Videodrome
I posted this review on Letterboxd, but why not post it here too? I guess this is long-form writing, I did end up writing a ton after all. And maybe this blog can be a place for all my long-form writing. I'm happy that, lately, I've been writing more, not just on here but in my journal as well (though most of the not too private stuff makes it here). I've also been having more dreams, and I think I'm having lots of conversations in those dreams too. I think I dream more when I have more stuff to work through, sort of like how your body temperature rises into a fever to kill off an infection. Fall is always a particularly sensitive time for me, but this is a more sensitive one than I've had in a while... anyway. Enough rambling. Some thoughts on Videodrome.
The first 2/3rds of this are really something special. It kinda loses me when james woods goes nonverbal and starts killing people, when the conspiracy comes to a head and all that. "North America has grown weak..." stuff feels like a shoddy attempt to tie things together, but like all great art what's really going on is more subconscious, and even the people making it can fail to really articulate what their own work is about. This wouldn't be the first movie to express its ideas clearly in every aspect but its textual thesis statement. As for the setup where those ideas are, explored in this dreamlike, paranoid, bizarre way... am I crazy to say that I think Cronenberg is some kind of genius?
A consistent theme I've been thinking about (aren't well?) is how images have come to supersede reality, and that's exactly what this movie is about. It's prescient in a lot of ways, including some subtle ones (Brian Oblivion, who is actually dead and is now nothing more than a rearrangement of everything he ever said, opines that in the future everyone will refer to each other by their screen names). But anyway, this is an unsettling and very deep idea, explored with such haunting and tantalizing imagery in a way that only Cronenberg can do. The key idea here is that this inversion of images and reality is not just taking place in "society", or even in "the mind", in some abstract plane of existence. Here, this transformation is envisioned as an evolution of the human body itself, even as new organs (the incredibly iconic chest VHS slot). As the clever device of the optics company points out, the eyes are the window to the soul. But maybe the eyes are not enough to handle the new age of images divorced from reality. And that's when things get interesting, and we can start exploring that big old cavern that William Blake was referring to that are closed off by the "doors of perception".
I've seen a lot of movies that touch on "transhumanist" ideas like this one (using that word loosely) by bringing humans closer to machines and in the process losing their humanity. Cyborgs, androids, ghosts in the shell. I've never seen the opposite idea before. In Videodrome, it is the machines become organic, literally breathing and sighing. Personally, and I don't know why, I find this much more terrifying and unsettling. At the risk of stating the obvious, Cronenberg's horror always brings things back to the human body and is all the more effective for it.
Struggling to organize my ideas here, I love it... okay, one more thing. I made the mistake of looking up what people thought about the movie and apparently, it's just a parable about how violence in movies is bad? I guess I can see that interpretation, especially if you only pay attention to the third act (I explained above why I think that's not a good idea). To me, though, this movie has a much more ambiguous stance towards violence and exploitation. James Woods walks this tightrope of being a sleazy businessman but also charismatic and likable in a way that mirrors perfectly this ambivalence. He says (and seems to believe) that he is providing some sort of public good, an outlet to harmlessly sublimate one's desires. Maybe that would make sense if we were talking about some sort of private fantasies. But those desires, manifested outside of oneself, made into images, which are more powerful and important than reality itself... it scares him, and it scares us too. By the way, I'll always return to this metaphor between dreams and film... won't say too much about it here, but this movie independently discovers that connection just like Satoshi Kon's Paprika and many others.
So yes, there is condemnation of violent media in here, but there's also fascination, fear, desire. What does it mean that sex and violence are the most effective vectors for the Videodrome, uh, disease (or whatever it is)? I don't know!! But man it is such a fascinating idea, and the more I think about it the more I like it.
I loved Cronenberg's Fly when I first watched it over ten years ago, but I haven't watched him since... I think it's time I watched some of his other movies. And this one, again, soon.