On a late-winter Chicago day that was more gray than cold, I retrieved a binder from a neighbor’s front porch. The binder was fat and unexpectedly heavy, and I had the deranged thought that it might be filled with sand, but it wasn’t filled with sand. It was filled with 92 DVDs. DVDs can seem heavy if you haven’t held them in a while.
I had not been on the lookout for DVDs, and until I became aware of this binder, I had no special attachment to DVDs of any sort. There was no box of Criterion Collection masterpieces lugged from apartment to apartment since my college days. I certainly did not long for the color-coded cables that always had to be untangled and reconnected to the DVD player my husband weirdly couldn’t bring himself to throw away, nor did I miss hunting for the special remote that only ever made an appearance when I was looking for the regular one. Society had moved past DVDs, and frankly, so had I.
Still, the second I saw the binder—containing “practically every major kid’s cartoon movie from the last 20 years on DVD”—appear on my local Free Box Facebook group (where my neighbors give away everything from original artwork to half-empty bottles of shampoo), I wanted it deeply, covetously, like when you see someone wearing a wool sweater that is so entirely your style, you can’t believe it isn’t already yours. Ninety-two disks! Without a moment’s hesitation, I typed, “Interested!” and pressed return. And the next day, I stood awkwardly on my neighbor’s porch to collect my prize.
At this point, I still assumed my excitement about the DVDs had primarily to do with thriftiness, or perhaps a kind of rugged self-reliance. I still assumed their appeal came not from what they could offer me but from what they could free me of, namely going along with the ever-more-expensive whims of Disney+ executives.
In other words, I considered a binder containing 92 DVDs to be the children’s media equivalent of F*** You Money—Take that streaming bill and shove it!—and not, say, something to build my identity as a parent around.
Obviously.
That evening, while my husband sautéed asparagus on the stovetop and my children squabbled over whether to watch Peppa Pig on Amazon Prime or All Engines Go on Netflix, I announced to my family that we were quitting our streaming services and going analog.
“Well, more analog,” I said, suddenly unsure. “Digital analog. Is that a thing?” I sensed that it might not be, but also that this wasn’t particularly important. What was important was that our viewing habits were moving back in time to an era when watching television didn’t require keeping a credit card on file with five different companies.
Then I inhaled sharply, cringing the way one does while uncorking a particularly volatile bottle of champagne. Ditching streaming would be no great struggle for me, someone who watches about as much television as your typical giant Pacific octopus. But the rest of them?
To my surprise, the anticipated shrieks of displeasure never came. My children, whose ears shut down at six p.m. though their bodies keep kicking until eight, wouldn’t even register the change until the end of the month, when our Netflix account finally ran out of gas. At that point they would look at me as though I’d shredded a sacred contract formed between them and the universe. I would, in turn, cheerfully remind them about the DVDs.
“That’s right,” I would say. “They are very shiny. No, stop—you can’t touch them! They scratch.”
Even my husband merely nodded and flipped the asparagus. I could only assume that he was deep in thought, considering the transformative possibilities of spending less time watching television. The two of us have always shared some private dismay about not being altogether more impressive people—Times obit–worthy, ideally, but at the very least, people who exercise more often. Besides, it went without saying that I would not be canceling YouTube Premium, which is where my husband watches sports highlights. In my quest to become a thriftier parent, I had no desire to become a single parent.
An honest account of the binder’s out-of-nowhere appeal should also include observing how neatly DVDs’ technological primacy aligns with my own “reminiscence bump.” This is what psychologists call the increased salience for the autobiographical memories we form between the ages of approximately 10 and 30. For the rest of our lives, although what came before and after will predictably recede, the events of those 20 years will maintain their privileged place in our minds. Researchers aren’t entirely sure why this is. Some suspect novelty: New things are inherently more memorable, and this is a time of new things. Others chalk it up to the sheer number of culturally significant milestones that happen during our teens and 20s, from first kisses and summer jobs and driver’s licenses to weddings and college graduations and—well, more common until recently—first homes. Another theory focuses on storytelling: As we come of age, the places we go and the music we listen to and the people we bond with become the settings and soundtracks and characters for the stories we tell ourselves about the people we are becoming, stories that we’ll carry all our lives.
If these theories sound similar, it’s because they’re all trying to explain the same phenomenon: why our formative years are so very formative. They are all trying to explain why some part of a reasonably well-adjusted, middle-aged woman with a husband and two kids will always be a teenager with spiky hair, trying desperately to convince herself that she likes watching low-budget horror movies.
