Analog Rituals in a Digital Age
The TV was $25. I picked it up from a guy in the suburbs one afternoon, who assured me it was in perfect working order.
I had been hunting for a CRT TV for months, striking out over and over again online and in person. Even at the specialized electronics thrift store, the clerk told me they only get a few in a month, and that they aren't really worth fixing if they don't work perfectly. They take up too much space, she said, and aren't in high demand outside of the small community of retro game enthusiasts. But I finally had one, the centerpiece to my stash of old consoles and half-functional VCRs, sitting in their tangle of cords and adapters like birds in a nest.
I don't know what possessed me, really, the day I decided that my next mission was to build an analog media set-up in the Crypt. In a world with endless entertainment at my fingertips, why spend so much time and money on something outdated and clunky? After a bit of thought, I came to the conclusion that it's the same feeling that makes me occasionally pause near the door of the Church kitty-corner to the Crypt, albeit on a smaller scale. The longing for ritual.
The whirring of the machines, the fiddling of cords. Plugging things in in the correct sequence to make the humming TV click over from static to blue. The slow fade-in of the logo of some movie studio long bought out by a media conglomerate that now specializes mostly in data farming. The quiet buzz of the cathode ray tubes that glow behind the screen, the shlick shlick slick of the tape being unspooled in the VCR. Commercials that give you just enough time to make popcorn and get a drink. This is the ritual of movies.
It took me by surprise how quickly my mind readjusted to the ritual. My phone and computer where soon forgotten. Maid Jean was in the armchair, I curled up on the floor, and we passed snacks back and forth as the night grew dark outside the window. Soon, the room was lit only by the soft glow of the TV. The movie finished, and we moved into the muscle memory of shutting it all down. My brain was quiet, thoughts less tangled than they usually were after a night of binge-watching and doomscrolling. I pressed the button that turned the TV off with a burst of static and a muffled crack. The tape was ejected and I slid it into the sleek little rewinder I had found at the thrift store, a relic of the days of single-purpose machines that would outlast generations. I had already dropped it once, and it kept humming along like nothing had happened.
It is strange to romanticize something as mundane as watching a movie, but I think it's important to remember that it was magic once. Before the mass production of "content," movies were something almost otherworldly. The Silver Screen was somewhere we went to step outside of our day-to-day lives and experience a story together, and later, the room in which families and friends congregated to bookend our days. It was a ritual, an important one, and it can be one again.
