Videodrome

I love Videodrome. Such a complex, deeply nuanced tale of consumerism, both television and pornography, and the feeble, susceptible mind, open to influence, however it is packaged. Cronenberg (you sick, beautiful freak) forces the audience to consider not what if consuming violent, dubious, and possibly illegal/unethical media causes someone to be an innately, inarguably “bad” person, but what if it does alter us, change us for better or worse? What if our “voyeurism”, from our safe, seemingly unreachable corner, our side of the screen, is no longer passive but an active participation? We cannot watch without being changed. Every image and every representation constructs what we understand as normal, desirable, frightening, disgusting. Real. Max thinks that he is the spectator, but he isn’t. Eventually, he too becomes a spectacle, and his original power and masculinity is reversed in almost every conceivable way. At the beginning, Max owns the image, judges it, programs it, distributes it. Throughout Videodrome, we witness Max transform, his body manipulated, once closed and autonomous, now open, vulnerable, penetrable. It’s brilliant. It’s such a wonderful, grotesque reversal of the traditional narrative: male spectator and female spectacle. “Long live the new flesh!” becomes ambiguous, although it was never so simple and limited. It’s disease and evolution. Tumor and healthy, functioning organ. Death and transcendence. Anyways, gotta love the torso-vagina. So grateful to exist along a nasty, magnificent mind like Cronenberg’s.