Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

Herein is my conundrum, to honestly analyze a beloved cult film, that I’ve discovered has too many flaws for me to embrace in spite of my respect for the director and appreciation of parts of the movie.

It is akin to cult movie blasphemy to come down hard on VIDEODROME, I realize, but alas to write otherwise would be less than honest and compromise my integrity.

So please tread here with an open mind, understand my opinion need not reflect your own, but perhaps is valuable as a much in the minority dissenting voice.

Once upon a time, back in 1983, I sat confused, dazed and not quite sure what to think of David Cronenberg’s bizarre twisted horror film, Videodrome. Most people who wanted to like the movie did exactly the same thing. I was once like so many still seem to be—ready to call this film a flawed masterpiece, a daring innovative, wild one of a kind creepy horror science-fiction movie that should be put up on a pedestal.

Once upon a time I would say overlook it’s considerable flaws, its confusing and sloppy narrative, its misogyny and it’s utterly baffling, confusing convoluted ending.

I embrace its outrageous imagery, so over-the-top it may provoke both laughter and disgust.

Can all of this boil down to a message about how easily manipulated we are by forbidden sordid sexual perversions that can numb us, brainwash us, change us into another person? Our Dr. Hyde craves being overly stimulated and seduced and is willing to blur our morals and ethical values to get its fix.

The new flesh is our mind unleashed to shape-shift our own bodies?

Yes it is heavy stuff. The movie however doesn’t quite get us to this place. It cops out. It’s convoluted, confusing narrative and leaps of logic are not merely sloppy but irresponsible, and incomplete. And it’s not the irresponsible I’m most concerned about. For in the end, you could and perhaps should see the whole movie as but a nightmare of its main character.

The old chestnut that it is all a dream? Pretty much.

Most of the people who embrace this movie would never accept this reading of the film, They have thought about it, conjectured, built around it, much more than it ever could be. But there it is. In front of your eyes, an unsatisfying ending that must be ignored and dismissed in order to appreciate the rest of what we have seen.

Huh?

So how come it’s got this reputation as a classic, when it’s confusing, imperfect, a mess of a show with a last half-hour that know one is quite sure what to make of? A few films can claim this distinction, movies like David Lynch’s Lost Highway for instance. But that one is decipherable if you really want to take the time to do it. This ending if you decipher it by simply accepting what is there, is a real let down.

So we will forget the ending—and think more abstract than that.

I had better give you a quick synopsis:

Max Reno (James Woods) is one of the owners of what is basically a small soft-core cable t.v. station channel 83. He’s looking for something provocative, something the viewers haven’t seen before. His chief t.v. tech engineer guy Harlan (Peter Dvorsky) has tapped into an illegal satellite transmission of an all-torture, all-murder TV signal called Videodrome which at first seems to be coming from Malyasia, but may actually be coming out of Pittsburgh. Max assumes its all staged as sick entertainment. We in the audience are ahead of him pretty much believing it's probably real torture going on. Is it?

Max asks porn agent Masha (Lynne Gorman) to find someone he can talk to about it so he can buy the program for his cable channel, and the trail leads to Bianca O'Blivion (Sonja Smits), the daughter of video cult visionary Brian O'Blivion (Jack Creley). Brian O’Blivion seems to exist only on video-tape and prefers to appear even on talk shows as a guy behind a desk on a television monitor. He has a philosophy that seems to be encouraging people to completely and physically merge with the virtual video world. Along the way Max meets and is very attracted to the popular radio psychologist Nicki Brand (played by Blondie’s lead singer, Deborah Harry).

She turns out to be a masochist sex freak who introduces Max to s&m. When Max tells her and even shows her Videodrome, she wants to volunteer as one of the torture victims on the show. This freaks Max out a bit. Then she disappears. Then Max is told the torture show isn’t faked, but real. Then Max discovers that Videodrome may be transmitting a strange signal that actually causes a brain tumor that leads to hallucinations. And from there is really gets quite bizarre.

Obviously this is one wild, utterly out of the box movie that wants to go where no movie has gone before. But as I said it becomes an incoherent muddle of weird visuals and ideas that you simply won’t believe, but may find utterly fascinating and outrageous. At the end of the movie you won’t be sure of what you have seen. Some have decided it must be brilliant.

In an effort to better understand the film I re-read Phillip K. Dick’s incredible 1964 novel The Three Stigmatas of Palmer Eldritch. I knew Cronenberg was a Dick fan and used many ideas in Dick’s short story: A Scanner Darkly and elsewhere to create his near masterpiece Scanners.

So I figured I would understand this convoluted mind-screw of a movie if I plunged into Dick’s mind-screw of a novel The Three Stigmata—right?

