Callum Preston’s Videoland in the Joy exhibition at Melbourne’s Immigration Museum has been opening doors in my brain. The installation is a simulacrum of that suburban mainstay of the late 20th century – the video store. It looks almost accurate, a little uncanny: VHS videos in their requisite categories line walls and aisles and browsers. Preston has created a logo and signage, right down to the branded carpet, but many of the cases still bear stickers from their original homes (namely Video Ezy and Blockbuster – rivals again).

The counter was unmanned when I visited. The TV screen behind it played an instructional tape about video hygiene. There were even snacks – I’m not sure now if they were real – that made me remember how video-store snacks (like multi-coloured popcorn full of additives) were always overpriced and rarely what you actually wanted.

On the day I visited the installation, there were a couple of secondary school groups going through. As I lingered, reading the covers, sometimes getting flashbacks, I was half-listening to their comments. They hung around in merry clumps, laughing at the old-world aesthetic. They talked about childhood films and weird parents and the ancient pre-internet days of wonder.

I could see how a replicated video store could represent joy, but for me, other emotions were taking over. Solastalgia is philosopher Glenn Albrecht’s term to describe the feeling of distress that comes from environmental change. While it is typically applied to the natural world, it can also relate to built environments – anywhere a person’s concept of home is disrupted, changed or eradicated. Call it nostalgia’s wounded cousin. Or, as Albrecht puts it, “the homesickness you have when you are still at home”.

I was thinking about how video stores functioned as third places. In his 1989 book The Great Good Place, sociologist Ray Oldenburg defines eight characteristics of third places, including accessibility; being “neutral ground”; being conducive to conversation; “a home away from home”; regulars who contribute to the overall tone; and being playful spaces where banter is king.

In my teenage suburbia, third places were hard to find. Youth groups were too holy. The shopping centre could get expensive. Skate parks were unpredictable, and often attracted an unsavoury element. But video stores were an all-weather peak destination. I had memberships at several stores, trying to outrun my fines. The video store stayed open late. You could hang out there for hours, alone or with friends.

In those days of paltry funds, renting a video was a small happiness. It offered a similar dopamine hit to what I’d get from shopping. And it was a path to a kind of cultural capital: if the film was brilliant, this was a reflection of my impeccable taste; if it was terrible, it just gave me something else to be disparaging about.

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The third-place quality of the video store has been explored in film. Some attest to the concept, some subvert it. In Kevin Smith’s Clerks, careworn Dante serves at the convenience store, while his loquacious sociopathic colleague Randal mans the video shop next door. If he’s not sleeping (“resting his eyes”), Randal’s finding new ways to repel his customers.

When a woman asks for a recommendation, he tells her he doesn’t watch movies. A young mum with toddler in tow, asking for Happy Scrappy Hero Pup, is subjected to Randal ordering a string of porn titles from the distribution house.

“You’re a clerk paid to do a job,” Dante scolds him, “you can’t just do anything while you’re working”. Randal responds by spitting water in a customer’s face before lighting out for Big Choice video, where he can borrow beyond his own store’s limited range.

In The Lost Boys, when single parent Lucy finds work in Max’s video shop, it appears to be the perfect family-friendly environment. Max seems like potential stepdad material. The night that David and his metal-haired vamp cabal wander in off the boardwalk Max warns them away, but it’s all an act. The store is a front and Max is the head vampire, the baddest daddy of them all.

Mike, the empath video-store clerk in Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind is doing his best to keep business running smoothly, if at all. Then Jerry, his best-worst customer, becomes magnetised and accidently wipes the shop’s entire video collection. The pair resolve the problem by reenacting and remaking films from Ghostbusters to King Kong, roping in locals, getting increasingly elaborate and adventurous in their efforts. These recreated, “sweded” films, they tell customers, cost more because they take longer to make and come from Sweden. They save the store and generate a creative empire that has resulted in a flourishing of “sweded” film festivals in real life.

I have also been thinking about video stores as repositories of dreams – mine and other people’s. I spent my 20s working in books, music and video retail. I was poor in pocket, but rich in inner life. The real me that the customer didn’t see was destined for greatness. Ambition was there, even if it was formless and unproven.

Many of my co-workers had similar yearnings. We were surrounded by other people’s creative output. This could be inspiring, or intimidating, but as long as there were brick-and-mortar repositories it didn’t seem so unbelievable that one day it might be our book or film or CD on the shelves. Once, during a late shift, a customer who I regularly chatted to asked me out. I felt thrown. You don’t understand, I wanted to say, this isn’t me. By which I meant I was not an agreeable automaton and my uniform was actually camouflage. I said something less articulate, and after that he got his videos somewhere else.

Video stores are third places and repositories of dreams, but also, they are dinosaurs. Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles was the first music video played on MTV in 1981. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights explored the seismic effects of home video on the adult entertainment industry in the San Fernando Valley in the 1980s. For a little while, people thought laserdiscs might become a thing.

The first DVDs were released in Japan in 1996. By 2003, 35 per cent of Australian households owned a DVD player. I recall a golden period of tech-in-transition, before smartphones, way before streaming. I was living in regional Victoria and my son was starting primary school. Weekly, we’d mosey down to the video store to borrow five DVDs for $10. They were often the same titles week after week, but it was a mission, and it was a ritual.

At the same time, I was borrowing videos from Cinemedia online. Films I’d only read about would turn up in a brown box at my local library – another third place – and lo, the weekend was sorted. That video store, like all the others, went the way of all things, but maybe the tides are turning back. They said vinyl was dead. And flares. And low-rise jeans.

Like I said, the Videoland installation opened doors in my head. I am thinking about video store ghost-signs now. There are two in Melbourne’s north that I seek out whenever I’m driving past. They give me a warm and spooky feeling. There must be more. Now I am imagining a bigger project, a map of lost video stores, with personal stories and sad faces to mark the sites. During the writing of this piece I found myself mesmerised by a digital map by V1 Analytics that shows the rise and fall of Blockbuster in the US. Electro music pumps and the stores twinkle twinkle like little stars. They spread until they nearly cover the whole map, and then – so fast you can hardly believe it – one by one, they die.

Joy is at the Immigration Museum until August 29, 2025.