Low-budget horror movies on DVD, that is. In 1997, when the disks first hit American shelves, I was just 13; by the time revenue from streaming eventually eclipsed that from DVDs (and their higher-definition Blu-Ray cousins), I had already left my 20s behind. Which means that for me, the pinnacle of home entertainment is and will always be synonymous with a fat binder of DVDs.
For a few weeks, quitting our streaming services and embracing DVDs indeed seemed like a sacrifice. Quickly, though, the experiment morphed into something quite different. I found myself proselytizing about the Way of the DVD. They’re so cheap, I’d say to another parent at pre-K pickup. People are literally giving them away. Go to a garage sale of any size and there you go: more DVDs for the collection.
It’s nice to really own a thing, I’d say to a colleague with children of her own. It’s nice not to worry something will go poof in the night.
It’s great for the kids to have choices but not too many choices, I’d say to anyone still listening. It’s great when what they want to watch is in the binder, and it’s great when it isn’t and they have to decide whether they want to purchase How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World with their tooth-fairy money (both of my kids were in highly productive tooth-losing phases) or wait for a free disk to arrive at the library. Because when everything can be yours just like that, is anything even real?
It’s good for movies to be real, I’d say. Treat them badly—roll them down the stairs or throw them like frisbees or wear them because it’s fun to pretend to have large, glassy robot eyes—and they will scratch. Natural consequences! It’s good for there to be natural consequences.
In this manner, as DVDs were added to Christmas and birthday and pre-K graduation wish lists, and as I thought of more reasons why this was a good thing, I stopped considering DVDs in practical terms and began to think of them in moral terms. With every new struggle over what was just and right—should one child spend her birthday money on Bluey if that meant her freeloading sister would get to watch it, too?—my confidence in the moral superiority of the Way of the DVD was affirmed. This was what childhood was for! This was as good a moment as any to learn, in the words of Ursula from The Little Mermaid, “Life’s full of tough choices, innit?”
For my husband, who by virtue of being a father needed no introduction to life’s tough choices, the Way of the DVD was indeed transformative—just not quite in the way I’d expected. In mere months, he’d perfected the art of subscription hopping, signing up for free trial periods of Showtime and Ameba TV and Noggin and Paramount+ and AMC+ and Apple TV+ and FuboTV, timing them so they never overlapped and then, with an athlete’s discipline, turning off the auto-renew before his credit card was ever charged. That he then was obligated to binge as much television as humanly possible during each trial period, thus turning leisure into work, in no way detracted from his satisfaction at gaming the system.
Occasionally, when he wanted to watch something on a channel he’d recently canceled, I would let him use my information to sign up for a new account. This felt a little sneaky and a little fun, like helping ourselves to our sleeping children’s Halloween candy. It was something we could share.
It’s good when DVDs bring people together.
Though my brain was apparently hardwired to accept DVDs as a kind of Platonic ideal, I suspect this might not entirely explain their appeal. I suspect this because my home is already stocked with items I’ve acquired, sometimes at great inconvenience, from such a hodgepodge of eras, it would put Taylor Swift to shame. In the basement there’s the ’70s floor lamp with a built-in night table. That lamp is freaking genius—everyone says so. In the living room there’s the pair of Victorian chairs, upholstered in burnt-orange velvet; we had them shipped from my husband’s grandmother’s estate in Georgia. On a bookshelf in the dining room rests my father’s old brass spittoon, already antique when it came into his possession. My favorite is the ’60s Siesta lounger in our bedroom, the one that arrived from Denmark in a box light enough to convince my husband we’d been scammed. We hadn’t been scammed. That lounger is just so sleek and well designed—not a spare gram of anything—and so comfortable, it is nearly impossible to encounter it unoccupied by one warm-blooded creature or another.
Clearly, I’m someone who’s easily persuaded by the argument they just don’t make them like they used to. Clearly, I’m someone susceptible to the soothing pleasures of nostalgia.
