Videodrome

by | Dec 28, 2014 | The Horror Review News | 0 comments

Many cite David Cronenberg’s remake of Kurt Neumann’s 1958 film, The Fly, as the Canadian director’s masterpiece. Surely, in respect to the work’s narrative fluidity, rotund characterization, and virtuoso acting–especially on behalf of Jeff Goldblum–it is easily the filmmaker’s most aesthetically appealing. Yet, in respect to the philosophical scope and range of the various entries in Cronenberg’s canon, Videodrome proves to be, not only superior, but exceptionally prophetic as well. Perhaps this is why the production was a failure at the box office whereas The Fly was, to date, his must successful venture. Yet, as the years have passed, the director’s sixth feature-length film, a 21st century rendition of The Manchurian Candidate, continues to gain in popularity as the initially disposable cult flick has become a staple in postmodern theory.

When Harlan (Peter Dvorsky) presents the president of Civic TV, Max Renn (James Wood), with a pirated transmission called “Videodrome,” the broadcasting opportunist believes he has discovered the next phrase in visceral, hard-edged programming. However, after watching a few episodes of the snuff broadcasts, Renn begins hallucinating. As such, his attempt at locating the responsible party behind the show becomes all the more exacerbated as the tries to discern who is real, who is deceiving him, and who is–indeed–a mere facsimile of his perceived reality.

Recent criticism of Videodrome often includes the phrase “ahead of its time,” which, as time continues to progress, threatens to become an exponential understatement. In a film in which, not only the forth wall, but the barricades enclosing social, critical, and philosophical thought are toppled via Baudrillian theory placed alongside a Marshall McCluhan-look-and-think-alike (Brian O’Blivion, played by Jack Creley, whom–like his real-life equivalent–suffers from a brain tumor), Cronenberg’s visionary indictment of the effects of television borders upon daunting. Not only does the filmmaker fashion a story in which he explores both sides of the argument in respect to the influence of the electronic image, he ends by permitting, as only a true master would, his audience to resolve the issues at hand.

Cronenberg’s premise revolves around a personage who is unable to determine reality from fiction as the result of having watched television. At first Renn, on a television talk show, espouses the liberal stance that violence on television is “better on TV than on the streets” before becoming the paradoxical and ironical victim to his own mantra. However, during the course of Renn’s attempts at discovering the “who’s” and “why’s” behind what has blurred his grip upon reality, a program called Videodrome, the director’s seemingly conservative position upon the matter is usurped when Barry Convex’s (Leslie Carlson) admits that the titular program was designed to disable the day-to-day functionality of the types of people whom would willfully expose themselves to such–in the words of Peter Dvorsky’s character, Harlan–“rot” (which is made all the more potent in that Convex, using the business front of an eyeglass provider to the third world, is the individual responsible for NATO’s missile guidance systems). As such, Cronenberg holds out a double-edged sword to his viewer, for the manipulative potential which we are told television possesses–especially with its subconscious imagery–is utilized to the polar opposite ends from which we are instructed to be watchful: the propagation of conservative ideology. Thus the directorial-twisted thumbscrews rotate another excruciatingly psychological turn by film’s end as a wicked masterful, yet nonetheless logistically essential, consequence.

It is not that Cronenberg denies the influence that television exerts upon the masses (Renn does exactly what he is told from the people who appear onscreen), he merely refuses to identify the culpable party. We witness Renn literally inserting a videocassette into himself during the film’s proceedings in order to discern what to do with his life. Few viewers could miss the satirical message as such: People are mere machines which, with a push of the proper button, are played-cum-directed in whatever direction the powers that be deem necessary (or advantageous to their cause). We’ll ignore that fact that the violence enacted on behalf of other parties by way of Renn is prefaced by a hostile, unVideodrome-inspired, board meeting at the film’s open . . . .

