Videohell

Alex Ross Perry’s recent film Videoheaven is a comprehensive, omnibus documentary about the history of the video store, as told through the depictions of the video store in film and television. The film is a stone-faced dissection of what the video store meant to film culture and American culture more broadly, but it also oozes the love of cinema that circulated at these palaces of home viewing in potentia.

It was at video stores that I cut my own teeth on cinephilia. In my renting era, this was primarily a series of Blockbusters (depending on where I lived). I browsed racks upon racks and rented my way to film knowledge.

My most formative experience, though, took place in an alternative space only briefly mentioned in Videoheaven: the supermarket video rack. As a young closeted trans girl, I stared endlessly at the cover of Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde (1995), a film that promised a gender-bent twist on Robert Louis Stevenson’s endlessly remixed tale of transformation and inner self. The cover was so tantalizing to me. The current me sees the obvious Sean Young connection with Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, a film which shaped my young trans self-identity more than any other in a profoundly negative way. But owing in part to the exclusively potential energy surrounding the unseen Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde, I have fond memories here.

I loved this cover. But I was too scared to rent the film, and I never saw it.

Until, that is, I saw a used VHS copy at my own local video store* a few weeks ago. I exchanged a few dollars for the tape and took it home, in a strange fulfillment of my childhood imagination and fantasies. In removing the tape from its box, I watched the label flitter to the ground, too old to adhere to the tape or perhaps too ashamed to identify such a forgettable and trivial piece of cinema history.

I did watch the film, but the film itself** isn’t important here. What’s important is the youthful experience of browsing a shelf and fixating on the trans-coded cover of terrible movie and how that very late nineties / early aughts experience in video hell shaped me for better and for worse.

*Not a surviving video rental store, as documented in Videoheaven, but a modern boutique video seller.

**I think Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde most closely resembles films like Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), The Mask (1994), and Flubber (1997). The film is of a kind with those rubbery contrivances, modern-day slapstick atrocities, death-rattles of the post-eighties consumerist libido. Kid me would have loved it, like I loved the three other films listed above.