I just spent the last hour looking for a way to watch one movie. By the end of that hour, I bought the DVD out of spite. (For several dollars less than it cost me to buy three mini Crumbl cookies yesterday—take that as you will.)
It’s not that I feel I’m entitled to watch everything on the planet for free whenever I want to, but there are certain services I already pay for, and it is nice sometimes when they end up having the one movie that you want to watch without any more fuss. That was the appeal of streaming in the first place—you watch a movie, you are already paying for a streaming service, you look for the movie, if it’s there, you watch it! Simple! Effective! Wow!
But this movie. This ONE movie.
I truly believe that my experience trying to find this film represents the overwhelming downward spiral that every piece of media has been following over the past decade, as the Streampocalypse began and started consuming all of our media into inaccessible bite-sized pieces. With the way things are going, I wouldn’t be surprised if streaming services started tugging so hard on the rights of movies that Netflix gets the first sixty minutes and Hulu gets the second.
Anyway…
This is about The Talented Mr. Ripley.
Starring Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Cate Blanchett, and a bunch of other people I swear I know from some other movie I watched seven years ago, The Talented Mr. Ripley is a thriller/crime film that came out in 1999, which I originally watched several months ago with my family. It’s a wonderful film, and logically, the time has come where my brain wants to pick it apart with a bunch of tiny tools to see exactly what makes it tick.
Originally, I rented the film off of Amazon Prime for my family, and that’s all there was to it. I rented the movie, I watched the movie: the end. However, I am under the impression that if I have to rent something more than once, it’s more worth it at this point to purchase the movie outright and never have to pay for it again. Or, even better, to find it for free somewhere and watch it that way (preferably through… non-seaworthy methods, but yo-ho, do what ye must). So that’s what I did. Or, tried to, anyway.
This, my friends, was my descent into insanity—documented here in much saner terms.
The Library Saga
Before anything else, I decided to check both of my local libraries.
I have begun to realize recently just how valuable a resource the library can be, not just for educational resources but for entertainment as well. As a student, the Auraria Library actually has a decent collection of DVDs available on the first floor, a fact I was not made aware of until sometime last week, when my roommate and I looked through the whole collection and found four films to watch over the next seven days. Unfortunately, we only got around to two, but we will definitely be returning to borrow them again, and actually watch them this time around.
However, at the time of my writing this, I was at my parents’ house for the weekend. This is an hour away from the university library, so I couldn’t just walk in and see for myself whether they have The Talented Mr. Ripley in their collection.
Looking on the website, I have always had trouble finding an accurate representation of the library’s physical collection. For whatever reason, and I truly believe this is just my own problem, I can never seem to figure out what books/media they actually have when I am not on one of the computers physically located on the second floor of the library. The website, for me, is a great resource for finding research materials and reviews, but less so for searching through their physical fiction catalog. Either way, when I searched for the film in their database, nothing showed up for The Talented Mr. Ripley. There was the screenplay, the original book it was based on, and a surplus of book and movie reviews, but no dice for the actual film. For comparison, I also searched for one of the movies that I had checked out and returned the previous week—no results showed up for this either. After fiddling around with the settings for a while, I gave up and moved onto the next possible source.
*The Monday after I wrote this, I went to the Auraria library in person to double-check my search was accurate and to ask the front desk how to search on the website in the future. The movie was indeed not in their collection, which I assumed, but I did find a solution to the search issue. For any curious minds in a similar situation out there, here’s the trick: in the advanced search settings, check off “video recording” as one of the parameters before searching for the movie. Also, if you don’t mind waiting a few days longer and the movie is not available, you can go to the front desk and ask to have a book or film or anything else transferred from another library entirely. Be aware of some stricter time constraints, but for the most part, this is a wonderful resource to take advantage of, both for school and personal use. Support your local libraries!
The public library near my house has a slightly more navigable page, at least in my experience—the problem I ran into here was in the availability. Across the seven branches of the Douglas County library, there is only one copy of The Talented Mr. Ripley available, which was in use and already on hold. I was about to give up here as well, but then something caught my eye.
“Available immediately on Kanopy.”
Huh.
I’d used Kanopy before, and to very mixed results. Usually, even with two accounts from the two libraries, the movies I am looking for are never available, but the library says it is available to watch! Perfect! I’ll just click on the link right there, and it’ll take me to the movie in the app, and—
Wait.
It took me to the app, but this is just the home screen. I’m logged in, I’m in the correct account. It should work.
So I try again.
Nothing. It opens the app, and nothing happens. A bit frustrated now, I go to the search bar and search for The Talented Mr. Ripley. Nothing comes up. I change the Mr. to Mister just in case. Nothing. I even go to my University library account and see if it’s available there instead. Nope.
Now I’m just confused. It said it was available as an option on the library website—so why wouldn’t it be?
And then, as one does, I questioned this contradiction on the internet. In my research, I discovered how Kanopy works, and I’ll break down the basics here:
Depending on if a library is public or academic, there are different payment options available. While academic libraries like the Auraria Library would have to pay a license for each film, priced differently depending on the popularity, length, and supplier, the public library must follow the Pay Per Use (PPU) plan, in which the library pays a small fee any time any film is watched through their library’s Kanopy account.
