I bought myself a $40 DVD player after realizing I was paying for nearly all of the streaming services and barely using them. Maybe it wasn’t the most practical purchase in this era of “Are you still watching?” and binge-watching an entire series in one sitting, but I was starting to feel like I wasn’t actually choosing what I watched anymore. I was being guided, nudged, and influenced toward whatever the algorithm decided I should consume next. Stream this. Watch that. Because you liked this, you might also like this. YUCK.
And honestly? I was just kind of sick of the whole parade, ya know? My DVD player rebellion wasn’t even meant to be nostalgic at the time. It was just me wanting to make my own choices again. But here we are.
It all started when I scrolled through every app on our TV and realized we rarely watched any of them. Instead, we spent more time trying to decide what to watch than actually watching anything. That realization sent me down a rabbit hole of physical media, where I discovered something hiding in plain sight this entire time.
Maybe I wasn’t plugged into the Matrix yet. Or maybe I had noticed them all along but had simply accepted that physical media wasn’t part of the world anymore.
Either way, something shook loose and I reverted to a previous operating system and I started catching up on decades of movies I never had the chance to experience in my youth. Somehow, this $40 DVD player became my tiny act of rebellion against a world that was always trying to tell me what came next and gave me a safe space to let the kid in me heal a little.
Now every trip to the thrift store and used book store feels like a scavenger hunt; I never know what’s waiting on the shelf between a stack of workout tapes and ten copies of You’ve Got Mail. Sometimes its a copy of the movie Stay and sometimes its The Craft or all of the Twilight movies.
You see, I grew up in a home where everything I watched, listened to, or read was carefully filtered. Entire corners of pop culture simply didn’t exist in my world. While my (at school-only) friends were quoting movies, discovering bands, and obsessing over television shows, I was living inside a very small definition of what was considered “acceptable.”
As a kid, I didn’t question it much. Well, no, I did, but questioning it wasn’t really an option.
It wasn’t until much later that I realized there were entire pieces of my adolescence that never got the chance to happen. So when I tell you that I squealed after finding a copy of To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, I don’t just mean I found a movie. I mean I found another tiny piece of a life I wasn’t allowed to experience.
Watching these movies now feels strangely emotional. It’s like introducing my younger self to all the people, stories, and ideas she should have met decades ago. While that definitely sounds dramatic, it does genuinely feel like healing in a way that’s difficult to explain. Maybe that’s why I’ve become so fascinated with physical media lately?
A DVD isn’t trying to convince me to watch something else after the credits roll. There’s no algorithm deciding what I should consume next. It’s just me, a movie I intentionally searched for, found, and brought home. Its ninety uninterrupted minutes with that teenage girl who still lives somewhere inside me.
Recently, I ordered My So-Called Life from ThriftBooks because it was another cultural touchstone that somehow passed me by. I mean, obviously.
There was no universe where I was going to be allowed to watch Angela Chase kiss a boy, have a gay best friend, or dye her hair. Just asking to watch the show would’ve gotten me grounded.
I’m currently five episodes into my very first watch at forty-three trips around the sun, and I’m honestly devastated there’s only one season.
Where is the fan fiction? I need archived message boards and late-night Reddit debates. I need to know what Winnie Holzman imagined for Angela and the rest of these characters. More than anything, I wish I’d gotten to discover it when everyone else did, back when I was young enough to relate to Angela instead today, relating to her Mom Patty.
But I keep telling myself (and the younger version of me) that there isn’t an expiration date on becoming the person you were always meant to be. There isn’t an age limit on discovering the books, movies, music, and art for the first time, even if it shaped everyone else twenty years ago. I feel like I am reclaiming my younger self here but in reality this isn’t about recreating my childhood at all. It’s about finally giving myself the permission to be, to exist, to like the weird stuff I like and not worry that its going to upset someone else or get me grounded.
I know my childhood wasn’t perfect, but now that I’m older and have a little perspective, I think there’s something worth reclaiming from a time when we chose our entertainment instead of letting it choose us. I don’t want to the past, but I do enjoy finally getting to meet the parts of it I missed the first time around.