On the summer solstice of 2005, I joined an upstart DVD-by-mail rental service called Netflix. The first DVD I rented was Last House on Dead End Street, followed by Blood Feast & Nightbreed.
Today, over 17 years later, after much hemming & hawing, I finally canceled my membership.
My relationship with Netflix has been longer than any romantic relationship I've been in, any job I've had, any place I've lived. When I returned from overseas in 2010, I found that I finally had fast enough internet to use their new streaming service, so I started taking advantage of that, though I didn't start streaming regularly until I moved to Charlottesville in summer 2011, plugging my Macbook into my big boxy CRT television with a mini DVI to composite video adapter.
Around 2015, I started to notice that Netflix was slowly but surely removing its archival back catalogue from streaming while simultaneously pouring tons of money into its original programming--which, with a few exceptions, I never thought was very good. These trends snowballed over the next several years. I've probably been talking about canceling Netflix since 2018 or so. But there was still enough interesting programming to keep me hanging on, & through it all I continued to use the DVD mail service.
Over the past 2 or 3 years, though, I've noticed an even more insidious trend. I am pretty much convinced that Netflix original programming is not being made by humans anymore. At the bare minimum through the conceptualization & treatment stage, if not all the way through screenwriting & preproduction, I think these shows & films are being created by AIs that crunch massive amounts of customer analytics & spit out entertainment calculated to please various sizes of viewership cross-sections. As an artist & as someone who would love to make films one day, that offends me. It's even worse when it works. For instance, the Netflix original series Archive 81 seemed precisely calculated to appeal to me--me, specifically--from subject matter & writing all the way down to style & casting. I don't want that. I don't want to feel like a guinea pig for a robot focus group.
Let's go back to those first 3 DVDs I rented from Netflix. Roger Watkins's Last House on Dead End Street, H.G. Lewis's Blood Feast, & Clive Barker's Nightbreed are all intensely personal, quirky films full of their creators' auteurist obsessions. They are not wholly successful films. (I won't even argue that the first 2 are even good films.) They are messy & ambitious & ragged & human.
That's what film discovery has always been for me. I don't want to be spoonfed algorithmically perfect content anymore. I want to be left alone to discover my own weirdness. I want to buy random dollar store DVDs, I want to crowdfund indie dreamers, I want poke around in neglected corners of the internet for backyard SOV opuses with single-digit views on Letterboxd. I want to support freaks & weirdos making films outside anything recognizable as a "system" but at least they're made with authenticity & fucking passion. I don't want to be told what I'll like. I want to discover that for myself.
The more universal story here is how David slew Goliath & then indulged in gluttonous excess until he ended up taking the giant's place. But my personal story is a lot simpler: I miss humanity.
So goodbye & good riddance, Netflix. You did this to yourself.
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