The Tsundoku Shelf

There's a Japanese word for buying books you intend to read but never do. The books accumulate on shelves, spines uncracked, as a kind of aspirational architecture. You're not failing to read them. You're buying the possibility of reading them, which is a different thing.

The word is tsundoku. I learned it years ago in the context of books and immediately recognized something I was doing with films.

I have 884 physical media copies in my collection. Maybe 20 percent of them I've never watched. That's lower than you might expect. I tend to buy films I've already seen and want to own. But there's a specific category of disc that keeps growing on one side of my shelf, and it's not because I don't want to watch them.

Citizen Kane is on my shelf. I own it. I have not watched it. This is a thing I am acknowledging publicly.

Apocalypse Now is also on my shelf. So is The French Connection. Phantom Thread. The Favourite. Call Me By Your Name. I know these films are extraordinary. I know I will respond to them. That's exactly why they're still in the shrink.

They feel like films I should own. Need to own. Films that deserve the right conditions: the home theatre, the right evening, a version of me that hasn't just finished a day at the office, made dinner, and cleaned up after. The mental energy to give them what they require.

The week Marty Supreme arrived, I had been looking forward to watching it with my oldest son. I'd preordered it. Had a plan. That same week, my son had a bunch of his friends over and they watched it together in the home theatre. By all accounts a great night.

I still haven't seen it.

The occasion I'd been holding the disc for happened without me. The film sat on the shelf and waited, which is what discs do.

What I watched instead, at some point that week, was probably Point Break. Or Road House. Possibly Dirty Dancing. I am a significant Patrick Swayze fan and I make no apologies for it. These are films I have seen enough times that I could probably recite them. After a long day there is a real and specific comfort in a film that asks nothing of you, that you already know you love, that works the same way it has worked every other time.

Apocalypse Now asks something of you. Citizen Kane asks something of you. Point Break asks you to turn your brain off and watch a man rob banks while surfing, which is a very different request and one I am almost always willing to fulfill.

This is tsundoku. Not the failure to watch, but the accumulation of intention. The shelf isn't a backlog I'm behind on. It's a set of promises I've made to a future version of myself: the version who will have the right evening, who will sit down with Citizen Kane and give it what it needs and get back exactly what it's supposed to give.

That version of me exists. He's just had a long day.

I'll get to those films. Citizen Kane, Apocalypse Now, the rest of them. I know they'll land hard when I do. That's not optimism. It's why I bought the discs. The shelf isn't a record of things I've been avoiding. It's a record of things I'm keeping.

How many discs are you keeping for the right evening? And how many times have you watched the comfort film instead?