Videodrome¶
316 words on Films
When seeing A History of Violence recently, I was reminded of David Cronenberg’s existence and decided that I had to see some of his other films as well, in this case his 1983 film Videodrome.
And sure enough, Videodrome is much closer to what I’d consider a typical Cronenberg film than A History of Violence was. In the film, Max who’s running a trashy TV channel and wants to push limits in the amounts of violence and porn he can broadcasts, comes across a show called Videodrome that he pirates off some satellite channel. It shows people being tortured and killed in a very realistic way (I also had faint Abu Ghraib memories coming up). He’s intrigued and wants to know more. Quickly everything starts being pretty fucked up with the videos, hallucinations and paranoia taking the better of him and the boundary of what’s real and what he hallucinates starting to blur.
In the end it’s all about mind control and illnesses being spread through that show, about people being killed or people being told to kill others. There’s a freaky ‘TV asylum’ where poor people can bathe in the glow of the cathode ray tube and there’s its dead owner, Brian O’Blivion, who continues living on video tapes. Max falls into this world of craziness which includes additional body openings to insert video tapes in and TVs that kiss and swallow you and just barely manages to survive it.
A complete freakshow, in short. But somehow it’s exactly what I expect of a Cronenberg film. Just like eXistenZ it’s a bit disgusting for the fact that things like video tapes are inserted into people and thus merging humans and the technology and it’s also quite scary to see the line between phantasy and reality blur that much. I also thought that the film looked much younger than the 20+ years it is old.
