Note: the footnotes are not enabled for this document. Hopefully some time in the future I will fix that.

 

CHAPTER 7: Videodrome (1982)

“Why would anyone watch a scum show like Videodrome?”

            Videodrome is Cronenberg’s epistemological break film: the film which decisively reconfigures the basic dramatic structure of his films. For in this film, still one of Cronenberg’s boldest and most risk-taking, there is finally a shift of the ground of the action into the male protagonist, a centralization of this masculine figure who can now properly represent the masculine sensibility of the film. The marginalization or diminishment of this figure in the earlier features looks in retrospect like a kind of evasion—or, to be more charitable, perhaps simply a stage in the filmmaker’s continuing hunt to discover the ground zero of desire and prohibition. Now, that centre is at last discovered to be not the sexually transgressive woman, nor the inventor-father, nor unfeeling and predatory elements of society (although all of those forms are importantly present in Videodrome), but, rather, the self. And the appetites and anxieties, with their bodily mutations and diseases, finally unfold in and enact themselves on the self, and the self’s body. The self is the monster.

            Cronenberg has said that Videodrome is “a first-person film,” and this idea is the key to the film. The protagonist, Max Renn, is present in every scene of the movie, and again to quote Cronenberg, “We get no information that Max doesn’t get himself.” President and part owner of a Toronto independent television station (Civic-TV, Channel 83) specializing in sensational programming with heavy doses of sex and violence, Max encounters test transmissions of an experimental show called “Videodrome” consisting of nothing but sadistic torture and murder. But, as he only gradually discovers, the Videodrome signal induces powerful and complex hallucinations which are often impossible to distinguish from non-hallucinatory reality. These hallucinations—entering the film most unmistakeably and shockingly when Max sees a gigantic quasi-vaginal slit appear in his abdomen—intensify and proliferate until they dominate Max’s life and cut him off from outward reality. And while this process is going on, he is being pulled confusingly by a whole array of different influences. These include radio pop-psychologist sex-siren Nicki Brand, who introduces him to the exciting and frightening realm of sadomasochistic pleasure while watching Videodrome torture; the video pronouncements of “media prophet” Professor Brian O’Blivion, who preaches that television has usurped reality, and, as inventor of the hallucination- and tumour-causing Videodrome signal, has fallen victim to its destructive effects; the current owners of Videodrome, a corporation called Spectacular Optical, which wants to use the device for political ends, has covertly introduced Max to the signal, and “programs” him to become an assassin and to give them his television station; and O’Blivion’s daughter, Bianca, who is dedicated to spreading her father’s gospel of transformation-through-television, and “counter-programs” Max with the transcendent idea of “the New Flesh” as an apotheosis of the psychological changes occurring in him. In the end a hopelessly scrambled and anguished Max, on the run from police and immersed in ever more powerful and confusing hallucinations, fires a pistol bullet into his brain—though he may think that by doing so he is entering into another, utterly transformed, realm of existence.

            Notwithstanding the external forces apparently initiating the Videodrome signal and later attempting to manipulate Max like a marionette, the precise characteristics of his hallucinations are all embodiments of his inner personal conlicts, somatizations of a (malign) psychic condition, as in so many of the earlier films. More overtly and explicitly than ever before (except perhaps in the quite different context of Shivers), the problem is sexual. It is a problem of transgressive sexual appetite, explicitly sadistic sexual appetite, which produces excitement and feelings of liberation, then harm and guilt, and finally complete psychic chaos and self-destruction. In this respect, Videodrome is a self-accusatory film, far more so than any of Cronenberg’s previous films, and setting the pattern for many of his later ones. At the same time, the film remains ambivalent, perhaps even confused, on this question of whose fault all these dreadful outcomes are. Certainly the presence of unscrupulous power-hungry institutions like Spectacular Optical, of crazed intellectual idealists like Brian O’Blivion, and of an entire society whose basic reality is becoming vicarious, suggests that the fate of the individual subject Max Renn is not entirely of his own making. And yet even clearer is the outline of a transgressively-desiring person whose appetites, combined with his inadequate understanding of their real nature and potential consequences, precipitate disaster. Altogether, the film undecidably dichotomizes the source of disaster: it is politicized (externalized), and it is sexualized (internalized). The split is epitomized in the mechanism by which the hallucinations are created: the “Videodrome” subsignal, transmittable under any picture, is one cause; but so is the presence of sadistic sexual appetite in the viewer. And yet as the film moves along, it gravitates more and more towards a primacy of the personal and the psychic.

            The first-personness of Videodrome is not only relative to Cronenberg’s earlier films, it is absolute. The film moves far beyond the conventions of identificatory protagonist-oriented narrative to a submersion in the central character’s increasingly fevered and disconnected hallucinations. It is not just Max Renn who becomes delirious, boundaryless, fantastically beset—it is the film. Cronenberg has always expressed his allegiance to the romantic-existentialist-modernist idea of the artist as heroic and transgressive explorer—explorer especially of the inner sources of transgression. His admiration especially for William Burroughs has always taken this form, and his attempts to emulate Burroughs have led him to create works which seek a direct, oneiric connection with unconscious instincts and associations. Videodrome is, along with Naked Lunch, certainly the best—most extreme and virtuosic—example of this phenomenon. The film’s absolutely un-objective plunge into the realm of bodily disorder, identity-chaos, bewildering transformation and abjection, signals a new commitment of Cronenberg to this principle of dreamlike truth to the imagination, an embrace of fundamental disorientation as the price for a direct connection with the unconscious, and a discovery of a new path to the goal of artistic honesty.

            Not only does Videodrome restage Cronenberg’s eternal mind/body problem, it represents a massive return of all the primal forces which were, to a greater of lesser extent, excluded from Scanners: sexuality, the visceral body, disease, abjection, monstrosity. No Cronenberg film contains an image more shocking and disturbing, more indicative of the filmmaker’s particular brand of transgressive assault, than Max’s gigantic gaping, pulsating torsal vagina, into which he immediately inserts, and loses, a pistol, and which is brutally penetrated twice more later. The subsequent re-emergence of the pistol as a “Fleshgun” is an equally graphic assault, as is the extended, horrific “cancer-death” of Barry Convex. Fundamentally, these provocations are demonstrations of Cronenberg’s seriousness. We are far from the elements of “gross-out” horror humour in Shivers and Rabid here, and almost as far from the adventure-story thrills of Scanners. Videodrome’s political and social implications, taken up and augmented from Scanners, are also much more serious: deep and widespread, offering a kind of postmodern-paranoid model of manipulation of helpless private individuals by predatory corporate forces under conditions of universal technological penetration and colonization. At the same time, the protagonist whose psyche and body become the uncontrollable landscape of transgressive sexuality, boundaryless transformation and abjection, and murderous violence, becomes also in the end the foundational example of Cronenberg’s many suicidal melancholiacs. Driven further and further from stable identity and meaning, sinking into chaos and dereliction, experiencing the inexorable crumbling and collapse of his personality in a torrent of bewildering, irresistible images and compulsions, Max Renn becomes that figure for whom his life is impossible, his self is impossible. And this is the figure we will see again and again in Cronenberg’s subsequent films: in The Dead Zone, in The Fly, in Dead Ringers, in Naked Lunch, in M. Butterfly.

The Videodrome of theory

            Videodrome has attracted perhaps more commentary than any other Cronenberg film to date. Its thematization of media as an ubiquitously intrusive and identity-threatening force, of the transformations enabled and threats posed by information overload, of the dissolution of borders between simulacra and the real and between spectacle and the body, of the politics of image manipulation, of sexuality and subjectivity as unstable cultural constructions, are irresistibly attractive to postmodern cultural theorists. Marshall McLuhan is of course the starting point for Cronenberg here (and Brian O’Blivion is clearly a “radical” pastiche of McLuhan as a “media prophet”), but scholarly commentators have immediately gravitated to Foucault, Debord and especially Baudrillard as providing models according to which the film can be explicated. Indeed, this is putting the cart before the horse, since the project of so much theoretical writing in the field of popular culture is not to use theory to explicate texts, but rather to discover texts which will illustrate theory. In this respect, Videodrome is an object of almost pornographic appeal for scholars seeking an explicit textual embodiment of some of the most powerful contemporary currents of cultural theory. Virtually all commentators emphasize the film’s paranoid dimension of social manipulation and mind control, which connects individual anxieties about identity engulfment and transformation through media images with political analysis which asks questions about who wields media power and to what ends.

            The individual subject displayed widely in theory is a creature whose sphere of private identity is initially constructed exclusively by cultural impress, and then has its illusory unified autonomy both violated and dispersed by postmodern technological imbrication and media bombardment in a system of late-capitalist material exploitation. In this context, the loss of the unified subject is both necessary and inevitable. Since its private autonomy was always a disguise for hegemonic social currents operating the subject in puppet-like fashion through the mechanisms of ideology, its claim to authenticity is always-already false, and its destruction is hardly to be lamented. Simultaneously, the uncontainable and ungraspable explosion of technology in general and information systems in particular floods this falsely-autonomous subject so drastically that inevitably the dispersion of its unified identity must finally penetrate even its false consciousness, until it understands that it is dispersed. The “crisis” or “panic” (Kroker) which results from this loss of identity is, however, mitigated by the very dispersion of the subject whose “depth” is now removed and whose present “flatness” is affect-impaired. In this scenario, we are all identityless and panicked, but we have long since ceased thinking that the situation which rendered us so is fixable or even understandable, and in our scattered and overstimulated numbness our identityless panic is as shallow as our excitement or pleasure, so instead of despairing we might as well just go to a movie.

            And if we should encounter Videodrome there, our recognition of our own condition in that of Max Renn will also be only another spectacle-stimulation. Max’s experience in the film certainly dramatizes a radical loss of subjective identity at the hands precisely of the technological, materialist and media-intensive forces which are the primary carriers of social postmodernity. Moreover it replicates the postmodern condition in which the outside world is diminished or effaced through incomprehensibility and its place as a focus of attention and anxiety is taken by the body. But to suggest, as most commentary seeking to claim Cronenberg as an exemplary postmodernist does, that his films observe these transformations from the near side of the postmodern divide is, I think, a mistake. His films, and especially Videodrome, certainly display a highly sophisticated awareness of the pressures of the postmodern condition—of their insidious ubiquity and inescapablility. But Cronenberg is not at all convinced that unified subjectivity is a false and undesirable construct, and he is not at all sanguine about what state will follow its loss. And if he has been looking for alternatives to it ever since Stereo, he has yet to imagine one that works—or, to put it more strongly and accurately, one that is not catastrophic. He is more aptly described, in the term he has more and more adopted in his self-commentaries, as a (pessimistic) existentialist, who recognizes that technology plays a strong role in the way we define ourselves out of the emptiness, but for whom that existential self-identity is still unified, and still of absolutely basic importance.

            But such a perspective has no attractions for commentators seeking to situate Cronenberg in the middle of the postmodern stream. For Fredric Jameson, Videodrome not only is an exemplary postmodern text drawing the shallow, irridescent powers of popular narrative into the vacuum left by the death of high modernism, but also embodies a regime of cultural peripherality amidst a global system where centralized categories of meaning have dissolved. It is not surprising that a prominent Marxist cultural theorist has an exclusively political perspective on the film. From one angle, the film can be seen “as an articulated nightmare vision of how we as individuals feel within the new multinational world system”; meanwhile, of the “sexual nightmare” of Max’s ventral vagina, he merely says, “corporeal revulsion of this kind probably has the primary function of expressing fears about activity and passivity in the complexities of late capitalism.” In one capsule description, the film is “this titanic political struggle between two vast and faceless conspiracies (in which the hapless Max is little more than a pawn).” This is certainly to privilege the political text and subtext of the film, and to read its private horrors as entirely determined by socio-political (and in fact socio-geopolitical) forces.

            Scott Bukatman more straightforwardly integrates the film into a line of media theory which includes McLuhan and Debord and culminates in Baudrillard, where old oppositions between history and spectacle, reality and virtuality, self and the world, have disappeared. He also (rightly) invokes Burroughs, preacher of the image as virus and of a paranoid world where this virus is deliberately used by predatory powers to exercise mind-control over addicted/infected individuals. The result is the transformation, the scattering, the dissolution of the subject.

The subject is in crisis, its hegemony threatened by centralized structures of control, by a technology which simultaneously alienates and masks alienation, by a perception of its own helplessness.

In this scenario, Max is simply the designated victim. Certainly his own psychosexual anxieties play a part in his reduction, and destruction; but really it could have been any of us postmodern transformed subjects in a cultural environment where we are destined to function as “terminals.”

