Videodrome (1983)

One of the fun things about following film - or any creative medium, really - is to pick up on an artist's pet obsessions. And as anyone who has seen the infamous "organic gun" scene from eXistenZ knows, few directors have more obvious and more bizarre pet obsessions than David Cronenberg. These include - and I'm sure I'm leaving one or two out - sexuality and its expression in an era of urban isolation; the remolding of the human body in spectacularly grotesque ways; people consumed by fantasy and pathology; seemingly supernatural horror unleashed by medical science; and, well, cars, an interest which came out harmlessly in Fast Company and much more controversially in Crash, a.k.a. That Movie With James Spader And The People Who Get Off On Car Crashes.

Videodrome is on my personal Top 20 list of favorite films (so don't expect an unbiased review!), but I find it's hard to recommend. Not so much because I think Cronenberg is one of those directors whose style can be so jarring that it can be a hurdle for new viewers (like, say, people who haven't even seen Tommy being exposed to Ken Russell's more obscure works or my poor mother who saw Drag Me To Hell expecting a straightforward horror film), but because it's hard to describe what it is in genre terms. I suppose it's accurate enough to say it's a horror film with sci-fi trappings. After all, it's a film about a sinister TV station that alters one's consciousness just by watching it. Yet at the same time Videodrome does in some ways take the shape of a political thriller.

Our target of bizarre intrigue is a network executive immersed in technology and softcore porn, Max Renn (James Woods!), one of the heads of a small but notorious Toronto station that specializes in offering up programming that's essentially softcore pornography. Imagine Cinemax circa the mid-'late 90s. Always aware of the possibility that his station might lose its edge, Renn is immediately interested when one of his techs shows him Videodrome, a pirate channel that broadcasts nothing but graphic scenes of people being beaten, whipped, and chained up before an electrified wall. Assuming that Videodrome is completely staged, Max tries to discover who is behind it, looking to adapt it for his own network. His lover, media personality Nikki Brand (Debbie Harry!), sets out on her own once she finds out that Videodrome isn't being broadcast from Malaysia like Renn's employee originally thought, but much closer to home in Philadelphia. See, Nikki has a masochistic streak that simultaneously unnerves and fascinates Max, and she shares Max's obsession with Videodrome so intensely she decides to "audition." Of course, she doesn't return to tell Max if she got the part.

Things become even stranger when Max's only solid lead turns out to be Brian O'Blivion (Jack Creley), a flamboyant philosopher who teaches that television has the potential to fundamentally alter human consciousness and who only communicates to the world through VHS tapes (there is at least one good reason he does this, as it turns out...), and his daughter Bianca (Sonja Smits), who takes dad's philosophy to the point that she runs the Cathode Ray Mission where the idea is that homeless people can be reintegrated into society by watching hours of television every day. Instead of getting closer to Videodrome, Max instead finds himself forced to endure a series of surreal hallucinations, topped off by the TV image of Brian addressing him directly and claiming that he was "Videodrome's first victim." As more visions, especially of the missing Nikki Brand, flood in, what's real and what isn't ceases to be a concern for Max, who finds out a bit too late that he's been drafted into a war between two ideological factions with the horrific potential of Videodrome as the prize...

Arguably the greatest asset to Videodrome is that, even though the plot essentially centers around a sinister UHF show, the technological developments of the past twenty years have made the vision behind Videodrome more potent, not less. After all, with the advent of the Internet and thousands-of-channels television its points about how immersion in information/entertainment (can there even be a real distinction nowadays?) alters our fundamental perception of reality and the lure of 24/7 sex and violence are all the more understandable.

What makes Videodrome interesting - but also what helps explain why the film was mostly panned and ignored until Cronenberg became a household name with The Dead Zone - is that it completely subverts the thriller genre trappings it sets up at the beginning. Without giving too much away (in other words, minor spoiler alert), Max truly becomes helpless before the forces working just off-screen. Appropriately enough, Max is toward the end of the film as passive as any TV watcher, which makes his final act in the film even more chilling. There's something tragic in seeing Max, who starts out as a sleaze peddler but a rather well-meaning (and surprisingly naive) sleaze peddler, eventually lose even his own personality.

With the exception of Max himself and maybe Nikki Brand, who plays a more significant role than one might expect from a character who technically dies off-screen by the end of the first act, the film's characters do tend to be overshadowed by its ideas. Bianca O'Blivion is magnificently and subtly played by Sonja Smits, but with the exception of presenting us with the beautifully surreal idea of the Cathode Ray Mission she does little more than serve as our Exposition Fairy. Masha (Lynne Gorman) is another well-played and well-written character, an over-fifty feminist pornographer who still has an active sexuality, who likewise ends up doing little other than advancing the plot.

But since this is a Cronenberg film, and there is one thing people usually remember best from a Cronenberg film: the grotesque and aggressively organic visuals, which show up in abundance. There's a phallic arm-gun that shoots tumors, a television set that pulsates like flesh, and a stomach that opens up in a vagina-esque way to provide a handgun. And no matter how outlandish they are all pulled off well, proving yet again that CGI ain't everything.

I'd go as far as to say that Videodrome is a classic, a film that manages to be brainy without being impenetrable and takes different genre components, mixes them together, and goes into several unexpected places with them. It's the first major studio film Cronenberg got to pull off with little interference, which is usually a warning sign but in this case it's a very good thing indeed.