I was thinking I would go see the new David Cronenberg body horror film Crimes of the Future this weekend. I have seen a couple Cronenberg movies recently, and they aren’t as freaky as I had thought they would be. Then I read the plot synopsis for the movie, heard people walked out of it at the Cannes Film Festival, some of them while getting sick, and considered how weird and freaky the trailer was…and I decided I’ll wait for streaming on this one if at all. I don’t want to see that sort of thing on a big screen, and I like to think I’ve developed a stronger stomach in recent years.
So, to make up for it, I watched Videodrome on Tubi. And one ad break worked brilliantly by popping up just as the protagonist popped a video cassette into a VCR.
Max Renn (James Woods at his most appropriately sleazy) is the president of a UHF TV channel in Toronto, CIVIC-TV. CIVIC specializes in extreme content, described at one point as spanning from soft core porn to hard core violence. Max is constantly looking for new material, and when his satellite dish operator Harlan (Peter Dvorski) finds something he claims is from Malaysia, something called Videodrome that shows naked people being tortured, possibly to death. Max finds it interesting, and his love interest Nicki (Debbie Harry) even finds it arousing. It would seem to be just another show on a TV channel that specializes in stuff that no one else can or would air, in part to get a leg up on the competition.
However, something odd is happening. Max starts to hallucinate, seeing things both on his TV screen and off it. Videotapes pulsate in his hand, a woman’s lips beckon him to make out with his TV screen, and a mysterious vertical slot may or may not be on his torso. Max, slowly but surely, becomes obsessed with Videodrome, seeking out a reclusive media theorist Professor Brian O’blivion (Jack Creley) for help understanding what’s going on. O’blvion, not his real name, has never appeared anywhere except on a TV screen, and his adult daughter Bianca (Sonja Smits) is initially rather cryptic herself about where her father is. Something is turning Max insane, and it may be someone is using Videodrome to control his mind. Or he’s insane. Or he has a brain tumor. Or all of those things. It’s that kind of movie.
I can appreciate what Cronenberg seems to be doing here. He seems to be making a statement on how television is dominating our lives, something that probably can’t alter our perceptions or beliefs the way Max’s does, but has the potential to do something along those lines. Given the rise of social media and sites and services like YouTube and TikTok, to say nothing about the way these services lead people to conspiracy theories and the like, it might make for an interesting reexamination by someone far more qualified than myself. I mean, I have a large 4K flatscreen with a very good picture. This is a movie where a console set with a lesser picture quality is good enough to make out with. It’s the sort of movie that is perhaps more relevant now than it was in 1983.
Factor in as well that Max is, as the movie progresses, a completely unreliable narrator. Does he really have a slot on his torso? Is his gun really fused with his hand? Some shots show it is, others don’t, and I don’t think that’s a continuity mistake on Cronenberg’s behalf. I think it’s more deliberate work to suggest Max’s madness, and for that it works. I’m sure it makes for great commentary on TV and media absorption in the 80s, but the way that it resonates even today made it for what I think is a deeper experience for me than I would have had I seen it when it was new. It’s kind of depressing to think of it that way as something more relevant now, and I hope Cronenberg didn’t intend it that way, but it did say more to me about the state of our relationship to media than I was expecting.
Grade: B+
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