The Brooklyn Rail

Whatever happened to the video rental store? For a whole generation, this question probably seems as silly and immaterial as asking “whatever happened to 8-track tape?”

But for anyone born before streaming, video rental was kind of a miracle: entertainment became no longer strictly an in-the-moment activity. Video stores gave people the opportunity to return to films, and later TV shows created decades prior and in other languages. They granted everyone the chance to see and have their own take on stories that until then only academics, critics, and filmmakers may have known. They also gave Hollywood another line of revenue, one so profitable that in its heyday it made more money for the studios than the films themselves—something that streaming has (momentarily) achieved at the expense of traditional cinema, a collapse for which streaming is in part responsible.

And yet for all this, today video stores are gone. How the hell did that happen?

For filmmaker Alex Ross Perry, whose new documentary Videoheaven (2025) considers the lifespan of video stores through their depiction in films and TV shows, trying to understand what happened to the video store was not simply an academic concern. Born in 1984, just a few months before Brian de Palma’s Body Double depicted a video store in a film for the first time, Perry spent his whole early adult life working in video stores. “My first job was at Suncoast video,” he told me in an interview on Zoom. “The whole time I was in college at NYU and then for a year and a half after, I worked at Kim’s Video on St. Mark’s between 2nd and 3rd Avenue.”

Kim’s, which opened in 1987 and stayed open until 2008, was an extraordinary place, known for the size of its collection and the knowledge of its staff (a number of whom, like Perry, went on to become filmmakers). “Go to any film school, and you can draw a line around the thousand most canonical films,” Perry explains. “That’s what you’re getting. And that’s a lot. Kim’s had fifty thousand movies. And the idea that you came to one physical room to access these things was very special. It’s how I grew up.”

Over the years Perry, who has written and/or directed more than a dozen films, has pitched any number of stories involving video stores without success. Then he read Daniel Herbert’s 2014 book Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store. In subsequent conversation with Herbert, he came up with the idea to document the depiction of video stores in film and TV shows, from their earliest portrayal in the eighties through to their collapse in the 2000s.

The more Perry dug into the project, the more he discovered a possible solution to this mystery he had been struggling with for so long. He acknowledges most believed there was no real mystery to solve: just as streaming is now cannibalizing cinema, it previously devoured the video rental business. But he was not fully convinced. “Yes, streaming started roughly the time stores went away, but so does music streaming—even earlier actually, and you can’t go to a small-town Main Street and not still find a credible music store.”

“Streaming didn’t end music sales—though it brought it very low. E-books didn’t end book stores.” So again, why was it different for video?

What he discovered in his research is that as the years went on, films and TV shows took a more and more hostile view of video stores. After initially portraying them as places where people are exposed to danger—David Cronenberg’s 1983 film Videodrome, though it doesn’t show a store, treats the video tape itself as a sort of monster we let into our houses—for a time video stores were imagined as spaces of discovery, even adventure. These were places where visitors had the chance to have richly curated cultural experiences, and also perhaps to experience for themselves the kinds of stories they watched. Clerks found themselves thrown into action movies. Customers looking for a romcom had their own meet-cutes. “This video space was advertised as a portal to a world of experience that was transportive,” Perry explains. “At Kim’s, you had fifty thousand futures waiting for you.”

But then other, darker ideas started to creep in. Video stores started to be presented as places where your own private desires were on public display, and as such, sites of potentially uncomfortable revelation. How many times have we watched scenes where someone hides the movie they want to rent because they’ve run into a friend or family member? Suddenly visiting a video store was like buying condoms or a pregnancy test at the pharmacy. “Being in public at the video store,” the film explains, “was a cause for concern.”

Likewise the knowledge and good taste that had been ascribed to clerks early on started to metastasize in movies and TV shows into characters who were condescending, belligerent, and at the same time, pathetic. They were, Perry writes in the film, “the modern equivalent of the eternally shushing fuddy duddy librarian,” but for some reason movies and TV shows made them a thousand times more intrusive and demeaning. Who would want to deal with people or places like that?

As video stores became a staple of modern life, Perry notes how movies and TV shows went one step even further, treating them as banal, brightly-lit, cookie-cutter purgatories, each with the same basic set of movies. Perry opens the film with a clip of Ethan Hawke in Hamlet wandering the aisles of a video store. Could there be any more fitting place to ask, “To be, or not to be?”

For Perry, this is the piece of the puzzle we’ve been missing: Yes, streaming is happening. But long before it did, film and TV had already spent the better part of fifteen years painting video stores as horrible, humiliating places. It seems bizarre; Hollywood absolutely depended on these stores. Perry agrees. “This was not anybody’s conscious intention,” he admits. But the facts are the facts: “I can find seventy clips of stressful, humiliating, embarrassing, awkward, frustrating, miserable experiences in video stores. I cannot find seventy-five clips of the same set in a book store, or a library, or a music store.”

One of the most interesting things about Videoheaven is its narration. For as personal as the story is for Perry, it’s not told in the first person. In fact it’s narrated not by Perry at all but by actress Maya Hawke. And it has many purposes to serve: “The film aspires to be simultaneously academic, elegiac, narrative, and entertaining,” Perry says. “That’s a tough Venn diagram to find the overlap.” But Perry’s language is crisp and provocative. Reflecting on the strange pattern of must-see TV shows like Friends having adult movie areas in video stores—something you would never actually find in a chain video store in that era, Perry writes, “These shows made the curious decision to depict pornography as common and accessible while never failing to also portray the idea of actually renting it as shameful and humiliating.”

Talking about the underlying significance of our rental choices, he offers, “Taste represents where we come from and where we want to go. Taste is a marker of our class, our gender, our age, and our education. Going into a video store meant declaring yourself.”

Perry’s takes are so insightful, they frequently had me pausing the film to write things down. And whether Hawke is being asked to present statistics, offer cultural analysis, or do a deep dive into one of her parents’ movies—she is the daughter of Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke—she presents the story with a compelling, hushed sense of intimacy. It’s by design, says Perry: “I told Maya, the story wants to be a cool girl leaning on the counter telling a customer a long story.”

Watching Videoheaven, I found myself having the strange experience of feeling sad for something that I had lost long ago without ever realizing it was gone. It reminded me of the current state of cinema. Will there be a day before too long when we look around and suddenly wonder, whatever happened to movie theaters?

Talking to Perry, it’s clear that combination of nostalgia, longing, and melancholy is what he’s been feeling for so long. The film was meant to give people “three more hours browsing the aisles at a video store,” he said, something that’s still possible to do in theory—in Los Angeles, New York, and elsewhere you can still find an occasional video store, but it’s pretty rare. “All I wanted was for people to get to the end and realize, video stores were a huge part of my life and the lives of everybody I know. And then one day they just weren’t there anymore.”