            Steven Shaviro is more attuned to the dimension of suffering and abjection, and his incisive study proclaims that “Cronenberg’s films display the body in its crude, primordial materiality.” A passionate defender of postmodern anti-holism, Shaviro finds in Cronenberg’s obsessive corporeality and palpitating abjection a strange site of resistance to ideology and power:

By insisting on the gross palpability of the flesh, and by heightening (instead of minimizing) our culture’s pervasive discomfort with materiality, Cronenberg opposes the way in which dominant cinema captures, polices, and regulates desire, precisely by providing sanitized models of its fulfillment.

For Shaviro, Cronenberg is not simply an illustration of postmodern media theory. Rather, “the brutally hilarious strategy of Videodrome is to take media theorists such as Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard completely at their word, to overliteralize their claims for the ubiquitous mediazation of the world.” But the difference between Cronenberg and (for example) Baudrillard is Cronenberg’s insistence on the palpability of mediated experience:

To abolish reference and to embrace “virtual reality” is not, as Baudrillard imagines, to reduce desire to a series of weightless and indifferent equivalences. The more images are flattened out and distanced from their representational sources, the more they are inscribed in our nerves, and flash across our synapses.

At the same time, however, Shaviro wants to claim Cronenberg as a Shavirian postmodernist, one who welcomes the destruction of stable categories both as a strategy of resistance and as an introduction to a new forms of ecstatic experience where the extremes of bodily experience share a common ground.

To the extent that the flesh is unbearable, it is irrecuperable. The extremities of agony cannot finally be distinguished from those of pleasure.

This is a credo of jouissance in abjection, and there is no doubt that Cronenberg’s films often occupy a terrain where the extremities meet, where the body’s abjection in pleasure or in pain is the site of a new and transformed kind of identity and experience.

            But it is my contention that this new space, this transformed identity, is in the end irredeemably destructive and impossible. What happens to Max Renn is “unbearable” indeed, and indeed it cannot be borne—not even by any drastically altered subjectivity or “New Flesh.” Its foundation in and relation to the “extremities of pleasure” (here, sadomasochistic sexual pleasure with Nicki) is not in any way functionally useful or progressive when it leads to ethical chaos, an absolute loss of boundaries and identity, and finally a melancholy so fundamental that suicide is the most positive option. Shaviro is right to disalign Cronenberg from the “weightless” virtuality of Baudrillard’s (or for that matter Bukatman’s) scattered subjectivity. Where he is wrong, I believe, is in thinking that Cronenberg has no nostalgia for the old unified subject. “Nostalgia,” to be sure, is not at all the right word to describe the horror and despair dramatized in the protagonist of every film from Videodrome to M. Butterfly in response to the dreadful leaching-away of stable personal identity. The fact that these identities were not so stable to start with, or that they were beset with serious and fundamental problems, or even that their sense of self was not rooted in any kind of existential truth, is ultimately irrelevant, since their last state is always much, much worse than their first.

The paranoid view

            But let us first pay what is due to the paranoid postmodern scenario. The Videodrome signal, co-invented by Brian O’Blivion, is taken over by Spectacular Optical, to be used for political purposes.   Spectacular Optical is to some degree an extension and continuation of all the previous institutions in Cronenberg’s films, from Stereo’s telepathic institute onwards, and has particular affinities with the menacing corporate anonymity of ConSec in Scanners. Both Spectacular Optical and ConSec are powerful organizations engaged in military and scientific development with conspiratorial overtones, and both of them have co-opted the inventions of the films’ idealistic scientists (O’Blivion and Paul Ruth respectively.) The extent of Spectacular Optical’s manipulation of Max is extreme: in order to ensure his exposure to the Videodrome signal the organization has actually gone so far as previously to plant an employee in Max’s business—his favorite technician and trusted right-hand man, Harlan. Having deliberately messed up his nervous system with the Videodrome signal the organization goes on to record the exact pattern of his hallucinations with a special helmet as a key to manipulating him more precisely—to murder his two partners at Channel 83 and to attempt the murder of their enemy Bianca O’Blivion.

            Spectacular Optical is actually far more frightening than ConSec, since it is planning to use Videodrome-relayed mind control to undertake large-scale social engineering of a hard-right-wing variety. It is particularly sinister in the wide reach of its influence. “We make inexpensive glasses for the Third World and missile-guidance systems for NATO,” says Barry Convex, Spectacular Optical’s Chief of Special Programmes and the suave, flinty-eyed personification of its power. This multinational aura, remarked by Jameson and others, derives also from the Asian appearance of the victims on the Videodrome program, the suggestion that signals emanating from Pittsburgh are re-rerouted through Malaysia, and Harlan’s political speech which pits the North American world against the rest. Also conjured out of these shadows is the sense of First-World capitalist domination and exploitation of the Third World in particular. It is not clear (as so many things in Videodrome are not) whether the corporation intends to use the signal to “program” viewers to perform robotic acts, as Max is programmed, or whether the idea simply is to send out the signal with the Videodrome torture-and-murder show and give cancerous brain-tumours to all the morally unfit people who will watch such a show. It is also not clear to what degree the corporation is pursuing material goals and to what degree ideological ones. Some of their actions appear inexplicable. How is it going to help Spectacular Optical to have Max Renn kill his partners, for example? He is certain to get caught almost immediately (except that he forestalls capture by his suicide), and will hardly be in a position to “give us Channel 83,” as the “cassette” he is programmed with repeatedly tells him to do. And how is a signal which gives anybody watching a fatal tumour, even when attached to a test-pattern, going to perform any comprehensible social control? But the very darkness of Spectacular Optical’s purpose, and even its apparent nonsensicalness, merely adds resonance to a paranoid perception.

            The notion of exercising “control” through the Videodrome signal which acts like a “virus” and infests the host body is certainly a conception deriving from Burroughs, as Bukatman and Grünberg both observe. Burroughs, possibly the most paranoid important writer in recorded history, elaborates theories of evil mind-control emanating from such diverse sources as creatures from outer space, seeds of alien infection preserved in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the U.S. government, drug dealers, and commercial advertisers. In fact no distinction is made between these sources—they are all part of the same conspiracy. Moreover the gateway through which evil enters the individual is need and appetite—for drugs, for sex—which reifies into images of violence and abjection. It is this same pattern which is repeated in Videodrome: a virus-like presence introduced into the brain and body of the viewer, entering through the portal of a transgressive and addictive sexual appetite, initiated by shadowy organizations situated somewhere in the world of corporate capitalism and military power but disguised as something more quotidian, which will subject individuals ruthlessly to horrific cruelty and manipulation.

            But these predatory corporations exploiting and discarding individuals have only a limited half-life in Cronenberg’s work. It is true that the medical institutions from Stereo all the way to Dead Ringers are manipulative and very often destructive of their “patients.” It is really only in Scanners and Videodrome, though, that the predatory corporation as such emerges. In all the films after Videodrome, with one exception, it is either absent or (as in Dead Ringers) has reverted to its more specialized medical form. The exception is Naked Lunch, Videodrome’s twin amongst Cronenberg’s films; and here it has returned in the most virulent and sadistic form ever. But Dr Benway and Interzone, Inc. are, first, even more deeply imbedded in untrustworthy first-person hallucination than any of the organizations in Videodrome, and, second, very much projections of a Burroughsian paranoia of apocalyptic dimensions which are impossible to separate from a specifically Burroughsian world and whose status is most likely delusional even according to the film itself. What does Interzone, Inc. want, supposing there even is such a phenomenon outside William Lee’s scrambled perceptions? It wants to make Lee suffer, it wants to make everyone suffer. It exemplifies Burroughs’s description of all persecutors as “control addicts.” The pleasures of sadistic domination are right up front, and material gain may or may not be somewhere off in the background. In other words, the predatory corporation here is a blind for the subject’s generalized sense of persecution and victimization, and also, I would argue, for his sense of guilt. But in Videodrome, as in Scanners, the predatory corporation really is plotting against individuals to exploit them for material ends. And consequently the film really does present a picture of the invasion, and indeed rape, of the individual and the collapse of his subjectivity as importantly grounded in the public social realm of hegemonic capital power. Moreover the means whereby this depredation takes place is specified: the control of mass-culture images in general and appeals to the “lowest” appetites of the “lowest” mass audience in particular.

            Then the film is clearly also fascinated by the addictive and transformative power of a non-predatory media. This fascination is expressed primarily through the character of Brian O’Blivion, and the institutions and disciples (his daughter Bianca above all) he has assembled around him. O’Blivion’s central idea is that television images are so widespread and penetrating that they have become indistinguishable from reality and have begun to replace it. As Shaviro says, this is a wicked joke at the expense of McLuhan before and Baudrillard after the fact. What takes O’Blivion out of the McLuhanite realm and into the Cronenbergian one is the alarming literalness with which he presses the notion of the physical effects of television and the substitutableness of video existence for real existence:

The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye. Therefore the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore television is reality, and reality is less than television.

O’Blivion is quite enthusiastic at this prospect, and his religious fervor to advance the process is evident in his establishment of the Cathode Ray Mission, a Salvation Army-like video soup-kitchen where derelicts are parked in front of televisions to “help patch them back into the world’s mixing board.” Such sentiments could hardly be more in tune with the Baudrillardian sense that virtuality has supplanted history and simulacra the real. In fact O’Blivion himself embodies (though one should say “disembodies”) the notion of virtual existence, since he is physically dead and exists only in the form of videotapes, and video hallucinations. “At the end,” says Bianca, “he was convinced that public life on television was more real than private life in the flesh; he wasn’t afraid to let his body die.” He greets even the fact that Videodrome creates a lethal brain tumour with what one may call professional optimism. His status as “Videodrome’s first victim” is something to be proud of; the growth in his head is in any event not a cancerous tumour, but “a new organ of the brain.” He exclaims:

I think that massive doses of the Videodrome signal will ultimately create a new outgrowth of the human brain, which will produce and control hallucination to the point that it will change human reality.

That change will be “the next phase in the development of man as a technological animal,” and will culminate in the translation of man entirely into the video world—as indeed is already the case with O’Blivion himself. Here, even more explicitly, is the disappearance of history and the real. What kind of existence O’Blivion might have if his daughter stopped playing and distributing his tapes is not addressed. In fact all questions about this “next phase,” this transformed realm of “human reality”—and this is also the road that Max is to take—are unanswered; and there is very little to prevent the straightforward conclusion that all these notions are delusions to cover over the anguish of identity loss and the prospect of death without any kind of resurrection.

Private transgression

            So in Videodrome we have a free-floating technology which transforms object-relations and identity and dissolves reality in hallucination; and we have a powerful and predatory organization which co-opts the technology for its own sinister purposes. Such a configuration is in keeping with Burroughs, with Baudrillard, and with Jameson all at once: a paranoid scenario involving the subjection of individuals to multinational corporate and political ends through the means of technology. But why is the consequence of the Videodrome signal a cancerous tumour? Why does the film so emphatically present Max’s infection with Videodrome as a consequence of his desire for more sexually transgressive programming, and even more as a consequence of his arousal by the spectacle and practise of sexual sadism? And why are its principle subjective symptoms the appearance of a large vagina in his abdomen together with other images of a markedly sexual, and trans-sexual, nature? What relation do these symptoms have either to the identity-dissolving consequences of media marination or the hegemonic schemes of capitalist predators? Surely a numbed, pallid, zombie-ish compliance, an emptying out of the psyche, would be a more appropriate state for a media-saturated perfect consumer.

            Here we may turn again to Burroughs, with his obsessive connection between transgressive personal behavior and persecuted victimization. Burroughs has a very complex reaction to his need for two forbidden pleasures, heroin and homosexual sex—both of which he feels at some level are destructive. Psychologically, he disavows the horrific aspect of transgression by deflecting it into a paranoid conspiracy theory, in which phantasmagoric agents of evil from inhuman viruses to human “control addicts” have infected him and are forcing him to do evil things. Powerful self-interested institutions like corporations are part of the conspiracy, but so are the transgressive urges he feels within himself. Here is a pattern we can discern in Videodrome, which similarly splits the cause of evil between external organs of power (Spectacular Optical) and internal transgressive urges (sadistic sexual enjoyment). Indeed, one might even say that the film’s uncertainty about the relation between those two causes, although it is covered by the hallucinatory uncertainty of everything, is also inherited from Burroughs. It is also noteworthy that the infecting, destroying image-virus that Burroughs speaks of so often in the “Nova Trilogy” is an image of “rage hate fear ugliness” as exemplified in atrocities of violence, very often sexual. This viral image is very close indeed to that of Videodrome, especially where Burroughs depicts the controlling functions of sex-atrocity snuff movies, or speaks of the activities of some recipients as “motivated by torture films.”

