Videodrome and Its Nostalgic Unfeeling

The VHS tape as a nostalgic weapon against the intangible, unfeeling digital age is ironic considering what it represents in Videodrome. Its fleshy surface, literally breathing and pulsating in veins, cases a world in which humankind’s deepest tactile, sexual and emotional desires manifest in images. These fuzzy cassettes labelled Videodrome – Malaysian snuff films disguised as a TV game show – create a drug-like effect; the overstimulation resulting in its viewers disposing of their outer flesh in favour of their inner selves.

Max Renn (James Woods) programmes CIVIC-TV with the best intentions one can have while peddling gore and softcore pornography. He’s foremost a businessman exploiting a gap in the market and justifies himself by explaining, “I care enough to give my viewers a harmless outlet for their fantasies and other frustrations. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a socially positive act.”

After talking radio agony aunt Nicki Brand (Deborah Harry) into bed, Max is horrified as she replicates the sadomasochistic acts from the tapes on herself. Nicki’s subsequent disappearance when she goes to audition for Videodrome causes Max to investigate claims by his purchaser Masha (Lynne Gorman) that everything on the show is “for real”.

He seemingly finds no perverse pleasure from the content at first. His prime reason for sourcing ‘harder’ material for the network is strictly for ratings. Max subscribes to the belief that going ‘softer’ – as shown in a tape of an Asian woman merely being sensual over a dildo – would make viewers search elsewhere for their kicks. But as he watches Videodrome more and more, his hallucinations reveal a man whose lusts go well beyond what his station can offer. He dreams of slapping his assistant around, waking up next to his girlfriend’s strangulated corpse, and whipping Masha with a cat o’ nine tails while she’s chained up within a blood red room.

Professor Brian O’Blivion (Jack Creley) describes the TV screen as “the retina of the mind’s eyes” that has a “raw experience for those who watch it”. David Cronenberg uses mundane imagery to ease the audience into this world; hence, sequences of Max alone in his apartment mulling over lewd photos as he eats leftover pizza, and of the unglamorous building in which CIVIC-TV operates.

This changes during his appearance on The Rena King Show, with its stagehands, cameras and lighting rigs all in clear view. A wholly synthetic setting, it’s no coincidence Max meets Nicki – introduced to the audience through a screen – for the first time here. Nicki’s beauty and openly erotic nature only exist in a place like television, where women are stripped of nuance in favour of the male gaze. Cronenberg uses intertextuality to his advantage by casting Blondie’s Deborah Harry as the love interest at a time when her poster was pinned up on many a bedroom wall.

Max’s experience of Videodrome turns him into an emotionless machine. His mind and body are manipulated by conflicting ideologies – those seeking mind-control through technology versus the new flesh. They insert videotapes into a vagina-shaped slot in his stomach and he acts upon what they contain. The film’s obsession with tape, despite how it’s a mere periphery item to the TV screen, comes from its rewritable nature. Anything can be recorded and spliced together and wiped as its author pleases, and this was the latest tool that could control the masses in 1982.

While one may smirk today at the outdated technology, Videodrome foretold how the screen itself will forever remain the main influence of our minds, even if the format changes. The Internet recently usurped television in telling us what to buy, how to look, and who to vote for -not to mention the ‘hard’ pornographic content – but its availability through more screens than ever means any perception of change and taking command of our own destinies is an illusion.

Cronenberg’s trademark body horror takes on a rubbery form in Videodrome. As Max loses all sense of reality, portrayed with a superbly unhinged performance by James Woods, he assumes a disfigured hand, locked by spikes grown out of his gun and welded together by skin. Never does it look realistic, but that’s the point: if the media and those controlling it painstakingly inject realism into their lies, wouldn’t this ‘realism’ up close appear entirely fake?

That Max finds himself incapable of distinguishing what’s real makes him a tragic figure. He bounces from one set of lies to the next, in the end shooting himself because a projection of Nicki tells him: “To become the new flesh, you have to kill the old flesh”, even though the ‘old flesh’ is the last vestige Max has on the real world. The organs flying out of the television depicts the death of Max’s outer body, succumb to fantasy and inner elation.

In the current wave of Ready Player One-style 1980’s nostalgia, the VHS tape has emerged as a symbol of the good old days before computers took the joy out of discovery and consumption. Yet, Videodrome shows the format was just another step in making the TV screen as attractive to humans as a bee is to brightly coloured flowers. To say the videotape carries substantialism over clinically pristine streaming or DVD and Blu-Ray is yet another lie from those looking for you to stay goggle-eyed and buy more of their lies.

Long live the new flesh, indeed.