Call me melodramatic, but it really does feel like life has changed. Transformed as suddenly and as spectacularly as that moment, over a century ago, when the first audience recoiled in terror and wonder at a close-up of a gun pointed straight at them in The Great Train Robbery.
Only now it's another sort of gun pointed right between our eyes, and I've finally joined the ranks of those who've pulled the trigger. I have gone hi-def.
I swore I wouldn't do it, but I'm weak. Like most sensible consumers, I vowed to sit out the idiotic and painfully counterproductive war that's been raging for the past few years between the two competing high-definition formats: HD DVD (supported by Toshiba and its minions) and Blu-ray (supported by the Sony gang). Inevitably echoing that bloody battle-to-the-death fought decades ago between VHS and Betamax, this new grudge match is every bit as stupid and twice as infuriating, at least for those of us who would rather be watching movies than watching history blindly repeat itself.
But when I sat down at the computer shortly before dawn last week and discovered the Internet abuzz with rumors of a national chain offering a brand new HD DVD player for under a hundred bucks — my personal tipping point for most home electronics items — I took the bait. It's probably worth mentioning that HD DVD might not have even been my first high-definition choice; the differences between the two formats are minor, but Blu-ray offers a slightly larger selection of the splashy, eye-candy titles for which hi-def was invented. But Blu-ray players are still hovering around $400, and a perfectly respectable HD DVD player for $99 was an offer that just couldn't be refused.
I'd actually been dying to make the leap into hi-def players for months, ever since the big, cathode-ray beast in the bedroom died and we'd replaced it with a snazzy 42-inch flat-screen. I'd been swooning over high-definition programming ever since, spending way too much time staring at HD travel shows and nature documentaries that looked like holograms hovering before my eyes.
The picture quality of hi-def turned out to be so amazing, in fact, that even my beloved DVDs suddenly began looking distinctly less than state-of-the-art. The final blow came one afternoon when I happened upon Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory broadcast in HD, and quickly realized that it blew the standard DVD version (itself none too shabby) completely out of the water.
So I bought myself a HD DVD player and then a little something to test it out. My maiden HD DVD voyage was Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a movie that may seem an odd first dip into hi-def waters, but it turned out to be an inspired choice. Gilliam's 1998 film rambles and occasionally stalls, but it's also an extended explosion of drug-fueled, day-glo visions that, on HD, achieve an astonishing richness that you feel in your gut. The movie looked pretty darned great on a DVD released a few years back by the scrupulously quality-conscious Criterion Collection, but the HD version is so exquisitely textured, so flat-out luxurious, it makes the non-hi-def disc look like fuzzy videotape.
Fear and Loathing is absurd, obscene, often extremely funny and an almost ridiculously seductive experience on HD. Fat, sweaty and speaking a slurred language that seems invented on the spot, Benicio Del Toro is every inch the unhinged drug addict he should have been in Things We Lost in the Fire, a hulking lunatic who nearly overshadows Johnny Depp's deliriously stylized Hunter S. Thompson. The film is essentially a showcase for the actors' psychotic meltdowns and for Gilliam's visual imagination — and the HD DVD communicates that vision with such depth and detail that Fear and Loathing makes us feel like we're part of the drug trip it's depicting. You'll feel the film's hi-def walls vibrating as Fear and Loathing's heightened reality gets deep under your skin and stays there.
And just when I felt in danger of fainting from sheer sensory overload, my virgin HD experience abruptly ended. Right around an hour into the movie, my HD DVD begin stuttering, breaking up into pixels, and finally froze, felled by a minuscule scratch on the disc's surface. I was eventually able to get the disc to continue playing to the end, but not before wondering if this were some sort of sign. Maybe this was just Icarus getting burnt by the sun again, or Ray Milland in X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes — blessed and cursed with such unnatural clarity of vision that divine voices begin encouraging him to rip his eyeballs out of their sockets.
All of this hi-def madness can probably be traced back to Orson Welles, whose revolutionary use of deep focus cinematography over a half-century ago prompted the great film theorist Andre Bazin to find something akin to truth in the cinema's power to capture multiple planes of reality at the same time. We can only wonder what Bazin would have made of high-definition, where the image has become so detailed that it's sometimes hard to know where to look, because the center of focus appears to be everywhere at once.
HD essentially begs the question of how much we're really meant to see: Certain stars and directors have already complained that the format exposes flaws that should never have been noticed. And when you get right down to it, do we really need to identify every last chunk in Benicio Del Toro's vomit when he pukes into yet another of Fear and Loathing's toilet bowls?
Well, we probably do. I suspect even Bazin might have ultimately agreed with Iggy Pop and the Spice Girls — that too much is never enough. And Ray Milland's tender orbs aside, there's no getting around the fact that hi-def is a blast, pure and simple.
HD may not turn out to be the final frontier — there are already rumors of fiendishly clever new technologies bubbling up from the underground — and, in any event, it's unlikely that all those standard-issue DVDs stacked up around the house are going to become officially obsolete until Hillary's well into her second term.
But in the meantime, why resist? High-definition DVDs of everything from Planet Earth to 2001, from The Matrix to The Searchers to The Corpse Bride, are already here for the asking. Just try to keep those eyes in their sockets where they belong.
This article appears in Nov 14-20, 2007.
