VHS cassettes are clunky, fragile, easily damaged and easy to accidentally tape over. When VHS was still new, and later, when it was a staple of everyday life, moviemakers tended to use it as a symbol of lonely alienation, as in sex, lies, and videotape or David Cronenberg's Videodrome (where the cable-TV huckster played by James Woods, his mind twisted into Silly Putty shapes by exposure to sinister cathode rays, is controlled by his minders via fleshy cassettes that are inserted into a slit he grows in his stomach), or as a chilly modern form of trespass, as in David Lynch's Lost Highway, where someone leaves tapes on Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette's doorstep, recording ever-closer invasions of their privacy. Introduced in 1976, VHS would somehow defeat Beta in the marketplace and have no trouble dominating laser disc, even though those rival forms offered superior picture quality, but when DVD appeared, offering superior quality and various bells and whistles in a durable, easily portable format, it was as if home video had suddenly caught up with compact disc technology, except that nobody has ever made the claims for VHS that many audiophiles still make for vinyl records as a "warmer", superior recording medium. The last movie released on VHS was A History of Violence in 2005, which means that VHS's commercial life stopped just short of twenty years. But, as 8-track enthusiasts have demonstrated, it's possible to feel nostalgic for anything, and Dennis Lim sees a growing wave of nostalgia for VHS represented in such forthcoming films as Be Kind Rewind and Son of Rambow, as well as such cult objects as the song "Videotape" on the new Radiohead album and "the deliberately lo-fi video" look of the Snoop Dogg video "Sensual Seduction".
Lim points out that "The generation that came of age in the ’80s, as the VCR was becoming a staple, is especially prone to VHS nostalgia," and this really isn't surprising. For those who grew up during the first stages of the home entertainment revolution, VHS will always be like the first car you ever drove. It was the means by which consumers redefined their relationship to movies; suddenly, we were no longer at the mercy of theater and TV programmers, but could dig through film history or take the latest blockbuster home in a little box and watch and re-watch it until we were barking sick of the damn thing. It's hard not to feel some lingering affection for a liberating force like that even after you've been made all too aware of its flaws, and I suspect that I'm not the only movie geek in the world who doesn't continue to hoard a little collection of VHS editions of movies and random oddities that haven't been released on DVD. Lim also reports on a "rarer and geekier phenomenon of VCR nostalgia" represented by Andy Hain, "a software engineer in Brighton, England, [who] maintains the Web site and 'virtual museum' Total Rewind, which scrupulously charts the evolution of VCRs from prehistory to obsolescence. Pride of place is given to the 70-plus vintage video players and cameras in the collection that Mr. Hain has been building since 1993. 'It was mainly the technology that appealed to me,' he wrote in an e-mail message. 'The more I discovered, the more strange and unlikely machines I came across, and I wanted to get hold of them and tinker with them. I also liked the design aspect. The early machines were very expensive and would have been proudly displayed in living rooms. They were styled like top-end hi-fi components, or in some cases like the bridge of the starship Enterprise.'” As for the director of Be Kind Rewind, Michel Gondry, he probably speaks for many in describing one of the natural impulses that makes it harder to let go and ride the wave: “Today new product comes so fast that sometimes the human brain doesn’t have the capacity to adapt.”
