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25 Hours Part Ten (Final)
Oct. 31st, 2011 01:03 amNow we come at last to the stop at the very end of the tour: Darkest Toronto, where lurks the extremely local cable TV station owned by Moses Znaimer Max Renn (James Woods), a borderline-sleazy hustler who talks a good game about pushing cultural boundaries and creativity vs. censorship, while simultaneously always keeping an eye out for a cheap, shocking Next Big Thing. Thus far, he's gotten a fair amount of traffic just from programing porn and violence, but everything people are trying to sell him these days—a “classical” orgy film full of belly-dancing and jiggly bums, the samurai equivalent of a Red Shoe Diaries episode—seems far too “soft” for the audience he assumes he should be courting. Max believes needs something harder, something that goes a little too far in the other direction...and with the help of his proto-hacker “signal pirate” friend Harlan, a satellite geek grabbing broadcasts from all over the world, he thinks he might have finally found it.
The show in question is (natch) something called Videodrome, which Harlan thinks might be coming from Malaysia, or maybe Pittsburgh. As Max notes, the production values are obviously rock-bottom: There's just one set, a uterine-colored basement somewhere with a possibly-electrified mud wall in the background, and every day at some randomly shifting time masked thugs drag a fresh victim wearing a Chilean torture factory-style smock in, kicking and screaming. These people—women, mainly—are then tied up, stripped naked and abused, possibly to death; certainly, none of them ever makes a repeat appearance. “It's genius,” Max says. “No script...what's the point?” “These people have something you don't, Max,” his old friend Masha warns. “They have a philosophy. And that makes them dangerous.”
Max brings his pirated videotape of Videodrome home with him, where sexy radio “psychologist” Nikki Brand (Debbie Harry) accidentally pops it in while looking for some icebreaker porn. (Nikki and Max first met while both appearing on the same talk show, debating the topic of “How Far Is Too Far?” and sharing airtime with weirdo media expert Brian O'Blivion [Jack Creeley], who only appears on TV “while on TV”—ie, via closed-circuit monitor-to-monitor broadcast.) Though Max is afraid the tape will spoil the mood, it actually has the opposite effect: Nikki becomes immediately aroused, burns her own breast with a cigarette, then invites Max to hurt her some more. She also starts bugging him for information about how to get onto Videodrome. “I think I want to audition,” she says, with a dreamy look in her eyes.
So far so predictable, maybe. Certainly, looking back on Videodrome from a 21st century perspective, it now seems to have predicted a horde of now well-established goreno and torture porn horror tropes, and its pre-Internet attitude towards what is and isn't acceptable in terms of fetish material can seem a trifle quaint, at least in the initial stages. But neither Max, Nikki nor the audience has seen anything yet, in terms of where things are going.
Sooner than later, the already slightly-paranoid Max moves into a state where he becomes completely unable to tell what he can only assume are his own hallucinations from “real life”. As befits a world in which television, as Brian O'Blivion intones, has become “the retina of the mind's eye”, he starts to believe that the Videodrome signal he's been viewing has genuinely infected and deformed him—first arousing sadomasochistic desires and sudden spurts of rage, costing him sleep and making him act impulsively, but later making him think he's having sex with Nikki in front of the Videodrome wall, or making out with his own TV, whose screen starts to swell and breathe sexily, much like the image of Nikki's lips that's currently projecting through it. Or, eventually, that he's abruptly developed a vaginal slit in his stomach which he proceeds to “lose” an entire gun inside, later withdrawing it when needed, only to find it's developed slimy cables that burrow inside his veins to render it inseparable from his hand.
In a lot of ways, the emotionally bruising, coldly-calculated spectacle of Videodrome often seems like the thesis statement to Cronenberg's entire early career, finally voicing aloud an “argument” he'd already spent at least six films developing. It's body horror, yes, but it's also mind horror—the horror of not understanding how what thoughts you “allow” yourself to think may be changing your own flesh, usually for the worse. It's also literally trans- and post-humanist, especially when it comes to the denouement of Brian O'Blivion's narrative thread, in which his daughter Bianca (a social worker who runs a soup kitchen for homeless people who are hopelessly television-addicted) explains to Max that her father died of cancer some time ago but recorded thousands of videotapes before that happened, thus “living on” as his own TV image. Then there's sinisterly affable businessman Barry Convex (Les Carlson), who sells designer frames for glasses, but also may have created the Videodrome signal as a mass thought-control/subliminal brainwashing method. Conspiracy piles on conspiracy, each new iteration contradicting the last, until all Max is left with are a murderous series of slogans: “Television is reality, and reality less than television. Death to Videodrome. Long live the New Flesh.”
