Be Kind Rewind as Critique

I wrote of the goofiness of this film in my previous post, and I maintain that, but I'm also taken with the idea of there being something more subversive going on.

The plot of the film hinges on the fact that the protagonists work and hang out in a video store: Had they been DVDs they rented the magnetization that erases the tapes' information would not have been a problem. This contretemps forces Def and Black to recreate the movies lost, themselves, doing their best to approximate elaborate special effects and professional acting without knowing anything about the movie business.

The DIY approach soon sees a huge interest erupt in their customers, increasing more so when those who rent the films take on active roles in their creation.

Sort of like making movies and posting them for your friends to see on youtube.

One of the greatest things about digital film making is that it puts power into ideas. Money is no longer such an issue as to keep people out by the nature of the medium.

But because of the way this new media is typically disseminated (over the internet) and consumed (on a personal computer), the feeling of community has been lessoned--or at least changed.

Watching movies on a computer is not the same as watching them in a theater: not just for the obvious differences in size and possibly irksome streaming problems, but even with a group of friends gathered around the computer screen there is a loss of the sense of a communal endeavor. Movies invite us to make a personal journey into the space between our own imaginations and those represented in the film, but in the space of the movie theater we do it together, with friends, sure, but people we don't know as well.

But the sticking point, here, and the cleverest observation, is the idea that these characters still want and value the collaboration of creation as well as consumption. They are never as happy or as filled with purpose as when they are all making their own movie together for an intended audience demographic no larger than themselves. They want too much of film for watching to be enough anymore.

Film making is by its nature a collaborative venture , so much so that creation and consumption have here ceased to be distinct ideas. Instead these characters make so they can consume, but the pleasure of the latter is directly related to the former. They have achieved the community of the movie theater by keeping it there, in the community, with each other, and value that experience as much as those experiences that made it possible. Each are linked so closely that they can't exist without each other, reminding us that we can't watch movies until someone has made them, and there would be no movies made if there were no one to watch them.