Psychologists would approve. Talk to a psychologist and you will probably hear that nostalgia is a healthy coping mechanism for the stressors of life, that it aids with emotional regulation by sending forth positive memories (and plenty of dopamine) to combat loneliness. You might hear how nostalgic thoughts connect us to previous versions of ourselves, which is critical for maintaining a continuous identity. You might even hear nostalgia described as a bit of an ass kick, prodding us to rekindle old social connections or forge new ones. If you quite sensibly raise your eyebrows at this—what, you’re just going to, like, nostalgia your way to a dinner party?—that same psychologist might cite a study showing that when people are primed to feel nostalgic, they move their chairs an average of seven inches closer to a stranger for an upcoming conversation.
On closer examination, my neighbor’s pitch that the binder contained “practically every major kid’s cartoon movie from the last 20 years” didn’t tell the whole truth. The movies in fact went all the way back to 1955’s Lady and the Tramp, and though among them were plenty of clunkers (Open Season, The Emoji Movie), all the major classics of my girlhood were accounted for: Aladdin, Toy Story, The Little Mermaid. Watching The Little Mermaid now with my daughters as we snuggle on the couch, the three of us singing along with Sebastian the Crab as he catalogs the merits of a life under the sea, I wonder: Would these DVDs feel so morally unassailable if my own childhood wasn’t so spectacularly represented in them?
Also, perhaps Sebastian doth protest too much. This crab sounds a lot like me going on about DVDs.
Unlike VHS tapes, DVDs encode data digitally, allowing for higher video resolution and superior audio quality. DVDs also store more data, and they store the information more efficiently. This is what frees up space for the bells and whistles: dubbed audio tracks and subtitles, director’s cuts and deleted scenes. DVDs are read by laser; so long as they aren’t used as coasters or hockey pucks, they shouldn’t wear or tear at all. On a commercial DVD, even the most determined fool cannot accidentally tape over a favorite movie. And remember the days before opening menus, when you stood by the television and pressed “REW” on the VCR until the members of your family screamed that you’d gone too far, in which case you’d press “FF” until they screamed again? DVDs have menus, and when they arrived, America let out a collective, “Hell yeah.”
But VHS, the technology that DVDs supplanted, was the truly transformative one. VHS was what let us all own movies in the first place, to watch whenever we wanted to. Or was it color television that transformed home entertainment? The rise of network programming? That very first public broadcast? It hardly matters. By the time DVDs came along, the latest crest among so many waves of progress, it seemed inevitable that they would be good, and that the technology that eventually replaced them would be even better.
A lot of things seemed inevitable then.
I grew up, after all, when the growing up was good. The Berlin Wall was coming down, and the world was opening up. The economy was strong and college attendance was on the rise and Americans were more optimistic that children would live better lives than their parents. There were problems, sure, but they were problems that would resolve themselves in time, as a new, more enlightened generation took the helm. I grew up when time itself seemed on my side.
I watched social media connect us, and then I watched it detonate us into a billion tiny factions. I watched smartphones liberate us, and then I watched them capture us all over again. Now I see artificial intelligence on the horizon, and even as I am awestruck by its potential, I shudder.
“When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck,” said the philosopher Paul Virilio. Here’s the thing: I grew up when it still felt possible that we could invent the ship and then put our heads together to avoid the shipwreck. In the world bequeathed to my children, it can seem like there is no avoiding the wreck. And in this world, in this widening gyre of uncertain outcomes and frictionless gratification, DVDs are shiny and real and the same shape as life preservers. DVDs are the last unambiguously good thing: the last technology that arrived and only made things better and would never ever let us down.
Here in America, it’s the marketers who understand nostalgia best. The marketers understand that it’s nostalgia that drives us to eat the foods of our childhoods and adopt the hairstyles of flappers and hippies and acquire artifacts from our pasts, or our ancestors’ pasts, or even just random old stuff. The marketers understand why we fill our homes with antiques and raid secondhand shops for the perfect vintage jacket and still make ourselves cinnamon toast on a bad day. And then, when actual old things won’t cut it, the marketers swoop in to sell us Lisa Frank cases for our smartphones and “retro-style” dishwashers that are Whisper Quiet and energy star certified. The marketers can pinpoint, with thrilling specificity, just when the strange and disconcerting wrongness of the world is most likely to compel us to purchase a pair of JNCO jeans.
I think sometimes about my foray into vintage dishware. After reading an article about microplastics, I threw out all our plastic cups and plates and scavenged antique malls for pre-plastic equivalents: delicate porcelain pieces covered in charming floral patterns and pleasingly chunky milk-glass mugs, all cheap enough to pass along to even the clumsiest child.
