Max appears on a tv talk show with a media guru, Brian O'Blivion, and tough love radio host Nicki Brand. Max makes a successful move on Nicki while O'Blivion (who will only appear on a small television in the studio) gasses off about tv being the retina of the mind's eye. Later, in his apartment, Nicki picks out a video marked Videodrome, thinking it's porn. Their sex that night includes some home sterilised piercing and a massive hallucination that they are in the Videodrome torture room, writhing on what looks like a giant ribbed hotplate. The next time she's around she tells him she's going to Pittsburg, where Videodrome is made, so she can audition. He fails to convince her to stay, or stay away, and she goes off into the night, never to return.
There are other pieces on the board but the last one I'll include as plot has to do with the media guru. He runs an outreach centre on skid row, welcoming the dispossessed in for some tv and a soup kitchen meal. He doesn't get to meet Brian but O'Blivion's daughter Bianca who deftly keeps him from getting too close, promising to send him a cassette of her father to explain things. The tape arrives that night. O'Blivion begins with his usual academic provocation before his voice enters the room for real and begins a two way conversation with Max before getting strangled to death by an executioner who, after a quick self unmasking, turns out to be Nicki. The itch that's been irritating Max's belly expands from a rash to a large vulval slit. He's been scratching the irritation with his pistol and, compelled, he plunges it into the orifice. He struggles to wrench his hand back out but the gun is still lost in there. This is a David Cronenberg film.
Not just any David Cronenberg film. Having challenged audiences from the mid '70s onward with the likes of the plague of sexual parasites in Shivers, the mutated vampiric armpit spike in Rabid, murderous children generated by pure rage in The Brood, and explosive telepathy in Scanners (yes, I know, Fast Company, but it's just not convenient here) Cronenberg had emerged as one of the most original thinkers in world cinema. Having used the Canadian tax dodge to make Shivers, he'd smuggled some compelling thought about society, sex and science into what was sold to the American drive-ins as a big schlocky monster movie.
The smuggling approach served him well until he stepped beyond need for it with Scanners which pushed the thinking forward and let the threat for part of the plot rather than the other way around. By the time he got to Videodrome the power of the concept was far too strong to just lie on top and needed to be woven more tightly into the fabric of the film. Cronenberg was no longer convincingly borrowing from the world around him but building his own that just resembled the real one. If Toronto looked like a modern metropolis by day it felt like the real city lay dormant, stirring after sunset to envelope at the individual level, all who roamed it with a thick night illuminated mainly by tv screens. It was a night whose reality behaved like dreams, leaving all who lived it scrambling around looking for explanations, anything, to tame it through rationalisation. As strong as his thinking had already got, Cronenberg had never achieved this level of complexity. Nor had he rendered it so enjoyably.
That's the thing about Videodrome. If you keep at making movies with sophisticated concepts you're apt to get more sophisticated but with this one Cronenberg was able to use his experience as a film director to add one last goody into the mix: warmth.
If there is one thing that holds earlier Cronenberg features back from higher celebration it's the shortfall in performance. It's not about small budgets equalling lower tier actors. It's not even about beginner writing. The good performances in early Cronenberg films happen despite his direction of lack of it that leaves the others wooden and amateurish. We're talking the likes of Samantha Eggar, Oliver Reed and Patrick McGoohan along with a small number of locals who were picking up craft during these experiences and outside them. While it took baby steps, by the time he was able to cast the dynamic talent of James Woods for Max Renn, Cronenberg's people were like the cattle that Hitchcock had smirked about in an earlier decade.
Woods comes on with a interpersonal assault plan that swings rapidly between disarming candour and outright sleaze. His come on to Nicki on the tv show is meant to make us cringe but it also shows that his tolerance of mainstream order has limits. Add to that Woods's readiness to show his character failing even on a tiny scale which prevents us from turning off an arrogant self-entitled player. Mainly, he's all flaws; he needs experience to find his decency which Woods demonstrates through a credible filter of impatience.
If Debbie Harry as Nicki feels a little wooden it's more down to inexperience. There is a long line of rockstars who fail to convince cinecameras, already long by then, but Harry brought from her schooling from fame and performance the power of contrasts. She was acutely aware of her beauty and its global celebration but her punk roots had shown her the value of looking like Aphrodite and sounding like a Bowery bum. Nicki Brand gets a slightly more cool jazz take on this but the roughness remains and, when blended with the character's transgressive sense of adventure the performance blooms. It shocks Mr Sin himself, Max Renn, into timidity.
