📼 VHS: A Manifesto for Loving Cinema as Function, Not Artifact 📼



By Buzz Drainpipe

Don’t mistake me for a clamshell collector or a thrift-store altar builder. I don’t burn incense for the hiss of tape, the chew of plastic. VHS is not relic. VHS is relay.

It was designed to work. To be played, replayed, left on overnight, dragged to a friend’s house, cracked open and re-taped. Utility over aura. Durability over delicacy. It carried the visions—the mad, the glorious, the terrifying—straight into your living room. No priestly polish. Just raw transfer.

DVD and Blu-Ray? Curated showcases. Streaming? An algorithm’s feeding tube. These systems fetishize presentation, sanding down the rough edges that made cinema feel alive. They treat movies like artifacts for climate-controlled display.

But cinema is not artifact. It is encounter. A story, a performance, an atmosphere—something bigger than you, rushing through your cheap television and lodging itself in your bloodstream. VHS, in its workaday scuzz, was the most generous delivery system we ever had.

Buzz’s Word: Don’t love VHS for the object. Love it for what it did. It moved the images. It spread the infection. It was the cracked, humming pipeline between you and the vision.


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