I remember once reading a great P. J. O'Rourke piece in, I think, Republican Party Reptile, about what sort of cars handle best. The best car, handling-wise, said P. J., is a hired car. Hired cars can be made to do things that your own car is simply not able to do, with you at the wheel.
And I'm here today to answer the question: what sort of DVDs are the best DVDs? And the answer is borrowed DVDs.
Number one: Borrowed DVDs don''t cost you anything.
Number two. They don't occupy any shelf space. When you've finished watching them, you take them back.
Number three. If you start watching a borrowed DVD and it is garbage, you paid nothing for it, so you have no obligation to yourself to watch it. You can just stop. If you hire a DVD or worse, buy a DVD, without realising that it is garbage, you then have the problem of how to get your money's worth. With a borrowed DVD that's not a problem. You can watch it anyway, and write a sneering blog posting about it (that's if you are a blogger), and take it upon yourself to tell all your friends of the DVD's demerits. Or you can stop.
Number four: You can watch it whenever you like. You borrowed it from a friend. He's already watched it, or he wouldn't have lent it to you. So, you can hang on to it for as long as you like. You don't have to take it back to Blockbuster by 11 pm tomorrow evening, or even 11 pm the day after tomorrow. You can keep if for days, weeks even. You can watch it whenever you feel like it. And if you really like it, you can wait a week, and watch it again. In particular, you avoid being in a position where you are watching what turns out to be a two hours ten minutes DVD (but you don't know this until it ends) when you have one hour and fifty minutes to get it back to the video shop. This is a really bad situation to be in. It spoils everything.
Number five: If you really love it, more than is really healthy, to the point where you want to be able to watch bits of a favourite DVD every day for the rest of your life, you can always go out and buy the DVD for yourself. Borrowing doesn't mean that this isn't allowed, later.
I'm sure if I thought about it some more, further advantages to watching borrowed DVDs would occur to me.
None of the above applies to classical music CDs. These it is necessary to own. Music is not like a movie. If you love a piece of music you want to listen to it seventeen times, and simultaneously live your life, while occasionally stopping your life and jumping about and waving your arms when the really good bit comes around. And you want to be able to do this at any time, day or night, for the rest of your life. There's nothing unhealthy about that. That's normal. Once you've decided you like a particular music CD, that means you want to own it.
Which explains, changing the subject somewhat, why movies, despite being massively more complicated and expensive to make, are nevertheless cheaper to buy than music. Music we have to have, and therefore they have us by the private parts with it. Movies, we can borrow, return, and meanwhile live without. They're always there, and obtainable somehow, by some means. So with movies, we have them by the private parts. They can only sell movies for twenty quid to people for whom twenty quid is nothing, or for whom instant ownership is essential. Most of us will only buy for a tenner or less. The economics supply/demand graphs are different for movies compared to music. Demand, I think I'm saying, is less intense, and in particular more "elastic", for movies. I knew you'd be excited.
Put it this way. If all my friends all agreed that Barenboim's Brahms First Piano Concerto is wonderful (which we don't of course – I'm the only one of all my friends who gives a toss about this recording), we would all have to have a copy of it. But if we all agree that Casablanca is wonderful, as maybe we do, one copy will do for all of us.
(Of course, whatever you think of the morals of the matter, the business of all of a group of friends each having a CD copy of something has recently got massively easier. See music industry, collapse of.)
Memo to self. Make list of all my DVDs and circulate to my friends. Or, I could blog the list, with helpful comments about the more obscure items, and then send an email to my friends, informing them of their special status.
Further memo to self. Do blog posting about how the definition of friendship changes as the things that friends are for change with changing trechnology. Now, friends are people to borrow DVDs from, and to lend them to. What have friends been in the past? What will they be in the future? Actually, that's pretty much it.