Well I believed I was on the right track with this stuff, but the best I can come up with is that Cronenberg used television in Videodrome as Dick used the drug Chew – Z’s in his novel. This only works so far however because Cronenberg has dumbed down so many of the ideas in Dick’s novel, that you have to wonder why this was done.

Of course maybe it wasn’t. Perhaps Cronenberg read the novel many years before creating the movie and it simply inspired him creatively to create this weird flick. The similiarities between the concepts and ideas are the result of linked coincidences.

Cronenberg seems to be using the then exploding home video and cable t.v. revolution to make a comment on how dangerous television could be. But he wasn’t buying into the right wing and religious conservative viewpoint that sex and violence on television was rotting our minds, instead he took it beyond that into the realm of satire to show thhat dangerous television is capable of not merely rotting our minds but sending us on a wild hallucinatory mind screw of trip.

You think television is dangerous? I’ll show you how television could really be dangerous…deliver a t.v. signal that creates brain tumors, that creates hallucinations. Now THAT is MUST SEE T.V (using television to brainwash and control people was explored the same year in Halloween 3- Season of the Witch 1983! ) Was there something in the air (make that ON the air) in 1983?

VIDEODROME allowed Cronenberg to truly explore his artistic impulses with a larger budget breaking out of making low and modest budgeted Canadian horror movies like They Came From Within aka Shivers (1975), Rabid (1977), The Brood (1979) and Scanners (1981) to make a bigger budget picture with some name actors like James Woods and rock icon Deborah Blondie Harry.

Do you want to see Deborah Harry of Blondie naked begging James Woods to stick her with needles and freaking Woods out by putting lit cigarettes out on her bare breasts?

Do you want to see a gun and a explosive grenade device meld onto someone’s arm to become part of their bodies? the new flesh. How about a completely interactive video that allows you to have not simulated but real sex with images on your television? How about your body changing so that you have a gaping vagina like opening in your stomach into which you can feed your body breathing, video tapes?

Sound ridiculous?

Well this is not a normal conventional movie. Of course the boundaries it rushes through are with things like soft-porn, torture, sado-massochistic sex and quite frankly all of that had been around for years and was one of the reasons video was exploding. Cronenberg presses buttons to get attention. Then he gets bizarre and twists the sex and violence into a different direction. Great idea.

The New Flesh could have been an evolving species of man, asexual, both male and female—but Cronenberg doesn’t go in this direction. Instead its guns and explosives that become part of our bodies and used in destructive ways.

Self destructive? Maybe.. that's where things get muddled.

The idea of a skid row mission that services homeless television addicts, by letting them vedge out in front of televisions that might be sending signals into their brains is an interesting one. Is it part of O'bLivion’s research or part of a plan to implant brains with tumors and let everyone hallucinate?
We don’t know, the movie doesn’t explain what any of this means. Or if it means anything at all.

And then he wraps it up by showing us a main character as a homeless person. So was it all a dream?

It was great instinct to cast Woods who was usually seen at the time as a weird quirky villain character in movies like The Onion Field and making Woods instead and odd quirky interesting flawed hero. Woods found a lot of humorous moments and did a good job of bringing that out in the role. It helps considerable that his so interesting and fun to watch. Some of the visuals are disturbing and repellent in contrast—we root for Woods to not succumb to the dark side.

When we are essentially ahead of the movie as Woods tries to track down Videodrome and figure things out, he carries us through the slow spots quite well.

Cronenberg would revisit this idea of a hero exploring abstract conceptual ideas that could possibly lead to a new evolution of man in his version of The Fly and in eXisTenZ.

DEEP INSIDE VIDEODROME

I’ve speculated that a lot of the ideas in Videodrome were at least in part inspired by Phillip K. Dick. I also have to mention that other influences on Videodrome are Marshal Mcluhan and William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch, Junkie).

Mcluhan explained at great length how television changes our habitat and creates its own sub-culture that in most cases it dominates, demands and receives attention, and more consideration than any other appliance in our homes (refrigerators, dish washers, etc.) and in some case more consideration than other family members.

He observed that we don’t watch television, we scan it. The television audience has a different relationship to it, then say a movie audience has to the projected image on a screen. We process a film or photograph differently than we do when we watch television according to Mcluhan. If we ignore a photograph on a wall it doesn't talk to us.

It’s more complicated than merely saying Television is intimate and has a hypnotizing, numbing effect on us, but I will simplify it like that anyway.

Cronenberg is fairly obsessed with Burroughs (Naked Lunch ). Burroughs understood first hand about addiction.. The self destructive nature of addiction is part of the lure of any new drug or sensation. The dark and forbidden elements are necessary.

