The Streaming Era Needs More Friction

Recently, Rob and Patrick found themselves remembering what it was like on The Old Internet, a period of loud dial-up modems and sketchy but surprising ways of pirating discovering music. In the same way, it's never been easier to "discover" movies and television shows, but doesn't it feel overwhelming and weird, too?

This conversation was prompted by our recent My Turn episode covering O Brother, where art thou?, a movie Rob, Patrick, and Cado hadn't watched since it came out more than 20 years ago. There's plenty of movies, and plenty of reasons, to go a long time before revisiting a film, but back in the day, the cycle was different. You had less choice of what to watch, but it also meant a world of curated entertainment by an invisible had of TV executives, or the local video store clerks.

Different doesn't mean better, but this week, we tried sitting with what we found attractive and interesting about that time, and considered ways to introduce movie spice into our lives. A little friction, so to speak.

Patrick: Rob, there’s a moment in the latest episode of My Turn where I ponder why it took me more than 20 years to return to O Brother, where art thou? 

Part of my explanation—or theory—is that it’s not a movie where I sit down at the end of a long day and go “okay, time to watch O Brother, where art thou? It’s a weird, charming movie that I’m glad to have spent a few hours revisiting, but upon reflection, what I was most taken by was discovering I hadn’t rewatched it within the confines of, say, a hotel room looping Starz or because it accidentally came up while browsing cable channels a decade ago and going huh.

We talked about this in the context of music recently, but it’s got me thinking about movies, too. I miss the days of flipping on cable, landing on a movie I’d seen before and getting sucked into a scene, only to find another 90 minutes had gone by and I’d rewatched. Heck, if it was airing on something like TNT, there’s a good chance I watched it with commercials and it was edited up. I discovered new films by renting them at the store and revisited old films chopped up on cable.

The difference between movies and music is that I keep up with the newest movies. I listen to several movie podcasts with spoiler discussions that I keep in the podcast chamber until I’ve had a chance to see it myself. This combination of internal and external factors are useful motivation for seeing Alien: Romulus but less useful for revisiting O Brother, where art thou? 

My favorite holiday is Halloween, and thus, one of my favorite traditions is coming up with a list of movies for my wife and I to watch over the course of the month. The list is important, because it serves as a guiding post and a checklist of shame for movies that we planned to see in October. (But if we’re being honest, the horror movie watching begins in earnest sometime in September, since it’ll take me nearly two months to watch more than 20 movies, anyway.)

That list ends up being a combination of films I hold dear that I want to revisit, movies with a significant historical milestone like a 30th anniversary, older movies I’ve overlooked, and new movies that are timed to drop around Halloween time. But one of the core services of the list is an opportunity—a push—to rewatch old movies! It’s my own curated cable channel of horror, in a world where I’m otherwise always looking forward and rarely find myself in situations where I’m revisiting a classic. Actually, let me amend that. Part of the reason I miss cable surfing is because it was full of stuff, not just classics. It’s easy to find reasons to rewatch a movie that holds a special place in your heart, but much harder to find reasons for, well, everything else.

Do you have a different method for revisiting older movies? Is your relationship to movies different from music, too?

ROB: To quote a movie I suspect we’re not actually going to watch before Megalopolis, “I don’t see any method at all.”