World of Video

Netflix recently held a competition to create the best "collaborative filtering algorithm" to guess how much a customer would like a movie based on how much they liked other movies. There was a winner and now Netflix is 10% better at guessing how much you'll like a movie. Still, computer scientists admitted that there's a low ceiling for improvement: "inherent variations" make perfection impossible; people fudge numbers.


Meeting Sean Gallagher brings that competition to mind. Mr. Gallagher works at World of Video where he'll recommend a movie if you tell him what you've seen and what you thought of it. He's kind of like a collaborative filtering algorithm but he's also alive. And then there's Pete and Justin and the rest of the crew, all distinctly human and dizzyingly knowledgeable about movies. They aren't anywhere close to perfect with their recommendations, but being misunderstood is a privilege. 


World of Video was founded in Greenwich Village in 1982 and it's moved around the neighborhood several times, the high point of which was displacing a Pottery Barn in the mid 90s. It got halved about six years ago when the store made the switch from VHS to DVD in part because DVDs are about half the size. (imagine if advances in computer chips led to factories staffed by only the littlest and then the most qualified engineers; imagine Willy Wonka and his Oompa Loompa staff). In their business the very alphabet keeps disappearing out from under them. We've forgotten Betamax and Laser Discs and VHS and HD DVDs, but they were all new, gaping paradigms threatening to obsolesce the store. This is no dusty bookshop; World of Video smells like plastic and so smells like modernity and so smells like everything and nothing at all.


World of Video rents, which is a very special and dangerous thing because it's invitation to familiarity. Customers are regulars; nobody goes in less than twice. Moreover, the store rents movies, and if one's got any faith that movies rile and excite and occasionally get banned, then World of Video is an incendiary confluence of familiarity, provocation and "Village people." It is a community.


One Sunday in "monsoon weather" the store was screening Sunset Boulevard. "When she makes this glorious descent down the staircase and she stops everything and she says how great it is to be back in movies. And she says, alright, I'm ready for my close-up. And she walks into the camera, and the camera absorbs her and dissolves into a white fade out. And the whole store applauded...a spontaneous celebration...That was the quintessence of what it was like to work at the place" avowed John Gaffney, who worked at World of Video in the late 80s and 90s. 


During Hurricane Irene New York shut down. Nothing much happened but anticipatory terror stopped subway service and pasted innumerable tape crosses on windows and bought up of all the batteries at the grocery store. Modern life broke down, which is to say World of Video was flooded with crowds they haven't had since the 90s. That was partly because it's cute to watch movies on rainy days but also because it made sense to stock up before a coming cataclysm, to physically procure entertainment in the way people had with batteries and astonishing quantities of pickles. Netflix and cable TV were suddenly dependent on highly complex and undependable infrastructures, on faraway factories and satellites in outer space. Hunkering down calls for a hunk of something, for a movie in a box in a hand. 


Around 1200 BC the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, collapsed. The "palace economy" of lands ruled by literate, bureaucratized capitals that traded with other capitals abruptly went up in flames. Trade stopped, the capitals were burned and looted and people fled in every direction. Scholars argue about whether it was tsunamis or earthquakes or volcanoes or invaders or something else that did it. There followed 400 years of isolated villages where the sole pastime was singing about how great things used to be. World of Video is the neighborhood citadel, the bulwark against systemic collapse. Rent from them now so that when the world ends they'll be here to sing like Homer in the darkness.