VIDEODROME It's the thinking man's "Dude, Where's My Car?" Sweet merciful crap! What the hell was Cronenberg snorting when he made this movie, and can he PLEASE send some over to Calgary? And this isn't even his weirdest movie, this looks like Notting Hill next to Naked Lunch. I saw it for the first time when I was about 13, my friends and I renting it at a store where the clerk said "This very violent movie! You sure parents say okay?" That it was violent was, of course, the hook for us, but we had no idea what we were in for. Needless to say, when we were 13 and it was all over, we all looked at each other with utterly lost expressions on our faces and said "What the hell was that?" James Woods stars as Max Renn, one of the partners in charge of a low-rent Toronto cable TV station which specializes in soft-core porno. He wants to take it to the next level; he's "looking for something that'll break through...something tough." And he sure finds it all right, when his assistant (Peter Dvorski) taps into a scrambled satellite signal showing a program called Videodrome, with is all torture, all the time. No plot, no characters, just pain. While doing a TV talk show where he gives the standard defensive defenses of what he shows ("Better on TV than on the streets"), Max meets a radio psychologist (Debbie Harry) and after romancing her for a VERY brief while, finds out that she's a little too hard-core even for him. (her name's Nikki Brand, accent on the BRAND) He also "meets" a personality named Brian O'Blivion (Jack Creley), who has a lot of wacky ideas about TV's place in the grand scheme of things and only communicates through pre-recorded monologues. All this is well and good, until it becomes apparent that Videodrome might not be fiction, Brand wants very badly to "try out" for the show, and Max starts hallucinating some VERY weird shit. Videodrome is fascinating in that while its pace is, on the surface, as slow and deliberate as most of Cronenberg's movies, as a thriller about revelations and ideas instead of action, it's breathless. We're always learning something new, weird, and wonderful about either the characters or the story. Most of these "rubber-reality" movies have long since worn thin on me, but Videodrome has managed to hold my interest because its plot is just so gosh-darn neat. Videodrome was, unfortunately, the last of Cronenberg's movies to be based upon his original ideas, until eXistenZ. This movie has him quite preoccupied with television, and its potential for both good and evil. It's kinda hard to say where Cronenberg's coming from here, since in the "potential for good" column, we have Max's age-old clichés and O'Blivion's statements, which might make a sort of sense in the movie but are mostly arglebargle when applied to the real world. "The television screen is the retina of the mind's eye. Therefore, the television is part of the physical structure of the brain." That's quite a leap of logic to get to that "therefore". The one big bang-on "prediction" O'Blivion makes is that "soon, all of us will have special names" (self-invented names like, say, Brian O'Blivion) - perhaps not true in his chosen medium of television, but certainly true on the internet. O'Blivion runs an inner-city mission (an explicitly Christian mission) that he believes will help the homeless by giving them a dose of TV that they would otherwise be denied. TV as the new altar of worship? Not exactly a new idea, but certainly a new presentation of it, seeming pretty fresh even 20 years after this movie first came out. Even Howard Shore's score has a sort of "church-organ" thing going on. Woods turns in one of his better performances as this shameless opportunist who's so unconcerned about whether or not his ideas are good ones that he doesn't even discourage the lady he's trying to impress from popping his Videodrome tape into the VCR. Lemme tell you, if I was trying to score with a hot chick and she started going through my stack of Videodrome tapes, I'd do nothing short of starting a fire in the kitchen to distract her. Man, he's lucky that as soon as she pops it in, she says it makes her hot and she wants him to cut her. Most of the time, I'd consider that more freaky than lucky, but in this case, I'm willing to concede that high-fives for him are in order because with 99.92% of other women out there, his evening would've come to a conclusion as soon as she pressed PLAY. Anyway, Max starts developing real feelings for Nikki, which of course, get in the way when she decides that she likes Videodrome so much that she wants to "try out". Funny how Cronenberg's films are so often dismissed as "cold and emotionless", when in fact, I find quite the opposite to be true. Did these people even watch The Brood or The Dead Zone or The Fly? Even here, there's real emotion in Max's feelings for Nikki. Harry is surprisingly good as Brand; I never much liked her acting elsewhere, but here she hits the right note, getting her best moment when she extinguishes a cigarette on her breast as a reminder to Max that he can't protect her from herself. The hallucinations - the most obviously "Cronenbergian" moments of the movie - are all weird, uncomfortable, and impossible to look away from. In one scene, Max inserts a fleshy videotape into a vaginal slit that opens up in his abdomen. And that's all I'm gonna say. There's a lot more where that came from. By the end of the film, the question of just how much of what we saw was hallucination and how much wasn't is difficult to ignore. I like to think that the only hallucinations were the things we saw which were, for whatever reason, impossible, but even those were based on Max's real actions. I also like to think that the end of the movie is not the end of the fight against Videodrome; maybe it's more likely that what we're seeing is just the inevitable meltdown of a mind in revolt against itself, but the "new flesh" is an interesting idea, and goddamn if there isn't actually potential for a pretty cool sequel in here. My big question: why the HELL hasn't Cronenberg worked with H.R. Giger yet? There are some plot problems, which either become more problematic, or less, depending on how hallucinatory you like your "rubber reality" movies. While the scene on the TV talk show has O'Blivion saying things which he would repeat later on, to support the notion that he only communicates through pre-recorded monologues, he does seem to be interacting on the show, which for reasons made clear later on, would be quite impossible. Still, Videodrome is easily one of the best "rubber reality" movies, and one of my favorite Cronenberg films. This is for him what The Thing is for Carpenter; armed with good-sized budgets (again, in this case, for a Canadian film) and with less than the usual concern for watering things down for the MPAA or the viewers, both films let their respective directors fire on all cylinders. And both make me glad they weren't made today, with a more squeamish MPAA and too much reliance on morphing and CGI. BACK TO THE V's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE