This gruesome hallucinatory vortex of sex and violence comes with some strange practical effects and a cultish commentary on the audiences from the Video Nasties era all the way to now.
We’re all junkies of visceral sensation; love, lust, fear, happiness, anguish and thrill, we walk around the planet like ants, turning over every leaf we find, looking for the next hit of dopamine, each time needed more and more. Micro doses of chemical stimulation through every menial little act we do throughout our day, we long to make it as rewarding as physically possible. There’s a common understanding among ex-drug abusers and people on probation that you can get a hell of lot higher without drugs than with them, so we find our kicks wherever we can. And damn there’s an unlimited supply of this enhanced titillation, streaming violently out of a screen in almost every living room in the world. Millions of beady little glazed eyes locked onto a TV screen, flicking through the channels faster than the flap of a bee’s wings, on the search for the next hit. This flat window into a world higher than their reality has it all, violence, sex, fright, melodrama and just about every mind-numbing reality garbage you could dream up. The thin boundary between what’s inside the screen and what’s outside begins to fade and they live their lives out on the screen, slowly deteriorating into their couches. Such a poetically stupid sight. Don’t stop on my account, if this is your thing, don’t let anyone stop you.
I’ll admit to a spoonful of carried away exaggeration with my description up there, but you can’t disagree that there’s some truth to it. David Cronenberg’s body horror classic Videodrome (1983) dragged me by the eyeballs through my TV and into a dystopian society where the lines between public TV presence and private flesh are in a precarious erasure. People are desensitized to even the most bombastic thrills you catch in front of your screen and they’re looking for more. Who’s going to give it to them? Max Renn, head of a trash TV channel finds exactly what will propel the world into an orgiastic viewing frenzy, a rogue transmission of people getting tortured and murdered. Digging deeper into this mysterious transmission, he finds his perception completely invaded by the influences of this signal as he figures out that the content is snuff. The more down under he goes, the nature of this rabbit hole gets ever more nefarious. I couldn’t help but notice a peculiar alignment between the audiences he’s seeking to titillate and us as audiences of cinema, his constant drive to find something that’ll be bigger and better, nastier and freakier that’ll send us flipping reflects a certain sensibility of cinema – especially underground cinema – to push the moral codes further and further to give us an unparalleled visceral experience. It’s ironic that from the 60’s onwards, when heavily censored and morally friendly TV as well as the growing desensitisation and bottomless boredom with Classical Hollywood cinema drove audiences to look for shocking thrills elsewhere, in underground theatres, on mail-order trash and paracinema catalogues and everywhere that the mainstream won’t touch, this historical moment is reversed in the film where people turn evermore to their TV’s for this jolting experience. It’s knee deep in dystopia with the fact that people are kept sedated with stimulus as they’re encouraged to never take their eyes off the screen.
Body horror is something that David Cronenberg is well known for; films that put transgress the human body to such a degree that our own bodies involuntarily spasm in response to the bloody horror on screen. With an arsenal of weird and inventive practical effects, TV sets turn into living undulating organs, Betamax tapes into rectangular slabs of flesh, the gun and the hand becomes one in techno-gore as the whole films descends into bizarre hallucination.
As Max slowly begins to lose large chunks of his mind to the video, he becomes a total lost cause as a narrator, his experiences as a criterion for what we should believe become as reliable as a pathological liar, and this death struggle between reality and pure vile phantasmagoria is conveyed through how Max is framed throughout the film. Often shadowed by falling gaps in light, crushed by the weight of his hallucinations, pushed into a claustrophobic corner in his mind, it’s visually apparent that he’s undergoing a transformation. The camera locks onto Max in the manner as ours eyes are on the screen; the camera can’t get enough of Max and wants more.
Droning growls of synthesisers give a modular edge to this film like hissing static against our souls.
The acting is stellar, although it falls short sometimes to capture the tremendous clueless terror that should ensue once things don’t make sense anymore, but I was pleased with the acting from everyone. Plus, Debbie Harry’s involvement is quite welcome.
Things start to take a rather ridiculous turn near the end once Max finishes his transformation and takes the reckoning to his assailants, with some misplaced and cheesy lines of dialogue and some near-dramatic acting. Though I get the impression that this was intentional.
Make no mistake, we’re the generation of the image. Our perception and reality hinges desperately on the images we see, whether it’s on screen, in a photograph, or our own self-image, and we’re hopelessly hooked on influencing and doctoring everything we can get our hands on. I like it when a film provides subtle commentary on this sensitivity in a way that doesn’t come across as flagrant and egregiously preachy. It’s a mind warping film and is a weird dose of dopamine fun that I certainly needed today.
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