For Free (With Ads)

I am old enough to remember what seemed like a small, shabby, silly internet, which is something you’d already know if you could see what the part of my face immediately around my eyes looks like. I have been on the one that we’ve currently got for a long time, too—long enough to remember its more utopian pretensions or possibilities, and long enough to have long since forgotten them. At the time, I promise that it barely registered; whatever the internet might have been, it was for me mostly a place where a very rudimentary webpage took a very long time to load one image of Angie Everhart in a bathing suit.

The lords of our shrinking, cynical internet were by and large the same people pitching all that then, which either does or doesn’t put things in perspective. It might be that the internet actually could have been everything that those curdling doofuses once promised—which was, more or less, The Place Where Everything Was, forever and for free (with ads). But it is not that, and it feels likelier, in retrospect, that those twice-sociopathic aspiring landlords and full-tilt, full-spectrum cretins were selling something that they thought they could own, or just presumed they already did. 

The truly big internet feels, at this moment, less like a technological impossibility than an ideological one. There was a fairly robust debate about what would or could or should be free online, and at what cost, and that battle continues thanks to the people who were actually interested in those questions. More broadly, though, it seems to have fallen by the wayside as the richest of the early homesteaders realized that their actual passions lay in collecting rent, and gossiping about each other, and finally in indulging in the same shopworn reactionary uglinesses that have always preoccupied ruling class types that have convinced themselves they don’t have anything else to worry about. These lummoxes are hard at work on all that, still. Or anyway, as you read this, wherever and whenever you are reading this, they are busy fulminating and posting about it. 

This part is admittedly very boring, because the people in question are very boring. They also will not go away if I stop writing or you stop reading about them, or even if I were to write something totally devastating like “what if an ostrich egg wore an oxford shirt for some reason, and also the egg had somehow become a committed fascist.” They are mostly abusing stimulants and stressing about what will happen when a chatbot that currently can’t do long division somehow Becomes God, and they will never get more normal or more interesting. But for the time being we are stuck with them, and stuck with and within the systems they want to lock down.

But the Big Internet is still out there, just in the sense that there remains an incredible wealth of stuff to find, and an inherent human curiosity about it, and an equally inherent human urge to add to it. The people in charge of much or most of all this are, just on principle, opposed to that—opposed to every non-monetizable aspect of its existence, opposed to the creative process and the fundamentally human impulse behind it, just kind of opposed, in general. For all their leverage, though, they are on the wrong side of things in the most basic and important sense. Part of the fascination of the internet has always been that it would, or might, encompass the world; the appeal of it, from the perspective of a user/human, lies both in its weird particulars and in the idea that all of everything could somehow just be there to be found. Every library holds this promise, too—the idea that what you might want, even if you do not yet know that you want it, is very near, waiting for you, somewhere in the stacks.

People were fantasizing about this before the internet existed. “There is no need for setting out, to advertise one’s destination,” John Ashberry wrote in The System. “All the facts are here, and it remains only to use them in the right combinations, but that building will be the size of today, the rooms habitable and leading into one another in a lasting sequence, eternal and of the greatest timeliness.” That poem was published in 1972. People have been dreaming of wandering through this mansion, and of making a space for themselves somewhere inside it, long before technology prised open the door. Another, smaller group of people dreamed just as fervently about putting up a turnstile at the door, and maybe an armed guard. You already know all this, and even if you didn’t you could probably guess which vision has won. 

Also, admittedly, this is kind of a long way to get to my experience of watching the 1984 existential road movie The Hit on a streaming service.

That movie, which was directed by Stephen Frears and written by Peter Prince and which features delightful performances from Terence Stamp and John Hurt and a pale and punkish young Tim Roth, is I would say “pretty good.” Stamp’s performance and linen activewear is a bit better than that, and the film’s vision of Spain—idyllic in fits and starts, smoggy beige in the cities, dusty and forlorn around the highways—is distinctive. The film itself is tense and sharp-edged and, like a lot of movies from that period, seems to have been made, if not quite in a different film language, a jarringly different syntax. But the most exciting thing about the movie, for me, was that I could watch it at all. It was fairly well-received in its time—Vincent Canby complained in the New York Times that the characters talk too much about abstruse stuff—and then disappeared, in the way that things disappear. 

The stores where you might once have rented The Hit are gone, as are the VCRs on which you could watch one of the (strikingly numerous) VHS tapes for sale; it was released on DVD in 2009, and then went out of print; the Criterion Collection restored and re-released it in 2020. Anyway, the version I watched wasn’t on the places where Criterion releases can generally be found—on Criterion’s streaming service or, in the only apparent benefit of Warner’s takeover of HBO, among the Criterion restorations filling out the MAX library. I watched it on one of the rapidly proliferating ad-supported streaming services that seem to be recreating video stores, just as streaming services are recreating cable, a process that is both excruciating and kind of amusingly recursive—in the absence of any new ideas or services, we get new configurations and fee structures for familiar ones, and movies perforated with the same three or four ads on a loop. 

In the movies I like to watch late at night, which tend toward the dreamlike and unhurried, like The Hit, there is something jarringly and almost bracingly shitty about the interruptions these neo-cable outfits force on you; in one moment, Terence Stamp faces death with strange equanimity in a carefully composed shot, and in the next Lily from AT&T brightly upgrades someone to a new wireless plan on a set lit like heaven’s bus station. But, and this is among the highest praise I can give, they Got A Lot Of Stuff On There.

During the ads, I thought about the strange tides that carried this odd little movie, which came out when I was in kindergarten, over long flat stretches of vanishment and through moments of rediscovery and re-rediscovery. I learned that it was Stamp’s first film in ten years, and that an image of him as a young man in The Hit was pulled from the film Poor Cow, which was the same film that Stephen Soderbergh would use for footage of a young Stamp in The Limey in 1999. The breaks gave me a chance to think about how long and improbable a journey it was for this wry and commanding movie to find me there on my dumb couch. (This kind of thing gets easier if you mute the ads.)

The free, ad-supported streaming services look and feel a bit ramshackle, much more so than they actually are—they’re owned by big studios (Tubi, where I watched The Hit, is owned by Fox; Pluto TV is owned by Paramount) and their shelves are populated from those studios’ libraries. It is not really new, either, and “a good movie with commercials in it” is, in point of fact, something I once got for free. It is too late in the game to mistake these streamers for anything else; all of this, in this space and everywhere, is unmistakably a feeling-out process in which the same few enterprises try to wring money out of the minimum viable product. It is a negotiation, I guess, though the only leverage I really have is, like, going to bed. But also, in a shrinking and witless moment, it’s nice to have someplace to find something cool that you weren’t really looking for. The demand here is elemental and inelastic—people want to find things that delight and surprise them, and to make them and talk about them, and this is sacred in ways that the seething adult libertarians and featureless business droids that rule this moment would naturally fail to value or comprehend. If it’s not what was promised, a Video Store The Size Of Today is better than anything I’ve been offered in some time.

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