This week on Overanalysis Theatre is Videoheaven (now streaming on The Criterion Channel), director Alex Ross Perry’s nearly three-hour documentary about the depiction of video stores in films and TV. And if anyone should spend a near-absurd amount of time piecing together film clips and crafting an academic deep-dive essay on the topic, it’s Perry, who counts among his bona-fides a counterboy stint at famous New York City video store Kim’s Video and Music (note, Perry joins Quentin Tarantino and Todd Phillips among the ranks of video-store clerks who became famous filmmakers). Of course, he also helmed Pavements, which I bring up because it’s his previous documentary that shouldn’t at all be taken seriously – and I advise taking a similar approach to Videoheaven, which is one of the more ridiculous films I’ve watched in recent memory.
The Gist: Maya Hawke narrates Videoheaven, and during its opening scene, an extended clip from Michael Almereyda’s modern-day version of Hamlet (released in 2000) in which star Ethan Hawke delivers the famous To Be Or Not To Be soliloquy while wandering the aisles of a video store. She doesn’t acknowledge the fact that the guy in the clip is her father; later in the documentary, she won’t acknowledge that she herself is in a clip from hit TV series Stranger Things, in which her character works at a Family Video location. One assumes her mother, Uma Thurman, never acted in a scene set in a video store, or Perry almost certainly would’ve unearthed it for this doc. Such is his M.O. for the film, which scrounges the hoariest depths of the now-theoretical “video store shelves” for obscure movies featuring scenes set in video stores – and the result finds him putting stuff like Video Violence and The Toxic Avenger III: The Last Temptation of Toxie alongside Videodrome and Body Double.
Perhaps this methodology is a metaphor for the video store itself: Your favorite movie-rental shop was the great equalizer, putting Z-grade junk on the same shelf right next to all-time classics. Prior to that, you’d have to drive past beautiful movie palaces showing shiny new big-studio releases into the seedy part of town to grungy theaters to see grimy horror flicks or (gulp) porn. The metaphor expands when you consider the story of video stores as one of the cogs of our late-20th-century capitalist society, specifically how megachains like Blockbuster not only pushed mom-and-pop joints out of business, but proved to be an unequalizer by filling a display with 40 copies of Cutthroat Island (37 of which inevitably went unrented) while one sad and lonely copy of Red Rock West sat on the bottom shelf (inevitably rented out every single effing time you hoped to see it). Of course, the metaphor extends even further, to the modern day, when you fire up the Netflix app and you see the world’s most generic, nearly forgotten Jason Statham violence-o-rama flick from nine years ago nestled in the Netflix Top 10 next to an erudite Oscar nominee like Train Dreams.
If all this seems a bit galaxy-brained and overanalytical, well, it’s completely in the spirit of Videoheaven, which is shockingly focused in its visual aesthetic (it’s essentially a super-sized YouTube-style supercut) and sober-toned commentary. In fact, it plays like a doctoral thesis with the chutzpah to probe the subtext of old Seinfeld clips, point out Sgt. Kabukiman NYPD posters in the background of a hideous Mark Wahlberg movie from 1998, pontificate upon the rich metatextual qualities of Last Action Hero, illuminate the profundities of Will Smith’s lonely DVD rental routine in the post-apocalyptic setting of I Am Legend, prop up Be Kind Rewind as a near-biblical text of video-store nostalgia, repeatedly force Maya Hawke to remind us that current films will never again set scenes in video stores unless they’re period pieces, and prompt us to dig up lost and forgotten films like Good Dick (dubious!) and The Watermelon Woman (worthy!) for their poignant portrayals of video store culture.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Well, Perry was featured in the 2023 doc Kim’s Video, which chronicled the death and resurrection of that independently owned chain of stores, and the strange journey of its large archive of VHS tapes and DVDs. But more tangentially, any film dweebazoid who watches Videoheaven will remember the crazy shit they rented on a whim from the corner shop (mine were Crazy Larry’s and Believe in Music) or Blockbuster: For me, they were Q The Winged Serpent, The Cook The Thief His Wife and Her Lover (yes, yikes) and Caligula (yes, DOUBLE yikes).
Performance Worth Watching: Let’s see – no talking heads here, Perry gets all the glory for this madness and Hawke plays it admirably straight with her narration. So I’ll reserve this accolade for David Spade, who turns up in clips thrice playing video store clerks. Who knew he was so typecast?
Sex And Skin: Can’t get through a clip show featuring De Palma and Troma movies without a boob or a butt.
Our Take: Criterion is the perfect place for Videoheaven to exist, considering its appeal is limited to mid-Millennial-and-older cinephiles who are interested in more than just a nostalgic trip down memory lane. Perry’s video essay charts the rise and fall of the video store in six chapters, and is impressively focused, especially considering its inordinate length and a tendency to belabor points through repetition and lingering a bit too long on scenes from The Big Hit and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2. It’s an entertainingly odd analytical lark, hinging on the caveat that you don’t take it too seriously when Perry pontificates upon the “sacred transaction” of choosing a video to rent, solemnly points out how “the movies are talking about themselves” when they feature scenes in video stores, or psychoanalyzes the stereotype of the fussy, judgy video clerk.
The director frequently points out how movies and TV feature “generally negative portrayals” of video stores, citing how they’re often scenes for public embarrassment – e.g., getting caught renting a porno, or being chastised for having bad taste in movies – klutzy romantic meet-cutes or extreme violence. The implication is, video stores were common public-gathering destinations for decades, and we should be sad that we have significantly fewer such things in the current era of digital media (you could say the same for record stores). It also implies that our fetishes have shifted from the click-whirr-hum-crackle of a VHS tape being loaded into a VCR to the smooth glide of a touchscreen – and Perry drops in Mads Mikkelsen as a video store clerk in Bleeder, a film by Nicolas Winding Refn, the most fetishy director this side of David Cronenberg, to further underscore the tactile satisfaction many of us got (still get?) upon using such machinery. And here I’ll leave it to you to append the topic with a discussion of pornography, which was a key fixture in video stores, and therefore enjoys an entire chapter devoted to it in Videoheaven.
But the implication within that implication is that common public-gathering destinations are often the site for Movie Drama, so of course the tone skews negative. Should we piece together a three-hour defense of the safety of grocery stores after Marion Cobretti shot up the produce section and meat counter to catch a bad guy? Would we rather watch a more realistic dramatic portrayal of video store life, where a person wanders the aisles for a stupid amount of time hoping something fits the current mood and eventually settles on a mediocrity that they pop into the VCR after burning the first bag of microwave popcorn and before they doze off partway through, then get up the next day and forget to return the tape on time and get slapped with a late fee?
I digress, where Perry never really digresses, even though it feels like he does – or maybe the whole Videoheaven endeavor is just a digression that can be two things at once: a preposterous catalog of minutiae and a quiet lament for brick-and-mortar cultural hubs. In stoking recollections from a bygone era, the film charts for-better-of-for-worse progression in the way we consume movies (or music, or whatever we order from Amazon or through DoorDash). But be warned – although most everyone of a certain vintage nurses some nostalgia for video stores, that doesn’t mean Videoheaven has universal appeal. It’s decidedly FCO: For Cinephiles Only.
Our Call: Or, to elaborate, FOTMHCO: For Only The Most Hopeless Cinephiles Only. Only. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
