Videodrome (1983)

Television is a dangerous technology. Its like a chainsaw, used harmfully it can deform, mutilate and amputate.
This damage is psychological and cultural - yet so many discount it because they cannot directly see it, only its effects.
Television is like radiation, it can mutate and decay millions and millions with its invisible rays, causing cancerous brains.


In 'Videodrome' the hero Max Renn is modeled on Toronto CITY-TV owner Moses Znaimer. (A year after Videodrome the real-life Moses will launch MuchMusic.) Max seeks the aid of the professor Brian O'blivion (on the screen above) modeled on famous Canadian media philosopher  Marshall McLuhan. Deborah Harry is the seductive femme fatale. The film is a horror-conspiracy set and filmed in Toronto during 1982-3.

Max is pirating a satellite feed of weird torture-porn, he becomes obsessed with it and gets his technician Harlan to track down the signal's source. Max even considers airing it because the production costs of the show must be so low. He figures the show must be coming from some South Asian hell-hole like Vietnam or Cambodia.

Harlan: There's no plot. It just goes on like that for an hour.
Max:Goes on like what?
Harlan: Like that. Torture, murder, mutilation.
Max: We never leave that room?
Harlan:Nope. It's a real sicko. For perverts only.
Max: It's brilliant. There's almost no production costs....you can't take your eyes off it. It's so realistic. Where do they get actors who can do this?
Harlan: Help me. I think he wants it.
Max: It's worth checking out - Did you have any trouble locking on to it?
Harlan: Not after I realized the Malaysia delay was a plant.
Max: It's not from Malaysia?
Harlan: You cannot fool 'Harlan the Prince of Pirates' for long.
Max: Harlan... where is it coming from?
Harlan: Pittsburgh. That's in the USA.

The torture-porn is American - and its mutating Max's brain. Lustful and sadistic hallucinations intrude on his everyday encounters, his mind is disintegrating. He seeks Dr. O'blivion and his daughter for help, they realize that it is a right-wing American corporation putting out the toxic signal, the logic being that only perverts would watch such a sick show, and such weak-willed perverts deserve brain cancer. Max rebels.

It is directed by David Cronenberg and his ambiguous conservative politics, but like many movies of this strangely powerful era - Terminator, They Live, Miracle Mile -it slips out of it's director's grasp into something more powerful and profound. The end of the film in a rusted-out tugboat in a Toronto wharf is near perfect to me and Cronenberg's intellectual pretensions and love of biological and bio-mechanical mutation prove the perfect mediums to show the dangers of TV.

Television gets inside our heads. It touches us inappropriately as it raises us - replacing parents and older culture. It tells us how to dress, act and speak - while questioning our worth. We laugh and cheer and jerk-off with it and cry and feel. It's blue glow is the nation's night-light. It teaches us history, tells us who should be our leaders and who are armies should kill.

The TV business model is dependant on advertizing - an industry dedicated to the art of 'hooking' human brains - by any means possible - and implanting memes in them (...jingles...sale prices...cute mascots...). They hope the brains caught by the fishing hooks will spread and memetically infect others.

Media technologies (radio, print, movies, smart phones) can nearly re-format a culture in a generation because they use art (song, acting, writing) as a weapon on a global-scale. For the baby-boomers and gen-X to remove the tendrils of TV would involved ripping out huge chucks of brain.

Videodrome makes our relationship to TV literal. It concertizes the metaphor. The invisible damage of TV's radiation is now visible and pulsatingly material.


We are TV-headed. North Americans see through the crude VR-machine of corporate media.




The glass screen that seems to divide us from the reality 'inside' the TV is organic and threatening. It is not a barrier but a membrane, alive and pointing at us as the next target. War and crime multiply inside our mind's eye.




The TV is no longer sleek and immaterial but disgustingly fleshy. You cannot touch it without it smearing you with blood. The idea that it can simply neutralized by flipping a channel or OFF switch is ridiculous. It is as real as JFK's brain-matter or the dripping flesh of a napalmed peasant or a protester cracked skull.




Video-tapes are just as organically volatile - more so even, the VHS revolution brought porn and horror to the masses. As a child the shelves of video rental stores were boxes of illicit nightmares and fantasies, you had to avoid sections of those stores to avoid creepy feeling as your eyes glanced knives, skulls and breasts.





And how we love it. We take TVs to our beds each night, we dedicate lives to TV shows and movies, obsessed and obsessing. It befriends the lonely and teaches us what is cool. We waste away in its grip but we would go crazy without it.



Max Renn's Toronto station was called CIVIC TV it's real-life counterpart Znaimer's CITY-TV was launched as a small UHF channel in 1971 but hard grown quickly through showing softcore pornography at night and American horror movies. Later Much Music would air Nine Inch Nail's yHappiness in Slavery video and we would treasure and trade VHS tapes of that broadcast like it was a holy relic. Cronenberg, every the cautious liberal, questioned how this tide of TV sex & violence might effect the population's morality, but he was also astute enough to realize that sex nor violence was in itself was the ultimate draw - sadism was the real attraction. Voyeuristic sadism was an addicting and soul-destroying drug.



Videodrome works as an analogy for many things and like the best Sci-Fi it is prophetic. It foresaw the rise of hard-core porn in every boy's bedroom and the torture-porn genre (hostel, saw, ect...) that arose from the 'Wars of Terror' and Al Queda's low-fi decapitation videos. But I have always felt that Videodrome also capture the effects of Reality TV's mass-market sadism on us.

No matter what metaphor you like the undeniable message is that TVs want to merge with you, mutate you and control your perceptions, The Videodrome signal makes it so that you cannot look a woman without imaging sexual violence, nor look at any human without a compensatory hallucinatory rush of sadistic images to prop-up your own ego.

I used to play the first-person shooter GoldenEye (Nintendo64) until I realized I was dreaming in it's 3D wire-frame hallways and every time I look at a human I would focus on their heads and then feel a strong second focusing as I sighted them in my telescopic scope. I felt my vision focus fir a head shot. The game was invading both my waking and dreaming life, it was re-formatting them for gun battles.

I only played that game for a few months - I was raised by Television.

In the years following 2001 a terrible period occured.
The internet brought acutal Malaysian porn to the masses, right beside gore videos, goth and horror.
Than came the "terror wars" of the "war on terror"