Directors Christopher Nolan and Guillermo del Toro are urging Americans to purchase physical media again.
Nolan encouraged people to purchase his upcoming Blu-ray release of Oppenheimer so that ”no evil streaming service can come steal it from you.”
In a follow-up interview with the Incredible Shrinking Far-Left Washington Post, Nolan explained, “There is a danger, these days, that if things only exist in the streaming version, they do get taken down, they come and go.”
On Xwitter, del Toro shared Nolan’s statement and wrote, “Physical media is almost a Fahrenheit 451 (where people memorized entire books and thus became the book they loved) level of responsibility,” he explained. “If you own a great 4K HD, Blu-ray, DVD etc etc of a film or films you love…you are the custodian of those films for generations to come.”
Physical media is almost a Fahrenheit 451 (where people memorized entire books and thus became the book they loved) level of responsibility. If you own a great 4K HD, Blu-ray, DVD etc etc of a film or films you love... you are the custodian of those films for generations to… https://t.co/ETGUNhKNoL
— Guillermo del Toro (@RealGDT) November 20, 2023
You think you own your digital copy. You do not.
You think your digital copy is safe from the left’s censorship Nazis. It is not.
Digital is such a delightful concept that I fell for it. I was suckered. I started selling off my DVDs and Blu-rays as I converted to digital. The idea that the America I grew up in — a country devoted to freedom and outraged by censorship — would quietly pull and censor movies never even crossed my mind. My thinking was this: If my collection is digital, I can take it anywhere, and it will never deteriorate.
Then the left’s censorship Nazis started pulling titles people had purchased.
Then the left’s censorship Nazis started altering Oscar-winning movies people had purchased.
Martin Scorsese isn’t even safe from the fascists who run the Disney Grooming Syndicate. My imported Blu-ray of Kundun arrived yesterday. I don’t even like the movie, but I still paid $30 for it. As del Toro points out, someone has to own the hard copies… We do indeed have a responsibility to ensure these movies both survive and survive without being vandalized by the left’s Sensitivity Gestapo.
What disturbs me more than anything is what we don’t know… What titles are being quietly pulled from circulation? What’s being quietly censored by studio vandals? Why can’t I purchase Zorro the Gay Blade (1981) on Blu-ray?
It’s not only movies… People who love books should preserve books. The jihad against the classics like To Kill a Mockingbird, Gone with the Wind, and Huckleberry Finn is no secret. The Sensitivity Gestapo is actively rewriting Ian Fleming and Roald Dahl. This was unimaginable 20 years ago. Now imagine what these fascists will be doing 20 years from now.
I’m changing back to physical in two ways. First, I grab deals on Blu-ray. Second, any title the left starts whining about I immediately purchase: Gone with the Wind (1939), Blazing Saddles (1974), The Dam Busters (1955), Birth of a Nation (1915), Tropic Thunder (2008), Holiday Inn (1942), Fawlty Towers (1975), Song of the South (1946), Pepe Le Pew/Speedy Gonzalez cartoons, Soul Man (1986), Cruising (1980), I Spit on Your Grave (1978), everything Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, and John Wayne.
As Ray Bradbury wrote in Fahrenheit 451:
Coloured people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the incinerator.
What’s more, the fascist movie studios want you to purchase digital for another reason: digital movies cannot be passed along or shared. Sure, you can give someone the password to your entire collection, but not one at a time. Who benefits from that?
Don’t you understand? Don’t you get it? They don’t want us to own anything. We’re becoming a subscriber/leasing culture. When you subscribe to radio, music, and TV, you own nothing. When you subscribe to books, video games, and computer programs, you own nothing. When you lease your car and rent your home, you own nothing.
Ownership is freedom.
Payments are slavery.
John Nolte’s debut novel Borrowed Time (Bombardier Books) is available today. You can read an exclusive excerpt here and a review of the novel here.