            The specific imagery, however, is all Cronenberg’s. The cancerous brain tumour is a repetition of tropes from Crimes of the Future, Rabid and The Brood—which will be terrifyingly expanded in The Fly. In Videodrome, as an integral part of the shifting of attention and responsibility at last onto a central male protagonist, Cronenberg’s uneasinesses (stretching all the way to terror) about the explosive transgressive power of sexuality come truly into focus for the first time. And it is this dynamo of trouble which separates Videodrome from the affectless identity-dispersion of postmodern archetype and also from Burroughsian paranoia. For Cronenberg’s version of the Burroughs scenario invests far more in the guilt-driven mechanisms of personal responsibility than it does in the paranoid mechanisms of socio-political manipulation—this is true of Videodrome and even more deeply and self-knowingly true of Naked Lunch. The intensity of the sex-scenes with Nicki, the way in which Max’s anxiety about his situation is so insistently triggered by sexual transgression, and then of course the ever-growing reliance on a purely subjective viewpoint, all combine to propel the affective centre of the film into Max’s private quagmire of desire and guilt. The relentless movement of the film is inward. Spectacular Optical’s project and motives become more and more opaque, and are finally irrelevant; at the end Max is alone with his gun, his personal organic television set and his image of Nicki, while Spectacular Optical has evaporated.

            Similarly, the “organicization” of technology—the “breathing” cassettes and TV sets—acts to transfer technology into the intimate and personal realm of the body. These palpitating, fleshly devices may be seen as a pointed manifestation of that project of the sexualization of science which is integral to Cronenberg’s work from beginning to end. And we should not miss the fact that Max is the first “scientist” in the film—and the first who has moved from a peripheral to a central position in a Cronenberg narrative. It is Max’s entrepreneurial search for a more overtly sexualized and transgressive content for his station which is the true beginning of everything in Videodrome. True, O’Blivion and Spectacular Optical had invented and developed the Videodrome signal first, and therefore replicate (for the last time) the older pattern in which distant or absconded patriarchal males originate the cause of bodily mutation—a configuration which becomes even clearer when O’Blivion and Convex appear as twin father-figures. But this does not obscure the fact that what we first see is Max experimenting and searching for something new, and doing so, to an important extent, out of hidden and disavowed sexual motives.

At last, a truly central hero

            Max is not only overwhelmingly the centre of Videodrome, he is Cronenberg’s first really three-dimensional character, and he signals a definitive turn in Cronenberg’s cinema to narratives which fix on deeply examined individual human subjects, rather than on remarkable situations peopled with flatter characters. Comparing Max to earlier protagonists such as Rose in Rabid or Cameron Vale in Scanners will illustrate this point immediately. At the same time, the intense interest hitherto displayed by Cronenberg in important secondary characters (e.g., Raglan’s patients in The Brood; Paul Ruth, Darryl Revok and Ben Pierce in Scanners) is here invested in the protagonist.

            This confident, aggressive, entrepreneurial hero is a startling contrast to Cronenberg’s earlier central males. Even Cameron Vale in Scanners, who does master his narrative and is central to it, begins in a condition of lostness and dereliction and can never be described really as an initiator, acting throughout under conditions determined either by Ruth or Revok. But the trajectory of Max Renn’s career, upon inspection, simply inverts the success story of Cameron Vale’s. Beginning as resourceful, controlling, even powerful, he progresses through escalating stages of disorientation and anxiety to a state of lostness and dereliction worse than that from which Vale emerged. As Max is tracking down Videodrome, following up clues from Harlan and program distributor Masha Borowsky and O’Blivion, the movie momentarily starts to look like a detective story, a plot movie. But the film then demonstrates Max’s utter inability to master this narrative, to control its outcome in any way. Max’s posture and attitude of mastery is savagely demonstrated to be illusory, and in the end he is as helpless before the forces of the body and desire as any of his predecessors. Indeed he is in a far worse condition because, if their passivity did not prevent or repair disaster, Max’s actions cause it: he is a murderer of innocent persons as well as guilty ones. And if his predecessors had to suffer the anguish of their impotence in protecting the females they love, Max stands convicted in his own conscience of actually abusing the ones he loves. Of course, notwithstanding his sins against others, Max is himself the principal ground of horrifying mutation and abject monstrosity—of suffering—in the film. He becomes (as we shall see) in every sense the “female” in the film, and the monster. In stepping away from the sidelines his predecessors remained on, in stepping forward to occupy this agonized role, Max embodies a great act of courage in the evolution of Cronenberg’s work. After seeing his fate, one can, as it were, understand retrospectively the caution, the deflection of responsibility, the safe impotence of the earlier heroes. If this is the result of action, it is better not to act at all. (This is an option Cronenberg will try to return to in his next film, The Dead Zone, only to discover anew that it is unworkable too.)

            Part of Max’s commanding facade is the control he assumes over transgressive sexual desire: he will stir up and gratify the appetites of his viewers while himself remaining, if not completely unaffected, then a detached epicure fully the master of his own appetites. The film reveals this attitude to be a false one, rooted in arrogance and disavowal. Interviewed on the “Rena King Show” on the subject of Channel 83's offerings (“everything from soft-core pornography to hard-core violence”), Max is glib:

Rena: But don’t you feel such shows contribute to a climate of violence and sexual malaise? And do you care?

Max: Certainly I care. I care enough, in fact, to give my viewers a harmless outlet for their fantasies and their frustrations. And as far as I’m concerned that’s a socially positive act.

At the same time what he is actually looking for is something that is precisely not “harmless.” Even before he sees the first Videodrome show, he complains to his partners about the slick and arty “Samurai Dreams” series offered to them by Hiroshima Video company:

I don’t know. Soft—something too...soft about it. I’m looking for something that will break through—something...tough.

The Videodrome show is certainly something “tough.” But even while pursuing his interest in it Max is unwilling to admit that this transgressive dynamite will have any actual effect, either on him or on its larger audience. Instead, he will consume it, and broadcast it for consumption, acting like the daring “pirate” which he (and his hacker-techie Harlan) conceives himself to be, taking what he wants but never having to pay.  Although he is anxious to distribute transgressive programming, he nervously refuses Masha’s invitations to move into production, and she responds by saying he lacks “a philosophy”—that is to say, the courage of his convictions. Later she suggests that if he did make his own programs, they might resemble Videodrome. Altogether, Max’s actions reveal, underneath a surface of confidence and power, a picture of inconsistency, moral uncertainty, disavowal and un-self-knowledge.

Sadistic male desire: Nicki

            Max’s sexual response to the torture and murder on the Videodrome show begins the process of his education, bringing what is latent to the surface and demonstrating logical consequences in a way which will batter and finally destroy him. His first sight of Videodrome is quickly followed by his first meeting with Nicki Brand. He encounters her on the “Rena King Show,” where she is wearing a sensational red dress and expounding society’s condition of excessive stimulation and craving for stimulation. Even as she says these words, however, she is manifesting herself as an active participant in the process (“I admit it—I live in a highly excited state of overstimulation”). Unlike Max, she does not deny her complicity with transgressive desire. Instead, she startlingly indicates the straight path of action and fulfillment rather than Max’s devious one of nervous rationalization and disavowal. With dreamlike directness this overtly sexual woman both defines and instantly fills the position of entirely willing masochistic sex-partner which is logically implied by Max’s sadistic interest in Videodrome.

            Max’s relationship with Nicki thematizes and, again, centralizes transgressive sexuality. The earlier films (up to The Brood, since Scanners avoids the area) were, as we have seen, very much impelled by the sexual female, whose exciting and frightening sexuality was expressed by a form of bodily monstrosity. The transgressive sexuality of the films themselves, though, was displaced onto a supra-diegetic plane: the sadistic or homicidal attacks on females in Shivers and The Brood, and by Rose in Rabid, existed as unacknowledged spectacle for covert enjoyment. Meanwhile the diegeses struggled to endow these same sexually monstrosified or abjected females with at least some sympathetic and non-spectacular qualities of the “human subject.” The male function was similarly split between the “nice,” ineffective qualities of the “heroes” and the at least sometimes sadistic transgression of the film’s masculine controlling sensibility.  Videodrome again demonstrates its “epistemological break” status by for the first time locating sexual transgression in the male protagonist, and by clearly labelling it as sadistic. Now the schizoid nature of the earlier films becomes the schizoid nature of the hero—aligned at last with the controlling sensibility. Max’s excitement at the sadistic transgression of the Videodrome show and of Nicki’s masochism is the film’s; and so is his hesitation and doubt, his recognition of the cruelty and human suffering it entails. Once more it is a female who attracts the masculine sensibility across the divide of transgression, who is the catalyst setting off the explosion of transgressive excitement and its catastrophic consequences. But now that male sensibility is located at the almost solipsistic centre of the film (Max), and its sadistic desire is demonstrated to exist prior to the catalytic transgressive female. Max shows instant fascination with the Videodrome show before meeting Nicki, so that she is, if anything, the result of Max’s sadistic desire rather than its cause.

            Max can say to himself, his partisans can say on his behalf—and finders of misogyny in Cronenberg can repeat—that he would never have entered this territory if he had not been seduced into it by Nicki. But as the film proceeds it more and more dissolves Nicki into an effect of Max’s psyche. And in the bottomless quicksand of the film’s oneiric and hallucinated narrative, the “reality” of her status at any time of the action is in doubt. I have heard viewers suggest that everything in the film after Max’s first viewing of the Videodrome signal is hallucinated: in that case Nicki would be entirely a hallucination (as would the O’Blivions and Spectacular Optical). If that seems an extreme interpretation, one might at least agree that there is something very strange, unstable, and fantasy-like about Nicki right from the beginning. She appears in that 5-alarm red dress and creates the most sensational and deliberately provocative effect. But in her next scene (at her radio station), she is decked out in teal and puce, her flamboyant hair done up in utilitarian fashion, and she is dispensing pop-psychic advice to a hysterical caller. Next, she is at Max’s apartment shuffling through his videotapes asking if he’s got any porno, homing in on Videodrome with enthusiasm (despite his nervous disclaimer that “it ain’t exactly sex”), inviting him to “take out your Swiss Army knife and cut me here—just a little” and showing him three cuts on her neck inflicted by “a friend.” Max is disbelieving, then reluctant, but when he at last acts out his (and her) fantasy the results are startling. He enters into a whole territory of profound sexual feeling buried within himself—suspected, perhaps, but never experienced. It is precisely the realization of a fantasy whose possibility was always prohibited, tremendously exhilarating and moving. Its depth and intensity are signalled by the appearance of the first obvious hallucination. As he exquisitely pierces her earlobe with a pin, and they make love, we see them locked in sexual embrace within the reddish-orange-and-black “Videodrome” torture chamber, the soundtrack emitting vast sighs and breaths, the camera moving sensuously. In her next appearance she suggests she would like to appear on the Videodrome show. “I was made for that show,” she says (he replies “nobody was made for that show”). Then—in the most objected-to scene in the film—she deliberately burns her breast with a cigarette. This atrocious act of mutilation draws an instinctive outcry from Max: “Nicki, don’t!” But once again she beckons him across the boundary of prohibition, and he goes again, however reluctantly, to the sadistic font of pleasure. After suggesting she was “made for that show,” all of Nicki’s subsequent appearances are in the video domain, where her status is as hallucinatory and Max-invented as anything in the film.

            I have recounted Nicki’s early appearances in such detail because I want to stress how much she has the status of a fantasy at every stage of her existence. Deborah Harry, the actress taking the role, injects an overt provocativeness, a “hard sexiness,” into her persona (and a kind of ironic artifice carried over perhaps from her offscreen role in the pop band “Blondie”). She is, as it were, already like a pornographic fantasy from the moment of her appearance, before she even does anything. Her subsequent actions in behaving more and more exactly and explicitly as an improbable projection of sadomasochistic desires merely carries her further along the same path. Again, she is more like the consequence of Max’s transgressive desire than the cause of it; in retrospect it is as if she never really had an independent character, as if she was always a fixture of Max’s psyche. This quasi-fantasy status is of course enabled and encouraged by the hallucinatory uncertainty of the narrative (Nicki is improbable as a “realist” character, but as Max’s fantasy she is entirely probable). And then her passage from a still-possibly-realist status to a clearly-hallucinated video status is made easier and smoother by such a starting-point. For how else to explain her transformation from exciting and alarming provocateuse beckoning Max into his own undiscovered country of transgressive sexuality to the childlike, mother-like, soothing figure beckoning him into the undiscovered country of the New Flesh and death? These are events in Max’s head, Nicki is an event in his head; and her metamorphosis through various forms of exciting, frightening, reassuring and guiding stimulus is an index (if not indeed simply an embodiment) of Max’s feelings about his own desire and where it takes him.

