DVD and Its Discontents - pros and cons of using digital video disks - Brief Article - Column

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), March, 2001 by Christopher Sharrett

ANYONE PAYING even half-serious attention to the home entertainment and film industries knows that a new technical revolution has once again changed the way we watch movies. I'm speaking of the DVD craze, which arguably may be on the verge of making obsolete VHS videotape, a medium that a scant 20 years ago seemed positively something out of science fiction and a treasure to those who love movies, as well as all the people who would become hooked on taping everything from sports to soaps to game shows off of television.

For those who have sampled DVDs--and they are the fastest-growing home entertainment item--their advantages over VHS videotape are obvious. DVD offers an incredibly crisp picture and is far more durable than tape. For years, film buffs have complained about the image quality of VHS, which strikes many as similar to watching a movie through a gauze filter. Digital technology has helped videotape, but it will always have limitations.

The video disc wears very well, is almost indestructible in reasonable hands, and has none of the imperfections associated with tape. More important, DVD players allow you to jump from scene to scene without rewinding or fast-forwarding. Movies being released on DVD are very often in the original aspect ration (the height and width of the image) intended by the filmmakers. The cherry on the cake is the capacity of the DVD. A video disc can hold an enormous amount of information, and movies released on DVD often come with extras, including feature-length audio commentary by directors, actors, and writers, along with complete screenplays, featurettes on special effects, and myriad other goodies.

To this point, you may have thought this is a cheerleading piece for the home video industry. Let me change horses. DVD is often remarkable, a treat several steps beyond the (for me) still-wondrous world of videotape, but may I also suggest that it may be yet another way of encouraging false consumer needs? Just as the CD made many of us repurchase our old record collections, DVD seems a way of making us rebuy our film libraries. For the average film scholar or serious buff--and certainly the average consumer--VHS is just fine. Movies have long been released in letterboxed, widescreen editions on tape, and the clarity of the picture provided by DVD may depend on the quality of your television. This takes us to an interesting quirk about DVD.

You will often hear DVD fans extolling the virtues of the new medium by emphasizing the low price of this very hot electronic toy. Indeed, DVD players quickly found a price range very comfortable to most consumers. However, there's more to buying DVD than meets the eye. When I visited a local media megastore recently in search of a DVD player, a rather wily clerk asked me if I had an "old" TV. By "old," he meant anything beyond five years. As it happens, I have a perfectly good 10-year-old JVC 21" set, but, alas, it wasn't quite fit for DVD. As it turned out, my television set, like many still in circulation, has a single coaxial cable input jack that won't accommodate a DVD player. "New" TV sets have various input jacks to allow for videogame players and other gizmos central to today's home entertainment cocoon.

I had assumed I could run the DVD player through my VCR--no such luck. DVDs have a copyguard function that doesn't like being passed through another video machine. (The image will most likely "break up" if you try.) The clerk at the megastore encouraged me to "upgrade," meaning buy a new TV set, preferably with digital picture and stereo. I bowed out. Actually, there are adaptors that can help you get past this type of flimflam, but one quickly gets the idea that DVD is above all about buying lots of new stuff having not much to do with appreciating movies.

The image on DVD is unquestionably superior to that of VHS, but there's a qualifier here. As with VHS, much depends on the source of material transcribed. While digital technology will improve almost anything it touches, you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, and a picture that is poorly shot on 16mm film will always look like one regardless of what kind of refurbishing is attempted. Moreover, is it really worth wondering if you gain much by purchasing "A Nightmare on Elm Street" on DVD rather than VHS (which I might add is now much cheaper)?

As to the "extras" offered by DVD, one can't help but eventually ask if this trip is necessary. While some films, like a reissue on DVD of "Taxi Driver" contain excellent feature-length commentary tracks by their directors and other contributors, many of the so-called commentaries are lackluster, sometimes no more than idle chatter that hardly illuminates the meaning of a film. A spectacular DVD edition of David Fincher's "Fight Club" contains four commentary tracks, with information often repeated several times.

Many films on DVD, like the very popular "The Matrix," trumpet their special effects and offer hours of information on digital pyrotechnics. When you look at all the digital minutia on one of these discs, you get the idea that the manufacturers assume you have nothing to do but spend a day pushing the buttons on your DVD remote. There is another problem. All of those eye-popping special features would be great to have and learn about if one felt that the movie associated with them was good. One of the ironies of the DVD revolution is its occurrence at the time of the Hollywood cinema's bankruptcy, with film emphasizing nothing much more than the computer-generated effects and technical wizardry of a technologically advanced, but intellectually empty, medium.