I would like to believe Cronenberg was consciously exploring some of this in Videodrome—even though he misses his mark in connecting the intent to the audience. Several idea were probably feeding his creativity which allows us to postulate about the underlying inspirations of the film. He has created a comment and I believe consciously (knowingly) on HORROR and its capacity to transform reality into another form.

We can read too much into this and say of course that makes sense. MAX and his ‘new flesh’, he has transformed into a different reality based on his addiction to his fantasies. His somewhat passive body has become completely transformed by this thoughts and hallucinations into something else. And this was triggered by television and video images. The transformation happens in stages involving manipulation, dream-like states and hallucinations.

How space and lighting is used in this movie is also telling. It creates a cyber-version of a Gothic movie (Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and James Whale's Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein). We have too much space in this movie and the space is used in a functional manner, with the sole exception of the cramped office where the pirated signal is originally discovered.

Marshall McLuhan has written: "electric technology has meant for Western man a considerable drop in the visual component of his experience, and a corresponding increase in the activity of his other senses." Television becomes tactile.

This is visualized by Cronenberg in scenes where Max is seduced by the image of Nicki Brand's lips and the televison screen bulges out to meet his touch and allow Max to put his head inside Nicki’s video mouth. Yet his hands fondle the television dials and controls. There is a private space television has in our lives—its intimate, personal and interactive in our lives.

Videodrome suggests television changes our private space, becomes part of our lives and changes our relationship to imagery. We are seperated more clearly from movies in a theater or a photograph on a wall. Television demands our attention. It will get louder (commercial advertisements) it will change programs and do many things to get our attention. Unless we intervene to break off what it is doing, television will win and force us to interact with it.

However, Cronenberg doesn't hold the audience responsible, allowing us to believe we are better than Max and other characters and ultimately with its ending suggesting it could also be a dream.

We can understand Max' seduction up to a point, but then we can see he has lost his sense of balance and it's hard for us to imagine that we could lose our balance in this manner. In fact since Max is already a rather sleazy opportunistic guy who deals with smut, most of us in the audience aren't going to closely identify with him and the business he is in. We might find it interesting, but few of us would seriously pursue what Max does. We don't have to be emotionally involved with Max. We are let off the hook. There is distance between Max's problems and situations and us as audience members.


I certainly understand how many problems Cronenberg had in dealing with the William S. Burroughs' (Naked Lunch, Junkie) inspired thesis of how seductive the repetitive subtle and not subtle pornographic images can be. Actually all images can feed perversions and become perverted.

Cronenberg was limited by censorship and ratings board considerations on what he could show and how. So he had to keep things fairly tame. However it puts some of the other more violent imagery out of proportion and since he does not hold the audience responsible it's too much of a dishonest compromise for me. The possibility that the director could have held the audience more accountable to how vulnerable we all are and therefore sent us out of the theater with an ability to connect one thesis to say how corporate advertising exists, is one heck of an opportunity missed in my book.

Cronenberg also started production of the movie before he had worked out an ending for the movie. He was in production for several months, and I wish he had spent a little time figuring out the ending. I do understand rushing into production on a project like this. When you get a green light, you go for it, because too many movies projects fall apart and don't get green lights.

*Corporate advertising using repetitive sexual and even pornographic imagery at times towards children as in Joe Camel cigarrette ads (The camel character appealing to children and resembling the male sex organ) and to a more subtle degree with Disney's advertising of it's products.

DVD NOTES

There’s a special edition Criterion DVd out there that is loaded with commentaries and special features for VIDEODROME AHOLICS to jump all over. I was hoping to get at least disc 1 of the Criterion from Netflix but I got the older DVd of the film instead that has only a trailer as an extra.

This is a good film for the Criterion treatment and I have every reason to believe they’ve included some interesting documentaries, and additional footage that will please fans and perhaps even fascinate me should I decide to take another plunge into the world of VIDEODROME.

Bottom Line:

I am currently fairly ambivalent toward VIDEODROME. I recognize some sequences as being ahead of their time, creative, daring and really bending the rules, but over-all the film is a convoluted, semi-coherent mess. Some of the more outrageous visuals are still pretty wild, other aspects are dated, but much less than I expected. Maybe I’ll decide in the next 10 years that this movie is indeed some kind of flawed classic like so many others do. I doubt it, but anything is possible.

Long live the new flesh



note To be clear, the movie Scanners central idea is based only partly on several ideas found in Dick's short stories. A SCanner Darkly has little relation to the movie except in title, but I didn't want to take several sentences to try and explain above. The short story A Scanner Darkly deals with drug addiction again mostly, but that is also part of the story of Scanners as well.

Here's a great Dick quote from 1978:

We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives. I distrust their power. It is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing."



Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV