Before the sordid realities are laid out, permit me a bit of backstory. It has been less than nine months since Kim and I made our 12 years together official. Throughout the life of our courtship, our relationship has always been built on a foundation of getting things in the open, airing out grievances, even allowing for the occasional shouting-but-no-shoving match to cleanse our collective pallet before resolving the issue of the day. Our confrontational approach served us effectively, preventing hidden agendas, ulterior motives and two-faced manipulation to fester and spread like the proverbial cancer. Or so she would have me believe.
What seemed rock solid, however, is a house of cards, and it took Netflix to reveal the cracks in our foundation.
Before Netflix came into our marriage, things were good, but the mail brought us the melancholies. I was stuck aimlessly thumbing through our uninspired cords of bills, Valu-Paks, pre-approved credit cards and the-weekly-never-to-be-read-but-necessary-intellectual-apartment-window-dressing New Yorker. Once the little red envelopes started arriving, we experienced, together, the unadulterated joy that combines the breathless anticipation of a child at Christmas with the knowing sophistication of an adult at Cannes.
As a husband, it was more than just the rush of a DVD I could keep as long as I wanted; it was uplifting my soul. The filmic gifts offered by the unending Netflix loop brought discipline, stimulation, and the John Cazale oeuvre into my life at a time when I was growing rudderless. I'd sunk to filling my time wondering when I would become the respectable adult all other married men appeared to be, then washing away my anxieties in a sea of mindless TNT replays. I must confess: shortly before Netflixing changed my life, I reached rock bottom-taking in Stepmom for a second time.
In my heart, though, I knew that adhering to a strict three-Netflix-a-week regiment was quite simply making me a better man.
And making my wife a monster.
This is not a cry for restraint. Kim is not a Netflix junkie, ignoring me and her wifely duties just to deepen her commitment to a John and Joan Cusack festival. Overall, I would say a mutual fondness for movies has been good for our development. It's taught us to share and to take the other's preferences, feelings, intellectual capacities and desires into the motion picture selection process. Kim and I have always done a solid job of giving-and-taking, taking-and-giving, scratching one another's back, excelling in the art of compromise when it comes to choosing what to see at the local movie haus. She picks one, I pick one. She selects Master and Commander, I choose Bad Santa. (I actually ended up seeing that one with my brothers, but that's semantics. You understand what I'm driving at.) We'd gone back-and-forth long enough to know one thing was certain: the system worked. Naturally, I assumed Netflixing as a couple would be another building block in our connubial development.
To the uninitiated (a brief editorial aside: what the hell is wrong with you), Netflix has an on-line "Queue" that functions like a joint checking account (or, at least I assume it does; my betrothed makes the lion's share of the coin in our brood and prefers separation of church and state), with each partner having equal access to the DVDs coming soon to a couch near you.
Netflix allows members three DVDs at a time, but there is no limit to the number of titles warming up in the on-deck circle. Some couples keep it close to the vest (my brother Myron and his wife Callen like a manageable number, less than ten), others add titles to the mix with reckless abandon (I believe my buddy Eric and his wife Aimee are near triple digits), while Kim and I fall somewhere in between (36 as we speak). The Queue isn't sacrosanct either; it can easily be reordered with the click of mouse. And it doesn't require both parties signing off on the movie selections. It's steeped in the mutual trust and respect of strong marriages that aren't crumbling... namely, somebody else's.
It's hard to put into words the pain I felt when I first realized that Netflix was the conduit she would use to destroy our partnership, behind my back nonetheless. Early on, I noticed that my movie selections rarely stepped up to the plate, to the blue "shipped" section, to the United States mail route that would bring it into the "screening room" of our two-bedroom apartment. Here's an example: Cotton Comes to Harlem was one of my choices, and it's become the Dark Side of the Moon of the Sauer household Queue-forever on the charts, never coming anywhere near the top. And why is that? Because the woman I thought I knew keeps drop-kicking it down the list so we can see yet another Nazi picture (my wife has a thing for the Third Reich, what can I say. Beats Julia Roberts). If I were callous and cold like Kim, I might metaphorically state that my movies are in a concentration camp of their own, doomed to suffer anonymously and never be freed, but I yearn for world peace, not domination. So I won't.
Oh sure, movies we both want to see always make the cut, but funny, Kim always makes a point of saying "one of yours is here," when she knows damn well we had every intention of catching A Mighty Wind in the theater. And it gets worse. I've seen the Netflix pile on our coffee table altered without a word. What do you know, some new foreign nonsense like Whale Rider has been strategically slipped underneath Talk to Her and Into the Arms of Strangers as if to say, "Oh, it's been there for weeks." Meanwhile, Roger Dodger and The Secret Lives of Dentists must have been lost in the mail, gone AWOL, gotten filched by the president of the Campbell Scott fan club-or maybe, just maybe, they got downshifted in the Queue by a spiteful, passive-aggressive shrew with no respect for the equitable movie turn-taking system we put into place during the first Bush presidency!
I can't even look at our Queue without the bile of sadness and anger rising in my throat, because I know what's going on, even if it leads to so many unanswered questions that rattle through my brain at all hours, and have wiped out whatever shreds of hope I had for salvaging our wedded mess.
Harrison's Flowers? Who is this woman?
Personal Velocity? What the f--k is Personal Velocity, oh wait... Parker Posey... yeah I Netflixed that one.
Better Than Chocolate? Is she leading another life? She has been "working late" quite a bit... Do lesbians like Nazi flicks?
Like Water for Chocolate? Tell me she didn't bump Apocalypse Now Redux for a gaggle of films selected because they have the word "chocolate" in the title? Is that possible? I'm through the looking glass on this... but I don't see Chocolat on here, but that's just what she doesn't want me to think, or is it? I'm afraid this thing goes deeper than I ever imagined...
Bent? Bent? Gays and Nazis together again, is this some kind of subliminal torture... my hands are clammy... I think I'm having trouble breathing... I wish we'd never seen The Pianist...
I'd bet the rent money I had Bad News Bears in Breaking Training in our Queue at one point.
How many Adrien Brody movies can there possibly be?
I no longer recognize The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.
I posted Princess Mononoke for you, sweetheart, well the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.
Private Pyle, what have you done to my beloved corps?
Is Polish Wedding grounds for an annulment?
I trust Netflix and know it will never betray me, but unfortunately, it is an impossibility that the three of us can co-exist. One of us has to go.
There is no way my next wife will have access to the Netflix account.
"Little Red Envelope" first appeared at Handlebars.
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