Indeed, we can all agree that any image, sound, taste, smell, or tactile sensation alters its perceiver’s reality forever, yet television’s prowess makes it all the more dangerous in this regard due to its multifaceted potency. As Jerry Mander warns in his Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, the powers that be love the fact that greater and greater numbers of people are watching television for, by having like experiences, it makes people less dissimilar and, as such, all the more readily marketable. With this in mind, Cronenberg fails to allow us to dismiss Renn as an unstable mind, for we watch as a soup-kitchen is transformed into the “Cathode Ray Mission,” a place in which derelicts go to allocate their daily televisual sustenance (a parody further compounded by being sponsored by the evangelical fervor of its provider, O’Blivion) and, as a consequence, such action–in the word’s of Bianca O’Blivion (Sonja Smits)–patches them into the world’s mixing board. This is not to imply that Videodrome is a sci-fi world turned upside-down in a dystopian manner. Instead, Cronenberg posits his tale in an otherwise normative reality, albeit an exaggerated one, yet–like all literary metaphors–not at all removed from our reality. Hence, we are met by the owner of a chimpanzee organ-grinder who begs passersby for change in order to purchase batteries for his portable television.

The prophetic nature of Videodrome is not solely limited to the manipulate power of the electronic image during a period in which video cassette recorders were just hitting the market. The postmodern element of the film is concurrent to contemporary theory at the time (which is synonymous with Cronenberg’s equally astute plot, the notorious Faces of Death series having premiered only a few years prior) as the filmmaker presents McCluhanian and Baudriallian ideology in tow throughout. Most every character in the feature makes his or her initial appearance on the screen-within-a-screen as one figure, Professor O’Blivion, adamantly refuses to appear in person, his motives as such being as insightful and ingenious as they are critical as we are forced to question what constitutes “existence” at this venture in human history. Scathingly, it is not only O’Blivion who declines to communicate in any form other than through an electronic medium. Ironies are further abound as Renn’s conservative counter on the Rena King talk show, the succinctly-named Nicki Brand (Deborah Harry), host of the “Emotional Rescue” radio program, is revealed to be a self-mutilator in the form of cutting and burning (long before the phenomena would be taken up by gender and psychological studies). Thus, it should come as no surprise that by the finale, the only idea which we are sure of Cronenberg having cast is the oxymoronic cinematic presentation that, to be safe, all electronic imagery should be avoided. (Yet should we do what the television tells us?) That said, need we even bother humoring the notion that, arguably, everything after the premier broadcast of Videodrome could be seen as a mere hallucination by ourselves? (Cronenberg’s own Foucaultian joke at his viewers’ expense after having mucked the line between the subjective and objective to such as degree as to make such analogous to the definitive tracing of the source of a retransmitted pirate recording.) Perplexingly, O’Blivion’s rhetorical inquiry of “There’s nothing real outside our perception of reality, is there? You can see that, can’t you?” becomes as sage-like as it is nonsensical. Descartes and Aristotle’s Law of Identity be damned.

In his extensive study of the director, The Artist as Monster, Videodrome is summarized by William Beard as “[a] paranoid scenario involving the subjection of individuals to multi-national corporate and political ends through the means of technology.” Much like the plight of the character of Max Renn who, upon the opening of a new door during the feature, is met with a new challenge, we too are challenged by David Cronenberg at most every venture during the narrative. Thankfully–not only did the director return to familiar, comfortable territory by reintroducing his otherwise stalwart theme of sexuality after all-but-abandoning it in Scanners–after having visited Modernism with the latter in the wake of a series of otherwise traditional social narratives, he bolted wholeheartedly into postmodernism with Videodrome, and, at that, to resounding success. Again, ironically, in his first character-driven tale, one of the few things which we can be sure of after the film’s poignantly obfuscated close is that we, once more, have been blest with one of cinematic history’s finest auteurs in what is perhaps his greatest effort in a career of steadfast, timeless productions.

Conversation piece: Maliciously inconsistent (in order to run concurrent with the film’s philosophy), Cronenberg grants hints as to when what is being viewed during the proceedings are in fact empirically founded or are a mere projection of Renn’s delusions, such as when the “fleshgun” reappears as a standard weapon and when (thus accounting for the apparent perceptual discrepancy) Renn erroneously believes to have found a corpse in his bed in light of having, since his initial sighting, turned off the television.

-Egregious Gurnow

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