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Videodrome
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The Mind
Boggles
Did
I really see Videodrome? It appeared,
entirely unannounced, in a Melbourne cinema late 1984 – already a legend, a
myth, already almost two years old. I raced to see it, and immediately wrote
the words you will find below. I then rushed back the next day, to verify and
expand my first impressions. It was already gone from the marquee, replaced on
the screen! Did it really exist, in that shadowy room?
This
film can’t be for real. Comic strip stuff, like Brian De Palma’s Sisters (1973): character names like Dr Convex (Leslie Carlson) and Professor O’Blivion
(Jack Creley), nutty talk-show set pieces, crazies serving behind shop counters
(“That’s some script you got there!” sings a laid-back black optician to an
ageing customer – or possibly the writer of Videodrome).
I mean, this film just can’t be for
real. Where the hell is it going now? What’s that ugly looking dome contraption
Dr Convex has just placed over the head of Max Renn (James Woods)? “Excuse me
for leaving”, the good Doctor explains at this point. “I can’t take this freaky
stuff”.
At
least he has the option of a quick
exit. Me, I can’t move. David Cronenberg has clamped this whole damn film over
my head, I’m trembling and I won’t leave – mainly because mounting incredulity,
the reflex that makes you want to turn to anybody else in the theatre and
enquire “Can you believe this??”
provides also a kind of ecstasy. I can’t for the life of me predict the next
move in Videodrome. The mind of this
viewer is in full boggle, as the
paranoid logic of a very weird film escalates at a rate faster than is usual –
even for Cronenberg.
The
catastrophe principle of the modern horror film (Cronenberg, Larry Cohen,
George Romero): start it in the banal everyday, soft and corny, and then
proceed quite quickly, in a hyperbole that always inches just a bit further,
twists just one more time, into the full, metaphysical nightmare: a terror that
acknowledges, as it flies screaming out of the back windscreen of the movie’s
abrupt ending, that Good and Evil, Appearance and Reality, Truth and Lie, Mind
and Body are no longer operatively distinguishable. A tortured philosopher
indeed is Cronenberg, as he dredges his fictional premises and image-ideas out
from the worst carnages of derailed mythic thought: bodies mutating, Egos
controlled by sinister, unknowable Others, the splattering of on-edge
subjectivities all over the screen. Yes, folks, believe it: that really is a
huge hole in the hero’s stomach, into which forced guns and video cassettes are
being forced; that truly is a gun sprouting nails and drilling itself into his
hand.
And
that really is a TV set breathing, moaning, stretching out; it’s truly got
skin, veins, hands and a little hole in the extended finger for some strange
mixture of bullets, saliva and semen to shoot out. That’s, in effect, another
order of nightmare which Cronenberg plunders at length in Videodrome: all the sociological fears about the hypnotic effects
of TV, the video invasion, the medium massage, the plug-in drug, blablabla.
There’s something both dumb and wild in the way Cronenberg literalises these theories about the media (some quite old, some
completely in tune with Jean Baudrillard) one after another willy-nilly,
instantly pulverising them, in the process, into yesterday’s
pseudo-intellectual clichés, the stuff of pure fiction – thus letting us off
the hook of deep-seated terror in a truly perverse and liberating way. It gets
down to this kind of nutso, sci-fi prediction: headsets will record your
dreams; human bodies will be turned into programmable video machines;
media-induced hallucinations will become the only perceptual reality! Media
Panic material (copyright Arthur & Marilouise Kroker: like Cronenberg, also
Canadian).
Videodrome starts off by
preying on some of the anxieties aroused by the ongoing pornography debate –
consumers in search of a tougher, kinkier image-fix (i.e., snuff movies) get
their brain softened up, their spine and nervous system prodded into numbed relaxation,
their emotions desensitised – and then slams home with the most literal kind
of conspiratorial control thesis. For it’s not the porno images that are the root cause of the film’s Philip K. Dick-like
global takeover, but that deadly
frequency (videodrone?) in the transmission causing brain tumours,
hallucinations and bodily mutations. This sounds and looks like some
monstrously inverted fantasia on a bit of outdated Marshall McLuhan, or a
delirious sick-bed reading of Australian artist Mark Titmarsh’s “Touch Me
Television” (and everything that essay says about the tactility of video finds
its literal apotheosis in Videodrome’s
most unforgettable scene) – a thesis which, figured as it is by Cronenberg
through an insistently synthetic horrality (as Philip Brophy called it), a textuality both schlocky and unnervingly phantasmic,
comes out as both intellectually vacuous and absolutely right in its feel. (1)
But
maybe it’s not so vacuous, after all. Cronenberg’s secret, his trick, is
doubtless in the multi-threaded structuration of his catastrophe narrative.
