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For many, Videodrome (1983) remains David Cronenberg’s signature film. It is not his most successful or necessarily even his best, but it does most thoroughly define the descriptor “Cronenbergian.” It is a distillation of many of the themes and motifs he would explore throughout his filmography. Along with The Fly (1986), it is perhaps his greatest depiction of the subgenre that he is most often associated with—body horror, but it also explores a number of philosophical ideas that thread their way through much of his body of work. Above all, Videodrome is an often uncomfortable interrogation of humanity’s relationship with violence, entertainment, and media, and forty years after its release, that interrogation has only become more disturbing and prescient.
Videodrome is an idea movie wrapped up in a mystery/conspiracy plot. That the plot makes any sense at all is rather remarkable considering, due to Canadian tax shelter policies, shooting began without a finished script and much of it was shaped on the set and in the editing room. This sculptural process ultimately works to the film’s benefit as the leaps from sequence to sequence coupled with its visceral imagery emphasize its ambiguities, making it a film that worms its way into the psyche, forcing viewers to contemplate its mysteries long after they have left the theater or turned off the television. Ultimately it is the striking visuals and the complex ideas about philosophy, media, technology, politics, and their effects on the human body that make Videodrome endlessly relevant and fascinating.
The politics of the film are not as clear cut as they so often are in movies now. An aspect of Videodrome is the ways that both the political right and left use media to their own ends with neither side shown in an entirely favorable light. Though the film ultimately sides more with the left, represented by Brian O’Blivion (Jack Creley), his daughter Bianca (Sonja Smits), and television executive Masha (Lynne Gorman), both sides use Max Renn (James Woods) as a pawn in their death game. This political ambiguity was problematic for some, particularly Canadian critic Robin Wood who objected that Cronenberg seemed to come down on both sides of the political spectrum and called his films reactionary. In actuality, Cronenberg presents the discussion and allows the audience to draw its own conclusions.
The tech pirate Harlan (Peter Dvorsky) and Barry Convex (Leslie Carlson) represent the political right, objecting that North America has “gone soft” as the rest of the world has hardened. The character of Barry Convex, who Cronenberg based on the now disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker, is the image of a spokesperson for the so-called “moral majority,” embodying the contradictions of that ideology. Convex’s company does performative charitable work, making inexpensive eyeglasses for the third world, but also supplies missile guidance systems to NATO. He has created Videodrome to turn Max into a weapon to destroy his enemies on the left, including Max’s boss Masha and Bianca O’Blivion.
On the other end of the political spectrum, Bianca carries on her father’s work with a mission that supplies food to the homeless but, rather than a religious message, gives them access to television in order to “help patch them back into the world’s mixing board,” mirroring current pushes to supply free internet and wi-fi for everyone worldwide. When Max arrives to assassinate her, however, she removes the videocassette that Convex has implanted in him through a vagina-like opening in his stomach and replaces it with her own, making him the “video Word made flesh,” a variation on a Biblical reference to Christ. Through a kind of death and resurrection, he is reprogrammed to destroy Videodrome along with Harlan, Convex, and ultimately himself.
The audience is shown all this through a series of powerful hallucinations experienced by Max. As the film unfolds and the media world intertwines with the real world, it becomes increasingly unclear where consensus reality ends and these hallucinations begin, raising a number of questions. How much of what is seen is reality? What is hallucination? What is media? The movie also asks a more puzzling question—does it matter? The film posits that reality is what we perceive it to be. So, is there any objective reality at all or is it merely a product of what we take into our minds and, because this is a Cronenberg film, our bodies? It is entirely possible that the second half of the movie is Max’s hallucination while wearing the prototype helmet built by Barry Convex and his Spectacular Optical company to record images from the brain. Brian O’Blivion warns from a videotape early in the film that Max’s reality “is already half video hallucination. If you’re not careful, it will become total hallucination.” In other words, the deaths of Masha and Nikki Brand (Deborah Harry), Max’s assassination of Convex, and even his own suicide could all be in his mind. The power of the film is that it does not tell us but flows freely from what seems to be objective reality to perceived reality and hallucination.
