by Jeremy Meckler
This review is our second entry in the Joyless Canon—our 100 favorite movies, from enshrined classics to guilty pleasures to left-field oddities, which (we hope) define our personalities as film-lovers. Every few weeks, we’ll analyze another of our canonical entries in-depth. Check out our Index page for other Joyless Canon (JC) selections.
This review is our second entry in the Joyless Canon—our 100 favorite movies, from enshrined classics to guilty pleasures to left-field oddities, which (we hope) define our personalities as film-lovers. Every few weeks, we’ll analyze another of our canonical entries in-depth. Check out our Index page for other Joyless Canon (JC) selections.
On January 1, 1983, ARPANET was migrated from NCP to TCP/IP, a new communication protocol that translated an experimental military computer system into one that could facilitate communication with computers outside the network. This of course cascaded and expanded into the overwhelming and all-enveloping Internet that we have today, where you are reading this article right now. About a month later (February 4), David Cronenberg’s Videodrome hit theaters. While it may have had smaller repercussions, Cronenberg’s mindbending work serves as a perfect analogue for the system that would develop out of the same era—it predicted and critiqued the Internet and its profound effect on us years before it became a reality.
Though it may not be readily apparent, through all the bubbling 80’s visual effects and viscera, Videodrome is Cronenberg’s most theoretically involved work. The film centers on Max Renn (breathtakingly portrayed by James Woods), a cable television executive whose channel seeks out the shocking and obscene. As Renn discovers Videodrome, a new pirated television program that depicts murder and torture in an eerily bland room, his world begins to transform—the Videodrome signal alters his mind and body. Eventually, with a vaginal abdominal cavity perfectly sized to receive pulsing, fleshlike VHS tapes and a cybernetically merged gun-hand, Max begins to understand the system behind Videodrome, though we never do.
Writing a plot summary for Videodrome is a ludicrous exercise, since its plot is deliberately convoluted—labyrinthine and contradictory, never making clear what is hallucination, what is transformation; even its startling conclusion leaves much unsaid and unexplained. Yet throughout its 89-minute span, it puts forth an ever-present vibe, a clear and unsettling closeness between technology and the human body. As the film says, in no unclear terms, the power of video is not just to enrapture but to fully transform, creating gross distortions both cerebral and physical.
Writing a plot summary for Videodrome is a ludicrous exercise, since its plot is deliberately convoluted—labyrinthine and contradictory, never making clear what is hallucination, what is transformation; even its startling conclusion leaves much unsaid and unexplained. Yet throughout its 89-minute span, it puts forth an ever-present vibe, a clear and unsettling closeness between technology and the human body. As the film says, in no unclear terms, the power of video is not just to enrapture but to fully transform, creating gross distortions both cerebral and physical.
As we watch Max meander through the plot he comes across Masha (Lynne Gorman), a video producer who is peddling a softcore version of the Dionysus myth—complete with goblets of wine, revealing togas, and breasts dangling everywhere. Max quickly rebuffs this film, as he is in search of more risqué programming, but he solicits Masha to find the producers of Videodrome for him. After a little searching, Masha comes back and tells him, “It has something you don’t have, Max. It has a philosophy. And that is what makes it dangerous.”
Perhaps the same could be said of Videodrome, but for now let’s turn our attention back to 1983. Cronenberg’s movie was hitting theaters; the Internet was twinkling in its father’s eye; and Donna Haraway, a research biologist cum philosopher, was beginning work on her landmark article, “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Haraway was certainly tapped into the same line as Cronenberg, focused on the vague borders between the human and the machine and how such collaboration could be liberating and revolutionary. In the age of mysterious technomancy that began in the early 80s, perhaps the sky was the limit—breaking through the previous separation between things and humanity. In “A Cyborg Manifesto,” she sees the cyborg as both a next stage in human evolution and as a compelling escape from the constraints of the Oedipal narrative; through the cyborg, one can reject the strict boundaries that exist between living human person and malleable thing, she writes. “The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.”
Perhaps the same could be said of Videodrome, but for now let’s turn our attention back to 1983. Cronenberg’s movie was hitting theaters; the Internet was twinkling in its father’s eye; and Donna Haraway, a research biologist cum philosopher, was beginning work on her landmark article, “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Haraway was certainly tapped into the same line as Cronenberg, focused on the vague borders between the human and the machine and how such collaboration could be liberating and revolutionary. In the age of mysterious technomancy that began in the early 80s, perhaps the sky was the limit—breaking through the previous separation between things and humanity. In “A Cyborg Manifesto,” she sees the cyborg as both a next stage in human evolution and as a compelling escape from the constraints of the Oedipal narrative; through the cyborg, one can reject the strict boundaries that exist between living human person and malleable thing, she writes. “The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.”