Everything contributes, inexorably, inevitably, to the piecing together of the
paranoid phantasm that is the film; every banal little detail, every seemingly
innocent minor character becomes, eventually, crucially significant in the
retroactive comprehension of the Videodrome conspiracy. And, away from the
strict plotting, clueing and revealing, floating in and through this tight
chain of cause and effect, is a series of motifs and metaphors that the film
deploys, in a deliberately off-hand manner, to expand the horrifying phantasm
in our minds.
Endless
details return us to the englobing, symbolic paradigm of video: a dispositif constituted by screens (“I’m his screen”, says O’Blivion’s
daughter) and spectators (“Love comes
in at the eye”, a convention slogan for the Spectacular Optical company; “The
screen is the retina of the mind”, muses O’Blivion) and the
unification/intensification of both in performance (spectacles “improve the performance” of eyes; the invitation of Nicki Brand [Debbie
Harry] to sado-masochistic love making is “Let’s perform”). The screen and the
spectator: points that come to define the limits of a performance enclosure, the type of enclosure that
appears everywhere in its claustrophobia and finality: the room with clay walls
in which the snuff-scenarios are enacted, into which lovers project themselves
in ecstatic hallucination; the monstrous head-set apparatus for recording
dreams; and, finally, that “box in the corner” (as the TV set was once called)
itself, into which Nicki B. disappears, its sides her new flesh which she asks
her lover to beat with a whip. In the realm of the
senses … but here, everyone is a victim of these rooms, these spaces,
overwhelmed by these sense stimulations triggered and channelled by others.
J.G. Ballard, Philip Dick … the modernistic, science-fictional associations
flow in, feeding Cronenberg’s precisely calculated vision.
I
have suggested that the nightmares of Videodrome are of two orders: the metaphysical and the sociological. Usually, in
Cronenberg, a third in is order: the sexual. Robin Wood – a horror film moralist/ideologist
as significantly rigorous and probing as Brophy, who works on the subject from
a very different, essentially amoral and open-ended perspective – sees
Cronenberg as unremittingly and unforgivably reactionary in his sexual
politics; even as the kind of filmmaker who could be counted on to give us,
right now in the mid ‘80s, a great, State-approved, thoroughly panicky horror
movie on the subject of AIDS. According to Wood, any sexuality deviating from
the strict, straight norm is thoroughly disgusting to Cronenberg, this disgust
thereby producing the conceptual premise for his work’s horrifyingly evil proliferations
and catastrophes – see especially Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1977). However, by
the time we reach, in Cronenberg’s career, The
Dead Zone (1984), this thesis certainly no longer sticks; and in Videodrome – although it plays in some
particularly troublesome minefields, like sado-masochism – something mysterious,
not-quite-formulated but potentially marvellous is going on.
I
read Videodrome the way Raymond
Durgnat reads Buñuel’s Belle de jour (1967) (2) – as a film which, in
the area of its sexual phantasms (“the film is a pattern of fantasies”), is
calmly cruising around all kinds of dead-zones, interstices and imbrications;
playing with, and every now and then dissolving, the straight/bent, normal-vital
sex/death-driven porn dichotomies that seem to precede it as a horror movie
premise. Typically, catastrophe/conspiracy horror movies separate out so-called
normal, public, familial sex-life – safe and sanitary – from the seething (and
equally so-called) perversions that are invisible, underground, covered-up,
rising up only to wreak wholesale destruction. What’s remarkable about Videodrome is that it allows no space or
place for such stereotypical ideas of normalcy – its public, everyday world is already quite happily into soft porn on
a cable station … titled, significantly, Civic TV.
Some
cultural Others, onto whom horror movies typically displace their notions of
the Evil and Perverse, like Orientals or homosexuals, are here coolly
accommodated into the soft hedonism of this up-front society: Civic TV runs Samurai Dreams; the hero’s subterranean
video agent is a well-matured, sophisticated woman who eyes off young men in
restaurants. (Wonderful gag: when the really evil Videodrome snuff-stuff appears, it’s traced not to some Third World black
hole or a dug-in pocket of Euro-decadence, but … Pittsburgh!) Nicki, above
every other element, carries this theme in the film: set out initially as a
prissy, repressed, public-moralist figure on a TV talk show (famous for her
radio therapy program Emotional Rescue),
she is, in a flash and on air, off with Max, tuning in and turning on later to
his Videodrome tapes, inviting him to “play around” with pins-through-the-ear
and cigarette-burns-on-the-chest. Videodrome is quite adventurously progressive at this point – at least in the kinds of
skin-games and ambiences with which it can persuade you to flow as a spectator.
