Videodrome

[nolanoe]

Holy moly, ordered it last sunday. Glad I did!

[colinr0380]

Re-watching the film again for the first time in a couple of years, while I love the entire construction of the film, I'm finding myself as much drawn towards the evocative, yet rather underplayed conspiracy elements to the plot in the second half of the film now as much as to the exploration of sex and violence first half. I do like the way though that the Manchurian Candidate-style political paranoia angle is pushed rather into the background, as Max isn't within the circles of power, or even really a trusted aide that the wider situation is dependent on (unlike say the hero and villain of Scanners, and I wonder if that is why this more political paranoia stuff is tamped down to a few lines in Videodrome due to having been much more of the primary focus of the just previous film), but is instead "just another victim", as Bianca O'Blivion says. Max is our window into the world, and our perspective is through his eyes, the film ending with him also, but there are those tantalising suggestions of a wider battle going on between Bianca's Cathode Ray Mission and Spectacular Optical that suggest something much greater occuring just beyond the reaches of the film.

I often imagine what a wider scaled sequel to Videodrome might have been like (although we've sort of seen what happens when other filmmakers take Cronenberg films and try to push them forward, ending up with residually intriguing, though also relatively 'safer' films focused more on action and gore setpieces, in the Scanners sequels and The Fly II). Maybe we see the army of derelicts that the Cathode Ray Mission has indoctrinated going up against the dangerous optician staff of Spectacular Optical who are wielding laser eye surgery equipment in a menacingly dangerous fashion! The two forces clashing as the rest of the population fall prey to the broadcasts from Civic TV's newly installed management team! Which side will win, and whose stock price will rise the furthest the fastest in order to peremptorily buy the other party out?

This film feels amusingly as much about aggressive corporate take overs as anything to do with questions around effects of extreme imagery, as Max goes from the head of his TV channel to being 'programmed' into destroying it and allowing the larger forces to take control of it for their own ends. The wider fight between O'Blivion and Convex appears to centre around a naively idealistic creator attempting to wrest control from a wider organisation (with an emphasis on the 'organ') exploiting their discovery for darker, nebulous ends. Though O'Blivion is an 'idealistic creator' in the same sense that the crazy scientist in Shivers who creates a parasite that turns people into uninhibited sex maniacs is. So he's not exactly trustworthy or flawlessly noble either, and like most of these Cronenberg 'father figures' hasn't really stuck around to get involved in the havoc that they have wrought! (Maybe all of these figures are like mini-Oppenheimers, as much as being a specific McLuhan in this specific film, struggling to deal with the consequences of the forces that they have unleashed by their discoveries getting out into the wider world in an uncontrolled manner) But all of these wider events are filtered through Max's 'footsoldier' perspective, just figuring out what has happened to him and eventually moving from running a company to becoming an almost mindless pawn, or hired goon, to be used and discarded by both sides when he is of no further use to them.

In a way Max's hallucinatory deterioration decontextualises the sex and violence: what was once safely on the television screen or used to heighten a hot date overwhelms and become little set piece moments in themselves, their inexplicable appearance triggering off the next event in the narrative. I love the way that someone being horribly whipped and tortured on the screen can just be muted and play as a wallpaper to a couple making love! That is perhaps more damning than getting turned on by the imagery itself: that eventually even that level of extreme imagery, as with news reporting on another war or atrocity, isn't 'real' enough to keep the attention for long. At least Videodrome forces attention by creating the brain tumour! Though it is interesting that the use of TV sets falls away a little at the halfway point too, once the hallucinations have made reality something more than television for Max, only returning for the final scene to provide perhaps Bianca O'Blivion's final sugared pill of comfort, as Max stops to rest and exhaustedly flops down only to check out what's on the box! (In a way I was reminded of the ending of that crime drama Chopper, as our hero is eventually left alone in his cell with just a television for company, and seems happy enough with that, albeit isolated!)

EDIT: On my quick comparison the Arrow and Criterion sets complement each other well. There are a few overlaps but a few unique selling points of each. The Arrow has the BBC introduction, Tim Lucas commentary, the TV version and novelisation and new featurettes; while the Criterion contains the two commentaries and the unedited footage from the Videodrome set with commentary. Unless that footage is hidden away somewhere on the Arrow set as an extra feature, but I also wonder whether the B-roll footage of a woman getting tortured to death would cause problems with the BBFC, even with commentary over it! After all the first half of the Videodrome footage, showing the Japanese porn film, does turn up on the Arrow disc, so maybe the second half was considered still too provocative even today!

[Adam X]

I see numerous references online to From the Drain as a black & white film, but here it's presented in color. Does anyone know what the deal is here?

Finally dug my copy of Cronenberg on Cronenberg out of the cupboard.
It's filmography states that both Transfer & From the Drain were shot in colour. Skimming through the book's relevant section, no further mention is made of it by either Chris Rodley or the director himself.

[nolanoe]

While I haven't seen DRAIN, I actually did see images of a bootlegged-copy a while ago, and those were B/W. So that would be curious (I figured everything pre-CRIMES... was B/W).

WOW: So my copy actually did come in the mail!! And - indeed - the two early shorts are in color!

[Amazing Goose]

Does anyone know if the Justin Humphreys essay looking at Videodrome in a modern context is available online anywhere? A Google search mostly just turns up reviews of the Arrow release.

If nothing else, can someone who has the book tell me anything more about Mr. Humphreys, such as where he teaches? I presume he's a professor, but a search turned up a couple of guys at different universities, and if it's not online maybe he would share it with me (I'd like to use it in a potential class.)

[diamonds]

Does anyone know if the Justin Humphreys essay looking at Videodrome in a modern context is available online anywhere? A Google search mostly just turns up reviews of the Arrow release.

If nothing else, can someone who has the book tell me anything more about Mr. Humphreys, such as where he teaches? I presume he's a professor, but a search turned up a couple of guys at different universities, and if it's not online maybe he would share it with me (I'd like to use it in a potential class.)

Arrow used to offer a selection of their booklets as PDFs on their site. I'm not sure if they still do, but I did grab the Videodrome booklet when it was available, and it has Humphreys' essay. Would you like a copy?

[Quote Perf Unquote]

This?

https://s1.thcdn.com/design-assets/docu ... odrome.pdf

[Amazing Goose]

Wow, this is fantastic; thank you to both of you!

I'm going to look around Arrow's site to see if other booklet PDFs are still available as well.

[Thornycroft]

Wow, this is fantastic; thank you to both of you!

I'm going to look around Arrow's site to see if other booklet PDFs are still available as well.

You can access all the available PDFs by logging into your account, clicking the 'View My Points and Rewards' button under your points balance on the account screen, then scrolling down to the big 'Download Free PDFs' box. Not exactly intuitive but that's how you get there.