And...that's all, folks! This has been fun, but I'm dead on my damn feet, and I have a book to write. Happy Hallowe'en.
The show in question is (natch) something called Videodrome, which Harlan thinks might be coming from Malaysia, or maybe Pittsburgh. As Max notes, the production values are obviously rock-bottom: There's just one set, a uterine-colored basement somewhere with a possibly-electrified mud wall in the background, and every day at some randomly shifting time masked thugs drag a fresh victim wearing a Chilean torture factory-style smock in, kicking and screaming. These people—women, mainly—are then tied up, stripped naked and abused, possibly to death; certainly, none of them ever makes a repeat appearance. “It's genius,” Max says. “No script...what's the point?” “These people have something you don't, Max,” his old friend Masha warns. “They have a philosophy. And that makes them dangerous.”
Max brings his pirated videotape of Videodrome home with him, where sexy radio “psychologist” Nikki Brand (Debbie Harry) accidentally pops it in while looking for some icebreaker porn. (Nikki and Max first met while both appearing on the same talk show, debating the topic of “How Far Is Too Far?” and sharing airtime with weirdo media expert Brian O'Blivion [Jack Creeley], who only appears on TV “while on TV”—ie, via closed-circuit monitor-to-monitor broadcast.) Though Max is afraid the tape will spoil the mood, it actually has the opposite effect: Nikki becomes immediately aroused, burns her own breast with a cigarette, then invites Max to hurt her some more. She also starts bugging him for information about how to get onto Videodrome. “I think I want to audition,” she says, with a dreamy look in her eyes.
So far so predictable, maybe. Certainly, looking back on Videodrome from a 21st century perspective, it now seems to have predicted a horde of now well-established goreno and torture porn horror tropes, and its pre-Internet attitude towards what is and isn't acceptable in terms of fetish material can seem a trifle quaint, at least in the initial stages. But neither Max, Nikki nor the audience has seen anything yet, in terms of where things are going.
Sooner than later, the already slightly-paranoid Max moves into a state where he becomes completely unable to tell what he can only assume are his own hallucinations from “real life”. As befits a world in which television, as Brian O'Blivion intones, has become “the retina of the mind's eye”, he starts to believe that the Videodrome signal he's been viewing has genuinely infected and deformed him—first arousing sadomasochistic desires and sudden spurts of rage, costing him sleep and making him act impulsively, but later making him think he's having sex with Nikki in front of the Videodrome wall, or making out with his own TV, whose screen starts to swell and breathe sexily, much like the image of Nikki's lips that's currently projecting through it. Or, eventually, that he's abruptly developed a vaginal slit in his stomach which he proceeds to “lose” an entire gun inside, later withdrawing it when needed, only to find it's developed slimy cables that burrow inside his veins to render it inseparable from his hand.
In a lot of ways, the emotionally bruising, coldly-calculated spectacle of Videodrome often seems like the thesis statement to Cronenberg's entire early career, finally voicing aloud an “argument” he'd already spent at least six films developing. It's body horror, yes, but it's also mind horror—the horror of not understanding how what thoughts you “allow” yourself to think may be changing your own flesh, usually for the worse. It's also literally trans- and post-humanist, especially when it comes to the denouement of Brian O'Blivion's narrative thread, in which his daughter Bianca (a social worker who runs a soup kitchen for homeless people who are hopelessly television-addicted) explains to Max that her father died of cancer some time ago but recorded thousands of videotapes before that happened, thus “living on” as his own TV image. Then there's sinisterly affable businessman Barry Convex (Les Carlson), who sells designer frames for glasses, but also may have created the Videodrome signal as a mass thought-control/subliminal brainwashing method. Conspiracy piles on conspiracy, each new iteration contradicting the last, until all Max is left with are a murderous series of slogans: “Television is reality, and reality less than television. Death to Videodrome. Long live the New Flesh.”
And...that's all, folks! This has been fun, but I'm dead on my damn feet, and I have a book to write. Happy Hallowe'en.
