The garage at the end of the world

The other night I watched Venom: The Last Dance.

I did not want to watch Venom: The Last Dance.

In fact, I had already watched Venom: The Last Dance a few weeks back. In an actual movie theatre. With old, chewy popcorn and a tepid Coke Zero. I hadn’t wanted to watch Venom: The Last Dance even then, but it was what was on. And I am a piteous sucker for what is on.

The reason I watched a movie I hadn’t even wanted to watch the first time, again, is that I’d been doom-scrolling Netflix for about half an hour in an attempt to ward off unkind thoughts about the point of my actual existence (otherwise known as Sunday Night – cue the theme for Carte Blanche), and it was just … there. So I bloody watched it. Again. Purely because it was the thing on top of the list and required me to put in the least amount of effort.

And so my unimaginative, low-effort, repeat-watch of a movie where Tom Hardy is having a peculiar kind of fun but no-one else is, is the reason I have a very specific bee in my bonnet.

Now, to be fair, bees in my bonnet aren’t unusual. You might even say that “my bonnet” is the only place I reliably store my bees. But this one has been buzzing really loudly since the beginning of the year and has everything to do with the weird, slippery reality of watching filmed entertainment these days.

Because here we are: a global entertainment industry still reeling from two Hollywood strikes, the devastating LA fires and a marketplace about as stable as a drunk Great Dane on a three-legged trampoline. Yet, somehow, we’re supposedly spoilt for choice when it comes to what we watch.

Rather, this is the superb trick that’s been pulled by Netflix, Amazon Prime, Showmax, Disney+, Apple TV – all of which are doing a fairly decent job of convincing us that we’re living in a golden age of boundless content.

But somewhere between the fifth “continue watching?” notification and the 40-minute exercise in choice-paralysis that is trying to find anything that hits the itch you’re trying to scratch, it struck me that this is not freedom. This is the algorithmic equivalent of being held hostage by a Wimpy menu – pages upon pages of variations of mostly the same burger, but you know … one of them inexplicably has Vienna sausage in it. And this is only if you’re loony enough to subscribe to all the different streaming options, which no sane person does. I am not sane.

The streamers pitch themselves as if they contain the entirety of cinema’s past, present and future, available at a tap. What they’re actually giving you is a highly selective and deeply temporary slice of what they currently have the rights to, for a limited time, based on what an unpaid intern thinks might make you feel “engaged” by the fourth minute.

Spotify, for all its ills, at least gives the illusion of the archive. You can find a 1973 Hungarian folk album and then listen to it on repeat until you understand why your marriage failed. But the streamers? Ravines. Carefully walled gardens with a pathological aversion to memory, history or context. If it doesn’t serve the release schedule or extract cash from your eyeballs, it either gets cast out into the depths of menu options where none but the bravest will scroll – or vanishes altogether.

Press rewind

Which led me, naturally, to Brakpan. A place where any problem can be solved with a cable-tie or by selling it at a 30% markup.

Specifically, to a place called Echoes Record Bar – a name which humbly obscures that it’s basically an Eldorado-ish Lost City of Physical Media. It’s essentially a converted storage unit in a strip mall behind a Makro, flanked by an incomplete housing development and one of those open fields that only ever gets talked about when it’s on the news because someone found a body in a shallow grave. You know the kind.

Inside, though? A very specific kind of heaven.

Records. CDs. DVDs. Blu-rays. Probably a discarded UMD on a slow day. A temple to the once-future-now-forgotten formats that promised permanence. Behind the counter, the lady who runs the place with her techno-loving son will very eagerly give you the whole history of their little company even if you didn’t ask for it, all while handling online purchases and bundling together stacks of niche Japanese cinema ordered for collection.

Crouching beneath a trestle table covered in surplus 3D Blu-ray copies of X-Men: Days of Future Past (a film nobody wanted to watch in 2D, let alone three), I found a dusty crate with piles of eclectic titles I hadn’t seen in years. Or even ever. The lady behind the counter shrugged and said: “They’re a bit scratched and might not play, so if you find something you like just take it. No charge.”

This is definitely not a place governed by an algorithm. And, to me, it’s what choice actually feels like. It’s walking into the Video Spot and having some film-school student working the counter excitedly convince you to watch a South American film about cabbage. Or finding a film from the 70s that you last watched while on holiday at your gran’s place.

And that is the bee. Being reminded that DVD stores once offered more real discovery than any streaming service has since. Reintroducing oneself to the idea that discoveries sometimes happened because the cover looked cool, or because the girl in the tight top behind the counter whispered, “This one’s weird, but you’ll like it.”

Curiously, the one place that still offers the original Movie Experience should be falling over itself to provide another cornerstone that the streamers can’t: the immersive, sense-invading experience that cinema still does best. But Ster-Kinekor and Nu Metro seem determined to make sure that they cough up whatever corner of the market they still own by letting their contempt for the product they sell and the experience their customers have while they sell it to them, permeate every microlayer of their business. Honestly, Ster Kinekor’s website should be prosecuted at The Hague.

So yes. I am an unashamed meme of the Guy Who Wants To Tell You Why Physical Media Is Better. A happy hoarder of the obsolete. A fighter for special features. And I’ll do whatever I can to make sure the little garage in Brakpan, and whatever other places there are like it, survive. I want to live in a world where someone still alphabetises Kurosawa, even if the shelf is sagging. Where a scratched copy of In the Mood for Love can be salvaged, not buried under a thumbnail of Red Notice 2: Ryan Reynolds Looks Slightly Sadder This Time.

I want the archive back. And sometimes, to find it, you have to leave the algorithm and take the long road to a garage in Brakpan.

_{Top image: David Friedman/Getty Images.}