Aging

I had a bit of a scare yesterday. I was watching my VHS copy of Tango & Cash. It was the third time in a row when suddenly the picture got weird. It was rather fuzzy and the VCR warned me how it might need to be cleaned. It does that sometimes. It bothered me that this all happened with that particular tape though, because it had been pristine, and suddenly it was so bad that it was barely watchable.

It did get better, and I think it's OK again, but it's a sad fact that VHS tapes wear down with use, unlike disc media. Those can obviously degrade if mishandled, but as the critical part of the disc is touched by nothing more than a laser, being played often shouldn't have any bearing on whether the disc lasts a while or not. When a disc goes bad though, it goes worse. The player skips past a bad section entirely, which I don't care for.

Give me a beat-up VHS tape. When it has a rough patch in it, it just plays through and you can maybe make out what's happening or hear it. Maybe there's less that you can do to fix a bad tape, but then that just means that there's less you have to do. I'm not fond of having to snap into action when a DVD goes bad. You take it out, you wipe it down, you dry it off and suddenly an enjoyable movie-watching experience has been marred by a microcosmic floor cleaning.

There is an appealingly bittersweet quality to the VHS tape, knowing that it is destined to perish. The modern disc (or worse, streaming file) can outlive us all, and thus is something like the cold, robotic Terminator. The fragile, perishable VHS tape is like a human. Its existence is special for the very fact that it will end, and not in spite of it. It saddens me to see the tapes break down and go bust, but it makes me a little happy too.