The first was Scumbag Clique Prole Dad.

Every Christmas somebody bought him a DVD because nobody knew what else to buy a man whose interests were listed as trucks, Clint Eastwood, and being left alone. He got Gran Torino. He got The Departed. He got Band of Brothers in the metal case. He held each one up and said, “Oh yeah, I wanted to see this.”

Then he put it under the television and never opened it.

The shrink-wrap turned yellow. Dust collected around the security sticker. The disc sat six feet from him for fifteen years.

Yet when the same movie came on TNT, already forty minutes in, he watched the whole thing.

He watched commercials. He watched the censored version. He watched a picture cropped wrong and stretched across a Magnavox screen. He would not stand up and insert the pristine DVD because that would mean making a decision.

Prole Dad did not choose entertainment. Entertainment struck him.

The DVD asked too much. Open the case. Change the input. Press play. Commit to the beginning. This was bourgeois ceremony. He had worked all day and now TNT would decide what happened next.

The unopened DVD was not media. It was a household icon. It said the family knew Dad liked war, prisons, westerns, organized crime, or movies where a tired white man finally had enough. It was decorative soap for the Scumbag Clique.

Then there was the other man.

The 2000s DVD Loser.

He did not let television happen. He administered it.

He bought one season at a time. He carried it home from Best Buy like medicine. He removed the cardboard sleeve carefully. He unfolded the package. He inspected the discs. He checked whether Disc Four had come loose in transit. He read the episode list before watching the first episode.

This man did not watch The Sopranos. He took possession of The Sopranos.

And the prices were insane.

One season of The X-Files could list for about $150. One season of The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, or The Wire could list for about $100. This was not the complete series. This was twelve or thirteen hours of television pressed onto plastic and sold at the price of a minor appliance.

The Gen X DVD man may have needed fourteen hours of labor to buy one season. Fourteen hours under fluorescent lights. Fourteen hours answering phones, moving boxes, fixing printers, explaining to a supervisor named Rick why the shipment was late. Then he handed the proceeds to HBO so he could own thirteen episodes he had already watched on cable.

He called this collecting.

He brought the box home and placed it among the others. The spines had to line up. If HBO changed the package dimensions between seasons, he became angry in a way he had never become angry about wages, housing, or the slow hollowing-out of his town.

Then he went online.

There waited the Gen X ’Nuff Said DVD Reviewer.

He reviewed discs for DVD.com, DVD Talk, The Digital Bits, or some gray website built in 1998 with a black background and a spinning compact disc GIF.

He had a goatee. He had opinions about anamorphic enhancement. He wrote like a man entrusted with the Dead Sea Scrolls.

“I have been a fan of Carpenter since my older brother snuck me into The Thing in ’82. ’Nuff said.”

Nothing was ever ’nuff said. There followed 1,800 words.

He discussed black levels. He discussed edge enhancement. He discussed whether the rear channels received “a decent workout.” He noted that the French track was presented in Dolby 2.0 even though nobody in his county spoke French. He owned the laserdisc and therefore knew what had been lost. The movie might be about divorce, murder, or the collapse of civilization. He cared that the layer change occurred at 58:14 and was “somewhat noticeable.”

He had spent most of a workday earning enough money to buy the disc. He then spent most of an evening reviewing the plastic quality of the case.

Recommended.

The Prole Dad and the DVD Loser were enemies because they represented opposite forms of helplessness.

Prole Dad wanted no control. The movie had to be selected by a cable programmer in Atlanta and delivered to him halfway finished. The DVD Loser wanted total control. He needed the correct aspect ratio, the right transfer, the original mono track, the cardboard slipcover, the episode booklet, and confirmation from another divorced man online that the source print was acceptable.

One refused to press play.

The other turned pressing play into naval procedure.

Prole Dad owned Gran Torino and would not open it. DVD Loser owned every season of The Sopranos and could not watch Season Four until he had reread the insert and confirmed which commentary tracks were worth hearing.

One man surrendered his evening to TNT. The other converted leisure into unpaid archive work.

Then streaming came and killed them both.

The unopened Dad DVDs went to Goodwill. The sacred box sets went into plastic tubs in a basement. The $100 seasons became tiles in an app. Nothing had weight. Nothing had a spine. Nothing required fourteen hours of labor except the monthly subscription, which continued charging after everybody forgot they had it.

Now there are ten thousand things to watch and nobody watches anything. Men scroll. They preview. They abandon. They ask Reddit what to watch and reject every answer.

The Scumbag Dad looked stupid watching the last half of The Fugitive with commercials.

The DVD Loser looked worse holding Disc Two by the edges and whispering about compression artifacts.

But they watched the movie.

The modern man pays for six services, owns nothing, chooses nothing, and falls asleep on the menu.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884631&forum_id=2Elisa#50013554)

fucking noob.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884631&forum_id=2Elisa#50014441)