The pair of them anchor their respective sides of the Videodrome screen that allows the extraordinary moment at which her ballooning image from the screen opens its mouth to accept his penetrating head. There is more than a little trade on what audiences at the time would have made of the frontwoman of Blondie in this context but Debbie Harry meets it and even lifts the relatively unknown James Woods to her podium. The actor James Woods jovially complained about the heavy reliance on practical effects, particularly the abdominal orifice, saying, "sometimes I just feel like the bearer of the slit." Debbie Harry responded with, "now you know how it feels."
If you delve into disc extras or just read about this movie you'll find quite a rocky developmental road. If you sift through the history of various cuts, rethinks in credits sequences, deleted scenes you'll see a few different movies coming through. The "soup or veg" moment I knew from a tv version in the '80s, finally seen again in the Arrow 4K, is not missed. There is a scene between Max and Nicki in the back of a limo which shows Debbie Harry in impressive form that was long excised. All of the deleted scenes I saw deserved deletion. What is left is a wonder of economic storytelling where one scene closes in on the same thing that another opens outward from, hallucinations become indistinguishable from reality and the descent of Max into the befogged state in which he achieves clarity is seamless and thrilling.
Necessary mention here of longtime collaborator Howard Shore's score. Combining synthesis with orchestral sounds he provides a grinding liquidity. I used to think the main instrument was a harmonium. If you've ever played one you'll know how hard you have to work just to keep the airflow with the bellows pedals and how that precludes almost everything beyond plain chording.
If it had been another Scanners we would celebrate it as coolly. The warmth of Videodrome gives way to the emotional integrity of The Fly. Videodrome is the source point for Cronenberg's survival as a film maker. From this we can see the branch off from the body horror to relatively straight drama and then recombination with titles like Dead Ringers. With this proof of concept for creating fluidity between states lets us accept the two-places-at-once scenes of the hitherto unfilmable Naked Lunch. All of David Cronenberg's strengths come from this knotting of the early experiments into his enviable fruition as an artist.
In the '90s Videodrome was hailed for predicting reality tv. Well, maybe, although the earlier Network does that a lot better. What Videodrome does is suggest the kind of internet that emerged after the split between the navigable surface that the graphical world wide web gave us and the continued unchecked development of the submarine mass of the dark web. I don't just mean that there are some nasty currents running beyond the light of Google but that when the mainstream web was corporatised it behaved exactly as all such absorptions do and rendered the worst of us acceptable. No need for conspiracy thinking, it's all right there on our screens. Not all of it is nefarious it's just that it can be and that can be very hard to tell.
Early scenes that show the cheerful Harlan showing Max the torture scenes include poignant cutaways to Harlan avoiding sight of the screen himself. Bianca O'Blivion's assertion that the signal could just be delivered over a test pattern contextualises the brain damage that her father called the New Flesh could grow like worldwide crops every time someone looked at a screen. She has already infected Max with a tape of a much more powerful dose than he'd previously had. Her admission that she thought he was to be her assassin is followed by a moment of audible regret that might be the very second between the director's cold presentation and his discovery of warmth. Then, later, Max is shattered when Harlan and corporate exec Barry Convex tell him the Videodrome works on everyone who sees it, as they insert a tape into his abdomen that sends him off to murder his colleagues.
There is no happy ending here. Max, beyond retrieval, finds a kind of safe haven in a condemned ship, talks to an image of Nicki on a tv in the hold before blowing his brains out with the whispered slogan: "Long live the New Flesh." Brian O'Blivion had theorised earlier that television was reality and reality less than television. Don't watch television, anymore? Ok substitute "the screen" and it works again. Our contemporary videodrome is not the sci-fi nightmare of the one in this movie but that might be because it doesn't have to be. We don't need a subliminal signal telling us what to think as we'll get to the thinking in our own time. You shouldn't panic about this as long as you still can discern all the old standard contrasts, even when the screen is normalised as it is now. We don't need to opt out violently like Max but we will need to keep on the right side of the illusion on the wrong side of the screen. Videodrome still works and will work again.
Viewing notes: I have had copies of this film from the DVD era onwards, including Criterion DVD and Blu-Ray editions. It's always been quite well served on digital video by contemporary standards with good extras and strong audio visual transfers. The version I watched for this blog article was Arrow's 4K box that comes with a raft of extras, two versions of the feature cut and a packed booklet. The Dolby Vision enhanced 4K video takes the image to a clarity level that I was constantly marvelling at. Whether it was pores in skin or the depth of the image. While much of the film's evident technology places it in time, the quality of the presentation is so stellar that it looks freshly minted.
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