Tuesday, October 02, 2007

LEAVING ENGLAND I: DALSTON BLOCKBUSTER

Self-Savagery 2002: If things are going just fine, leave. Burn your bridges only if they are strong. Give up only good things.



They closed down Blockbuster in Dalston last week, the week I left London. The same branch that I wrote about in an earlier post, entitled 'TRULY SMASHED AND BLOCKED', a piece that was a failed attempt to examine a variety of nostalgias for a variety of unheralded moments; A suggestion that pointless, forgettable passings, must be marked somehow; some arbiter must look up and nod 'duly noted' before returning to important electrical doings.

Dalston's Blockbuster then: I picture it all going up in a psychedelic bonfire, melting titles together, a black mass of disinterned plots from VHS trailers, an explosion of plastic forgettables. A pixelated bomb.

As it burns, hear the concrete music of repeated reversed shootings, rough cutting of disembodied comic cliches and familiar thriller dialogues (rarely with motives beyond, as James Stewart says in Rope, 'the blonde or dollars in the mattress'), spitting and looping ad nauseum, on the fuse and off the beat, confusion breaking bones amid eternal male feuds, china wives and love interests cracking between plots, sucked under in a Hellmouth tide of pop ephemera. As it all falls, a collage of arbitrary summer blockbuster noises, looped and tensionless as a million rainy games of hangman; outlines and suggestions of grave drama, written in dim light but drawn spare and cold. The last few weeks of the store being open saw endless runs of Superman Returns one screen that still worked, sounding to the glancing ear vital and familiar, but on closer investigation a hollow treatise on a million older dreams.

The Dalston Blockbuster always had special offers that lacked specialness. DVDs skipped and brayed like asses in my machine, causing many films I borrowed from there to remain enigmas after I'd seen them: Hidden, The Right Stuff, Far From Heaven, Harry Potter 3 and 4, Pretty Persuasion, Little Miss Sunshine, Art School Confidential, Carnivale series 1, Huff series 1, Family Guy series 5. Fines grew non-existent in recent weeks, a symptom of either famine or plenty.

I picture the aftermath of the gutting flames: Friends boxsets like cakes out in the rain. Overspill from groaning messy stockrooms, grazed and shrunken echoes of prop-rooms at studio backlots, charred and dumped in the street. Cardboard cut-outs of Keanu or Angelina, five-sixths life-size, one half cinema size, five times video size, left by the pound-shops.
Overlapping mantras of the 'Haven't we seen that one?'/ 'No that was that one, this is this one' ilk echo through the empty building still.

So it's gone. Largely unnoticed. There is a bigger and better one up the road. Narrative convention in departure scenes would have me standing outside Blockbuster with my suitcase as they put the 'CLOSED' sign up in the window. I'd sigh, put on my hat and walk away.



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