAD. No more SUSPIRIA. INDEPENDENCE DAY was a Guaranteed Rental, though.

A place of imagination, of imperfection…a patchwork quilt of hits and oddities…the smell of fresh popcorn and aisles and aisles of mystery to trawl through were replaced with something sanitary and static. An effective place to make money, sure, but not a place you really wanted to spend an hour or two on a Saturday night picking out your entertainment. No, this was fast-food video, friends. In and out with the latest and greatest, and that was it. No soul.

We moved on to other video stores. In a way, it drove us to even better ones way off the beaten track in our town, but eventually they too would feel the impact of the coming of Blockbuster.

I’ve never forgiven them for taking our place away. For taking the store that made me fall in love with movies and the joy of the communal film experience. Going out with good friends and picking out something that captured our imaginations. Predatory late fee structures? Monopolistic business practices? Terrible selection? These were minor sins by comparison.

Years later now, standing in the desiccated remains of a Blockbuster store surrounded by bins of clearance Previously Viewed DVDs, I recognize we really are at the end of an era, and the high-water mark of my generation’s way of doing things was that point right before they took our video store away from us. I didn’t expect to feel sympathy for them, but I do.

Over 100 copies of COP OUT stare me in the face and tell me the story of where the tipping point was when the video store stopped reflecting the tastes of people passionate about movies and started reflecting what studios wanted to push. The aftermath of all that is on sale now at your local Blockbuster.

I’ve browsed a video store for what might be the last time, and even though it’s a Blockbuster, I just can’t muster any schadenfreude. Watching the old flesh die and fall away should be cause for celebration, and for some I guess it is.

I bet those people never held hands with a girl they wanted to impress, though, tirelessly searching the racks for the key to the evening. Never found an unlikely favorite that changed their life in the back racks of unsorted tapes. It’s the joy of the search, the communal pleasure of discovery that we still struggle with in these new times where analog scarcity is replaced with digital plenty.

How can I stand here and call myself a scribe of this new era when I feel so much for the past? Only someone who knows that sense of mystery and discovery and recognizes it when they see it even now can properly do the job.

I’ve forgiven Blockbuster, I guess, now that I see it crumbling before me. Before I let it go entirely, however, when it all comes down for Blockbuster and they shutter the last stores, I’m still going to do a little dance on their grave—for Bandito Video and for the spirit it had and that Blockbuster broke because they missed what made retail special.

In the spirit of looking back on the old through the medium of the new, I want to introduce our film this week: design collective MK12’s FOLLOW THE SUN. Taking an old and familiar piece of film nostalgia, the refreshment reel, and slowly twisting it to places beyond our comfort level and into a psychedelic paranoid alternate history. Animator TJ Fuller gives us a vision such as Albert Hofmann might have seen had he taken his most famous invention to the movies instead of on his fabled bicycle ride. I was so taken with how such a short film could seem to burn so slowly and then deliver such a punch. It’s hard to even spot the point where things go off the rails; you just know it feels wrong and then does it ever go wrong, spiralling into a fever dream of suburban drive-in apocalypse.

In our next installment, we’ll talk to the creative team behind FOLLOW THE SUN as they try to create a new mythology in the age of the meme and of infinite availability. What can the New and Old learn from each other? If we agree the New Flesh has a heart, does it also have a soul? All that and more next week.

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Bloody Blogs - Long Live the New Flesh