Classic Movie Review : Videodrome (1983)
The phrase “the medium is the message” has traveled in circles around popular culture for almost sixty years. Coined by Canadian theorist Marshall MacLuhan in 1964, it originally meant that it doesn’t matter what you’re watching on television. It only matters that you’re watching television and every new media innovation only matters in the ways it alters your behavior. For example, your iPhone matters because you use it to broadcast in the digital realm a curated image of you that matters more than who you really are.
“The medium is the message” has been used by lazy public intellectuals who don’t really want to debate media issues, but the phrase survives because its meaning is still pertinent, like David Cronenberg’s seminal horror film Videodrome survived because it is very much still pertinent in 2022. It is also as gloriously afraid of the future and of itself.
Videodrome is a complicated movie to summarize. Small-time, sleazebag television executive Max Renn (played by a gloriously sleazy James Woods) is always looking to add shocking content to his programming. When his pirate Harland (Peter Dvorsky) finds a mysterious broadcast where people get tortured and killed on air, he’s immediately interested. But Videodrome (the show and the movie) is more than what it seems. Max starts hallucinating in broad daylight and the line between what’s real and what Videodrome wants him to see is getting thinner and thinner.
The Retina of the Mind’s Eye and Whatnot
One of the aspects of Videodrome that makes it so timeless is that it’s a cornucopia for body horror freaks and film geeks both. The literal, metaphorical and symbolic dance a crazy person’s dance for 87 minutes, leading you to different viewing experiences depending on what mood you’re in and where you are in life. But at heart, Videodrome is a movie about television or more precisely about our relationship to media. A question that is still insanely pertinent today and that was just starting to poke its ugly nose in public discourse in 1983.
The most interesting and intriguing character in the movie is professor Brian O’Blivion. A weird, disembodied scholar who has seemingly achieved Videodrome’s ultimate goal and became one with his television. O’Blivion is insanely interesting because his fate resembles ours in 2022. He is in a constant state of representation. He only exists in other people’s consciousness through a television screen. He loves saying it himself throughout the movie: television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye. It has formatted the way you’re thinking to a point where what you can think of and what you perceive through it are one and the same.
Now, this premise has sounded insane for many years. But it stopped sounding quite so since our primary media device (smartphones) have basically become the extension of ourselves. They are our primary tool for interacting with the world and a documenting device that helps us create an online alter ego who is a marginally idealized version of who we really are and that marginally idealized self is now more important than the real one. In its own gory and convoluted way, Videodrome anticipated our contemporary state of toxic interconnectedness.
A movie that is psychedelic, surreal and extremely violent that has such a profound vision of the future is something extremely rare. That is why David Cronenberg’s movies age so well and are so inimitable. Of course, they aim to entertain. But it’s not their raison d’être. They are the obsessions of a very intelligent man who is absolutely fucking terrified about the future. He directed this movie in a state of manic terror that can only be rivaled by the terror of a blissfully unexpecting soul watching his cinema for the first time.
Death to Videodrome, Long Live the New Flesh
Another enthralling aspect of Videodrome is David Cronenberg ambivalent fatalism. Humanity will eventually NEED to embrace change on a molecular level in order to secure its own survival. This is what protagonist Max Renn precisely does when turning against the Videodrome people. Ridden with cancerous tumors (something Cronenberg has been long obsessed with), he turns what would normally be a disease into a weapon for free will. Once change is introduced in a society, the important thing is not to fight it : it’s to seize control of it.
Once again, this is weirdly inspiring from a movie that aims first and foremost at grossing you out. Max Renn’s power struggle is not against technology, but against who is wielding it. The changes it has operated inside him are impossible to overturn. The only thing he can do is understand them and use them in a way he sees fit. He is given only two options for the sake of narrative brevity, but anybody with half a mind can understand the point: technology is not supposed to control our lives. We’re supposed to control it.
*
With Crimes of the Future now in theaters, I thought it would be interesting to revisit one of David Cronenberg’s flagship movies and Videodrome more than held up. If anything, it bears witness to the fact Cronenberg is more than just a blood-soaked storyteller. He’s a man of ideas. A visionary who expresses itself in popular, violent allegories through which he expresses his own fears. Videodrome didn’t age a day in thirty-nine years, guys. Even the weird, clumsy CGI disappears behind the movie’s intensity.
