A specific type of Saturday afternoon has vanished. The one where you would watch a movie through to the end, sit in a daze for a little while, then grab the remote and restart it with the director’s commentary turned on. Different world, same images. All of a sudden, you were inside the creator’s head.
Most of that experience has since faded. And it departed more quietly than it should have.
The commentary track on the DVD was never a glamorous feature. There was no aggressive marketing. The majority of people completely disregarded it. However, it was the entire purpose of owning the disc for a certain type of movie-loving viewer, and there were millions of them. Its decline has been lamented for years by critics, filmmakers, and ardent fans, and it’s telling how little the industry has responded.
The emergence of streaming has altered more than just where people watch movies. It altered the degree of context surrounding them. When you watch a movie on Netflix, it doesn’t have any annotations, a second layer, or the accumulated thoughts that used to come in those plastic cases. You hit play, watch, and then continue. There is already a queue for the next title. A filmmaker cannot sit next to you and say, “Here’s what I was trying to do.”
Ridley Scott on Blade Runner and Alien. With the patience and accuracy of a true movie enthusiast, Roger Ebert narrated Dark City. Edgar Wright and Tarantino spoke so quickly that you had to constantly rewind. Shakespearean subtitles were available on the Monty Python disc for those who didn’t enjoy the movie. These weren’t just gimmicks, or at least they weren’t gimmicks. Anyone who bothered to turn the disc over and take a look could listen to them, which were audio versions of film literacy.
In an interview with EL PAÑS last year, film critic Kyle Turner put it simply: “They helped you understand the director’s intentions or the techniques used during production,” he said, referring to DVD extras as his first real cinematic lessons. There’s a feeling that those menus and making-of documentaries gave a whole generation of millennial moviegoers an informal education that no one specifically created for them, but that nonetheless developed naturally as a result of the act of caring about a movie enough to watch it past the credits.
That’s what streaming hasn’t been able to duplicate. It is not compatible with the format. There is no incentive to create infrastructure that allows you to stay on a platform long after you’ve finished watching something if the platform’s survival depends on you watching the next thing. Behind-the-scenes features and commentary tracks demand time, money, and a willingness to treat the audience as though they are interested in learning more. The majority of platforms have opted not to place that wager.
It’s important to remember that the unique features weren’t always positive. A director would narrate shot descriptions while the movie was playing, adding nothing and saying less in some of the endless commentary. There were dead zones in the format. At its best, however, the commentary track produced something truly unique: a direct, unmediated dialogue between a director and a viewer, with the movie taking place between them. Nothing in the current streaming scene can compare to that; it’s an odd and private thing.
A few minor attempts have been made to bring the form back. Some Blu-ray releases still treat extras as a significant component of the product, especially those from Criterion and related labels. For a short while, House of Cards experimented with commentary tracks. In order to listen to commentary tracks while driving, one Reddit user mentioned ripping them to their phone. This workaround is both clever and a little depressing given how much people want the format to return.
It is made worse by the rights situation. The additional content, such as the commentary, making-ofs, and interviews, frequently vanishes completely as streaming licenses expire and physical releases cease to be pressed. No one tries to preserve it because it isn’t necessary to the movie itself. It simply ceases to exist in silence.
It’s not just entertainment that was lost. It’s a method of viewing movies as something worth studying, revisiting, and comprehending from the inside out. At its best, the director’s commentary was just that—a second movie existing inside the first, challenging you to view it in a different way. We traded it in for a seven-dollar monthly subscription that allowed us to watch something else right away. At the time, that might have seemed like a fair trade.
