I just watched The Last Blockbuster on Netflix — which was funny, streaming a movie about Blockbuster on the site that killed Blockbuster. In the doc, they try to make the argument that poor management, debt, and the financial crisis are what really dug Blockbuster’s grave, but it’s a pretty weak argument. Especially when Blockbuster passed on the chance to buy Netflix. But who knows.
What I found interesting, though, was the way the movie was a swan song to video rental nostalgia. The meat of the movie was interviews with people talking about how many good memories they had at Blockbuster, how it smelled, how it felt to hold a VHS, what it was like to work there, the conversations with the employees…
The movie argues that streaming services isolate us, and that video rental stores were a place of community gathering. So many people waxed nostalgic, and there were shots of people who traveled across the country (and across the world, one person was from Spain) to visit the last Blockbuster in Bend, Oregon.
All I could think of was how sad it was that our collective gathering place, our good memories, our capitalist mecca, was this video rental franchise.
I grew up in the suburbs, and when people ask where I grew up, I often say that I’m from Target. My hometown is outside of Cleveland, and it looks like so many other suburbs. Of course I have memories and places I hold dear within that space, like our home, yard, a park, the gas station…but there’s nothing in particular that defines that town. It doesn’t have much character. And to be honest, the space that makes me feel most at home is the comfort of walking through the brightly lit aisles of a Target.
It’s strangely comforting, knowing that any Target I walk into, no matter how far I am from home, has the same colors, lighting, and layout. I wish I didn’t feel so comforted by this consumerist haven, but I do. And that’s the same feeling the people being interviewed felt in Blockbuster, except that there’s not longer is a Blockbuster in every town, so they can’t feel that sense of coming home.
I’ve moved a lot since graduating high school, like many millennials. I moved for school, for a fresh start, for the ideal city and landscape, in search of the place that feels like home. In doing so, I feel like no place is home, or that any place could be. I feel rootless, and often anxious that I’m not in the “right” place, or about where I should move next. There’s such an ease in just picking up and moving, particularly when you don’t have kids or other humans to take care of.
So many people have moved closer to family during the pandemic, or out of cities to greener pastures. I haven’t moved, but I’ve definitely reevaluated what I want. More and more, I want to feel rooted, part of a community. Like many, I have the American dream of owning a home, which will never happen in the town I live right now, where home prices are around 500k.
I dream of a home where I can make a space and community that doesn’t revolve around franchises, but rather of the land, and of the people in it. I want something particular, small. I want my children to come home and know the landscape, to be able to name the native trees and grasses, to know the street names and the local farmer. To miss the block parties or the grimy basement music venu or the indie theater or the coffee shop with the yellow patio tables.
When I think of home, the one business that was of that place was a hotdog shop called Dan’s Dogs. My friends and I would order a milkshake and the taco dog. It was as weird as it sounds, and involved refried beans and sour cream and lots of cheese. They also had other winners such as pizza dog, nacho dog, and a peanut butter and jelly dog. But more often and not we went to Steak and Shake. And the most frequented place was the gas station near the high school, Sheetz.
I didn’t mean for this post to become an ode to local businesses, but it’s the closest thing I have to place and community gathering. I wasn’t raised religious, my extended family lived about two hours away from us. We didn’t host parties or gatherings. I had a soccer team and sports to gather around, so I suppose the other way of forming community was around nachos in the stands.
Mostly what I want to say is that there’s something deeply missing in the heart of our American culture when our cultural touch points are Blockbuster and Target and Marvel movies.
I’m currently reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, a collection of essays about indigenous knowledge, place, and ecology. In one essay she talks about how America is a nation of immigrants, and because we are immigrants, we don’t have the same connection to the land, which makes it easier to mistreat and exploit it. She says we must learn to “become indigenous to a place.” She writes:
After all these generations since Columbus, some of the wisest of Native elders still puzzle over the people who came to our shores. They look at the toll on the land and say, “The problem with these new people is that they don’t have both feet on the shore. One is still on the boat. They don’t seem to know whether they’re staying or not.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
We need to set aside the colonist mindset that ravages the earth, and the capitalist machine that creates Blockbusters. Even though I lived in the same house until I was 18, where both my parents still live, I’ve never felt that I have two feet in one place. For my entire adult life, I haven’t known whether I’m staying or not. Usually, if I was confident in one thing, it was that I wasn’t staying.
While I, by definition of my immigrant ancestors, will never be indigenous to this place we call America, Kimmerer does offer the idea of becoming a ‘naturalized immigrant.’ The example she provides is of a plant called Plantago major, or White Man’s Footprint. It is one of the first plants to reach the America’s from Europe, but instead of becoming an invasive species, like kudzu, it integrated into the landscape, supports other plants, and helps with soil rehabilitation because it grows well in areas that have been disturbed. It has grown so long and so well that it is naturalized.
How do we learn to become naturalized? To plant our own two feet somewhere? To stay? It’s not by turning family owned video rental stores in Blockbusters, or whatever today’s version of that is. Something with Amazon or Walmart…but it means, I think, stepping out of fluorescent lights of a box store and out into the environment around us. Even if that means concrete, parking lots, and corner stores. Let’s become hyper local. Let’s learn the names of the trees on our block. Let’s stop talking about how we miss the physicality of a VHS or a floppy disc or complaining about how the internet is destroying human connection and get our hands dirty in the community garden. Look, there are people around us, and real community isn’t built through commerce, capital, and exploitation.
Sam Killmeyer 