Greetings friends,
This morning, at Stonykill Coffee and Records in Chatham, New York, I bought a used hardcover copy of Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast. It’s a searing, hilarious, shocking novel I first read as a teenager—after watching the River Phoenix movie version 100+ times on a VHS tape I owned. (That movie was part of my own small movie collection at the time.)
The inscription makes it clear that this particular hardcover was purchased 44 years ago, as a gift, for Dave from Bruce.
I’ve written many such inscriptions in books over the years. Indeed, one of the great pleasures of loving a book is passing it along to someone else who I hope will love it. (Or buying a second copy for them, and keeping the first for my own library.)
That pleasure has almost completely disappeared from my life, because I mostly buy books on my Kindle, which just kinda sit inside the machine, little grainy black and white thumbnails in a digital library I don’t really even own. Point being: I can’t pass them along. And I know a lot of other people also read on Kindle, or some other e-reader, or on their phones, or who knows.
So I give a lot fewer books as gifts these days.
I still do it — it’s just a LOT less often.
I used to also gift an awful lot of music (handmade mixtapes, or new or used CDs), and movies too (VHS tapes, DVDs). Like, all the time. Cheap copies of art were maybe my standard gifts, for decades of my life.
Today I can’t remember the last time I gifted a movie.
Actually I do — I gifted someone Elizabeth Lo’s Stray on iTunes (or Apple TV, or whatever it’s called). I remember it was hard to figure out how to do it, but I did it. I think I was even able to attach a brief message with it which would have been sent in an email. It sort of felt like I had sent him homework, instead of a gift. I mean… really, an email, Penny?
Even if a digital download is a kinda lame gift, I STILL like the idea that by buying a movie, I am supporting the film itself. I want to support the artists behind it, as well as its funders and distributors.
But if I am reading the current support page correctly, it seems Apple has eliminated the gifting feature (lol). As far as I can tell, Amazon doesn’t allow it either. Point being, I’m no expert here, but it seems like it’s not actually all that easy to gift a download, and anyway I can’t know what platform(s) the recipient is on, or really ANYTHING about how they watch movies.
In my opinion: this stinks.
Art is, fundamentally, a gift
I adored this recent piece (gift link 😊) by about how the big movie studios will almost certainly take the wrong lesson — as usual — from this summer’s surprising surge at the box office.
Hollywood’s paucity of imagination means the answer is often the most facile: They liked sharks, so let’s give them more sharks. The business is obsessed with “content,” a word that always makes me think of a bunch of interchangeable blobs, meant to fill empty space. Streaming algorithms run on the logic of content. If you like this action movie with a strong female lead, you’ll like that one. If you dig tales of miserable wealthy people in beautiful places, here are 50 more. It’s all content to fill your day, one as serviceable as the next.
Alissa argues instead that people love going to the movies for two reasons: (1) they show up because they trust and like the directors and stars — the human beings behind these works of art; and (2) they want to share an experience with friends and strangers in the dark. Both reasons are about human connection.
Lewis Hyde’s essential 1983 book The Gift argues that art belongs simultaneously to two different economies: a market economy and a gift economy.
A work of art can be bought and sold, of course, but its life AS ART depends upon its essential nature as a gift — a sacred, even magical thing that the artist freely receives, in the form of talent or inspiration or tradition, and then transforms, in order to pass the gift along to others.
Hyde is not saying artists shouldn’t get paid or that all art should be free. He’s saying a market exchange ends when both parties receive what they paid for. A gift exchange does the opposite: it creates an ongoing bond between the giver and recipient. As the gift continues moving, that bond expands outward, connecting people into a community. “The gift must always move,” Hyde writes.
For the first few decades of my life, when a work of art gave me something, one obvious way I kept the gift moving was by literally giving a copy to somebody else. It was a common ritual in my life, made possible by the ubiquity of widely used physical media.
The physical object — a book, a CD, a DVD — allows me to do two things: 1, pay money to support the art (and hopefully the artist) and 2, choose one particular work, separate it from the infinite ocean of culture, wrap it, and place it in another person’s hands. I can even inscribe a message onto it, in pen or magic marker, a message that could last for — who knows!! — maybe even 44 years. Maybe more.
I may give fewer books as gifts today, but at least I can assume everyone I give a book to has the correct technology to read it. Bruce doesn’t need to determine whether Dave owns the correct brand of book player — or whether he owns a book player at all — before giving him The Mosquito Coast!!!!
