About once an hour during the summer I spent working at Video Spectrum — a rental house in Bowling Green, Ohio — someone would burst through the door and demand a film that had been released in theaters the day before. Staggered release dates, a business technique as simple as it is well established, continually confounded our citizenry, much to my surprise. Worse, this seemed to result less from ignorance than from contempt: People were actually offended to find the shiny new thing on TV unavailable at the store. For all the ink spilled on the magic of the cinema, on how it creates mass spectacles, and on the overweening awe of the giant screen and its attendant bombast, the truth is that most people would rather just watch that shit at home. Yeah, they’ll miss elements of the mise-en-scene of Citizen Kane, and that pan-and-scan transfer of Ghostbusters is notoriously sloppy, but your average customer doesn’t really care. Theaters are places for mooching A/C and getting hickeys; movies are for forgetting your bills and getting your kids to shut the fuck up.

I confess I was sad when I learned of the Spectrum’s demise. Not for the authentic shopping experience, as in “Future generations will never know the ecstasy of serendipitously discovering The Howling IV — instead they shall merely ‘Google’ it!,” but for Bowling Green itself. Nestled in a small homogenous town in a state locked in protracted decline, Video Spectrum was a refuge for all the queers, pinkos, artists, stoners, and mentally ill of Wood County. This bizarre assemblage of VHS detritus was a space to engage briefly with the public between private viewings of vampire erotica, serial killer documentaries, and the late, lesser work of Godzilla. One guy’s entire rental history was Clean and Sober starring Michael Keaton, and I like to think that the store was as responsible for his sobriety as it was for my intoxication. The Spectrum paid me just enough to cover the requisite PBR and schwag to secure my master’s. It lent me my documentaries for free.

I’ve seen two summer “blockbusters” this year, two more than usual and two more than I plan on watching ever again. Neither cineaste nor cinema buff — indie video store job notwithstanding — I find most movies scab-pickingly boring, especially those most desperate to be otherwise. This is probably why I found J. J. Abrams’ patently inoffensive Super 8 so execrable. It’s a blockbuster about the magic of blockbusters. More precisely, it’s a Spielberg production about the magic of Spielberg, father of the modern blockbuster and living instantiation of the ultimate fanboy mythos: geek out, do it your own way, and, eventually, you will rule the world. Abrams, an entertainment industry brat who grew up in LA, inserts the Spielbergian ideology directly into the time period of his own childhood, opening his film with an irritatingly plucky group of youngsters who make science fiction shorts in a surprisingly mountainous Dayton of 1979. Even amid alien shenanigans, Abrams pasting his own face onto the master’s biography is the most interesting part of the whole convoluted presentation, the sort of thing that would be creepy even if Spielberg hadn’t produced it, which, of course, he did.