One of my favorite movies is Videodrome, mainly because it deals with the horrors of Cable TV and home taping (on Beta!!!), which are two things that scared 1983 Hollywood more than the average person. Never before has Hollywood so nakedly laid out it's fears for the world to see.
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"Death to Videodrome! Long live the new flesh!" This is a great film and I'd like to suggest that it had more on its mind than the economic rivalry between the motion picture industry and emergent cable TV and home video. Cronenberg based Brian O'Blivion's philosophy on Marshall McLuhan's ideas about a future in which people are globally connected by electronic media, creating a collective, externalized nervous system. This would be the foundation for a new global cult of tribal magic, otherwise known as media spectacle, that bound people together in a shared hallucination which could no longer be distinguished from ordinary reality. It is revealed in the film that the torture porn of "Videodrome" is being produced by the Spectacular Optical Corporation in an effort to harden the sensibilities of a North American population that has gone too soft to face the dangers and violence growing in the geopolitical scene. Of course, it would just be crackpot speculation to think that Hollywood, television and the internet have today merged into what Fox Mulder called the "military-industrial-entertainment complex" and are busy inuring people to the idea of torture in a new and dangerous world. I recommend Cronenberg's "eXistenZ" as an updated companion piece to "Videodrome", which plays out some of the same questions in the world of totally-immersive virtual reality games. "Death to the demoness, Allegra Geller!" Long live...Operation Smooch?
Wow...I can't top that! I need to see this again-just for Debbie Harry!
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