Videodrome at 40: David Cronenberg’s singular tech horror remains relevant

Early on in David Cronenberg’s masterpiece Videodrome, TV station programmer Max Renn (James Woods) brings radio host Nicki Brand (Debbie Harry) back to his bachelor pad for the seduction that’s been coming since they exchanged some heated words about the decline of western culture on a roundtable talkshow. She declared the “gorging on [overstimulation]” promoted by his channel Civic-TV to be a bad thing, only to concede a few seconds later that she can’t help living “in a highly excited state”. So as they enter his cluttered apartment, where most couples might put on Al Green, they instead set the mood with a videotape containing raw, context-free footage of a nude woman being flogged with a cat-o’-nine-tails by a hooded man. “I can’t believe this,” she says, but she stops Max when he offers to turn it off, purring, “No, I can take it.”

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The power dynamic between these kindred sickos seesaws back and forth as she startles him by asking him to cut her shoulder with a knife – in the exact same spot Saul Tensor would give an erotic incision to his lover Caprice decades later in Cronenberg’s recent Crimes of the Future – and he then gets in touch with his inner dom while piercing her ear. On their next date, she stuns him by gently pressing a lit cigarette to her breast. Max invoked Freud in their earlier televised tete-a-tete; imagine what the good doctor would have to say about this little phallic symbol, crushed on the bosom of womanhood with ease, and yet also with enough pain to leave a scar.

Voracious as its appetites for carnage and skin may be, Videodrome anxiously sweats the question of how far is too far, a debate that’s grown more dystopian than even Cronenberg dared to fear in the 40 years since he first loosed his veiny, slimy vision of future panic on audiences. As the head honcho of Civic-TV, an off-the-beaten path UHF operation beaming a steady stream of sex and violence just shy of illegality to Torontonian insomniacs with exotic interests, Max sifts through heaps of video in much the same way an online content moderator combs the internet. He curates a mix of productions in the sweet spot of endearing sleaze, rejecting the Orientalist softcore title Samurai Dreams as too classy, and his brain is warped once he views a bona fide snuff flick concealing a signal that causes hallucinations and tumors. Meanwhile in the present, the watchdogs at porn tube sites populated by user uploads must differentiate between innocent smut and an unending torrent of pure evil from a technological otherworld of deepfakes and AI.

Cronenberg’s nightmare was never that we’d be poisoned by filth, but that perversion itself could be perverted. Every freakazoid with a passion for splatter pictures and stag films knows they’re not real, their artifice key to their charm. The trouble starts when shadowy forces chip away at our precious human ability to tell the difference.

Just as the Silicon Valley startups behind chatbots and image generators won’t rest until they see the whole of art conquered, monetized and vanquished, Videodrome situates its horror and sci-fi conceits in a political climate of mounting reactionary influence. The mind-scrambling terror contagion eating away at the edges of Max’s reality isn’t just something that’s happened, but a deliberate act of offensive warfare from a clandestine conspiracy (which gives the film its title) bent on purging the planet of degeneracy, their master plan being to infect anyone deviant enough to tune into their frequency. In 1983, it had been only eight short years since Cronenberg was evicted from his building for violating a “morality clause” in his leaser’s contract, and he was still freshly aware that societal authorities would claim taste as a damning referendum on character whenever possible. For all the absurd humor applied to the enemy’s cause – their headquarters hidden behind the Spectacular Optical eyeglasses retailer showroom, their leader’s typically Pynchonian name of “Barry Convex” – there’s a genuine hostility in their wish to destroy an entire way of life.

Obscenity, indecency, pornography: these are things worth fighting for, the sacred “new flesh” that Max takes up as a rallying cry once he’s reprogrammed by the daughter of media theorist Brian O’Blivion (a self-selected “special name”, as he explains in a close prediction of email addresses, gamer handles and social-media @’s) to join the righteous fight against the Videodrome. The Marshall McLuhan-ish public intellectual O’Blivion also appears on the talkshow where Max and Nicki first get the hots for each other, albeit via the mediating barrier of a rolled-in TV set playing a tape he’s pre-recorded. He says that the television is “the retina of the mind’s eye”, a later tape adding that “whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it.” Though Cronenberg’s too morbidly fascinated to identify as a Luddite, it stands to reason that someone with a home in the cinema – a vetted, finite, collective phenomenon taking place fully on site – would have a natural suspicion of TV’s intense potential as an isolating, endless flood of content transmitted from elsewhere through freer open-sourced access. As a boy in Canada, he’d sometimes be able to pick up TV signals from Buffalo, and he never forgot the chilling thrill of happening upon something you were never meant to see, now the universal experience of internet navigation.

The film’s definitive image is that of a gun, either the one that extends from a TV set with a screen stretching like skin, or the one that fuses to and melds with Max’s hand. But to presume in these symbols an underlying sentiment as blunt as “technology is trying to assimilate and kill you” would be to miss the finer points of Cronenberg’s ethic as composer and connoisseur of exploitation cinema. A television, a camera, a broadcast signal or a computer can all be used for right or wrong like any other tool, an innocent outlet for healthy urges separated from an incubator for destructive pathologies by a razor-thin line. McLuhan famously coined the adage about the medium being the message; in this instance, the message mutates into the medium, ill intent corrupting the devices that provide us with pleasure. Cronenberg’s genius was to rebuke kneejerk distrust of that pleasure, and to recognize its virtues beyond simply feeling good. He’s on the same humanely depraved frequency as Max and Nicki, and just as they find temporary solace in one another through torture porn, his films have assured generations of scuzz enthusiasts that they’re not alone on their odyssey through the underground.