By Nia Edwards-Behi
Where do you start on a film like Videodrome? It’s a definitive work of one of modern cinema’s most interesting auteurs, a body horror ur-text, an iconic and a quotable cult film classic; it’s one of those films that everybody’s seen. Well, I hadn’t. The images associated with Videodrome make it one of those films that seem familiar even when you haven’t watched it fully, something which can be a frustrating aspect of visiting a classic for the first time. Regardless, my immediate thought when the film ended was ‘I’d like to watch that again’, a thought I only ever really consider to be a very good thing.
Max Renn (James Woods) runs a soft-sleaze TV station and is running out of ideas. Luckily, Videodrome lands in his lap, a torture show one of his techies finds coming out of, allegedly, Malaysia. Max orders the pirating of the programme, and makes an appearance on a TV chat-show to defend his station’s violent and sexual output, alongside radio psychologist Nicki Brand (Deborah Harry) and academic Brian O’Blivion (Jack Creley), who appears only via TV set. Max and Nicki start dating, and Nicki convinces Max to show her a tape of a Videodrome. She finds the programme to be arousing, and when Max finds out and tells her that the signal for the show comes from Pittsburgh, not Malaysia, she decides she’s going to go audition for the programme. When Nicki disappears, Max tries to track her down, and in doing so uncovers the truth behind Videodrome, and with it, a series of increasingly disturbing and violent hallucinations.
It almost feels superfluous to say that Arrow have put together an incredible package here, but they really have. The special edition Blu-ray set includes a mountain of extras, including archive documentaries and TV specials, brand new interviews and commentaries. Most excitingly, it features a whole disc of Cronenberg’s early works Transfer (1966), From the Drain (1967), Stereo (1969) and Crimes of the Future (1970). These are all presented in lovingly transferred and restored versions which really look great. The short films Transfer and From The Drain endearingly feature many of the pitfalls of first-time filmmaking – dodgy acting, rubbish sound-recording – but otherwise bear the tell-tale signs of ideas that would flourish in Cronenberg’s later work. There’s also an excellent, though brief, to-camera discussion from Kim Newman, who contextualises these early works alongside the early works of other filmmakers, such as De Palma, and Cronenberg’s later body of work.
But we’re here for the main feature: Videodrome. What an exceptionally topical film! For a film so heavily concerned with a particular medium, especially one which is treated so nostalgically now, its narrative concerns are breathtakingly modern. Given how quickly technology develops, this 32-year old film manages to tread surprisingly relevant ground. There are lines of dialogue in the film that absolutely reflect a present internet age: “Soon we will all have special names. Names designed to cause the cathode ray to resonate.” Videodrome brings together various individuals, trains of thought and topical issues in a way that surely contributes to its enduring relevance.
In Videodrome we have something of an enfant terrible of cinema channelling his academic background in order to explore notions of media consumption, cultural taste and censorship. It’s no secret that the film’s academic character Professor Brian O’Blivion is heavily inspired by Marshall McLuhan; he’s the man who coined the phrase that ‘the medium is the message’, an idea that’s crucially central to Videodrome in a way, and central to the way it manages to be quite quietly indicting of censorious and dismissive media critics. Although we’re introduced to Videodrome as violent and sensationalist television programming, it is, ultimately a ‘signal’, and as Bianca O’Blivion says: “it can be delivered under a test pattern, anything.” Cronenberg was familiar enough with the sort of knee-jerk reactions that challenging films can receive by the time he made Videodrome, and he would surely continue to receive such reactions (not least of all with Crash, over a decade later). While I don’t think that Cronenberg is trying to say that either video or television is, as media, inherently potentially dangerous, I think he’s certainly saying that any medium can be made dangerous with a malicious enough intent behind it. It’s significant, then, that those with malicious intents here are not sleazy station owners, but rather institutionalised authorities. The censorious and the morally-superior are very much the villains of Videodrome.
Yeah, okay, we’re not here to talk about media theory, but it is a significant part of Videodrome which I find particularly interesting. There’s another significant element to Videodrome – a significantly Cronenbergian one at that – and that’s the suffusion of sexuality in the film. I admit I don’t entirely get Cronenberg’s focus on erotic obsession, but that probably says much more about me than it does about any of his films. There’s buckets of it in Videodrome, literally and symbolically, mostly centred on the figure of Nicki and on Max’s hallucinations. Those hallucinations become frighteningly real, of course, the Freudian slit in Max’s torso becoming the conduit for Videodrome’s total control of his life. I don’t particularly enjoy psychoanalysis enough to want to spell out that imagery, but the analysis is very much there for the taking. Being a Cronenberg classic, it’s not surprising that the body-horror imagery of Videodrome is perhaps its most memorable and iconic aspect. From TV-people to exploding bodies, the film’s bodily breakdowns range from subtle to explicit in various ways. One of my favourite moments is the fateful merging of the gun with Max’s hand, literally making him into Videodrome’s weapon. (This is of course something taken to extremes in Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo films, which I love, the first of which came just six years after Videodrome.)
My biggest impression of Videodrome is certainly by far the extent to which its narrative and themes are applicable today. Cronenberg created a film of immense insight, not only into the sociology of technology but of human nature, in a way; the way in which we use the tools we develop. If there’s one line of dialogue in the whole film that sums this up, for me, then it’s when Bianca speaks of her father. Now, we’re not all mad professors, by any stretch of the imagination, but what Brian O’Blivion eventually stands for is a victim of the Videodrome signal, but also, through Bianca – who is one of the most real-world grounded characters of the film, to me – represents the resistance to Videodrome. What Bianca says of her father is what I’m doing right now, it’s what so many of us do when we make use of the internet: “the monologue is his preferred mode of discourse.” Yikes. If the internet is the great democratising power idealists might purport it to be, then it’s certainly made monologuing into the abyss something of a free for all.
Released on the 17th of August 2015 (one week ago at the time of publication), Arrow Video’s dual format edition of Videodrome is already sold out & out of print! Second hand copies are currently available for exorbitant prices.