Videodrome... by David Cronenberg, 1983

I'd like to thank you, Canada

In my mind, Canada is a country inhabited by bears, members of Voivod and Cronenberg. I know there should be other people in there somewhere and that Bryan Adams and Celine Dion were born there as well but all these don't seem to fit in my picture for this great great country. Canada for me is excellent thrash and body horror; a neat place indeed.

Videodrome is a turning point in Cronenberg’s career. It sums up all defining characteristics of the body horror genre and introduces the theme of “how real is reality” (enter the ghost of Philip K. Dick showing his stigmata) that is going to re-emerge later on in eXistenZ, in a less intriguing and much more evident way. Cronenberg, along with Lynch and a few other directors, are considered a good entry point for anyone beginning to become interested in cinema as an art rather than just entertainment, or at least that was the case when I was a teenager in Greece. This is the film I consider to be his best work. Long live the new flesh is also one of the strongest lines in cinema. I have watched this, thought and wrote about it so many times that the following may seem more like a rant than a review. You have been warned. 

A Brief and Boring Synopsis of the Film, I won’t provide this time

I've thought a lot about this. The whole point of the review is re-watching a film and re-thinking about it. If you haven’t seen the film the review has no artistic merit on its own, I assure you. On the other hand, if a guy writes a couple thousand words on a movie you haven’t seen, then it might be worth the time watching it, right? 

Too much TV is Bad for your Eyes

Early on Mr. Cronenberg hints at the direction the film is going to take by doing something very clever here. He transfers the action from actual space to screen and then to another place. He does that constantly and in a consistent way. 

First we are here, in a small room, with suspicious looking gentlemen, ready to watch a new video. The video starts and…

…they watch Samurai Dreams. We watch Samurai Dreams. We are now in the screen following the action in the images.

Now we are reminded that we are watching a video, a representation of reality. 

And then we find ourselves in Max’s office. We were transfered through the screen to another time and space while we were watching the show. Our perception was not only directed into the images on the screen but it was also transferred through the TV space-time to “real” space-time. We will see that a lot through the rest of the film until it develops into its main drive. 

First off, we see Max in this tiny monitor. The show is about to start.

Then we cut to the real Max, sitting in a real chair, in a real place. He looks to his left to see the other guest. The camera moves to the left following his eyes…

...and we see the other guest in a screen. He he. That was cool. Everything is mediated by the screen; his perception, the viewers’, ours.

Right after that we see an isolated TV set and the show begins. This TV set is ANY TV set. It is not in the studio, it isn’t one of the crew's monitors, it can be anywhere. Notice the black background. We are in limbo. We do not know where we are. We can be anywhere since our perception is focused on the screen. The background fades. And then we are transferred back to the studio. It seems like we could play this game throughout the whole film… and, yes we can. When the illusions start, induced by the growth/new organ, who can tell us what is “real” space and time and what is not?Imagine a dark cellar and you standing facing the door and the thin ray of light that comes in from the keyhole. What lies behind your back becomes a dark undimentional space. When the door opens, you could be standing anywhere. Space and time, as we know it, becomes irrelevant. It's not that it actually disappears; it's just that movement doesn't matter anymore, as long as the transmission is continuous.

We can push this even further. Is there any real difference between Tokyo and New York or London and Hong Kong? The same shops, the same advertisements, the same philosophy behind architectural space. Well, I know there are some differences still, especially in countries on the margin of the western capitalist world, but they are progressively disappearing in front of a unified culture. Is there any real difference between a tourist resort in the Canary Islands and one in Indonesia? Not really. Same products, same services, same exploitation mechanisms, different background to swimming pools and depressed employees and consumers. Natural space is irrelevant. What matters is the flow of information. It's not that the real world is not there anymore. It's just that we are taught/built so that we can't perceive it. We do not use the same tools anymore. All these might seem a bit farfetched to some, especially in relation to Videodrome, but I am just trying to illustrate how the same mechanism and philosophy behind television and the world of the images in general, applies to our experienced reality as well-fed, busy, bored and miserable consumers/citizens of the market world. Anyone noticed how we don't refer to people as citizens anymore, preferring instead words like consumers and viewers? 

The Binary Language of Desire

Nicki asks Max for porn to “get her into mood”, that is she needs the image in order to articulate her sexual desire. When she discovers the Videodrome tape, Max warns her that this is not porn; it’s actually just torture and murder, not exactly sex. “Says who” replies Nicki and goes on to show that what matters to her is not the narrative, the meaning behind the image but the image itself, the stimulation upon receiving the signal, the shock, the neural surge. What matters is stimulation. 