The most powerful aspect of Videodrome and the one that makes it practically prophetic is its examination of our intimate relationship with television. The film opens with this intimacy—a closeup of the Civic TV logo and the tagline “The One You Take to Bed with You,” making the human relationship with television practically sexual from the first shot. When the film was made, this would partially refer to falling asleep in front of the TV, but now we have mobile devices that can literally be taken to bed with us. Television is far more interactive now than it was in 1983 when cable and even home video were relative rarities and luxuries. Now, through physical media, video on demand, and multiple streaming platforms, we can personalize our media consumption to our every whim and desire, and all in the privacy of our own home, or bedroom.
And then there is social media, something that could not even have been dreamed of when Cronenberg made the film. The character of Brian O’Blivion, based on legendary media analyst and intellectual Marshall McLuhan, embodies what would become social media in several ways. First, he never appears in what we would call in today’s world of Twitter and Instagram “real life,” but only on a screen. He admits that Brian O’Blivion is “not the name I was born with. It’s my television name,” anticipating Twitter handles and screen names. When Max seeks O’Blivion out, his daughter tells him that her father may send him a videotape, prompting Max to say that this will make it difficult to have a conversation. She replies by saying, “my father has not engaged in conversation for at least twenty years. The monologue is his preferred mode of discourse.” This is analogous to the Twitter thread, for which the poster can limit who (if anyone) can respond, or simply mute if they simply grow tired of comments. We also learn that
Brian O’Blivion died eleven months before the film begins and his existence and legacy is curated by his daughter as if he were still alive. Today, the social media accounts of many who have died still exist as a record of the aspects of their lives they shared with the public. Some are even carried on by family and friends as a memorial to those who have passed.
This is not to say that certain technologies and media trends did not exist when Videodrome was made, they most certainly did. As good science fiction writers often do, Cronenberg latched onto these trends and extrapolated them to where they could be in the future. At the same time, he avoids the pitfalls that so many science fiction films fall into by extrapolating the ideas, but not the technology. Instead, he sets his film in the present of 1983 and uses the technology available at the time, filling the movie with Betamax video cassettes, tube televisions, large circuit board cabinets, and a primitive satellite dish. Videodrome is frozen in time in a kind of alternate Toronto of 1983 that also exists beyond that in its explorations of philosophies and ideas. As a result, the film does not really age or date itself because it is true to its time and place.
It turns out that many of Cronenberg’s predictions, though he never sought to be any kind of prophet, became reality, some of them even more extreme than they appear in the film. Sex and violence have reached a level on television, especially cable and streaming, that few could have predicted. True crime has become one of the most popular, and lucrative, forms of mainstream entertainment. Media has reached a level of intimacy that is unprecedented with so many options that it can be practically tailor-made to the individual, with social media bringing an even deeper level of intimacy. The scene in which Max kisses and caresses the image of Nikki Brand’s lips on his television now falls just short of literal reality. Much of the fiction of Videodrome has become fact. In a sense, the video Word has indeed been made flesh.
The film is not necessarily saying that media and our relationship with it is entirely bad, but it does change who we are as human beings. We experience a new reality because of it, and we must grapple and contend with the fact that we live in the world of “the new flesh” that only continues to grow and evolve. After the final frame of the film, we are left to ask ourselves what this “new flesh” really is, or if it even exists at all. Max is told by the video image of Nikki that he will transcend, become something new, but only by destroying the old flesh. But is this simply another trick of Videodrome, the arena for the soul of humanity? The ambiguity of the final sequence leaves the viewer to wonder if this new flesh is even worth it. Will media ultimately help us to evolve or will it bring us to destroy ourselves?
Cronenberg would continue to explore the ideas of our interaction with media and entertainment throughout his career. The intimacy of video games in eXistenZ (1999) and the unusual entertainments found in Crimes of the Future (2022) are perhaps the most direct, but the ways machinery, computers, science, and various forms of technology affect the mind and body can be found in The Fly, Naked Lunch (1991), and Crash (1996) as well. Cronenberg’s vision is one of the most potent, intellectual, and visceral in all film, deftly balancing mind and body in ways that continually horrify and provoke. Videodrome becomes more and more relevant as we continue to evolve as a species and society, and it will surely continue to endure.
Long live Videodrome, and long live the new flesh.