            Nicki is precisely Max’s sexual fantasy because she invites his sadistic sexuality, and thus seems to offer a way through the wall between the female as sexual object and as “human subject.” She can be a sexual object—moreover the object of sadistic impulses—while retaining at least a notional human subjectivity which, far from suffering at the hands of sadistic male desire, freely welcomes it herself. Moreover, in her final transformation into comforter and reassurer, in her simultaneous conflation with Bianca O’Blivion (she appears in this new form after Bianca has “reprogrammed” Max) as co-priestess of the New Flesh, she seems to show the way out of the hell of transgression as she has previously showed the way into it. Follow your desire “all the way,” as she tells Max to do in the final scene, and you may end up somewhere so different that you will be saved. Following transgressive desire has brought liberation, then a kind of abject perdition: perhaps it will yet bring a new liberation. It is a fervent hope—but it is also a hallucinated wish fulfillment and there is no reason to think it is not a delusion.

Sadism escapes its bounds

            What is not a delusion—because its appalling emotional effects are extensively depicted—is the fact that transgression has turned from exhilarating and liberating self-truth into horrifying self-truth. Sadistic joy, the unleashing of repressed desire, has—as ever in Cronenberg—uncontrollable unintended consequences. Its first anarchic act is to burst out of Nicki’s world into other parts of Max’s life—and other women in his life. Both Bridey and Masha are women for whom Max feels no conscious sexual attraction, notwithstanding the intimations of sexuality that hover around Bridey’s quasi-maternal quasi-wifely “girl Friday” attentiveness and especially the older Masha’s jaded European appetites. They are both people for whom he feels some attachment, not least because they both feel some attachment for him; they are both female “human subjects.” Yet each of them becomes alarmingly implicated in Max’s sadistic fantasies/hallucinations. Bridey is perhaps about to discover some of the compromising aspects of Max’s “Videodrome” life as she pokes around his apartment. In response he hallucinates slapping her brutally across the face—except that in mid-slap she turns into Nicki, the willing sexual masochist. Now he slaps “Nicki” again, only to find her turning into Bridey once more. He is appalled by what he has done, apologizing abjectly (Bridey doesn’t know what he is talking about, since he has hallucinated everything).

            This point is made equally graphically in connection with Masha. The soft-porn show she is peddling, “Apollo and Dionysus,” is absurdly veiled in the cultural respectabilities of its classical setting, while her garishly ornate clothing and jewelry are likewise meant to attract but seem outdated. The film cuts from the second of Max’s torrid sex scenes with Nicki to the preposterous shakings and clankings of a belly dancer in the Turkish restaurant where Max meets Masha—a setting that seems to reflect Masha’s style—and the jolting contrast emphasizes the distance for Max between her and Nicki. Yet a connection is made almost instantly as Max lights Masha’s Turkish cigarette and a closeup signals his memory of the cigarette with which Nicki had burned her breast the night before. Max flirts easily with her (“We can take a shower together any time you say” ) in a way that shows his confidence in controlling the situation. But when he is hallucinating a whipping session with Nicki while wearing the Spectacular Optical helmet, Nicki is unaccountably replaced as his victim by Masha; and upon awakening in the next scene, he finds Masha’s dead body—bound, gagged, and bloody from his whip—in the bed next to him. Masha, like Bridey, is substituted for Nicki in a moment of sexual anger/aggression, and the substitution is unwilled in both cases, showing that the wall of repression separating anarchic desire from rationality and ethics has broken down, and the contents of the two compartments are running uncontrollably together. Now the fantasy of the willing masochistic female (Nicki) is replaced by the nightmare of the female who does not wish to suffer (Bridey, Masha) but who is the innocent victim of the male self’s sexual transgression in a spectacle of moral atrocity.

The male’s enfemalement

            But this is only a small part of the Passion of Max Renn. If the first sexual effect of the Videodrome signal is to lead Max across the border of prohibition into sadistic pleasure, the next is to reverse the current and render him not the agent of sadistic aggression but its recipient. When, under the male eye of Brian O’Blivion (and, as it later transpires, the male manipulation of Convex and Harlan), Max sees a giant orifice open up in his abdomen, all positions are inverted. The piercer is pierced, the wounder wounded, the phallic male invaginated. Shaviro puts it succinctly: “You macho asshole, now you know what it’s like to be a cunt” ; and, as Bart Testa points out, Max’s role simultaneously shifts from programmer to programmed. In all of its forms, however, it signals a transformation from activity to passivity, from control (or the illusion of control) to helplessness and confusion, from male to female. As in Barbara Creed’s model, Max’s enfemalement is a monstrosification; and as in Carol Clover’s, it places him in the position of suffering and victimization. Thus in Creed’s sense Max has become the film’s abject female monster, while in Clover’s he has become its hysterical female victim.

            What Max has visited upon him is, in the sexual arena, an enforced occupation of the masochistic position (only without any masochistic enjoyment). As Nicki is pierced, burnt, whipped; as Bridey is viciously slapped; as Masha is gagged and whipped—and as Max has perpetrated all of these things for, or as a byproduct of, his own male sadistic pleasure—so is he invaginated, raped, manipulated and programmed by sadistic males. This whole process may be described as an hysterical (even a somatized) realization of his own fears of the moral consequences of his unleashed transgressive desire. Here the diametrical oppositions of abject desire and ethical ego-subjectivity enact themselves yet again, now upon the (proper) terrain of not only the psyche but the actual body of the first-person male. That these punishments are retribution for transgressive masculinity is evident in the whole “soft”/”tough,” “breakthrough” vocabulary which Max uses to define the aims of his porno-search. These are terms not only describing masculine potency in the oppositions of flaccidity and erection and the desire to penetrate, but the entire female/male gender map. Certainly “toughness” is aggression and transgression, and “softness” is passivity and restraint. Max wants to be tough; he first fantasizes toughness and then is drawn into acting tough; and then his toughness is made soft and penetrable through physical and emotional enfemalement.

            As Nicki is the “external” source leading Max towards sadistic behavior and enjoyment, so the “external” sources depriving him of control, making him female, and punishing his transgression are male. Brian O’Blivion, inventor and “prophet,” acts as initiating host and guide for Max’s Videodrome experiences in hallucination. He is the first personage to address Max from his own television set (a classic paranoid-schizophrenic symptom, we might recall), and his appearance and tone of voice are always unsettling to say the least. Notwithstanding his visionary fervor, O’Blivion is for Max always a harsh presence, whether piercing Max’s spectatorial distance by direct address, talking in a frightening fashion about his brain cancer and apparently collaborating in his own murder, or telling Max that “your reality is already more than half Videodrome hallucination.” The apex of what we may call O’Blivion’s assault occurs in the scene of Max’s bodily transformation. After talking about how Videodrome will create new organs of perception and control hallucinations to the point where it will “change human reality,” he says:

After all, there’s nothing real outside our perception of reality, is there? [laughs harshly] You can see that, can’t you?

What Max then sees is his abdominal slit. O’Blivion, therefore, is not only instrumental in the creation of Videodrome, but also in its creation for Max; and it is O’Blivion who presides over the specific nature of Max’s subjection to hallucination, to his enfemalement. In this respect it is possible to speak of O’Blivion as another of Cronenberg’s “inventor-fathers,” and particularly as a kind of father to Max. Of course he is literally a father as well, to Bianca; and his role as foundational and departed patriarch is emphasized in her devotional zeal to his memory. But this visionary father has, like his predecessors, produced a catastrophic effect on his “son.” There is nothing tender in his expressions to Max, and despite her redemptive rhetoric Bianca does not hesitate to reinfect him with Videodrome signals and later quite calmly turn him into a “New Flesh” robot of destruction. In other words, there is much harm and no benefit to show for the O’Blivion side of the patriarchal inheritance. Again, the phrase from Scanners, “cold and cruel,” seems to apply to this father-figure.

The castrating father: Convex

            Scanners twins its hero; in Videodrome, the hero is decisively singular, but the surrounding cast is twinned. Nicki and Bianca are paired and contrasted figures in the female realm, and so are Brian O’Blivion and Barry Convex in the patriarchal realm. Scanners had already divided the instrumental older-authoritative-male realm into the inventing and experimenting Ruth and the exploitative and inhuman ConSec. Now Videodrome repeats the process, only with an individuated and forcefully presented controlling executive figure. Barry Convex, as visible head of the demonized corporation, brings the distant, cold centre of power into the personal and individual plane and enables it to be felt more directly as paranoid persecution. Convex is by far the most terrifying of Max’s manipulators—and this is not simply because he is the perpetrator of the most horrific attacks. Rather, it is because he personifies the reversal of power and control from the confident ego-subject Max to other forces which he is helpless to control. The fantasy-ideal masochistic Nicki is one such force, corresponding as it were to Max’s most deeply buried id-like appetites. Barry Convex is another; and what he represents is the castrating father of the superego.

            Convex is a realization, almost, of that cruel and castrating father of Mike’s whom Raglan played in the first scene of The Brood: the father whose savage pleasure it is to reduce his son to smallness, impotence and femaleness. What really endows Convex with the power to do this is not simply his age and position, but the knowledge of Max’s guilty secrets, the knowledge of his moral turpitude and cowardice and unfitness. The fact that Convex has on tape Max’s “dirty” sadistic fantasies as recorded by the Videodrome helmet is what allows him to open Max up—with ghastly literalness, like a tin can—and insert through this wound of vulnerability the cassette which will control his actions. In this dreadful and oppressive scene, Convex burrows with terrible ease through Max’s defenses of denial, disavowal and theatrical bravura.

Convex: Why would anyone watch a scum show like Videodrome? Why did you watch it, Max?

Max [quickly]: Business reasons.

Convex: Sure. Sure. What about the other reasons? Why deny you get your kicks watching torture and murder?

Then he says: “I want you to open up, Max. Open up to me.” And as a powerful wind blows towards him, Max’s shirt buttons pop and his slit appears, open and throbbing. This involuntary “opening up” is like a sadistic rape: after O’Blivion has opened up Max’s vagina, Convex forcibly penetrates it. In this scene (and it is the same scene in which Max discovers Harlan’s treachery and also suffers his revulsion and contempt), Max is visited by all the forces of his own conscience in enlarged and monstrous form. The nervousness he had betrayed in first encountering the Videodrome show, his hesitation with Nicki, his gliding-over of objections to Videodrome from Harlan and Masha, his remorse over the hallucinated aggressions against Bridey and Masha—all of these have united in a judgement of Max which is also at some level a self-judgement.

            Just as Nicki is more plausible as a fantasy of Max’s than as a “realist” character, so the persona of Barry Convex has features which are strange and incongruous in a “chief of Special Programs” for a corporation that is in effect planning to take over the world, and which call his “realist” status into question. In the first place, the Spectacular Optical office where Convex meets Max is a down-at-heels little store in a rather seedy part of town, with a front room in which dowdy underclass customers are attended to by a comically mannered salesman, and a backstage area that looks like a boiler-room. Nothing could be further from any preconceptions of the offices of an omnipotent evil corporation—or from, say, ConSec headquarters in Scanners. When Convex, alone and looking rather incongruous in these shabby environs, unveils the hallucination-recording helmet, he pulls this impressive and frightening device out of an old cardboard box that looks like the container for some garage-sale piece of junk. Then, later on, the reprogrammed Max hunts down Convex to kill him at a Spectacular Optical trade show. This is taking place in a big hotel, and is indeed somewhat more opulent and pricey than the spectacles-shop; but it is of a surpassing spangled kitschiness that looks phoney and, in a larger sense, cheap. The gathering is full of crass area-sales representatives and their wives, whom Convex (before Max shoots him) is addressing with an equally crass small-time familiarity. “Well, you know me!” he shouts (voices from the audience shout back, “Yeah, we know you!”), and then with heavy jocularity, “And I sure know you—every one!” He introduces the product line (“The Medici Line,” with its bizarre renaissance motifs and slogans), and comments, “I think that even Pete oughta be able to sell the hell out of a classy campaign like that!” Who is this rube? one asks. Any resemblance to a high-ranking, frighteningly-powerful corporate executive is certainly invisible now. Of course, scenarios can be invented to “account for” the shabby store, the glad-handing sales pitcher (e.g., Spectacular Optical’s sinister plans are so deep that they descend to, and are disguised in, the most mundane places and activities). But it is much easier to account for them, as for Nicki’s implausibilities, by situating them in Max’s disordered personal desires and fears. From this perspective, Convex looks sleek and all-powerful to Max—as well he should given his status as the projection of Max’s castrating superego-father. But for the rest of us he is a smaller and shabbier figure—or, these momentary flashes indicate, he would be if we could see him undistorted by Max’s perceptions.

