The two last remaining indie video rental shops in the UK are each run by a guy named Dave. Different Daves. There’s 20th Century Flicks down in Bristol, but for anyone up North looking for good, old-fashioned film perusing, they’ll have to head to the Dave in Bebington, Merseyside. It’s there that a shop nestled between a florist and a hairdresser declares, in Hollywood-star-gold lettering: “SNIPS. MOVIE RENTAL – CARDS – BALLOONS.”
Snips has had its doors open since 1995. With half the shop dedicated to birthday cards and the other to stacks of DVDs and Blu-rays, it’s a surreal labyrinth of past and future – a beacon of the Bebington community, held together by the sales of silver helium balloons and experimental horror movies.
“The greetings cards and gift shop takes the pressure off the movies,” Dave tells me. “The movies then can just exist, there’s no pressure for people to be renting them all the time, because enough people come in for the cards.” He’s not kidding. In the two hours we spend together, we’re frequently interrupted by locals coming in for banners and cards, and our recording is haunted throughout by the wheezings of a helium canister. Dave doesn’t mind. “When I started working here, I didn’t think I’d spend most of my day inflating helium balloons, I thought I’d be talking about films,” he smiles. “But I don’t mind. The balloons enable me to talk about films.”
The death of the video rental shop can be somewhat tied to the death of a culture that respects and appreciates art, specifically film – stay with me here. With peaking popularity in the 1990s, video shops like Snips were the pillar of a culture that was consistently creating films by all kinds of directors with all kinds of budgets. They were a place to hang out and find new films, usually manned by a local movie nerd who could recommend an obscure Korean sci-fi to scratch the itch Alien 3 had just left you with. Once it was clear there was a margin for profit: boom, Blockbuster’s born, and the chain starts stomping out all the local indie shops. Then Blockbuster got a taste of its own medicine and was eaten alive by Netflix and the recession. In 2004 Blockbuster had 9,094 locations worldwide, by 2010 they were filing for bankruptcy.
The video rental shop, ultimately, was born from the love of film and the want to share it with others. It offered a real-life space to build connections, however small, around films. Streaming giants have taken that away from us, and Letterboxd isn’t quite cutting it.
“There’s nothing more lonely than watching a film that does something to you – makes you feel something – on Netflix, and when it finishes, there’s that black screen that just reflects you, alone, back at yourself,” Dave reflects in the soft-spoken voice of a librarian. “There’s no one sat either side of you. You’re on your own, and that itchy awareness of your own loneliness can be quite sickening. Is this how I’m spending my life? Alone on my computer? Is this all there is?”
With everything becoming increasingly individualised – even our news sources come from different social media timelines, posted by different people – an in-person recommendation from a friend is like gold dust. The mysterious, all-seeing, omnipresent algorithm feeds you what it thinks you should watch next, but there’s so much choice it’s paralysing. As Dave puts it: “We’re already a really lonely generation, and we’ve become so introverted.” Snips, however, offers Dave and the local community the opportunity to talk about film while keeping the medium accessible. “One thing I love about this place is people will come in and ask if I have something. They introduce me to new stuff all the time, I like the interaction. I like that we can all help each other to build this really unique library of films,” he explains.
“I’ve seen so many of my customers renting a couple of John Waters films, for example, and one of the most exciting things is that I get to hear their thoughts when they come back. And then you can jump off from that, and say: ‘Why don’t you try a Gregg Araki film as well?’ Streaming doesn’t allow that community feel.”
It’s important to Dave that everyone is able to enjoy films, and to ensure that, he’s kept his rental prices the same for the last 25 years: £2.50 for a grown-up film and £1 for a kid’s film. Plus you’ve got it for a week and there’s not even any late fees. “Everyone should have access to a broad range of films, from the 1920s right up to now,” he explains. “That’s always been a mantra for me, to make everything accessible to everybody, irrespective of their income.”
“Film is increasingly becoming an elitist pastime. Not to sound like an old man (which I am!), but 30 years ago we were in a situation where if you wanted to rent a film on a Friday night, you would have a selection of local video shops, all of them well-stocked with a range of films, and everyone had access to them. Now, we don’t have that. It’s who’s got the most money to pay for Prime, Sky, Netflix, whatever.”
“Not only are film lovers being shut out of the film industry,” he goes on, “but the homogenisation of one big, shady billionaire owning that industry is stopping the artform in its tracks. Once all the power goes to making profit, rather than making art, it’s near impossible for the good stuff to actually get made. Would Eraserhead be made now? Probably not – David Lynch is already lauded as one of the best filmmakers of all time, and even he can’t get funding.”
“I can’t believe we’ve given these corporations all the power to take over these art forms. You’re relying on a multi-million-pound company to preserve it. Call me crazy, but I don’t trust billionaires. I don’t think they have our best interests at heart,” Dave says. I’m inclined to agree. Not only are billionaires famously very selfish, but the size of their bank accounts can only be rivalled by their ignorance towards the world of art and their tendency to enjoy the absolute worst dreck that world has to offer. They care about ££££££, and usually the stuff that feeds bank accounts is not the weird queer stuff that makes you feel very alive and inspired and grossed out and in awe. It’s not Pink Flamingos, it’s Mickey Mouse Marvel.
“There used to be films made at every single budget level, but now there isn’t. It’s really concerning,” Dave goes on. I agree. If the only people who can secure the funding to make weird, out-there films are the ones who’re minted, then experimental and transgressive cinema is set to be inundated with more Saltburn, the sheltered posh quailing at cum in a bath. Boring! What will happen to our homegrown flock of movie weirdos – our Jonathan Glazers, Derek Jarmans, or our Clive Barkers?
Ideally, the longevity of an artform is shaped by the hands of people who’d like to keep it alive, and not the people who want to grab it by the neck and rinse it of all its worth until it’s dead. It might be looking bleak out there, but places like Snips, and movie lovers like Dave, offer some reprieve. In an increasingly desolate, deserted cultural void, a space where a small, dedicated group of film lovers can congregate might relieve those feelings of isolation we’ve all grown accustomed to. They may even provide us, dare I say, a bit of hope for the future. “It’s not a nostalgic thing,” Dave wants to make clear. “My favourite film is always whatever’s coming out tomorrow.” Snips is not a kooky relic of bygone times. It is a celebration of film and the preservation of an artform. And its walls lined with films and birthday cards are ones we should all be scared to lose.
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