Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store

In a 1986 article, the los angeles times described the video store as “the corner grocery store of the 1980s,” a comparison that highlighted the proliferation of rental outlets, as well as their local, idiosyncratic character.¹ Indeed, in the mid-1980s video stores were opening at a rapid pace and in unlikely locations, including gas stations and post offices. In Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store, Daniel Herbert deftly traces the history of the video store from the 1980s through the 2000s, a period when moviegoing was linked to the physical, material space of the video store and to the tangible videotape or videodisc. While the landscape of home video rental has changed dramatically in the past thirty years, Herbert shows how the social and cultural practices forged in the video store persist in today’s digital delivery–dominated media environment.

Videoland provides an important contribution to current scholarly discourse on home video, an area that has generated work from a number of perspectives in recent years. Unlike Joshua M. Greenberg’s From Betamax to Blockbuster (2010), an investigation of the industrial underpinnings of home video, and Caetlin Benson-Allott’s Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens (2013), a study of spectatorship and the video medium, Herbert examines the cultural and material dimensions of the video store. Across the book’s six chapters and three parts, Herbert engages a range of methodologies, including media industry studies, cultural geography, and ethnographic fieldwork, to argue that the video store’s physical layout acclimated viewers to “shopping” for movies for the first time. Herbert demonstrates that the haptic quality of the movie product asked viewers to think of movies not as ephemeral experiences but as tangible material goods.

Part 1 of Videoland presents a cultural and industrial history of the video store. Herbert argues that while viewers had long watched movies at home on television, the video store taught consumers to shop for movies as consumer products, as one would books or groceries. Herbert also shows how the video store contributed to the fracturing of the movie audience. Offering viewers an abundance of old and new titles, “mom-and-pop” video stores and national chains such as Blockbuster Video, Hollywood Video, and Movie Gallery appealed to fragmented tastes and preferences while also standardizing the social ritual and physical space of video shopping.

Indeed, physical space is central to Herbert’s understanding of the social interactions and cultural meanings linked to the video store. In chapter 2, Herbert illustrates how the architectural design of video stores constrained viewer selection and choice. Herbert develops a typology of organizational schemas, which, he argues, constructed “geographies of taste” within video stores. First, the “corporate video stores” arranged titles into broad categories, primarily new releases and everything else, reinforcing Hollywood’s understanding of home video as a novelty-driven marketplace. Second, “corporate-model independents,” a hybrid model, combined new release sections with more specialized groupings such as genre sections and adults-only titles (often hidden away in the curtained-off back room). Last, “specialty video stores” organized movies into highly specific categories such as national cinema, director, and even sections linked to taste culture, such as a “cult” section. Herbert argues that the physical infrastructure of video stores registered and responded to the fragmented video audience.

Drawing from interviews with video store owners, managers, and employees across the United States, Herbert explores the relationship between the video store and the larger community in part 2 of Videoland. Herbert examines several specialty video stores in larger cities, including Seattle and Los Angeles, and also in smaller college towns like Murfreesboro, Tennessee. “Video capitals” such as Seattle’s Scarecrow Video were (and in some cases still are) hubs of alternative film culture and often occupied an elevated cultural status within the community. Herbert argues that, in addition to serving specialized client tastes, video capitals also functioned as centers of cultural activity, hosting community activities and driving local film culture.

In contrast, the...