77. Videodrome

David Cronenberg, 1983

“Long live the new flesh!”

This year has been a real banner year for me as far as discovering some of the world’s great horror directors for the first time. At the top of that list are Italian maestros Mario Bava and Dario Argento. Also near the top of that list, although I suppose I officially began to look at his work at the end of last year, is Canada’s David Cronenberg. For most of you, Cronenberg’s most recognizable work is going to be the 1986 version of The Fly. He is also the director of Dead Ringers, The Dead Zone, Scanners, and, most recently, the excellent A History of Violence. Over the past year, I’ve watched a number of Cronenberg’s films and am fascinated by his uses of graphic sexuality and bodily transformation. Both of these are apparent in The Fly and, indeed, tend to appear, in one form or another, in most of the rest of his output. Yet, nowhere are these themes as prevalent, or indeed, intertwined as they are in Videodrome.

Videodrome is the story of Max Renn, played by James Woods and the head of a Canadian television station, who makes his living pirating television series from various, usually foreign, markets and broadcasting them on his own station. Renn’s tastes are increasingly dark, seeking out sexual programming at every turn. This is when he comes across Videodrome, a program of indeterminate origin which is part sadomasochistic sex game and part snuff film. Renn is drawn to the program and even begins an S & M heavy affair based on its influence. Weird? I know. It gets weirder. Stay with me. Eventually, Renn’s girlfriend, Nicki, played by Debby Harry (Blondie!), goes off to audition for Videodrome and disappears. Meanwhile, Renn finds his world and, indeed his very body, warping around him, due to the influence of Videodrome. Of course, he goes off in search of the signal and things only get weirder.

Eventually, the signal really begins to transform Renn’s body and this is where things really take off, especially for me. Now, the idea of film as an intrinsically voyeuristic and therefore, at least partially, sexual medium is an old one. The idea is we watch these people on the screen and take joy from it, whether it is joy in their joy or perverse joy in their fear. Critics like Laura Mulvey would argue further that that gaze is permanently male and is predicated a great deal on watching the women on the screen, sexualizing them at every turn. Whether you agree with that or not is not my point right now. I certainly have my problems with it. What I am getting to though is that, in Videodrome, Cronenberg takes this idea of a link between the film/video image and sexuality and merges them literally on the screen, all while servicing his own, particular oeuvre. When Renn transforms, as is almost inevitable in a Cronenberg feature, the transformation is to grow a long, vertical slit in his belly. His hand, meanwhile, grows into a sort of organic gun, which is explicitly phallic. The slit, meanwhile, is as vaginal as the gun is phallic, and serves to deliver Renn his orders by means of the insertion of a video tape into the slot, thus making the tape, both here and later in the film when an organic, pulsating, video tape is introduced, into a phallic symbol in a way I’ve never seen, certainly not so literally, before. Within Renn, sexuality and the video become one. He becomes a bi-gendered being who serves only the video. It is weird messed up stuff. Certainly, heavily surreal and just as thought provoking. I could go on for a while about the ideas implicit in combining sexuality and the video in this way, but, to be frank, I certainly haven’t worked through it all myself. I just find it fascinating to see this long bandied about idea made into something so literal on the screen, especially as part of an otherwise truly disturbing, effecting, and oddly entertaining horror film.