A Eulogy for the Netflix Little Red Envelope

When Netflix started mailing DVDs to mailboxes on quiet suburban roads all over the country, it was an insurgence against the gatekeepers I’d begrudgingly venerated for years. Now it seems unimaginable, but Midwestern strip-mall Blockbusters never stocked the films that premiered across the country in “select cities.” You either lived in these chosen urban centers or you knew, while reading the enthusiastic review in The New York Times, that you would never see the film. Between my small town in Michigan and the even tinier town where my college was located, I didn’t stand a chance.

A simple monthly subscription changed that forever. It was Netflix’s signature red envelopes that allowed me, on a frozen January night in a dorm room in the middle of Indiana cornfields, to watch the wonderful curmudgeon Harvey Pekar in American Splendor. I remember shouting up the stairs to my fellow film lover when it came in the mail, promising to pass it on the next day. It was weeks after American Splendor had been released on DVD, and the warmth of watching a movie about a grumpy Ohioan was easily confused with the glow from my laptop’s screen.

On Sept. 12, Netflix made what would seem a simple modification to its classic subscription plan. Previously subscribers (all 23+ million of us) received DVDs in the mail by ones, twos, or threes at a time, with the bonus of streaming a much more limited selections of movies directly from the website. Netflix raised the price of the old plan, but additionally offered the cheaper options of getting only films by mail or exclusively streaming.

It’s that last offering that proved the most divisive. One week later, amid a steady flood of complaints from loyal customers, Netflix founder Reed Hastings announced that the mailed DVD option will now be called Qwikster, and become an entirely different company all together.

It’s hard to blame him for treating streaming as the future. Bloggers feel comfortable suggesting something to watch if it’s available online, as if a streaming Netflix account is as natural as a cell-phone plan. Roger Ebert, the man defining Facebook as an all-purpose content platform, uses his page to invite discussion and highlight obscure old films now streaming for all. And in the lull between announcing the change and the September deadline, an avalanche of new fantastic films have shown up to further sway us. Can it really be chance that Miranda July’s creepy and undeniably obscure Me, You, and Everyone We Know has just appeared, exactly the kind of film that garnered eager media coverage but never would have made it to Blockbuster, much less Red Box? Winter’s Bone and I am Love, the two recent indies warmly loved by everyone from Vogue to NPR, have also appeared at my fingertips.

If our sense of time is truly speeding up to match the pace of invention, I suppose it makes sense that I experienced a true moment of nostalgia at the age of 26, even before the object of my reminisce has had a chance to fade. The wrinkled edge of the red envelopes showing through the glass of my dorm mailbox every couple of days held the promise of finally getting to nod appreciatively alongside the critics ensconced in the big city. The genius of that envelope, one sticker to close, one perforation to open, one perforation to send it off again. The revolution of simply (and giddily) adding small release films to your online queue, knowing they would show up amongst the bills and carpet-cleaning flyers in just a few days.

Sure, you can still get those envelopes in the mail, though they’ll now be newly labeled with Qwikster’s logo. But I will be joining the streaming subscribers, my viewing content now at the whim of deals between Netflix and the distribution houses. My husband and I don’t own a television: We watch our network shows via Hulu; I stream last season’s Mad Men while nursing my five-week-old, and I bought a lightweight new laptop without a DVD drive. But before crass convenience trumped being the first in my town to see a film, it was Netflix who allowed me to follow along from afar.