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| Science Fiction-Double Feature... |
Videodrome was made about 30 years early. It's sharp, resounding critique of television is uncomfortably applicable to the Internet generation ('...soft...'), with its ready access to unlimited entertainment and stimulation. At the heart of Videodrome is fear about our future and how technology relates to it. This is a theme I've addressed several times before, and shall most likely never stop returning to...
There are two competing forces in the film: Videodrome and Prof. O'Blivion (his 'television name'). Videodrome's ambition is social purification, O'Blivion's is evolution. The Videodrome project is being carried out by elements or organisations unknown (the notion of the deep state is doing the rounds in the horroristic edge of the Reactosphere, so I'm going to head-canonise it as that) who wish to purge the North American continent of unwanted types of person- the type of person who would watch the Videodrome transmission. There's an obvious, though well-delivered, meta element whereby Cronenberg is asking what kind of person would watch his movie in the first place (the viewer is the scum to be purged in much the same way the viewer is the ancient god to be appeased in The Cabin in the Woods- at least in my reading...).
The Videodrome transmissions appear to be both nihilistic and nihilising, not only devoid of any abstract meaning or plot, but hostile towards meaning. The signal they carry actively damages the brain of the viewer, after all. Though, far more disturbing is that it carries an occult agenda; the character Masha (Lynne Gorman) warns James Woods that Videodrome's danger lies in the fact that 'it has a philosophy.' Videodrome is pure social Darwinism: considering Cronenberg's penchant for the bodily, it is not appropriate to describe it as social engineering- it is social surgery, it is cutting out the cancerous elements of society in order to allow that society to survive. The forces behind Videodrome fear that the peoples of North America are not up to the challenges that await them in the coming century. In their view, the people of their continent have became 'soft' while the rest of the world was becoming 'tough.' What future is there for the social body if the diseased flesh is not excised?
O'Blivion, on the other hand, considers the Videodrome signal to be the doorway to a new form of reality. Throughout the film there are disturbing images of the mechanical and the biological merging, warping together into something new. Woods' hand becomes his gun, his television his lover. O'Blivion has realised that the distinction between the real world and the 'video (virtual) world' has already broken down, and that the technological will not stop at our thoughts, it will seep into out flesh, transforming it and reshaping it as it itself is reshaped by the flesh to produce the New Flesh (long may it live!). For O'Blivion, who by the time the film begins exists solely on video, no biological components of him still functional, the tumour induced by the Videodrome signal is a new organ, one that transforms our perceptions and thus reality itself. Hardware/software/wetware are forcibly wired together into the New Flesh, into new forms of revealing and living which are not even conceivable to us on this side of the Singularity.
Neither option looks particularly appealing, do they? On the one hand, a systematic cultural purge, on the other...who knows?
Something uncomfortably new.
