Saying Goodbye to Netflix DVD's

In honor of Netflix DVD this past week announcing that they are closing down later this year, I wanted to share my journey with this remarkable company.

Priest, Shane, and The Man Who Would Be King were the first movies that I rented from Netflix.  Movies that have virtually nothing in common other than being ones I wanted to see (and being good movies-I had taste from the start), all of them movies I was seeing for the very first time.  This was in my junior year of college, 17 years ago, and I had won the subscription for free in conjunction with a scholarship I had applied for through my school.  I was a Film History major, and was writing my senior thesis (which was about New Hollywood cinema), and as part of the scholarship I had access to a full year of Netflix.  That none of these movies would really qualify as a "quintessential" film of New Hollywood kind of underlines that this was really more a way for my advisor to give me access to a service I had been talking to her about for over a year.

When I first joined Netflix, it was the ingenue in the movie market, not the dominant figure it'd become in a few years.  Blockbuster and Hollywood Video were still regular parts of my shopping experience, and as proof that I usually just expand my film/TV-watching habits rather than replace them, I visited rental places as often as I did Netflix until they closed.  But Netflix was special from the start.  Within two weeks of owning it, I figured out that queue's had limits (500 titles) as I transposed all of my excel files into the queue, and eventually kept an excel file of movies I wanted to move onto my Netflix queue.  I started with three-at-a-time, which felt a bit indulgent for someone who lived alone, but it was the "most popular" at the time, and in the years that followed, I never changed that-I always would get three Netflix discs at a time.

Any regular user of Netflix discs knew some of the in's of the trade in those days.  For years, until it shut down, the distribution center in the Twin Cities (where I've lived for most of my adult life) was quick enough that you could do a turnaround twice a week with all three discs if you planned hard enough.  I used to refer to Wednesday night as "Netflix Night" and would frequently plan my entire week AROUND that night because it was the day that new Netflix discs arrived, and if I watched & mailed them the next day, I'd have three more on Saturday for the weekends.

I used them as part of a number of cinematic lists, and they're in part responsible for this blog existing.  The Oscar Viewing Project certainly has had hundreds of movies taken off of the Netflix DVD queue, frequently hard to find movies that I couldn't get anywhere else.  I finished off myriad AFI lists, and would use it to structure all of my upcoming viewings.  Some of my favorite films of all-time, movies like Vertigo, 8 1/2, Jules and Jim, Blow-Up, Nashville, Rebel Without a Cause, Once Upon a Time in the West, and Fanny and Alexander...they all started with the tear of a red envelope.  Few businesses have had such a profound impact on the way I look at the world as Netflix.

I endured the jokes as the trend waned from friends, and people traded in the once convenient at-home service of Netflix for even faster streaming platforms like Hulu and Netflix's behemoth big brother, the streaming service it's better known for now.  But I didn't care.  I knew that the gargantuan library that I had access to paled to pretty much any other service.  Even today, there's less than 50 titles on Netflix streaming right now that were made before 1980.  I have more than that in my queue on DVD Netflix.  I said with pride (and a little bit of snobbery), "real film fans still get the discs."

Like all things, I kind of assumed that the end of Netflix DVD's was inevitable.  It was a dinosaur that was on borrowed time, and when it was announced that it would close later this year, I was sad, but hardly surprised.  There is a bitterness that comes with the inevitable, but I understand the logic of it.  They had current users fill out a survey, and asked if we were here until the bitter end, and I very much will be until that last red envelope sends in September.  There's a place for a rant somewhere in this about taking physical media for granted, but I'm going to save that for a different day.  I'll end this instead with love, and type this with the same smile I've had for the past 17 years every time I've opened my mailbox and saw a bright red envelope containing my next adventure.