We’d been using the dishes for a year before my brother informed me that older paints and glazes often contain heavy metals like lead. “You can buy these home test kits,” he told me helpfully. “When I did it on our old dishes, half of them were safe.”
In lieu of further exploring just what fraction of my lovely dishes, intended to safeguard my children, had been slowly poisoning them instead, I loaded the lot of them into an old milk crate that I carried down to the basement, where I still do my best not to look at them. I later purchased a set of plates from Anthropologie: lead free and spanking new, but hand painted with an old-timey look, decorated with proper English springer spaniels, as if I might in fact live on a country manor and be expecting the likes of Mr. Darcy for tea. The marketers had me pegged.
Nothing is ever simple. Nostalgia protects and nostalgia poisons, and still we go back for more.
For several centuries, before its reputation was so thoroughly rehabilitated, nostalgia was considered a disease, akin to a depressive melancholia, experienced by soldiers fighting in far-off lands. As late as the American Civil War, a particularly dire case of nostalgia, however clumsily feigned, might earn you a quick trip home from the front lines. Next, doctors blamed nostalgia for “immigrant psychosis,” wherein despair for their homelands might drive newcomers to a kind of madness. Then psychoanalysts took a turn, tying nostalgia to regression and retreat: Can’t hack modern life? Why not just climb back into that nice warm womb? Nostalgia didn’t fare much better under a generation of historians who decried its tendency to distort and romanticize, making it the perfect political tool of regressive politicians. “Of all the ways of using history,” the historian Malcolm Chase memorably proclaimed, “nostalgia is the most general, looks the most innocent and is perhaps the most dangerous.”
Nothing is ever simple, you see. Before ushering us into the streaming era, Netflix was in the DVD-rental business. DVDs were the sturdy, unambiguously good stool the company stood on as it took swing after big, disruptive swing.
In our house, the backslide to streaming began with an individual movie: If our daughter wanted to shell out her hard-yanked tooth money on Moana 2, well, did she really need to wait three days for it to arrive in the mail? By then the weekend would be over. So we let her buy it from Amazon to stream instead. Just that once.
But it wasn’t just that once. Sometimes I would get so frustrated trying to find the remote that would let me switch the TV’s input over to the DVD player that I’d make my children stream one of the few movies we’d purchased from Amazon instead. Owning a few more movies we could stream that way seemed prudent. Like common sense, really.
In the end, I was the one who caved. After more than a year without streaming services (well, a year without paying for them, anyway), I was looking for something my younger daughter and I could watch together. I’d just started a new job, which left my soul tired at the end of the day; I needed something that spoke to both my daughter’s wildly competitive spirit and my own desire to stop thinking. We settled on The Great British Baking Show, a show itself steeped in nostalgia—my new Mr. Darcy plates would fit in nicely—where the contestants actually seemed to like one another and everyone was treated with kindness and respect. How quaint! How perfect.
It wasn’t available to rent at my library, though, and purchasing it seemed a bit extreme. Baking competitions are not exactly the kind of thing you watch on repeat. It was, however, available to stream on Netflix. So what did I do? I got out my credit card.
As parents, we want to protect our children from everything strange and disconcerting and wrong. We want to connect them to the past, our past, however real or imagined, distorted or romanticized. We buy them Goodnight Moon and Lincoln Logs so that our entire family might maintain a continuous identity.
My husband, a high school teacher, worries about his students. He worries about them growing up with their noses in their phones. He worries about them wanting to be influencers and trying to win big at sports gambling. He worries about their attention spans and their work ethic and their faith in the world. “We broke them,” he is known to say, and he is only half kidding.
He says this often to me and our friend Abby. Abby also works in education, and normally she nods along. But the last time we talked, she didn’t. “I wonder about that,” she said. “I wonder about that a lot. It’s an easy thing to think, but then I wonder if the kids aren’t doing exactly what they should be. Maybe we’re the broken ones, and they’re just preparing for the world they will actually inherit.”
There is the ship and there is the wreck, and maybe—maybe!—noses in their screens, they will dodge it yet. We need to believe this, and we need them to believe this, too.
There are days when, if my womb were large enough, I’d be pretty okay with my kids climbing back inside, just for the afternoon. There are days when I find it remarkable, truly remarkable, that I let my children so much as touch anything brought to market after about 1997.
But I must. And so, even as the bulging DVD binder fattens, I do.
