Videodrome

I cannot stop thinking about this movie. Actually expected it to be even surrealer and freakier than it actually is just from what I heard about it beforehand. It's surprisingly grounded particularly with the benefit of getting to witness its almost prophetic vision about 45 years in the future. Videodrome is a story about how extremes and contradictions contrast each other, be it Spectacular Optical's philosophy versus the things they're producing or the contradictory nature of filmic reality itself. Regarding the latter, it's almost constructionist as it interrogates the relationship between perception and reality. It's hard to differentiate between hallucination and filmic reality because to both Max and the viewer, they're practically the same. Diegetic reality and subjectivity merge and the subjective takes on the property of reality. Both the hallucination and the physical are "real" at the same time. Whereas I cannot relate to the experience of stumbling onto some fucked up pirate tv channel or some strange vhs tape due to me being 23 years old born in 2003, I found myself reminded of early internet gore videos, the kind that one friend has on his phone of iPod Touch for some godforsaken reason and shoves into people's faces during recess. As morbid as they are, these videos carry the DNA that Cronenberg lays out.