Videodrome: The Glass Teat

As I’ve said before, I prefer to look at films as finished, singular products, and focus less on the people who made them. Not that those things are unimportant - far from it, the choices and decisions filmmakers make shape and define the final product, and there are particular directors whose work I seek out as much as possible - but rather because I think it’s easy to lose sight of the film when you focus on the personalities behind it, and this is especially a problem in horror film. Horror film has its own level of celebrity, and it’s hard for the enthusiast press to be objective in the face of it. More cynically, as often as not the people being celebrated are just churning out another sequel or spinning off one franchise from another franchise, and I don’t think that’s anything to celebrate. To me, the film is what matters, more than who made it.

But goddamn is it ever hard to maintain that critical separation when talking about certain directors, and few directors are more difficult to divorce from their work than David Cronenberg. Over the course of almost 25 years, he made a series of films that confronted ideas about desire, control, technology and biology with both the clinical eye of a surgeon and a surrealist’s refusal of taboo. I’ve written about a couple of his earlier films - Shivers and The Brood - here, and though they have their shortcomings, they’re still really powerful if for nothing else than the ideas they present. 

Cronenberg envisions the body as, in some ways, technology - a collection of machinery that can be put to different purposes, often other than originally intended. And because there’s this tendency to see the body as sacred or pure, as emblematic of humanity, the ways he depicts this idea are often pretty damn unsettling. And I think it’s Videodrome where I really see this particular vision of his start to cohere, where a thesis about the intersection between technology, desire, biology and perception starts to come into focus. Like those other films, it’s very much a product of its time, and I wonder if that dulls its edge a little, but there’s still a lot going on here.

Max Renn is an executive at a sleazy television network - sort of the Canadian equivalent of public-access television. They’re a small operation with pretty low bandwidth, and a healthy chunk of their programming is soft-core pornography or violent exploitation. Cheap thrills for the indiscriminate consumer. Max secures programming in part by having a technician pirate signals from foreign networks using a satellite dish. It’s tough, I think, to appreciate this idea in the modern day. Once, everything was terrestrial broadcast, and if you had a powerful enough receiver, you could pull in signals from all over the world, not all of which were intended for public viewing. Signals could be scrambled, but it wasn’t exactly modern encryption. Things that were scrambled could be unscrambled. 

And it’s in this search for new programming, harder-edged programming for an increasingly jaded viewing audience, that their technician discovers a program out of Malaysia called Videodrome. It’s pretty low-budget - there’s a bare room, and two men in hoods, beating and torturing people. No narrative, no breaks. People get dragged on and brutalized, people get dragged off. Max is fascinated - he wants to find the people making it, he wants a distribution deal. He can’t believe how realistic it looks. Almost like it isn’t being faked.

Not all signals are intended for public viewing.

Max’s search for the creators of Videodrome take him to some strange places, but the world we’re presented with is already strange in its own right. Video is a medium permeating everyone’s life in a way that wasn’t really true of the time in which it was made, and it’s all shown in incidental details - a well-known media critic refuses to appear anywhere in person, only communicating through video broadcasts, homeless people gather at a mission, not to eat meals and hear sermons, but to watch television, and as Max soon discovers, rogue broadcasts have the power to reshape the brain. The film presents a world in which video broadcasts and videotape recordings have essentially infested everyday life like a fungus. Television was an established medium when this film was made, but its omnipresence in the world of the film feels sinister without being didactic, and as Max goes further down the rabbit hole in search of this mysterious program, the more the world around him begins to warp - nightmares, hallucinations, televisions and videotapes that pulse and breathe with animal life, and strange changes to his very biology. There must have been nothing like it at the time.

Watching it now, there’s still nothing else like it, albeit for different reasons. Almost all of the technology in the film is now obsolete, so there’s a quaintness to it, the unease of pernicious technology undercut by that technology’s antiquation. I suspect to anyone who didn’t grow up during this time, it could all feel faintly silly. Its age shows in other ways as well - like The Brood, it’s very much of its time in terms of relations between the sexes and the zeitgeist of the late 70s/early 80s in general (there’s plenty of casual sexism to go around, and some of the cultural preoccupations might not make sense to a modern viewer), and though the effects don’t let down the story as much as they do in that film, some of them are still somewhat dated to the modern eye. It’s not as choppy as Shivers, but it still moves a bit abruptly and doesn’t necessarily give some of the revelations room to breathe. Weird shit tends to happen and then the scene changes, so it’s less effective at building a mood than it could be, and the last act sort of loses focus and threatens to collapse into gobbledygook, but I think a lot of these limitations are more a function of a limited budget than anything else. That it got made at all is something.

It’s an audacious vision, regardless of the context,  and one that runs through the first half of Cronenberg’s career, from Shivers up to eXistenZ, one that doesn’t hold the body or bodily desires as sacred, that explores what happens when technology becomes as much a part of the body as anything else, how powerful entities will exploit it, and the ways we rebel against that control. These preoccupations, and its mix of high technology and grungy settings, the street finding its own use for things, the way people get in over their heads, running afoul of the wealthy and powerful, these all persist all the way up through today in films like Antiviral and Possessor, made by Cronenberg’s son Brandon, who hasn’t missed a step. None of these things have really changed, only their trappings. 

IMDB entry

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