The other day I brushed incautiously against a packed, unstable shelf in my bedroom and caused a catastrophic DVD-slide, which almost swept me down the stairs and into the street. It took 40 sweaty and bad-tempered minutes to stuff them back in, as semi-forgotten films suddenly pressed themselves on my consciousness. Enter the Dragon. The Sorrow and the Pity. Dodgeball.
Every time I look, I have more DVDs. Hundreds. Are they breeding? They are double- and triple-stacked. The ones at the back are condemned to be utterly forgotten. Many more are crammed horizontally over the top, always the sign of a neglected shelf. Film companies send me discs in the hope of a review. I now have enough to fill a skip.
Putting all those DVDs back was a strange experience. In his essay Unpacking My Library, Walter Benjamin recounts the smell and feel of his just-uncrated book collection in a new home, before it is shelved: there is a sensual thrill of disorder in which his books disclose their almost-forgotten identities once again – and a challenge in managing not merely thousands of volumes, but thousands of memories.
To be honest, there isn't the same piquant quality in handling DVDs. They're all alike in dimensions, and I can never remember how I came by the ones I wasn't sent. Online, probably. But my DVD tsunami revealed something else: an old row of VHS cassettes underneath, impossibly ugly, clunky things. They are the skull beneath the skin of my DVD collection: a reminder of horrible obsolescence. Videos were once the bee's knees. Now look at them.
And all my DVDs are destined to go the same way, aren't they? Soon we will be ordering movies as downloads on our laptops and iPads (if you get burgled, incidentally, it is these precious objects that will be nicked, not your discs). Having a Region 2 DVD player will soon be like owning a windup gramophone. Benjamin himself said that private book collections – though not books themselves – contained the seeds of their own extinction. Well, I hope it doesn't happen to my DVDs yet. Getting them down the road to the Oxfam shop is going to be a nightmare.