Certainly Videodrome does its best to see this separation demolished. Not only does Max’s body begin to take on aspects of the media technology that he consumes (or does it consume him?) but other characters become even more deeply ingrained in the medium itself. A lover (Deborah Harry) disappears on a trip to Pittsburgh, only to appear again within the Videodrome transmission—is it a vision or a nightmare? And a would-be sensei, the founder of the “Cathode Ray Mission” Professor Brian O’Blivion, has been dead for years but is kept alive by appearing only on television screens, having recorded thousands of VHS tapes prior to his death, appropriate for any situation. It’s hard to imagine, at least from the vantage point of 1983, a more complete integration of video technology and the human body than to be kept alive only through video memories.
And like Haraway’s apocryphal cyborg, Max Renn undergoes a border-bending transformation as the film progresses. Not only does he become an ambiguous blend between person and thing—as he sprouts constricting steel veins that meld his gun into his hand—but his very psychology, that most interior and hallowed thing closest to the true self, becomes suspect and mechanical. With remarkable acuity, Cronenberg’s film form mimics this spiral into profane corporality. Max’s anxiety and neurosis disappear—in favor of the objective sureness that belongs to the thing in itself (a gun never doubts what it is)—and the plot and aesthetic start to coalesce. Things start making sense, in their own convoluted backward way. Villainous agents step out of the woodwork, revealing that any self-censored paranoia was actually right all along, and Max’s increasingly insane decisions become clearer and more decisive. This is not to say that they are rational, in the purest sense, but they are clear and significant. Max, in losing his humanity into the vagaries of media sublimation, begins to forget about the Garden of Eden. As he mutters in the film’s final scene, “I am the video word made flesh.” He is not made of mud or dust, but of the interlacing lines shot from an electron gun.
And like Haraway’s apocryphal cyborg, Max Renn undergoes a border-bending transformation as the film progresses. Not only does he become an ambiguous blend between person and thing—as he sprouts constricting steel veins that meld his gun into his hand—but his very psychology, that most interior and hallowed thing closest to the true self, becomes suspect and mechanical. With remarkable acuity, Cronenberg’s film form mimics this spiral into profane corporality. Max’s anxiety and neurosis disappear—in favor of the objective sureness that belongs to the thing in itself (a gun never doubts what it is)—and the plot and aesthetic start to coalesce. Things start making sense, in their own convoluted backward way. Villainous agents step out of the woodwork, revealing that any self-censored paranoia was actually right all along, and Max’s increasingly insane decisions become clearer and more decisive. This is not to say that they are rational, in the purest sense, but they are clear and significant. Max, in losing his humanity into the vagaries of media sublimation, begins to forget about the Garden of Eden. As he mutters in the film’s final scene, “I am the video word made flesh.” He is not made of mud or dust, but of the interlacing lines shot from an electron gun.
Perhaps what is most impressive about Videodrome is not the philosophy itself, but the fact that it is so beautifully imbued into a film without becoming didactic or bland. This is not a manifesto about the cyborgification of the human, but a film that still has its soul; it is thrilling, alienating, exciting, at times suspenseful or disgusting, but it is at its heart a piece of art that is also a piece of theory.
Watching it today, Videodrome’s critique becomes all the more salient. When we spend countless hours each day absorbing mediated images—via computers, televisions, phones, radios, and the other myriad devices that clog our lives—and people readily admit that they feel their smartphones are a part of their bodies, how could such a film not make an impact? The difference, though, is that in 1983, this film was horror; its statement that humanity could be transformed and subjugated by mediation was a terrifying thought. Today the same thought is mundane—and that makes it even scarier.
Watching it today, Videodrome’s critique becomes all the more salient. When we spend countless hours each day absorbing mediated images—via computers, televisions, phones, radios, and the other myriad devices that clog our lives—and people readily admit that they feel their smartphones are a part of their bodies, how could such a film not make an impact? The difference, though, is that in 1983, this film was horror; its statement that humanity could be transformed and subjugated by mediation was a terrifying thought. Today the same thought is mundane—and that makes it even scarier.
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