First they are viewers. They have to take in the new images in order to articulate their desire. Past generations used to do this through literature, songs, traditional manerisms etc. We do it through the images. 

Max also seems to welcome this new language of intensity after he watches Videodrome. In McLuhan’s words, the medium has been the message.

When they have sex the first time, it seems they are already in Videodrome. Reality now will be perceived through the language of the spectacle, images meant to stimulate, "special names — names designed to cause the cathode ray tube to resonate".

Human beings have two bodies, a biological and a cultural one, so we learn to articulate basic needs and urges through this cultural body into what we call desire. We articulate sexual desire through narratives; we make up stories in our head, we act out scenarios, some more elaborate than others. This mechanism is an intrinsic part of our existence.  There lies the difference between “I want” and “grmffff”. Nicki, seems to propose a new articulation of desire, which resembles the 0-1 language of computers and cybernetics; stimulated / not stimulated. The term "cyborg" (as in cybernetic organism), emerges here.

Nicki demonstrates she’s perfect for Videodrome. Notice how difficult it is for Max to accept this cigarette and yet how irresistible it seems. It’s not just a cigarette he accepts; it’s a whole new perspective. Videodrome truly changes you.

A Note on Body Horror

The Body Horror genre is all about metamorphosis and, of course, the ultimate metamorphosis procedure that is sex. As if we don’t feel alienated enough from our bodies’ grotesque geography through culture, sex transforms us from “someone” to “anyone”, bringing to surface animal automatisms and dissolving any notion of identity. Body horror remains at the core of Videodrome, while Cronenberg chooses to focus on perception, another bodily function, and the horror that comes from its distortion and, let’s face it, basic relativity. 

I bet I'm not the only one who sees a penis entering a vagina in this image. Sex with machines results in a new man.

Nobody Knew They were Cyborgs

Viewers “take civic TV to bed with them”. Early on in the film we are presented with the major theme of the film, that of the symbiotic relation between man and “machine”, the viewer and the network. What we see in the TV screens in this film works not just as a narrative device, parallel to the action, but as a living part of the characters’ world, space and time and body included. 

Max’s apartment is a mess. Appliances and garbage everywhere, bits and pieces of technology and biological life clashing. It’s not just that Max is a very busy man and can’t clean his space. His relations with technology seem to be on the aggressive side, with technology invading his body life and the TV set ultimately transforming it.

Sex and images and video and food stains that look like blood. Need I say more?

Professor O’Blivion is a prophet for the new information age. Most of what he says sounds remarkably similar to McLuhan’s theories for the media. Our perception of the world is mediated by the TV screen and we reach out to the world through the information networks. The TV is our eyes and ears and also our brains, so it is only natural to consider it as a natural organ of our bodies, since we already experience the world mediated by our other organs. Information media are extensions of our neural system and whatever happens on screen, in this hyper-reality of the images, we perceive it directly.

Cronenberg is really funny sometimes in a subtle-subversive way. The hostess directs him while he is looking the other way... Priceless. 

Max meets Professor O'Blivion who has already transcended into a new existence. 

Inside the Cathode Ray Mission. Social misery is caused by lack of exposure to the images. These people live outside society because they live outside the images. They are not connected. Look at the happy-creepy homeless guy. He doesn't care what he watches; he is happy to be exposed to the signal. Definitely one of the funniest/scariest moments in cinema for me.

O’Blivion is a new human being, a cyborg of sorts. He has transcended his bodily existence to the world of information. He now exists as a nebula of information, stored in tapes in his office, that are organized to a cohesive image at the receiving points of the network. He is in Videodrome. He is translated to information, and for Max to transcend to that stage as well and become the new flesh, he should embody the new language of the networks and ultimately kill his physical body, as it is only a manifestation of a certain kind of existence. He is to inhabit the networks, to inhabit his extended nervous system in McLuhan’s terms, in the same way O’Blivion did. 

Our cyborg; part man, part receiver. This idea will be followed to its extreme conclusions: Max can be programmed to be the perfect assassin.

He is to become a nebulae of information in the limbo behind the screens, more than a human and way past the human. He is to become a pattern, a blueprint for a human that will inhabit a hyper-reality, that is a reality constructed by the new mediums (like the old one was constructed by old mediums such as language and narrative devices associated with writing and typing) as a virtual space-time, one that “can be” instead of “is” or “will be”.