Harlan

            Nicki may be seen as a projection of Max’s buried transgressive sexual desire; Convex a projection of his dread of superego punishment. And now we may add the strange and difficult-to-read character of Harlan. Harlan is perhaps the only person in the film with whom Max seems to have real two-way communication based on mutual affection and respect, although even here the relationship exists within a boss/employee structure with Max holding the ultimate power, and of course later Harlan turns out to have been manipulating Max. If Bridey and Masha embody buried and ambiguous sexual feelings towards women who are not basically objects of desire for Max, then Harlan may be seen even more markedly as an object of repressed homosexual desire. Cronenberg describes Harlan as “deliberately seductive in his cute little way,” and when he comes to Max’s apartment to corroborate Max’s Masha hallucination he is nervously flirtatious: “Well, here I am, patron...camera, flashgun. What’s up—you wanna be a centrefold?” This coy sexual joke, delivered as Harlan has been summoned to Max’s apartment in the middle of the night, is followed by Max’s invitation to “photograph what’s in my bed,” a request incredulously repeated by Harlan. The homoerotic implications are hardly dissipated by the angry exchange that follows, full of “fuck you”s and “asshole”s and other potential sexual double entendres:

Max: I’m not just fucking around here, do you hear me?

Harlan [with a force he can’t quite sustain]: Well, fuck you! I’m not just a servo-mechanism you can turn on and off when you want to. You want me to fall out of bed at 7 a.m. and act like an asshole, you tell me what I’m doing it for. Otherwise, I’ll see you during office hours, patron.

Max: You’re right. I’m running like an express train here, I don’t know how to stop. Meet me at the lab in an hour...I’ll tell you everything, I promise.

Harlan [tentatively]: I’m sorry if I freaked out, patron. [he puts his hands on Max’s sides] I don’t work with you just for the money you know.

Max: I know that. Piracy is never just for the money, is it?

The final display of affection is the closest the two characters come to expressing a mutual attachment directly. What is underlined is how much buried emotion is present in the relationship—and how much that emotion resembles a homosexual attraction which neither party seems to recognize.

            In Harlan’s case repression of (homo)sexual desire has led to a profound sexual loathing, manifested very clearly in his diatribe against the (hetero)sexual perversions of the Videodrome show and its devotees. His denunciation of sexuality is phrased in the terms of mess versus order in a kind of Fascist sublimation of aggressive (i.e., sexual) unconscious impulse into idealistic terms:

North America’s getting soft, patron—and the rest of the world is getting tough, very very tough. We’re entering savage new times, and we’re going to have to be pure and direct and strong if we’re going to survive them. Now you, and this...cesspool you call a television station, and your people who...wallow around in it, and your viewers, who...watch you do it—you’re rotting us away from the inside. We intend to stop that rot.

This phobic revulsion at (hetero)sexual gluttony and voyeurism may seem very far from Max’s experiments in sadism, but in fact Max’s lack of sexual awareness and Harlan’s sexual repression find an echo in each other. Certainly Harlan’s adoption of Max’s “soft”/”tough” vocabulary is startling, and his bitter, nauseated condemnation of Max’s sexual indulgence is, like Convex’s similar reactions which will follow momentarily, a dramatic reflection of Max’s own unresolved feelings of guilt. Like Nicki’s masochistic enthusiasm and Convex’s vengeful power, Harlan’s betrayal seems very much like a projection of Max’s inner feelings, and Harlan another imaginary inhabitant of Max’s psyche—one in whom unexamined feelings of trust, affection and homosexual attraction, when juxtaposed with overt hetero-sadistic Videodrome-desire, metamorphose into punishments from the superego.

The Fleshgun

            Max’s hallucinations provide him with a vagina; but they also provide him with a “new” penis. This is the Fleshgun, tool of assassination and finally suicide. The Fleshgun’s antecedent is the pistol which Max inserts into his abdominal orifice in a completely unexpected and shocking fashion. As he sits in front of the TV shirtless and wearing the gun’s shoulder holster, watching O’Blivion’s cassette, he begins to scratch the pink outline of what will become the slit (he has previously described it as “a rash or something”) with the tip of the pistol. And it is almost in response to this scratching that the slit does fully incarnate and open. The gun, then, invokes (or helps to invoke) the slit; and when the slit appears Max’s first action is to slowly, painfully, but determinedly insert the pistol all the way into it. If the slit is invaginating and enfemaling, the handgun is a masculine and phallic aggressor—an emblem, in its ugly promise of violence, of transgressive maleness. Its act of penetration is a sadistic one, if only because it is a pistol, not a penis. And thus it realizes its role in the film as symbol of the sadistic sexual desires which Max wishes to realize, and which are realized upon him.

            After Convex has brutally inserted the “programming” cassette into Max’s belly, the idea of a rape which has impregnated its victim begins to suggest itself. The “child” is the compulsion planted in Max to kill his partners. But the form in which it emerges, physically, from his belly, is that of the Fleshgun: the pistol which Max (not Convex) had inserted and inseminated himself with. This Fleshgun-child—clearly male—is dragged from the viscera in great anguish, dripping with bodily slime; it then fixes itself horrifically to Max’s grip by organic-mechanical steel cords which burrow through Max’s hand and arm. But who is the father of this child? Convex may claim partial paternity (the cassette seems to have made the pistol into the Fleshgun), but so may Max himself (his “little” gun replicates itself in a larger, more independent, organic gun-thing). Again, the origin and authorship of monstrosity and horror is split unreadably between the paranoid external control-power and the psychic faults and imbalances of the self.

            Subsequently the pistol appears either as unaltered pistol or as transformed Fleshgun, as the film oscillates unpredictably between hallucination and something closer to “actuality.” What we see when Max shoots his partners is the “real” pistol, although the murder is clearly dictated by the cassette-program and thus within the realm of the Fleshgun. This double killing is an act of violence without any sexual dimension: what began, perhaps, as Max’s sadistic impulse rooted in the pleasure of torture and murder has been converted by Convex and the patriarchal-corporate principle into simple utilitarian homicide. This desexualizing transposition of transgression away from sexuality towards depredation is reminiscent of what happens to the telepathic facility in Scanners (except that in Scanners there is no counterbalancing sexual dimension).

            The cassette’s next “instruction” is to kill Bianca O’Blivion. Max finds her alone in the Cathode Ray Mission at night, and when he withdraws the still-concealed hand to shoot her it shows the Fleshgun, not the pistol. As he hunts her down she counters by inducing a hallucination of her own. Max encounters a television screen which shows Nicki being murdered on the Videodrome show. That image is then replaced by a blank (noise-filled) screen which begins to distend into an growing pillar ending in the shape of the Fleshgun; then the noise-screen turns flesh-coloured, develops veins, the entire gun-tipped pillar now explicitly resembling an engorged penis. This organ then ejaculates a charge, shooting Max three times in the abdomen. He staggers, falls to his knees, looks up to see the television screen now appearing in the form of his own naked abdomen, pierced with three bleeding bullet-holes. It is difficult to interpret this phantasmagoria with any certainty. We may say at least that the Fleshgun has shot Max himself. But it is Bianca’s Fleshgun, and in shooting him has inflicted a wound which is a kind of counter-piercing to the monstrous vagina—a painful treatment to heal the initial “wound.” Once more the weapon, the aggression/transgression Max is wielding is turned on himself. Although the result is to “reprogram” Max to employ Videodrome weapons against Videodrome itself, the tone of this new programming is evangelical, redemptive. As Max, now lifting a Fleshgun-free fist into a salute, intones after Bianca, “Death to Videodrome, long live the New Flesh,” his expression is that of a sinner saved, a damned soul redeemed.

            We are certainly not finished with the Fleshgun, however, which now appears when Max goes to the Spectacular Optical trade show to assassinate Barry Convex. Although it is seen in monstrous-organic form, it seems to shoot real bullets. But the hallucinatory status of its effects in Max’s perception is evident as we witness the “cancer-death” of Barry Convex—an obsessively explicit moment of regurgitory violence and horror which, however, Max cannot “really” be seeing as he is already heading out of the building. This use of the pistol is just as brutal and ugly as the earlier one; and in fact, after raising it in salute and shouting Bianca’s slogan (“Death to Videodrome...!”), Max once more thrusts it guiltily into his jacket, as he had after murdering his partners. Convex may be a villain and Bianca may have at least the appearance of a saviour: but who are the good guys and who the bad guys now seems a meaningless distinction when these scenarios are playing themselves out in the deluded fantasies of the utterly helpless and pathetic Max. All that is left is for Max—again under the direction of a hallucination which cajoles and instructs him—deliberately to turn the Fleshgun on himself. When it shoots it will not translate Max into some realm of the New Flesh, but merely put a bullet in his skull as any pistol would. It is a logical end point. Max began as a sadistic phallic male and was transformed into an invaginated recipient; now he has moved from being a homicidal pistol-wielder to being a suicide against whom the pistol is wielded.

Female metamorphoses

            As these male aggressive and transgressive impulses are systematically realized and just as systematically reversed and turned against the male, so the female principles in the film are undergoing similar metamorphoses. Nicki’s status as masochist fantasy-object always contained an element of the dominating: part of her fantasy role is to take the initiative, to guide Max across the barrier of prohibition and inhibition. This dominant, guiding role is shared by Bianca, who leads and instructs—and manipulates—Max in a “sacred” and non-sexual sphere just as Nicki does in a bodily and sexual one. Although there is never any indication that Bianca ever acts for Max’s benefit, she does, after the “reprogramming,” assume a solicitous and caring tone (“that’s better—so much better”), and her role is nominally always a ministering, redemptive one.

            What is more striking is Nicki’s gradual evolution from flaming “bad girl” to Max’s private voice of wisdom, consolation and reassurance. As a video hallucination, her tone becomes startlingly more intimate and personal, more regressively primal. “Come to me, Max—come to Nicki—don’t keep me waiting,” she says in pouting, sexually-infantilized tones. But it is Max who is infantilized, and the sexual-fantasy-masochist-child-woman takes on more and more the voice of a mother—a mother who knows, and forgives, and cherishes, all her child’s secrets and weaknesses. At the end of this scene Nicki’s lips fill the television screen, which then begins to bulge outward in appeal and expectation until Max does what “it” wants and thrusts his head into it. This extraordinary image is truly surreal, and like so many sexually surreal images is full of contrary suggestions which somehow seem to unify themselves in the image. Max thrusts his head into the soft, engorged Nicki-mouth of the screen, a penis into a waiting vagina. At the same time, she is “giving him head” (except it is he who is giving his head to her). At the same time, as whole-man penis, he is returning into the mouth-vagina, through the uterine canal to the womb. And, perhaps most vividly of all, he is an infant at the soft breast (which is, however, the mouth that is sucking Max rather than vice versa).

            Throughout this and the subsequent scenes in which Max responds to Nicki’s “come to me” call, he experiences the joys of surrender: a surrender which was in the first instance a surrender to his own long-prohibited desire (with Nicki the dominant masochist and Max the reluctant sadist). As the film progresses, Max becomes more and more passive and dominated. But if one aspect of that dominated passivity is the horrific possession by the paternal male principle (Convex and O’Blivion), another is the pleasurable possession by the maternal female (Nicki and Bianca). And if, when Convex makes him a child, it is to punish and disempower and intimidate him, then when Nicki makes him a child it is to soothe and nurture him, and to shelter him from the savagery of the paternal superego. Hence, in the final scene, Nicki speaks as a wise and benevolent controlling voice, a lover-mother’s voice, and beckons him to go through abjection (the pistol shot, the exploding-viscera television) to a higher “oceanic” union with the mother in death-oneness-abjection. One result of Bianca’s “white magic” has been to remove Nicki from Videodrome sadism into some less transgressive-sexual realm. The first step of Bianca’s “reprogramming” of Max is to show him Nicki on a video screen, not as a willing masochist but as a murder victim of Videodrome (“they killed her, Max”). The effect of this shift is to transfer Nicki from the “sexual object” category to the “human subject” category of Bridey and Masha, where she takes no more pleasure in sadomasochistic ugliness. Instead, her child/mother, infantilized/infantilizing qualities (“come to Nicki”) are mobilized for the “white,” de-bodied purposes of a New Flesh which is no flesh.

From paranoia to melancholia

            I have suggested that the film moves from a set of external causes for Max’s predicament to a more internal set, and that the hallucinatory narrative itself has the strong tendency to bring everything back into his private perception. This idea may now be phrased differently: in the search (Max’s, the spectator’s) for a cause and an explanation of what is going on, there is a movement from a state of paranoia to one of melancholy. The paranoid explanation is that spectral forces of control are plotting against him and manipulating him. The melancholy explanation is that the kind of meaning inherent in a paranoid explanation has collapsed, that explanation itself is delusion, and that his plight is the result of long-suppressed fissures in his psychic makeup whose inevitable end is simply a conviction of hopelessness and loss. “I am an unworkable, impossible subject,” is the melancholy message; or, in the words of Joan Frost at the end of Naked Lunch, “all is lost, all is lost—it’s all I ever write.” Videodrome journeys from paranoia to melancholy, and so does Cronenberg’s work as a whole, which has progressed gradually ever since Shivers from the social realm to the personal, and which will continue to move relentlessly inward in such later films as The Fly, Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch.

