Netflix Guilt

"City of God," the award-winning 2002 Miramax film about the slums of Rio de Janeiro, is the most expensive film I've never watched. By my calculation, it cost me $66. I hear it's great.

Perhaps you're familiar with the following dynamic: film is highly recommended; film appeals to intellectual and aesthetic sensibilities; film is added to the Netflix queue, and soon appears in the mail in that unassuming but somehow pushy red-striped envelope. Temperament, timing and ambiance is never quite right for film's subject matter—in this case, brutal and depressing. Film sits on TV for a year, taking up valuable space on Netflix queue and inflicting pangs of guilt and regret. Said intellectual and aesthetic sensibilities are called into question when "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" is watched and quickly returned.

I had "City of God" in my possession for 11 months, during which I paid $18 a month for a three-DVD-at-a-time Netflix subscription. Finally, I returned the movie in defeat while delusionally re-adding it to the end of my queue. By that time, my wife and I were talking about a dangerous new force in our lives: Netflix guilt.

The digital revolution has introduced us all to the life-altering phenomenon known as asynchronous entertainment. We can now enjoy movies, TV shows and our favorite media sources wherever, whenever, we want. But a decade into this monumental shift, the drawbacks are coming into focus. Episodes of "The Daily Show" and "Letterman" pile onto our DVR television recorders like copies of The New Yorker, begging to either be consumed or wastefully discarded. Netflix movies line up on our shelves like airplanes on a runway waiting to take off. And all of those blog postings relentlessly flood into our Web browsers every hour, every day. There's certainly not time for all of it. Is this entertainment? It feels more like homework.

Grappling with these feelings of SNA (Severe Netflix Anxiety) I asked the Silicon Valley movie rental firm to let me talk to the most delinquent Netflix customer of all time, the user who holds the record for keeping a single movie out the longest. The company didn't want to violate their members' privacy but gamely played along, serving up former employee Crystal Trexel.

Trexel, I could tell, was a kindred spirit. She likes movies and is on the eight-films-at-a-time plan ($48 a month). She watches several films a week, but there was one she absolutely choked on: the 2004 indie film "Maria Full of Grace," an unflinching depiction of desperate Colombian women who smuggle drugs into the United States. Trexel received the film in December 2004, and she still has it, sitting on her TV cabinet.