Videodrome
I’m finally starting to dig in to David Cronenberg, and boy, are his classics of a different breed than the ones I started watching him on. I get why he became one of the great genre filmmakers of his generation. It’s not just the way he utilizes horror and makeup, but what he says in those films. His films are a commentary on the society they were made in, and that’s why the best ones continue to have an urgency and energy now. It’s fascinating to think of how society was in 1983, when he made “Videodrome,” and where it is now, and how his views on media and the consumption of media seem quaint when we apply them to 1983, but prescient when we consider media now.
This might be James Woods’s best role, and best performance, partially because of what a piece of shit he’s shown himself to be in real life. Here, he plays Max Renn, the President of Civic TV, a low-wattage UHF channel in Toronto where he relishes in playing shows and videos that push the boundary of entertainment. Soft core porn? Sure. Hard core violence? No problem. So long as it gets people watching his channel, and coming back for more, he doesn’t have a problem. One day, he goes to Harlan (Peter Dvorsky), who runs an unauthorized satellite dish for Max, and he has something new for him- it’s a show called Videodrome, and it shows a woman, naked, bound in front of what looks like a mud wall as she is tortured. Max takes it home, and shows it to his girlfriend (Nicki Brand, played by Debbie Harry). The show has its hooks in Max immediately, and he needs more. But what if the show isn’t fake? What if he’s watching snuff? He begins to hallucinate, but his id is fully in control. He needs more Videodrome.
When the film originally came out, it was the dawn of cable TV and video cassettes. The 24-hour news cycle was still getting started, and networks still had an “end to their broadcast day.” What Cronenberg is doing is surveying the new media landscape, and imagining what it might bring. One of the film’s most interesting characters is Brian O’Blivion (Jack Creley), a media analyst Max shares a talk show with in discussing this landscape, and one of the most striking things he talks about is, “One day, we will all have TV names.” In the age of avatars and anons and nicknames to hide our identities on Twitter or Instagram, we’re living in that moment now, and when the truth about O’Blivion is revealed, it gets even more prescient about online interaction now. Max goes to track down O’Blivion at a homeless shelter run by his daughter, Bianca (Sonja Smits), and she has TVs set up for all of the people there to watch. Media is the ultimate villain in Cronenberg’s film, and Max’s journey further down the rabbit hole is what happens now with the “algorithm” social media sites use to get us hooked, more and more, to particular content. Max is a willing guinea pig, though- while an assistant (Lynne Gorman) warns him about looking deeper into Videodrome, she also knows that he’s inevitably going to continue looking until he finds what he needs. Does this qualify Cronenberg as a visionary?
Cronenberg has made a truly seedy piece of film here- it’s not just the content that Max is chasing, but the director and his cinematographer, Mark Irwin, have made sure to make this feel as sleazy as possible to look at, and that’s a big part of why it works. The other key factor is the fantastic makeup effects by Rick Baker. There’s a tactile nastiness to Cronenberg’s body horror in this film that feels like a dry run of what he would do later in not just “The Fly,” but in 1999’s “eXistenZ.” Cronenberg is someone who doesn’t shy away from disturbing images, and “Videodrome” has some of his most unsettling and unforgettable, especially when we get to the third act, and Videodrome completely has its hooks in Max (literally), and leads him to, what seems like, an inevitable ending. After “Scanners” last year and “Videodrome” this year, Cronenberg certainly has his hooks in me- I can’t wait to dive more into the films of his I haven’t watched yet, and rewatch some of the ones I have.
