Classic Movie Review: 40 Years of 'Videodrome'

Videodrome (1983)

Directed by David Cronenberg

Written by David Cronenberg

Starring James Woods, Debbie Harry, Sonja Smits

Release Date February 4th, 1983

Published March 23rd, 2023

Videodrome is director David Cronenberg’s philosophical deconstruction of American culture, circa 1983. Yet, it remains relevant today as a commentary on the way in which American style violence infects the world. The story of shock television programmer, Max Renn, played by James Woods, Videodrome is not so much about Max as it is about how television is like an infectious disease spreading across the world with America centered in the narrative.

Max Renn is a carnival barker in the guise of a television executive. As the proprietor of Channel 83, Canada’s least watched yet most controversial cable network, Max specializes in blood and guts from around the globe. His programming features pornography and violence and even pornographic violence. Anything to get attention and sell advertising is okay by Max. But beyond his anything goes style of programming lingers an emptiness, a soullessness, that makes Max the perfect test subject for Videodrome.

What is Videodrome? For max, it’s the next big thing in sex and violence. Via his expert engineer and satellite pirate, Harlan (Peter Dvorkin), Max has stolen Videodrome with the intent of airing it on Channel 83. All that Videodrome appears to be, from what we are shown, is an hour of excruciating BDSM. A nude woman, never named, is brutally whipped for nearly an hour. There is no plot, no characters, just sexual violence. Max is convinced that he has a hit on his hands.

What Max doesn’t realize, not immediately anyway, is that Videodrome isn’t a TV show, it's not scripted, and it is not consensual. Videodrome was not filmed on a soundstage in Malaysia, it was not created in international waters to escape the law, but rather in a non-descript, lowkey studio in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The Videodrome is a real snuff film being broadcast with dire intention from a seemingly unlikely place. With the aid of a long dead Professor, Dr Brian O'Blivion (Jack Creley), Max discovers that Videodrome is the creation of a shadowy American, political cabal. It was created to take over vulnerable minds, like Max’s, and uses violent and sexual imagery to compel the vulnerable toward violence.

Max was chosen because he was a soulless hack, a man with no moral center, a man who lacks character. Max is an empty vessel that Videodrome, and the cabal behind it, can manipulate to do their bidding. Max represents the world consumer, the viewer, the audience drawn toward the twisted thrill of blood and sex and violence via their television. Videodrome is the hypnotic drug of sex and violence at a televised distance, spread around the globe by television and movies via VHS or Betamax.

The cabal, which takes the guise of an ophthalmologist cult called Spectacular Vision, aims to use Videodrome to seduce and control the world. Max is their first successful test subject, the first one who didn’t kill themselves soon after the visions induced by Videodrome came about. The indication is that Max has become so inured to violent media that he’s among those capable of enduring and enacting the tenets Videodrome.

David Cronenberg is well known for his use of body horror. The ways in which he twists and mangles flesh is an artform. In Videodrome that talent for body horror is put to astonishing use. As Max is drawn further into the world of Videodrome things begin to happen to his body. Whether this is a hallucination is not entirely clear but for us, we see horrific things happen to Max’s body.

For example, as Max is home alone, contemplating Videodrome and watching it on a videocassette, a delusion takes hold. Max has a gun in his hand, he’s become paranoid that the creators of Videodrome are out to get him. Slowly, what he believes to be a rash on his torso begins to open up before his eyes. He contemplates the sideways gash in his belly and is compelled to push the gun into the gaping wound. The wound closes around the gun and Max is narrowly able to retrieve his hand before the wound heals with the gun inside him.

You don’t need a doctorate in symbology to understand Cronenberg’s connotation. Videodrome is an American creation intended to dull the senses to violence, internalizing it, making it a natural part of the human condition. The metaphor is desensitization. Max is becoming so consumed by the violent culture he propagates that he literally internalizes a symbol of that violence.

That violent culture that Max steals from an American satellite with intent of selling it in his home city of Toronto, Canada, is specifically American. We are told that Videodrome is produced in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a large American city. In the view of a Canadian such as Cronenberg, American culture is one of terrible, hideous violence. He approaches Videodrome through Max to point out how America exports violence to the world.

Max becomes a tool, for a time, of the creators of Videodrome. They want Max to kill for them. Using Max’s hallucinations, they enact mind control via the Videodrome. They convince Max to murder his partners in the TV station so that he can give them his television channel. They then set him upon the path to murder Bianca O’Blivion, the Professor’s daughter and the one person who appears capable of slowing the spread of Videodrome.

Bianca’s father is based on the late professor Marshall McLuhan who became famous in the 60’s and 70’s for his dissertations on the medium of media. Cronenberg was an actual student of McLuhan, having attended McLuhan's classes when he was a student at the University of Toronto. Thus Cronenberg extrapolating the themes of McLuhan comes from a firsthand perspective. It's no wonder that Cronenberg brings a particular passion to the points he's making about the ways in which television has pervaded the thoughts and minds of the world, reshaping the way we see the world for better and, certainly in Cronenberg's eyes, for the worse.

Videodrome ends with the haunting phrase "Long live the new flesh." The new flesh in this case is no flesh at all. It's oblivion, it's the recovery of the soul by renouncing flesh. That it happens via the gun suicide of the main character is deeply disturbing with intention but saying Cronenberg is calling on people to kill themselves to escape the insidious influence of television is the wrong message to take from Videodrome. Rather, Cronenberg is merely exploring an extreme. He's taking the insidiousness of television and its manipulative message makers to an extreme conclusion as a warning about where such ludicrous dedication to nothingness, the empty, bland, heart of modern culture, is death in a different form.

Cronenberg shocks and talks down at us with an extremity that is intended to get his overall point across. The search for extreme titillation and the soulless pursuit of capitalist excess are but another kind of death. Eventually, shock becomes normalized, what was once strange becomes familiar, and what should be appalling, if given 30 minutes in primetime night after night, simply becomes part of the furniture of our culture. As long as the appalling thing can be monetized, there appears to be no extreme that heartless money-grubbers like Max will go to.

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