In other words, the digital era has put a dent in the perfection of book as gift, but man… it’s really decimated music and movies as suitable objects of everyday gift-giving. It’s turned everything into content, as Alissa points out.
It’s not all bad, obviously. The digital world has also wildly improved the speed and scale at which “the gift can move” in ways that are wonderful. Every time I send an Instagram meme to a friend, what is that but a gift in the truest Lewis Hyde-ian sense? And technological progress has probably made my entire career possible in the first place. So who am I to complain?
But as much as I love this newsletter, I do see it as content, not my art. I think you should TOTALLY gift it to a friend who you think will love it! But in some ways, a Blu-ray copy of NUTS! might be a better gift.
Sometimes an occasion calls for more than content
At the turn of the millennium—the peak of American CD sales—consumers bought 943 million CDs. By 2018, that figure had fallen to approximately 52 million—a decline of more than 94 percent. DVDs and Blu-rays also underwent a collapse: American spending on physical movie formats fell below $1 billion in 2024, a decline of 23.4 percent from 2023.
I clearly remember digitizing all my CDs and DVDs, and then doing what — throwing them away? I threw them all away!??! Eventually, of course, I lost most of the digitized albums too — some hard drive failure or another meant losing EVERYTHING, over and over again, including rare demos by, like, high-school friends’ bands.
It’s devastating, really. But it felt like progress at the time. I guess it was progress, of a sort. Richard Brody wrote beautifully about what we lose when we lose our physical media in the streaming era.
It’s not like CDs and DVDs are such super awesome objects. The plastic cracks, the discs scratch… they kinda suck as like, beautiful objects.
But they were affordable, I could assume anyone I gave them to had the right media player for them, and they were a great size to gift-wrap and put under the tree. And they had movies on them!! Whole-ass entire-work-of-art movies!!!
I’m realizing digital culture weakened one of my own primary everyday rituals through which I used art to create bonds between people. To build a web between my old VHS copy of The Mosquito Coast, to Bruce and Dave, to Paul Theroux. To you.
You can always gift an experience
This is Alissa’s point, and it’s a good one: people love going to the movies with friends. I say this as someone whose own film recently surpassed $250,000 at the box office — meaning I played my own modest part in that great summer box office. (That kind of signal tells my industry that maybe it’s a good idea to back my next film. Or Alissa would say: it should… but maybe it will just lead to a few more animal movies! 🦉)
So I love that the film is fulfilling its role in both the economic and gift economies.
But I am still thinking about, like, birthday presents.
It’s not always practical to plan a movie date as a gift. You could do a gift card to a local theater, or a subscription to a service you like? It’s not quite the same thing as choosing a particular movie for someone. We’ve established digital downloads kinda suck, and are hard to do (even if they do send an economic signal to the industry).
Hence… yay for physical media!!! Things like vinyl and Blu-rays have certainly staged a comeback — these media have proven to work really well for a certain part of the population. But how many people have the right players, and how do you know if your friend is one of them?
So this leaves me back where I started: this sucks!!!
I am not a pessimist by nature, and I’m not trying to just write some wail of dismay here, a Luddite’s lament about physical media — which, after all, I personally have more or less given up — but it sucks that I don’t know how to gift movies to people anymore.
Do you know how?
Do you gift movies?
How?
Is it realistic to just hope everyone will choose to meaningfully move back to physical media collections?
44 years later, I know nothing about Dave or Bruce. But the inscription preserves one fact about their relationship: Bruce wanted Dave to read The Mosquito Coast. I don’t know if Dave ever did read it. But I do know this everyday act of gift-giving was renewed when I traded $8.00 in merch sales money to the proprietor at Stonykill Coffee and Records.
The inscription also preserves a small act of faith in the art itself. Bruce thought this particular book was worth buying, worth placing in Dave’s hands, in order to say “thank you,” to say “this made me think of you,” to say “I hope you will love this.” In doing this, Bruce also sent an economic signal to the publishing industry that this Paul Theroux guy is someone worth publishing.
And now the book — and a brief story about these two other strangers — has been passed on to me, which led me to write this newsletter, which you have just read.
What a gift.
Comings, Goings, & News
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Our epic 6-week run at IFC Center with Wild Inside has come to an end. It’s still in select theaters nationwide, for another few weeks.
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Tons of film festival news coming soon, but I’ll start with Lunenburg, Hamptons, Hot Springs and Folkestone. FlacoDocumentary.com or @FlacoDocumentary on IG for details.
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BUY MERCH!
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ICYMI: I announced a new film! Please check your family’s home movie collections for elephants in American circuses and zoos!