Video Club
Two weeks after my parents’ divorce they opened a video rental store in the neighborhood where I lived. My mother became a member from day one. I remember that the first film she brought home was Holy Blood by Jodorowsky. It took us by surprise that she had not rented a movie like The Never Ending Story II that we liked so much and that we had attended the premiere at the Cineteca Nacional with my father. And now with the convenient proximity of the video store we planned to rent, watch and repeat the movie an insane number of times until we learned the lines. My mom was very excited to see the movie and in front of the VCR she revealed to us with some nostalgia that before she met my father she had done university theater and acted in the play El Juego que todos Jugamos written by the same director. Holy Blood easily caught our attention because my sisters and I loved the circus. Interestingly, the violence was not an impediment to finish watching the film. In the end, my mom was very proud of us for finishing it without problems. We believed at that time that this was the way to make her happy and from then on our goal was to always finish watching the movies, whatever happens happens. We saw many movies dubbed and subtitled in Spanish. We understood what we could understand at our age. My mom pretended to watch the movies, she snuck out to the terrace to smoke, she didn't come back. Many times the plots bored us, we would fast-forward or rewind the movies until we found a critical or dramatic moment where the characters scream, cry, fight, steal, break glasses or escape. We loved escapes! That's why we loved Thelma and Louise even though at the time we didn't understand what they were really running from and what we would run from later. We invented games. One of them consisted of seeing a scene so that later one of us would formulate a question in relation to what we were looking at. The questions ranged from what the characters ate, to what they wore, what color hair, eyes, lipstick, nails, color of curtains, tablecloths, number of chairs, pictures or windows. We would go back through the film to make sure the answers were correct and give a round of applause to the one who got it, That’s right! Like a game show. My older sister used to describe the game to her best friends as a kind of Where's Waldo? but advanced because we had to use our memory. My mom stopped selecting the movies, she stopped cooking, and she also stopped going to church on Sundays. Watching movies, cooking, and God were no longer among her priorities. One day my little sister and I rewound the movies, put them in the correct cases, and left the house to return them to the video rental store. We selected The Lovers on the Bridge by Leos Carax and High Heels by Almodóvar. We returned home. Mom never noticed.