4.5/5
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Some directors, such as Peter Weir, have disguised their sensibility behind a repertoire of work varied enough to be encapsulated by any film contained within it. Others develop an approach to filmmaking so distinctive that a single work bubbles to the surface as their ne plus ultra, a film with which their name becomes synonymous. For Martin Scorsese, that film is Taxi Driver. For Francis Ford Coppola, that film is The Godfather. In 1983, David Cronenberg released two films: The Dead Zone, a supernatural thriller starring Christopher Walken that would stand among the best Stephen King adaptions, and Videodrome, a work that would become its director’s calling card.
Max Renn, played by James Woods, is the unapologetic essence of sleaze ball film and television producers until he isn’t. He owns a little-watched television station that broadcasts hardcore pornography, violence, and some hybrids of both to attract viewership, although when accused of perpetuating visual overstimulation on a popular talk show, he claims to be performing a public service by providing an outlet for impulses that might otherwise be exercised in the real world. This statement is largely disingenuous hokum, but it reveals something about Max as a person; he’s not dumb. He recognizes a good business opportunity when he sees it, and it is this perceptiveness that breaks through the misanthropy and draws us into his character.
The panelists alongside Max are Nicki Brand, a psychiatrist played by Debbie Harry who condemns Max as Stan incarnate, and Professor Brian O’Blivion, a man whose presence is only made by a television screen broadcasting his image from an undisclosed location. O’blivion warns viewers that television, “… the retina of the minds eye…”, will soon supersede reality as being the supreme landscape of experience. After all, he points out, television is slipstream of images to be perceived and processed, and is anything real beyond the membrane of our perception? Not worth lingering on, at least not to Max and Nicki, who are later revealed to be dating, although that term is never used.
During a late night hunt for new and exotic forms of entertainment, he and his colleague Harlan pick up a Malaysian broadcast of something Max has never seen before; real, unassimilated violence. There are no actors, he learns, because it is not acted; somewhere in the world, the people on the screen are being just as hurt and sexually abused as they appear to be. Max sees an exciting, hitherto untapped market in this new material, something he learns to be called Videodrome. As he follows this thread into seedier and more suspect territory, his business advisor Masha warns him of just how dangerous Videodrome can be, although she seems to afraid to speak about it explicitly. It’s heavy stuff, she explains, and something unlike anything Max has ever had to face. And it is. The more exposure Max has to the images of Videodrome, the more his life becomes marred by horrific hallucinations. Soon, he has difficult telling the difference between reality and the Viderodrome-induced visions of sex and murder
In the name of transparency, I must make a confession for which I am now egregiously ashamed — I once hated David Cronenberg. Hated him. Could not sit through a single one of his films without losing all patience. I found his filmmaking to be stiff, numb, and lacking in anything approaching human warmth. At a certain point, I began to feel like the only source of silence in an auditorium of rapturous laughter. Videodrome was my third Cronenberg outing, and after two mind-numbing viewing experiences — Naked Lunch and… well, we’ll get to the other one in a later review— I was prepared for more of the same from what many claimed to be his opus. But a funny thing happened on the way to the final scene of Videodrome. Somewhere along its yellow brick road of surrealist horror, the rust between my gears dissolved and the whole machine sprung into vigorous motion. The veil was being lifted scene by scene, and at long last, my eyes began to open to Cronenberg’s view of the world. In the words of There Will Be Blood’s Daniel Plainview, “I was lost, but now I’m found.”
That’s not to say Videodrome isn’t cold, because it is, but it’s this icy foreboding that becomes the quicksand of its narrative. In its unraveling of events through graphic hallucination and spiraling paranoia, I finally found myself swept up in Cronenberg’s cinematic rhythms. His filmic language comes from a particular place and time in the history of movies, and his cerebral approach to moviemaking shouldn’t be misconstrued as inhumanity. Some directors find ideas and patterns within human emotions. Cronenberg finds the emotions in the ideas, presenting a thematic framework that allows human insights to gestate before quietly hatching when you least expect it. Some will argue that this is too antiseptic an approach to an art form, but it lends Cronenberg’s films a clarity of vision that his contemporaries often lack, even if that vision is utterly monstrous. Who else could film a man making love to a television set with such affecting sincerity?
Videodrome’s bloody final scene, surely one of the most upsetting in all of cinema, is as powerful a statement on the nature of perception as I have ever seen. It may well seem trite to those born in the digital age and raised alongside computer screens and the internet, but think again. What purpose is there to watch television, see films, and read books if not to be made sick by their lovely poison? The media we ingest changes us with every word and pixel, sometimes to distortion, and it’s a change we yearn for. It’s a change that can provide insurmountable emotional catharsis, but it’s also, as the film imagines, a change in which we can become lost. The result of this isn’t necessarily as extreme as the film depicts, but one is left wondering. I saw the movie for the first time three years ago. If the possibility it illuminates is such hogwash, why are its images still so present in my mind?
Spencer Moleda is a freelance writer, script supervisor, and motion picture researcher residing in Los Angeles, California. His experience ranges from reviewing movies to providing creative guidance to fledgling film projects. You can reach him at: www.spencermoleda.com
Spencer Moleda is a freelance writer, script supervisor, and motion picture researcher residing in Los Angeles, California. His experience ranges from reviewing movies to providing creative guidance to fledgling film projects. You can reach him at: [email protected]