The Disillusion of the Physical Copy

In my room, I have 4 distinct shelves loaded to the brim with dvds that I've collected from the heydey of my youthful era of teenage angst and self-exploration. These titles are primarily (though not exclusively) horror films that struck my fancy when I was perhaps impressionable enough to deem them as essentials. Classics of the genre that stood the test of time.

However, some movies take a while to gain the appreciation they deserve, and some are billed as classics almost immediately. It's hard to think of some of your favorite films being as old as they are, and you can reflect on when you first started to enjoy them when they were "old", but not nearly as old as they are now. I became obsessed with Terminator 2 when it was fresh on VHS. Now that movie is nearly 30 years old. I became obsessed with Halloween when it was nearly 20 years old. Now, it's over 40 years old.

I guess what I'm getting at is how some movies have that essential quality, and you know you want them in your life as permanent keepsakes of mankind's greatest achievements, at least in the cinematic realm. I feel that a lot of 60s through 80s movies knew they were breaking new ground with what they were doing, and inherently made themselves classics regardless of whether they could have been done better or not. I tend to always look back at the days of Anchor Bay with extreme favorable bias, because even if they had releases of movies that were subpar, their influence over me in that era was uncanny. I would eat that shit up because that catalogue had a notoriety about it. Today, nothing impresses me.

The last dvd I bought was a $2 copy of Porky's, because temporal distance can surprisingly give merit to almost anything. Not to say this movie is bad. I thought it was hilarious when I first watched it a few months ago, and I suppose that's a way of saying that movies back in the day can sometimes hold up better than modern movies where anyone can get a camera and make a pristine movie, but do most of them have souls? Not likely.

With all that said, I definitely don't need anymore dvds in my life. I have enough that I don't watch already, but most of them still have impacted me in such a great way that I couldn't recreate now if I tried desperately. Sure, I may see some great movies today, but I don't feel the need to have ready access to them. There's something missing that I can't pinpoint. Everyone knows that I can fall on that nostalgia trend just as easily as most, but the oldies had something of great value and I miss that. Even bad movies don't seem as bad if they were made in the right era. I watched Jaws 3D the other day and thought it was great. Does anyone care about Jaws 3 though? Not really. Do I only like these movies because they're old as dirt and have gained a mythical status that I irrationally adore? Or have physical copies become so polluted with re-releases and demeaned by streaming services that I feel completely unmotivated to possess movies that I have high opinions of, unless it was a sentimental purchase from decades ago? What are the rules?