            The subject’s (and the film’s) melancholy look inward discovers disorder, imbalance, mess. The outward sign of this condition, to an increasing extent at this stage of Cronenberg’s cinema, is dereliction. Videodrome displays this sign to a greater extent than any previous Cronenberg film, and does so in the detailed and meticulous, and yet dreamlike, fashion which characterises the film’s narrative and especially its mise en scène. Max’s apartment is already cluttered at the beginning of the film, and as the film progresses that clutter comes more and more to express the state of Max’s personality. Almost his first act upon waking up in the morning (in the opening scene), is to glance idly through some black-and-white still photos of naked women from “Samurai Dreams” while eating the remnants of an old pizza; accidentally smearing tomato sauce on one of the photos, he wipes it off absently on his housecoat. Here already we have an event whose iconography strikingly foreshadows the events of the film. The orange-red tomato sauce is the Videodrome-visceral colour, staining the arousing photograph, adding colour to it but in a careless, uncontained way which testifies to Max’s sleazy, proto-abject appetites and attitudes, and characterizes these in terms of mess and piggish manners. Max is constantly smoking—a “filthy habit” even before it became carcinogenic, and here beginning its career in Cronenberg’s cinema as a sign of slack and dangerous indulgence (flaring into the hotly transgressive in the breast-burning scene). The Hiroshima Video outfit is at the seedy Classical Hotel, where people are yelling at each other early in the morning and the rooms and their fittings are run down. The similar qualities of the Spectacular Optical shop have already been mentioned, but to that location may be added the “pirate’s lab” at Civic-TV, which has an old and run-down quality, and where, after being “programmed” by Convex, Max crawls out into a paint-peeled hallway littered with flakes of fallen plaster. The Cathode Ray Mission is a facility for street people and other derelicts, and its main ward is full of battered screens and grafitti. Bianca says to Max, “you look like one of father’s derelicts”—an impression which has become overpowering by the end of the film, which takes place in a condemned hulk. The junk lying around in Max’s apartment, in the Classic Hotel room, in the lab and in the Spectacular Optical shop, seems to accrete into an ever-growing pile which finally swallows Max.

            Videodrome maintains, in spite of and at the same time as its terminal, suicidal melancholy, the desire to convert what seem to be catastrophic transformations into positive evolutions.  O’Blivion is convinced that his brain tumour is not simply a death-sentence but rather a liberating advance. Max, too (under the influence of his “reprogramming” by Bianca), wants to believe that his chaotic abjection is something promising, “the New Flesh.” It is a thread that appears repeatedly in the later films, all the way down to Crash’s car-sex-Liebestod-suicides. This is the Cronenberg who keeps looking for the exciting salvational possibilities of “emergent evolution” in “omnisexuality,” “new organs,” “useful parasites,” “creative cancers,” “transformation,” “the New Flesh”. But all of the mutations, transformations, and metamorphoses which occur have catastrophic outcomes in the most straightforward sense, and this pattern refuses to go away no matter how much energy is put into efforts to interpret disease, loss of self, and death in terms of some hazy redemptive new reality. Subsequent films (The Fly springs immediately to mind) are even more depressive in this context than Videodrome, but no film demonstrates the syndrome more overtly than this one does. The concluding scenes, with their simultaneous emphasis on the language of redemption and salvation and on the iconography of loss and death, are a final mighty effort to recuperate Max’s suffering into something not so bleak—or not so clearly, totally bleak—as in fact it is. Nicki’s words “you have to go all the way now” are a repetition of Raglan’s mantra from The Brood: go with your boundary-destroying, Other-evoking feelings, don’t resist them but enlarge and amplify them, and the new reality you reach will liberate you. But we have seen what such prescriptions lead to in The Brood, and it is hard to think that Max’s boundarylessness will have a positive aspect no matter what Raglan or Nicki say—and no matter what Cronenberg may say, considering the spectacle of horror which inevitably follows such a giving-way in virtually all of his films. Perhaps I am being stubborn in resisting the film’s insistence that, you never know, there might be something good going on here. Max’s endpoint seems to me clearly that of a destroyed subject, a terminal deluded scramble, a flat sad recognition of unfixable contradiction and impossibility, a suicidal failure. Certainly nothing in the other films—especially the later ones—does anything to dispel this feeling. At least until Crash, Cronenberg’s films get sadder and sadder, more and more foreclosed and walled-in, as time goes by. And Videodrome is, in this dimension as in so many others, the key film.

Hallucination and cinematic narrative

            The hallucination-controlled narrative of Videodrome is highly unusual in mainstream cinema, really recalling aspects of the alternative or anti-narrative of abstract, modernist art-films rather than something you would expect to find in a horror movie. In this respect Videodrome exemplifies perhaps better than any of his other films Cronenberg’s often anomalous position between “serious” art-cinema and “shallow” commercial genre-cinema. Some films of the historical avant-garde (Un Chien Andalou, say) contain transgressive violence and sexuality, and surreally disrupted and “unreadable” narratives; but none of them could open in a commercial theatre without calling attention to their claims for a more elevated artistic status than the average piece of hack-work. Videodrome, though by any standard a strange and disorienting film, conceals its modernist “difficulty” beneath the wrapping of the horror and fantasy genre—or at least it could be marketed under such a label without getting many objections that this obvious piece of “art” was being misdescribed as “trash.” Admittedly, the film failed in its first release perhaps exactly because of such a false description; and its subsequent success as a cult film rests upon a reclassification of the film as “not-commercial-mainstream,” a unusual movie for select fans rather than formulaic junk for the herd-like masses. Even after this description-shift, though, Videodrome still doesn’t look like an art-movie.

            Nevertheless, the extremity of its formal experiments needs to be acknowledged. Videodrome proceeds in a subtle and unusual way to undermine the conventions of “classical realist” cinematic narrative. Examining its status as a “first-person” film will demonstrate something of what I mean. Because the camera photographs objects and not thoughts or feelings, cinema (like theatre) has what one might call an innate third-person bias, and must work harder to create something like a first-person narrative. Simply showing what is seen by a single pair of eyes has long since been proved clumsy, unconvincing and unworkable in any general way. Instead, the familiar (classical) “first-person” cinematic narrative is full of eyeline matches and point-of-view shots which serve to locate the viewer broadly in the protagonist’s position, while at the same time also locating that protagonist as a “third-person” entity in the world, another object in the world of objects seen by the camera. Moreover, in most cases, the “first-person” film is not at all interested in undermining viewer confidence in the (realist-fictional) “actuality” of what is going on in the narrative in order to promote a radically subjective view.

            Videodrome establishes the standard identification practices of the cinematic apparatus at the outset (i.e., “objective” shot of Max, “subjective” shot of what Max is seeing, both shots having the same “actuality” status), and continues to use them to some degree right to the end of the film. But whatever viewer confidence is conventionally brought to the film and sustained by these means is first undermined and then shattered, as Max’s perceptions of what is happening to him diverge more and more wildly from anything that could “actually” be happening. Dream-subjectivity and phantasmagoria have certainly been introduced into realist narratives—but always accompanied by markers of their non-realism, usually various forms of optical and auditory distortion. In Videodrome, there are often musical or soundtrack cues accompanying the most fantastic hallucinations, but visually all the “impossible” things are presented in a manner indistinguishable from any run-of-the-mill details of setting or behaviour. So although the experience is subjective, the apparatus is third-person. When Max hallucinates a huge slit gaping and palpitating in his abdomen, we see this slit not in a point-of-view shot, but in a shot-countershot vocabulary: shot of Max’s face looking down at his body in disbelief, then a shot of Max’s torso (or whole body) taken from some “objective,” non-Max’s-point-of-view position. Any distinction between subjective and objective introduced by the “first-person” editing conventions is lost, and we as viewers are now hindered rather than helped by the apparatus to make that distinction.

             The result is to disorient the viewer thoroughly, to blur and even erase the borders between objective external events and those of a subjective delirium. This is perhaps at once the film’s boldest and its most elegant formal stroke: to represent the fantastic elements of the narrative as straightforwardly and literally as the most prosaic. Eventually, and by dint of constant hard work, the viewer can piece together a crude partial map of which of Max’s perceptions that we’re sharing he is hallucinating, and which are “actually” occurring—and the film does even give some deliberate clues about this (e.g., alternating the Fleshgun with the real pistol). But vast tracts of the film remain unmapped, and it would be a foolhardy spectator who would claim to know “what happens” in Videodrome from any viewpoint which is not that of the utterly scrambled Max. And however much Max’s condition is the result of manipulation and introjection, the film relentlessly pushes us back into Max’s bizarre psychic landscape.

            The more one tries to disentangle the events of the film, the more they resist disentanglement. Trying to determine what is the “real” or “objective” status of most of the main figures (Nicki, O’Blivion, Bianca, Convex) is a hopeless task. Is the non-hallucinated Nicki really a radio personality? a sexual masochist? a person who wants to appear on the Videodrome show? Is there really a Brian O’Blivion who appears on TV talkshows posthumously? who established a Cathode Ray Mission to help derelicts with video transfusions? Is there really a manipulating, “programming” Barry Convex acting for a vast sinister organization? One’s first answer to all of these questions is in the affirmative, but one’s last answer may not be. Indeed, the process of questioning finally calls even their very existences into doubt.

            The first “definite” hallucination features Max and Nicki “in” the Videodrome torture chamber. But the status of that location may be imaginative rather than hallucinatory—that is, viewers may think that it is only Max’s, or the film’s, “poetic” visualization of a state of feeling rather than a literal belief in Max’s mind. Only when cassettes begin breathing, the TV set starts talking to Max, and the slit appears are we clearly in the realm of the hallucinatory. After this, it only seems to us that we can tell “real” from “hallucinated.” The blank literalness of at least some of the subsequent hallucinations eventually tells us that we can’t trust the “actuality” of what is happening, and that moreover some of the things we have already assumed to be “actual” may not have been. Enumerating the “untrustworthy” aspects of the story retrospectively, we finally can’t stop anywhere before the very beginning of the film. The opening sequence has a videotape of Bridey addressing Max in his sleep and protesting that she is not a dream, and his reaction is to roll over and (apparently) go back to sleep—encouraging the thought that the whole film might be taking place in a sleeping mind. Of course Videodrome never proposes this literally; it merely creates a climate of uncertainty and suggestion, an instability and dreamlike associativeness which permeate the film.

            Then so much of what is passing by on all levels of the film suggests a status removed from actuality. The names of the characters, for example, have a satirical or allegorical facticity which threatens the realist envelope: Nicki (cut neck) Brand (burnt breast); Brian O’Blivion (the seer); Bianca (white, pure) O’Blivion; Barry Convex (the lens-salesman). The names, also, of so many of the film’s organizations have an oneiric connectivity: C-ivic TV, C-RAM radio, C-athode Ray Mission (CRM); the Japanese Hiroshima Video company. The strange medieval-ness of the O’Blivion study, with its heavy furniture and tapestries and statuary, is a disorientingly exotic element, especially in juxtaposition with the very contemporary inner-city poverty surrounding it and providing its clientele. The almost comically strange Renaissance motifs of the Spectacular Optical have a similar effect, as does Masha’s Eastern-European Turkish-Greek flavor. The video-monkey organ-grinder derelict near the end of the film, who tries to get Max to contribute some spare change for the privilege of (as it transpires) watching his own life as a police case on TV, is another bizarre symptom of what seems to be a basic underlying condition of associative delirium.

Mise en scene:

Colour

            The deep subjectivity of the film is achieved not just by passing onto the viewer Max’s inability to tell hallucination from fact, and not just by the uncanny way in which the other characters seem like projections of aspects of Max’s mind. The subjectivity is also, in a subtle but insistent fashion, greatly strengthened by the whole mise en scène. The colour scheme and the photography have a subdued richness new in Cronenberg’s work. The dominant hue is a kind of earthy, dried-blood orange-red—a visceral colour that invades the outer world as a fine counterpoint to the way Max’s feelings take on physical shape. It is, primarily, the colour of the Videodrome show, with its clay wall and scantily-clad victims in red or orange shifts; and it is found in a multitude of other places, from the pizza stain smeared over the nude photograph at the beginning of the film to the rusted hulk of the condemned ship at its end. Red and yellow suffuse the scenes in Max’s apartment, especially when Nicki is present; and it is associated with her later in the film (she wears a red dress, and her hair is orange-red when she appears as a video image). The hallucination helmet pulsates in “Videodrome” orange; Max sports an orange-brown cowhide jacket in the later scenes. Reds are combined with black in the torture chamber, and that combination also appears in the most surprising places: in the red-lined black briefcase belonging to the Hiroshima Video salesman, for example; in the medieval furnishings of Brian O’Blivion’s study; and in Max’s black gun in its red case. Max’s nighttime apartment throbs with organic shadows and coloured lights, creating an atmosphere of Sternbergian sensuality unprecedented in Cronenberg’s work, while the pervasive camera movement evokes a sense of immanent and emerging feeling.