This means that every single time someone clicks on a film in the collection and even begins to watch it, the library has to pay. Evidently, these small fees can quickly build into something much more overwhelming.
As for the university library’s situation—according to a 2019 article from FilmQuarterly, “university and college libraries do not pay a flat fee like individuals might for Netflix, Hulu, or the (now defunct) FilmStruck. Instead, Kanopy’s platform drives ‘patron-driven acquisition’ in which three viewings (defined as 30 seconds or more of a title) trigger a library license fee per title. (The figures I’ve seen are $150 for a year, $350 for a 3-year license, though the price might vary or change over time.)”
A library, public or academic, might have to shave some films off a library’s catalog so that they don’t have to continue to pay per view or pay a several hundred dollar license for a film seen by three total people, especially in a time where libraries left and right are continuing to be defunded.
So Kanopy isn’t an option, at least for this film. Good to know.
Next, of course, I checked THE BEAST:
THE STREAMING SERVICE AMALGAMATION
My usual method of parsing out which movies are available, and where, is a simple Google search of the movie title. Usually, it’s pretty accurate in telling me what streaming services host it and whether it’s free or not, but this time—
This time…
The monster reveals itself. It is a wretched thing made from other things, absorbing everything in sight into its own twisted, mangled, almost unrecognizable form for the sake of its own greed-driven mission.
And for the low, low price of $9.99 per month! Plus tax. Plus Showtime! Plus Paramount Plus. Plus your money, and your soul, probably, somewhere along the way.
Of eleven streaming services mentioned which this film is quote-un-quote “available” on, only three are honest with their availability. All three are rentable for $3.99.
Every. Single. Other. Service. Next to their title, two tiny words in unassuming font.
“Premium Subscription.”
Or in YouTube’s case, “Primetime Subscription,” but who’s counting.
Typically, this means that somewhere along the way you have to pay a little extra per month for a specific cable channel or other streaming service on top of the original subscription of the service you already have. Something like Showtime, or STARZ, channels that were originally considered to be “premium” in the olden days of actual cable TV and are now extending that privilege to streaming. Alternatively, there is a streaming “bundle,” where technically, this film is available on Hulu, but only if you also have HBO Max! Sorry! It’s annoying—but that’s not the worst of it.
Usually, when there are multiple streaming services with this cute little “premium subscription” tag underneath them, there is only one service that is the answer to the problem. Usually, that problem goes by the name of Max. But this time, none of them individually made up the paywall issue.
So, I went to Hulu to figure out what unholy combination you actually needed in order to watch this film. I went to the search bar, and typed in the title, and finally found The Talented Mr. Ripley—
Available with a Hulu subscription…
In addition to a FULL Paramount + subscription…
PLUS Showtime.
A service, within a service, within a service, all of which you have to pay for on a monthly basis in order to be able to watch one movie.
Frankly, this is ridiculous.
At this point, I’d had enough. I went online, looked for the DVD, and bought it with two-day free shipping for $8.19—and here we are now.
All This To Say…
We are living in the age of the unobtainable. Media that was prevalent on cable and physical media even a couple of years ago is almost impossible to find and access today in the war between streaming and copyright licenses, and the profiting of large corporations with little to no regard to the original creators of the piece. Current projects are being canceled months, or even years, into production with no warning, especially animation for companies like Max, which deprives the rights of other companies or individuals to even think about starting the project up again elsewhere.
Much like Disney has always been, our entire creative media library is slowly but surely being locked away into The Vault. And soon, we won’t be able to watch anything at all without having to pay $12.99 for Disney + Premium Extra 4K HD with extra subscriptions to Lucasfilm and Showtime and the Library of Congress.
Going onto Amazon Prime, there is an entire section dedicated to the channels that you can pay extra per month for, and it took me thirty full seconds to scroll to the end of the list with my finger pressed down on the right button the entire time. (I counted—there are EIGHTY possible extra subscriptions you can get with your Amazon Prime account. Wow.)
And even then—not even the streaming services’ own projects are safe from their tyranny. In this self-cannibalizing system services like Netflix, Max, and countless others are taking their own original series off of their catalogs. So, even if a movie is available with your 29 million tacked-on subscriptions, you can never ensure it will be there tomorrow, even if it’s a Netflix original ON Netflix.
The Talented Mr. Ripley is by no means an isolated case. It is one of countless many, and it’s only going to get worse from here on out, as more and more companies decide to profit off this worse-than-cable monthly subscription to hell. So, buy physical media while you still can. Firsthand, secondhand, from friends, whatever it takes. Thrift stores like Goodwill sell DVDs and CDs for $2.99 a pop, and DVD players for about $10.
Oscar Wilde once wrote, “People these days know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.” In a world where buying the privilege to watch a movie means loaning a small fortune in perpetuity in order to do so, and where only a fraction of which goes to the people who made the film in the first place—know the value of your media.
Own what you buy.