Humans have never been “human” since they first picked up a stone as a tool and made an axe. The time when we were “naturally human” is close to when we were animals. Our technological ivilization makes us cyborgs by augmenting our physical abilities and strengths, extending our presence and grip outside our physical bodies through the tools we create. That is why the term “cyborg” really means nothing yet it also describes the human condition so accurately. It hints at alienation and self-mutilation (body horror anyone?) that best describe our existence inhabiting two bodies (physical and cultural) and, quite recently, the experience of projecting ourselves through networks. 

A perfect merging of flesh and tool. Furthermore, the man becomes the tool. He is but the cancerous outgrowth of the network, a vessel of its message. Gun= penis and shooting= ejaculation. He is trully the video word made flesh.

A malignant Betamax tape. How much more sexual can it get?

A TV set made of flesh that shoots out the video truth. It just screams: SEX!

The Dream is our Reality

Belly-dancers! And tsoliades! Oh, our eastern cousins and their sensual ancient culture...

Max, meets this old lady producer in an eastern restaurant. East, apart from being the exotic fantasy land of the mysterious and the ancient, it is also the place of the cultures of language, as opposed to modern western cultures that are based on image. She brings something that is too old-fashioned, a program with a story, heavy on sensuality, that is the opposite of “real sex- what people really do in their bedroom”, and of course Max seeks the “real”, meaning something more intense. So, “real” = “intense”, and when this is not enough, he must seek something that is even more real, more intense, and so on and so forth. Audiences get desensetized and so the hunt goes on. But we know what happens to Max's reality eventually: it vanishes and this intense “hyper-reality” of the images is unleashed. What we get here is that by mistaking the real with the intense, what we’ve known as reality gives way to a hyper-reality. 

Cronenberg introduces at this point the whole story about the Videodrome signal creating a tumor that is in fact a new organ for perceiving a new reality, that of the screen; the hyper-reality which’s language is the signal, that basic 0-1. What we experience as a reality is of course not real at all. We all know that by now, right? Reality is a construction we create, both collectively and personally (remember that biological/cultural body configuration I mentioned earlier?), based on what our inadequate perceptive organs tell us. We can never directly experience the real because it doesn’t exist. What exists are stories, a 2D map drawn by hand aboard Victoria. Hence, the constant search for “something real”, meaning something stimulating, apart from a clumsy desperate attempt to re-experience our lost physicality, is a futile endeavor, resulting in the disappearance of reality. When this hunt for the “real” reality is mediated by the media (heh, that’s what they do) and the reality they construct and communicate, we get a kind of hyper-reality. We believe that the map produces territory.

Reality is never real.  What the western citizen/viewer ultimately seeks in intense stimulation is a reminder of his/her mortality, of his/her physical existence that has been numbed down by the meaningless social existence within late stage post-spectacle and its automatism. In a world were nothing is at stake, nothing has any meaning and humans are creatures of meaning, that is they can only inhabit a world of meaning. It’s the end of history (remember?) and now we can live in comfort, safe from the dangers of pursuing ideologies and dreams. Capitalism won and it’s now the best and only (that totalitarian combination) way of living. We are now free to consume and enjoy ourselves in whatever way we please. Sadly, this is not what humans need. In a world where capitalism has become total capitalism (meaning that it describes every aspect of our social and personal lives, as well as how we experience our bodies- fashion/cosmetic surgery anyone?), depression is not a disease; it’s a logical reaction to a hostile environment. Us net-cyborgs are depressed and we don't know how to express it for lack of the proper tools. All is not lost. Amidst this organized chaos and reconfiguration of our identities, we must also create a new language to express our lack of freedom and construct new tools for our struggle against power. We know that this is all a game but not all the moves have been made. We have dissected the poor lady but now we have to put it all together so that it works. 

Videodrome is basically a grotesque image of the ‘80s, where the hero is the media man and the world, our private and social lives, is dominated by television and video (hence the somewhat outdated title). These conditions gave birth to the ‘90s and the ‘00s and the vast expansion of information networks to the point that we have to drastically re-invent our identity as social and biological entities. So, despite all its merits, it has aged a bit, in the sense that the cyborg it discusses has already evolved beyond the man-television configuration. Our bodies are now nests to various information networks through portable devices and the "man as information hub" metaphor now dominates our culture. However, Videodrome remains powerful and shocking (with its irony and everything)  to this day because it deals with basic stuff that still apply to our condition.