Sure, you think you know all about Blockbuster. You and all your indie-flick fans regularly castigate it for stocking fifty copies of Battlefield: Earth or The Fast and the Furious and yet only having one copy — or worse, depending on the store, no copies — of George Romero’s Bruiser. You shake your head and your fist at the chain’s insistence on stocking bowlderized versions of edgy breakout hits whenever possible. You discuss endlessly their obvious vendetta against independent cinema, or indeed anything even remotely original or trend-setting; not that you’re actually debating said vendetta (because, hey, everyone already knows that it exists), but whether it’s motivated by a perverse hatred of anything outside Hollywood’s bloated mainstream, or more specifically by a secret cadre of conservative Christian stockholders who use the chain as a weapon to strike out against Communists, homosexuals, and sundry other unsavorables.
But the truth, should you actually discover it, is far worse than you have imagined, Horatio. Discovering it may indeed cause a paradigm shift in your thinking, revealing to you evils in places you never imagined. Are you certain you want to find the true evil behind the illusions?
Are you sure?
Here, then, is the secret, which has incredibly stood naked before your eyes, hidden in plain sight like some kind of purloined letter of video marketing:
Blockbuster is (gasp) a money-making enterprise.
Let’s start with Corporate American 101, shall we? Viacom, parent company of Blockbuster, is a for-profit corporation. Unlike, perhaps, a family business or partnership, a corporation like this exists for one purpose, and one purpose alone: to keep the stockholders happy by being profitable. Not to encourage artistic expression, or promote a certain family lifestyle, or perpetuate the studio-driven status quo. Blockbuster is not there to rot the minds of the youth of America, nor conversely to provide a safe haven for children of all ages. All of that is beside the point.
As far as one can speak of a corporation as if it were a desire-driven entity, Viacom wants to make money. End of story.
What does this mean? Well, for one thing, Blockbuster has no inherent hatred of the mom’n'pop stores that it routinely out-competes. But growth means profit, so Blockbuster aims to grow.
For another thing, a theatrically-released bomb will rent better than a brilliant indie that no one’s ever heard of. That’s numbers, baby; they don’t lie. So why should Blockbuster make some sort of empty artistic gesture by stocking twenty copies of the latest brilliant subtitled French film when Joe Q. Public hates subtitles, or an edgy shot-in-video thriller when Joe Q. Public thinks that video footage looks like home movies? If those movies would rent, you can bet your ass they’d order them by the gross; but if Adam Sandler movies are guaranteed renters, then that’s where they’ll invest the bucks. Artistic gestures don’t bank with Wall Street.
For yet another thing, Blockbuster does not “edit” movies. To do so would be illegal, and lawsuits cost money. Instead, because they have enough outlets to give them considerable bargaining power, they negotiate with the distributors and studios to carry tamer, rated versions of unrated films (a deal which the studio has every right to grant, as they have paid the moviemakers for the express right to own the film, lock, stock, and barrel). And why? No, it’s not because the Board of Directors is overrun with old fuddy-duddies on a personal crusade to keep the citizens of America from seeing nipples. Those executives don’t really care a rat’s ass what those videocassettes contain, so long as they rent. And Blockbuster wants to attract family traffic, so they make a very visible effort (“gesture,” really) to appear family-friendly to middle America. Think about it; if it were really a moral issue, would Blockbuster stock at least two copies (R-rated, naturally) of every single release from the Playboy Eros line? Would they stock frankly unrated foreign films? It’s not a matter of content, it’s a matter of image, a concept on which the entertainment industry is built on from top to bottom. Boycotts are bad for business, so the powers-that-be simply carry edited versions of Requiem For a Dream as a bottom-line decision.
And don’t fool yourself into thinking that Hollywood Video or Video Update or any other corporate video chain wouldn’t do the same thing, if they had the clout and if they’d thought of it first. Think that Hollywood Video has an ethical devotion to independent film? Hardly. They’re just trying to mop up the segment of public that falls outside Blockbuster’s target demographics, simply because they can’t compete with Blockbuster head-on. If a magic genii reversed their corporate earnings tomorrow, you can bet your ass that Hollywood Video would fall all over itself trying to preserve the loyalty of that immense middle-class viewing audience that doesn’t like extreme or ambitious cinema.
You don’t believe me? Remember when the Fox Network premiered with edgy, offbeat programming to attract a demographic that just wasn’t being served by Murder She Wrote and Mr. Belvedere? They worked for years to build up a viewing audience and appear on the radar of the average TV viewer — and then as soon as they were a serious contender, they announced publicly that they would be shifting their programming more to the been-there-done-that in an effort to attract the demographic that actually had the money to respond favorably to car commercials. Audience loyalty be damned; they wanted the most eyes possible.
Does all of this offend you? Does the idea that you are an artfully wooed sucker make your skin crawl? Then realize this: Blockbuster isn’t your enemy — instead, corporate capitalism is your enemy. The idea of profit-making divorced from human conscience and consciousness is your enemy. People working for the good of the corporate non-entity, rather than the other way around, is your enemy. And every time you drop a buck at Wal-Mart or PetsMart or Ultimate Electronics or McDonald’s instead of a human-owned merchant, you’re feeding the enemy. So you can’t sit there wearing made-in-China shoes and sucking down a Coca-Cola beverage and complain about Blockbuster’s soullessness. No one listens to your mouth; they only listen to your wallet.
I don’t like Blockbuster’s business practices; I don’t like the standards they use to decide who to appease with their rental library. But I don’t whine about it. In a way, I admire Blockbuster the same way I admire a quick-spreading weed taking over my wimpy lawn with reckless abandon: It’s doing exactly what it’s meant to do, and doing it well. And you know what else I do instead of whining? I just don’t spend money there. Haven’t dropped a cent at a Blockbuster outlet for over two years. Competition is good; I like the idea that Hollywood and others can keep Blockbuster on their toes, and keep them from complacency in predicting the public. And I love the selection of movies at the struggling human-owned video stores, where they don’t have the money to replace their whole stock every six months and thus still have big-box copies of Crypt of the Living Dead or Raiders of Atlantis.
Fight monolithic consumerism and the corporate culture that encourages it and profits from it. But realize that they don’t care a damn for your protestations of artistic integrity or monopoly (hey, capitalism is dedicated to beating the competition — every corporation’s goal is de facto monopoly). They certainly aren’t going to see the error of their ways thanks to your ill-informed and irrelevent moanings about the First Amendment. Remember that the alphabet of capitalism is composed solely of dollar signs, and a closed wallet speaks an awful lot louder than an open mouth.
Nathan Shumate
2/20/02