            There is an opposite set of colours, too—though by comparison they are almost noncolours—representing the rational or desexualized, non-body world. The charcoals and greys of Max’s costume, particularly in the first part of the film, signify his repressed and self-deceiving conscious self (but note his black dressing gown with red pinstripes expressing his private “secret” life). The spiritual O’Blivions also lack strong colour. Bianca dresses in neutral shades, and O’Blivion’s television image is washed out. Bridey too stays away from warm colours and is wearing charcoal in the scene where Max “slaps” her. The “Rena King Show” and the C-RAM studios are presented in dull blues, teals and greys, and there is even a tiny motif of pastel stripes linking the TV talk show decor and Nicki’s costume at C-RAM. Convex is invariably in charcoal or grey business suits. The Spectacular Optical logo is in cool, bright yellow-greens, and there is much pale green and off-white to be seen in corridors and on walls in public places throughout the film. Harlan, as in so many other ways, lies in between and sends conflicting messages: he wears a kind of army-surplus khaki down vest (colourless) over a red plaid shirt (the body). There is in fact a kind of regimen of opposition between the visceral “Videodrome” pigments and these denatured blacks, greys, whites and various pale shades. Max’s apartment, for example, looks grey and colourless by day, (and is decorated with wall art which is exclusively black-and-white) but comes alive at night during the scenes with Nicki, where it develops organic pools of colour and shadow that are in extraordinary contrast to its daytime appearance. And Max graduates from from his charcoals and greys to the brown organic cowhide jacket for his first meeting with Nicki and for the last big chunk of the film. In a broad sense, one can speak of this war between colour-families as a battle between an “interior” which is visceral, sexual and abject on the one hand and an “exterior” which is rational, instrumental and repressive on the other. In the end, in the final scene in the ship, the “Videodrome” colours are omnipresent, signifying the completion of Max’s journey from ego-instrumentality and repression to ego-loss and damnation.

Seeing

            Another important motif that is largely conveyed by mise en scène is that of seeing. The idea of the video image is of course central to the film. The first thing we see is a TV picture; Bridey and Nicki are first introduced on television screens, and Brian O’Blivion exists solely as an image, as does Nicki later in the film. Video images are transmuted from passive to active things and change their viewers from active watchers to passive victims; and finally video and actuality become impossible to tell apart. In fact most of the “video” hallucinations have no perceptible connection with video images: they are simply seen, by Max and by us. The seeing motif is echoed in the name and activities of Spectacular Optical (and Barry Convex), whose misattributed trade slogans—“Love comes in at the eye” and “The eye is the window of the soul”—are both literally applicable to Max’s situation, and both heavy with cruel irony when we consider what it is that “comes in at the eye” and what transforms “the soul” in this film. The Spectacular Optical shop sells eyeglasses, which Max tries on in another weirdly dissociative scene. Convex walks in while Max is comically modelling a pair, tells him ironically, “You’re playing with dynamite,” then gives him extensive advice on what kind of frame would suit his face (“something more spidery”). Max is again playing at seeing, also trying on a quasi-theatrical “disguise,” but the consequence to himself will not be in any way playful or merely theatrical. Convex in the end gives him something really “spidery”—the hallucination helmet which looks like an insect’s body fitted over Max’s head—and, like a set of super-Videodrome-spectacles, it records the scenes of sadistic torture seen by Max’s (mind’s) eye.

            Glasses are important and so is glass. The two nominally have only a slender connection (you see through both of them), but in Videodrome slender connections like this are exploited and enlivened as everything flows into everything else. Max’s apartment has a series of thick, ridged, pebble-glass windows around its door (signifying Max’s myopia?). On two separate occasions, Max goes, in an odd, marked fashion, to the big window in O’Blivion’s study overlooking the mission, looks through the curtains, and says “nice view.” The windows of both the Spectacular Optical shop and the Cathode Ray Mission are smeared with grime (Max smashes the latter brutally on his way to kill Bianca and later in the scene rips down a pane of brown paper to find the Nicki-image being strangled). The door to Max’s bedroom is made of clear glass—decorated with red paint.

Micro-motifs

            Glass and doors are in fact associated throughout the film, and doors themselves constitute a motif. Metaphorically, Max passes through one door after another into new realms of experience. The door imagery begins when Max visits the second-rate hotel where the Hiroshima Video delegation is staying. Down the hall, a man is pounding on a door and shouting “Open the door! You know I love ya! Open the door for fuck’s sake!”; Max knocks at the door in front of him, and when it is opened the chain lock breaks off. Obviously there is going to be trouble going through doors in this film—first they won’t open, and when they do they can’t be locked again. After he has killed his partners, Max ducks out the back door into an alley where, very strangely, some workmen are transporting a number of glass-windowed doors from one place to another. The doors, like Max’s whole experience, are unhinged; by this time his movement into new worlds is without any context or referent he can discern. Looking for Bianca to kill her, he ignores the “Closed” sign on the front door of the Cathode Ray Mission, and makes his way through the garbage in the back yard to break in at another door. In the scene of Harlan’s death the explosion of his “hand grenade” blows a hole in the wall—a new door—through which Max leaves. On his way to the hulk in the film’s final section, he has to squeeze through a fence gateway labelled “Keep Out.” The last door, on the ship, has “Condemned” written on it. Max ignores all these warning signs—as he ignores the posted sign in Harlan’s lab, visible in the first scene where he watches the Videodrome show, saying “DANGER” in Videodrome orange-on-red. Max looks (through glass, at Videodrome); then he acts and moves (through doors, into sadism and murder). The looking is dangerous and the action and movement are fatal; in this way also the film characterizes the “transformations” that are undergone as wholly disastrous: Max should Keep Out, and in the end he is Condemned.

            The film is filled with almost abstract visual tropes whose effect is sometimes purely connective, and not metaphorical in any broader sense. A good example is the motif of a hard black surface striated with piping or slats. Its most striking appearance is in the metal floor-pallette in the Videodrome chamber. But it may also be seen in the patterning on the panels of Max’s big black console-TV-set—the source and setting of so many of his hallucinations. The motif is echoed in the hard black striations on the plastic cases of video cassettes (both TV and cassettes become “organicized” and pliable as well), and again on the black plastic front of the Videodrome helmet. Videodrome torture comes in various forms, but prominent among them are whippings. The scene of Max’s Videodrome-helmet whipping of Nicki—or Masha—allows us to get a close look at the implement, which is black leather, with striations, and in its coiling suppleness showing a resemblance to the “organicized” cassettes and TV set. During Bianca’s “reprogramming” of Max in the Cathode Ray Mission, the television set she unveils, and which shows Nicki (strangled with a whip) and which “shoots” Max, is “his” television—only now in organic brown rather than black. (Max’s pistol has made a similar journey from metallic black to organic brown in its Fleshgun form.) And it is this same now-brown console-set of Max’s which he finds in the deserted ship, on which Nicki and his own suicide appear, and which finally explodes in an avalanche of visceral organs. The trope of striations appears also in Max’s “visceral” black-and-red dressing gown, and in the venetian-blind shadows which begin to appear in his apartment after he has encountered Videodrome. Strangely and illuminatingly, not just a general similarity of seediness and dereliction but a particular iconography characterizes both the Cathode Ray Mission and the Spectacular Optical shop: their locations are equally downclass, and the latter’s clientele appears almost as far down the social scale as the former’s; moreover both their premises are decorated in pale blues and greens and both feature partitions for individual service. This resemblance is so extensive that it must be deliberate, and in any case furthers the suggestion found everywhere else in the film that these oppositions (O’Blivion/Convex, Nicki/Bianca, Cathode Ray/Spectacular Optical) are dream-phantasmagoria inhabiting a single psyche whose polarity is liable to reverse or collapse at some fundamental level.

            It is the multitude of cross-references of this kind that sets the final stamp on Videodrome as a dreamlike subjective experience. Chainsmoking Max’s first word to Nicki is “Cigarette?” In most scenes between these two, they are both smoking. Nicki burns herself with a cigarette and offers it to him to burn her again. The cigarette in the next scene links Masha with Nicki. In many of Max’s scenes of solitary meditation on the attractions and transgressions of what he’s been getting into he is sucking on a cigarette. All of these moments add up to an association between smoking and transgressive behavior that recalls Bukatman’s statement: “In Cronenberg’s world, smoking, drinking or sexual activity produce disastrous consequences.” The cigarette motif resurfaces, along with so many others, in the final scene—and there all the cigarettes have been smoked, the package is empty. The curtains Max pulls aside and looks through in Brian O’Blivion’s study bear a chain-link pattern. Then Max lingers by and skirts around a chain-link fence outside the Cathode Ray Mission on the night he goes to kill Bianca and is reprogrammed. And there is another chain-link fence guarding the waterfront where Max goes at the end of the film, and which he has to squeeze through. In the fashion of all these motifs, each new iteration adds to the sense that they are all the same. The chain links recall the chains in the torture chamber and on the ship. At the same time they are, like doors, a barrier which Max breaks through. The repeated motif of “breaking through”—it is the same breakthrough Max was looking for in his search for transgressive programming—is recalled in this transgressive movement through doors and fences and windows and screens into forbidden ground which will be destructive to Max. Even microscopic details like the bag of (“Videodrome-”) orange Cheezies and the green bottle on the table in the Hiroshima Video room have associative connotations. The patterns are so dense and so subliminally presented (this is by no means an exhaustive list) that the entire film seems to float in them, taking on a somnambulistic air that calls the reality of everything into question.

The final scene

            The culmination of this imagistic atmosphere comes in the superb final scene—still one of the finest things Cronenberg has ever done. As Max, weary beyond measure, the perpetrator of four murders whose significance for him would in a court of law be interpreted as clear insanity, arrives at the waterfront in his cowhide jacket, the dawn is breaking with a cold, grey beauty. He makes his way to the rusting ship’s hulk; it is utterly dead and old and forgotten. He pulls open the iron door reading “Condemned” and goes inside. The colours are those of the Videodrome torture chamber—orange, rust-red and excremental brown—absolutely visceral but translated now into the deathlike dull brutishness of ancient cast iron. It is a place of ultimate desolation and death—the death of everything that had once been alive and throbbing—Max’s death. Inside the compartment is the recapitulation of the whole film in terms of dereliction and uselessness and final decay. The gargantuan hanging chain and coiled ship’s rope recall the chains and ropes of the torture chamber; an old iron-banded frame bedspring recalls the rectangular grate on the chamber floor. Max walks past these things and flops down on a wretched stained mattress: the mattress of his apartment on which he and Nicki made love. His hands encounter an empty cigarette package (his brand, Nicki’s “brand”), and a green bottle like the one on the table in the Hiroshima Video hotel room (the most amazing stroke of all, this, because of its marvellous triviality—everything is coming back). His life is finished. Max Renn, the confident, dynamic entrepreneur with everything under control and the world on a string, is a derelict and a murderer and an outcast—and shortly to be a suicide in this deserted garbage bin. The whole scene, with its perfect balancing of objective tragedy and subjective release, its majestic marshalling of so many of the film’s reverberating ideas and motifs and its expressive flowering into the flames of both funeral pyre and phoenix is an overwhelming conclusion to the film, and as great an individual piece of cinema as I know.

Reflexivity, art

            To a greater extent than any previous Cronenberg film, Videodrome introduces an element of reflexivity. Max’s profession as television station owner and programmer is clearly an echo of the business of making films (even though Max refuses to get into production himself, and has “no philosophy”). The content of Channel 83’s programming is sensational, like the content of Cronenberg’s movies. Max has to endure a degree of public censure for this, as Cronenberg has had to (especially in his native Canada). From this perspective, the “Rena King Show” cross-examination is an ironic reworking of a specific situation Cronenberg has found himself in more than a few times. Max’s glib comebacks about violence, sex, and imagination are later pinpointed as such by Bianca. Cronenberg has talked on occasion about catharsis and vicarious outlets for dangerous aggression; and it is a joke at his own expense to have Max say that his programmes are harmless or beneficial and then have him, in effect, eaten by his own television set. Far from being a “harmless outlet,” the Videodrome show (which Max wants for Channel 83) encourages the impulses it is supposed to ground, to the point that they completely unseat volition and obliterate all moral control. This is made especially clear when Max visits Bianca towards the end of the film to kill her, and he numbly repeats his self-introduction almost word for word:

Max: I run Civic-TV. I was on a talkshow with your father.            

Bianca: So it was to be you after all. You’ve come to kill me.

Max: No. I’m Max Renn. I run Civic-TV. I don’t—I don’t kill people.

Bianca: Oh, but you do.

Here, Cronenberg, lifelong battler against censorship, is adopting exactly the censor’s viewpoint—as he has pointed out himself.