But
then what? Some will validly interject that the female agent is eventually
whipped and killed by our hallucinating hero, and that his brush with S&M
is what seems to open him up to brain tumours, mutations, and the most evil
manipulative effects of Videodrome. And that Nicki, walking on the wild side,
gets herself killed in pursuit of such unnatural pleasures, as if she were “looking
for Mr Goodbar”. It’s fair to say that Cronenberg is probably confused,
uncertain of where the schizzes and flows in his material can (and do) take him
at times, and that his cutting between metaphysical/sociological/sexual levels
creates many ideological problems and mystifications for all (of us) concerned.
The confusion stems from this: what seems to turn Cronenberg on, plugging into
one or several collective cultural phantasms, also frightens the hell out of
him. A familiar neurosis!
Dimly
aware of the potential and power of this reversibility, certainly aware of its
fascination, Cronenberg (like De Palma) comes to manufacture confusion, to make it work for him, multiplying its
indices on all levels. Videodrome takes the essential narrative device (theorised by Tzvetan Todorov in his
classic The Fantastic) of hesitation to new heights of
dissociation: finally, there’s just no telling what to strictly believe in plot
terms as to the status of anything that’s happening. Nor does there seem any
way to stabilise the critical vantage point of an “exploitation” movie that
analyses exploitative video (the official Videodrome title graphic – blurry,
dirty – is the film’s own title graphic).
Cronenberg
is fond, in his fictions, of finally unveiling two Grand Cosmic Forces – like
God and Satan – ready to battle it out at film’s (and world’s) end. In Videodrome, this comes down to a battle
between “Videodrome death” versus “the Video Word made Flesh” (or “the New
Flesh”) – except that, since both seem to be manifesting themselves at the same
time in the one blasted, mutated body of the hero, and both come out of, talk
through the same video screen, it seems an each-way bet whether Max, in his
last moment of directed action, is opening the door to an unrepresentable
future in that cut-to-black, or merely blowing his brains out. But, either way,
the film has managed to bring its vertiginous spin to an abrupt halt, and I
suspect that’s what really matters to Cronenberg – probably as anxiety-ridden
as we are over the whole, catastrophic affair.
Videodrome’s ace card in this
dizzy game of calculated confusion is the strategy of disappearance. Nicki disappears early in the film – en route to Pittsburgh, naturally, from
and to where the whole film flows (“See you in Pittsburgh” says the hero, as he
blasts his ex-best friend). A brilliant, unnerving strategy, this; for in her
three subsequent appearances on that damnable video screen – first murdering,
second being murdered, third advising her lover on how to murder himself (a bit
like the stages of the Freudian a child
is being beaten scenario) – it’s quite impossible to know whether, and on
which precise occasions, she is ever actually there. Disappearance of character, disappearance of flesh,
disappearance of sense: old-fashioned, referential reality flees this film in a
hurry, only to return in its monstrous, undecidable mutations and
transformations.
And
yet Nicki’s disappearance leaves us with a consoling possibility. Maybe the
hellish two-point tableau of screen and spectator has shrunken, by the end of
the film, into a small, compacted, insignificant, hallucinatory scene burning
itself out in the basement somewhere. And maybe cool blondes in search of
modern pleasures are still holidaying pleasantly, in the flesh, in the
Pittsburgh of their dreams. The mind boggles. (3)
MORE Cronenberg: eXistenZ, M. Butterfly, Crash, Naked Lunch
2.
Raymond Durgnat, Luis Buñuel (University of California Press, 2nd edition, 1977), pp. 139-146.
back
3.
Postscript: Videodrome did eventually
return to an Australian cinema screen in 1985 – as an official Film Festival
selection. There, an eminent programmer introduced it as schlock, trashy, fun stuff, which was also how Samuel Fuller’s White Dog (1982) was presented in the
same context. No comment!
© Adrian Martin North Fitzroy, 22 November 1984, 3.30-9.30pm |