            But the question is much more complex than that. The reflexivity of Max Renn’s profession and his tastes is another facet of that self-centralization, that acceptance of responsibility for transgressivity, which I spoke of earlier in this chapter. The absent scientist who in earlier films had set up the experiments, and who was the stand-in for the absent scientist making the movie, is present not just in the traditional form in the person of Professor Brian O’Blivion, but also in Max, the person who searches for transgressive images to display. This scientist has now begun to become an artist. Max is not quite that yet, but he is an important first step on the road to such later artist-creators as Beverly Mantle in Dead Ringers and above all Bill Lee in Naked Lunch. The essential aspect of that artist-figure is that he is one who transgresses into the realm of the body and desire in a process of trying to “break through,” find something “radical” and “new.” That was the sin of the mad scientists in the earlier films, it is the sin of Max Renn, and it will be very emphatically and articulately the sin of the writer in Naked Lunch. “Sin” may seem like an odd word to use, but it is exactly in the terms of a moral transgression that Max is punished. He sins not simply against social and cultural conventions but against the lives of others—especially against women, whom in the indulgence of transgressive desire he reduces to objects. Desire, the boundaryless body, transgression, the search for “breakthrough”—these elements which were formerly associated in Cronenberg’s films with scientific “experiments” are now, beginning with Videodrome, newly linked to self-knowledge and the artistic creativity which has its source in the self-knowledge of transgression. If this equation holds, artistic creation and sexual sadism are very close to each other; and knowing yourself, having the artist’s courage of truth in self-knowledge, is knowing yourself to be a sadist.  When you “go all the way through” your primal, instinctive inspiration, this dreadful scene is what you discover, and it is what converts the transgressor, the creator, into a melancholiac.

            Underneath Max’s pathetic fate, then, lies an anxiety about the sadism of the artist, his sinfulness, his compulsion to go into that realm of abjection and desire which will cut him off from the compassion and humanity which are essential to his constitution as an ego-subject. It is in this context that Videodrome is a replication of the censor’s viewpoint. What is the power, and what the responsibility and the consequences, of art—not so much for the audience, but for the artist? But such considerations are far from the surface of the film. Max’s disaster may be a major step forward in the centralization of the Cronenbergian cluster of obsessions because it makes the self the focus of the guilt feelings associated with transgression, but it is still quite a distance from a full resituation of these obsessions specifically into the realm of artistic creation. Videodrome’s awful intimation about the sadism of the artist is deflected because Max is situated to one side of the creative process: he will not produce, he “has no philosophy,” he is a coward without the courage of his desires (and the true artist must have this courage, even if it is catastrophic to himself and others). It is only, really, in the retrospect possible after The Fly, Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch that one can place Max as the pioneer of Cronenberg’s martyr-artists. The melancholy and martyrdom of Cronenberg heroes becomes their sacrifice to the consequences of transgressive art: Max, and the protagonists who follow him, must suffer and die because the artist (“Cronenberg”) follows his deepest instincts to their ends and is appalled by what he sees.

NOTES TO CHAPTER SEVEN (Videodrome)

. McGreal, 9.

. Personal interview with Cronenberg, 1982.

. Though Cronenberg says that Videodrome started out as a more conventional narrative, “a very straightforward melodrama about a man who discovers a strange signal on television...he becomes obsessed with it...tries to track it down, and gets involved in a whole mystery.” (Rodley [1992], 93-4) This sounds a lot more like Scanners.

. See especially Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic; Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity, and Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (all published within a one-year span, 1992-93); but also Christopher Sharrett, “Myth and Ritual in the Post-Industrial Landscape,” Tanya Modleski, “The Terror of Pleasure,” and Bart Testa, “Panic Pornography.” All of these writings foreground Videodrome either prominently or solely from amongst Cronenberg’s films.

. Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic, 26, 31.

. Ibid., 28.

. Bukatman, Terminal Identity, 92.

. Both Jameson and Bukatman reveal imperfect memories of the film’s events, however. Bukatman says that Max needs Videodrome because his station is “foundering” (85), and, more seriously, that “Videodrome is finally revealed to be a government project” (87). Neither is even remotely suggested. (Although in the alternate and sanitized version of the film often shown on television Convex says that Videodrome began as an Army weapons project). Jameson states that the Videodrome show is broadcast from Pittsburgh (27), whereas Harlan and Convex later tell Max that there was no broadcast of any kind, just a tape played for Max and described as a broadcast. Of course, in Videodrome of all films, a certain amount of confusion is almost inevitable. Jameson has the most elegant exit from the “decoding” problems the film poses. Getting hardly half-way through his plot-summary of the movie, he just shrugs off the work: “But by that time, the Philip K. Dick-like reality-loops and hallucinatory after-effects are so complex as to relieve the viewer of any further narrative responsibility....” (23)

. Shaviro, The Cinematic Body, 128.

. Ibid., 133.

. Ibid., 138.

. Ibid., 139.

. Ibid., 148.

. Here is Shaviro as a spokesman for abjection and meaninglessness: “But let us not mourn the disappearance of those promises of redemption and transcendence, which were never anything more than pacifying myths, or devices of social control, in the first place. The time for idealization and fantasy is fortunately over. Cronenberg’s films desublimate and decondition the affects of fear, anxiety and mourning; that is to say, they present these feelings positively and literally, as affections and transformations of the flesh, and not as secondary consequences of some originary loss or lack. We are given the experience (an intense physical excitation) without the meaning.” (The Cinematic Body, 149)

. In the alternate television version there is a scene, not present in Cronenberg’s cut, where Barry Convex explains that Videodrome arose from military testing of low-level gunsights—and was, presumably, only then “developed” by Brian O’Blivion.

. The Third-World “other,” tortured and economically exploited, is also present in a spectacle of a more “primitive” lower tolerance for “underground” or pornographic videos, evident in two scenes. In one Max warns Nicki not to get involved with the Videodrome show, since “in Brazil, Central America, those kinds of places, making underground videos—they execute you for it.” The second scene is the one in which Harlan contrasts a North America “soft” because of its (sexual) self-indulgence against “the rest of the world,” which is “tough” by virtue of its puritanical self-discipline. From another perspective, there is a suggestion here of Asian exoticism-eroticism in “Samurai Dreams” and the Videodrome victims which is returned to very articulately in M. Butterfly—both Wayne Hwang’s play and Cronenberg’s film. An additional point: when Bianca O’Blivion asks Max what format he wants a tape in, he says “Videodrome,” and, after a nonplussed moment, she asks “Is that an oriental configuration?”

. Bukatman, Terminal Identity, 74-80; Grünberg, 32-36.

. Now perhaps two, after the release of eXistenZ with its overtones of ruthless corporate behaviour.

. Note the direct echo of one side-effect of Rouge’s Malady in Crimes of the Future.

. Certainly this argument would raise an objection from Shaviro, who insists that it is precisely the unprogrammability of the body which makes it a site of resistance. In his reading, Spectacular Optical is as deluded as Max in its attempts to bring the body to heel. For theorists who are more centered on the mechanisms of social control and the evacuation of the subject through media engulfment, the consumer-zombies of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead would seem a more fitting monster than the hysterical, homicidal Max.

. The Soft Machine, 78. These movies depict the hanging-boys’-death-orgasm scene which Burroughs introduces obsessively and repeatedly in Naked Lunch and the books immediately following it. By the time of The Soft Machine, he was describing it as a controlling operation of the virus of evil—the image virus. This transgressive, ugly, sexually-exciting image has been planted in his brain by shadowy controlling powers—a paranoid interpretation which Cronenberg can never subscribe to for long, and humanistically or existentially converts into a question of personal responsibility. Again, see Chapter 11.

. Burroughs, Nova Express, 109.

. She is talking to a weeping woman who is trying to blame her (unknown) problems on her sister. Nicki’s response is “it isn’t your sister, lover, it’s you.” This advice to stop looking outside for persecution and start looking inside for responsibility might almost be aimed at Max.

. The last shot of this sequence is a slow-motion closeup of Max raising his face off of Nicki’s naked body. Cronenberg rarely uses slow-motion, but on those occasions when he does (the end of the swimming-pool orgy in Shivers, Rose’s attack on Judy—also in a swimming pool—in Rabid, and rather more often amidst the many anti-realist techniques of Stereo and Crimes of the Future) it signifies a grand moment of transgressive sexual indulgence.

. This is not the case in the alternate television version: here Nicki is given a whole extra scene and a distinctly different position in the narrative.

. We may recall that both Annabelle as murder victim in Shivers and Rose in her visit to the porno-theatre had this quality as well.

. Note that a shower would extinguish a cigarette.

. Doom Patrols, 77.

. Testa, “Panic Pornography.”

. Clover also persuasively categorizes a whole range of horror films which involve the “opening up” or emotional enfemalement of a male subject, which is seen as a necessary corrective to the closed-down-ness endemic to some males, and whose emasculating dangers are disguised through the simultaneous sensational over-hystericization of a female (Men, Women, and Chainsaws, 65-113). Videodrome (to which Clover refers on a number of occasions) is an almost overexplicit rendering of some aspects of “opening up”; but for Cronenberg, if this is a balancing corrective to male closed-down-ness or even sadism, there is nothing health-giving or productive about it. Instead it is abjecting and destructive. Clover does remark, à propos Shivers and Videodrome, that “Cronenberg is generally inclined to put men at very much the same risk as women” (96n). I would say that in the later films, at least before Crash, he is generally inclined to put them at much greater risk.

. Personal interview, 1982.

. One notes also the way in which Harlan in his lab carries a screwdriver in his mouth—a fellational image which also furthers the film’s surreal conflations of sexuality and technology.

. The paternity issue is further confused if we recall that, in the earlier scene, the moment Max has desperately confirmed that his gun is indeed “gone” and inside his body, the telephone rings to introduce and summon him to Convex.

. The notion of the screen as breast is not only articulated in Ralph Ellison’s collection of television reviews entitled The Glass Teat (1971), but has been persuasively theorised as a masochistic, pre-oedipal determinant of screen spectatorship by Gaylyn Studlar in a much-anthologised essay (“Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of the Cinema,” 1984) incorporated into her book on Sternberg-Dietrich, In the Realm of Pleasure.

. This is a point emphasized by Testa (“Panic Pornography”) in his analysis of the pivotal scene where Max’s slit appears. But Testa’s argument is rooted in “apparatus” theories which assume that the classical shot-countershot “system of the suture” is ideologically tainted, and that only alienating modernist narrative (or anti-narrative) structures can perform ideologically-resistive tasks. His analysis refers to the “banality” and “dullness” of the shot-countershot structure in this sequence, and emphasizes Max’s ownership of the gaze (which we share) at his own body. But it is precisely not Max’s gaze: it is that of the omniscient third-person camera sitting across the room in a position not even remotely possible to Max’s view. It is the “banality” of the apparatus here that constitutes its most disorienting feature, its most “radical.”

. The alternate television version has some shots here of Max sitting up, rubbing his eyes and getting out of bed. The fact that Cronenberg’s final version omits those shots helps to make the basis for the film’s events more uncertain.

. This strategy is hardly unique to Videodrome. In Cronenberg’s earliest films virtually every name is a kind of ironic commentary, and in subsequent films the names of, especially, the “mad doctors” (e.g., Hobbes, Keloid, Ruth) have this kind of significance. But in Videodrome these names spread out to cover more of the narrative than in any of the films since Crimes of the Future. For a consideration of the name-play in Cronenberg’s films up to Videodrome, see Maurice Yacowar, “The Comedy of Cronenberg.”

. Including a bizarre composite photograph which shows Hitler’s head on the body of a tutu-ed ballerina, whose costume bears a large black swastika.

. The alternate television version contains much material here which is not in the director’s version: Convex offers Max another pair of frames, more delicate, which looks equally inappropriate, and at last says sourly, “You look lousy in glasses.” This phrase, like “you’re playing with dynamite,” is a highly appropriate metaphorical commentary on Max’s behavior throughout the film.

. The full text of the sign is “Closed for Alterations”: the alterations will occur in Max as he is “reprogrammed” by Bianca.

. Terminal Identity, 81. In Videodrome the sexual characters (Max, Nicki, Masha) smoke, and the non-sexual characters (Bianca, Bridey, Harlan, Convex) don’t. Harlan’s screwdriver-in-mouth might suggest a monstrous cigar, a substitute smoke which is also a substitute phallus, again indicating displacement of sexual energies. Smoking is also a sign of bodily (and sexual) indulgence in Dead Ringers and M. Butterfly.

. “I wanted to see what it would be like, in fact, if what the censors were saying would happen, did happen” (Rodley 94). Julian Petley, in “V.D. O’Nasty,” takes a sneering and dismissive attitude towards the film on the grounds that it presents a “conservative” (and anti-sex) view of the damage television can do.