july 19 2024 : videodrome (david cronenberg)

videodrome was so good. like i'm not joking i sat there after the movie staring at my screen just saying over and over to myself "that was so good. that was So Good. oh my god that was SO GOOD." just on like... a surface level, i really enjoyed the special effects in this. yes, yes, i love meat and violence and gore aesthetics, but i forgot just how visceral it was to watch a truly truly wet horror no-punches-pulled special effects body horror scene. genuinely these 1980s films make me remember just how much i hate cgi gore. if you're going to commit to making a bloody movie you better fucking commit to making a bloody movie.

i can see why people would dislike it, for sure. the plot seems somewhat contrived: it's mind-control television, for god's sake. Get Off Your Damn Phone except 1980s-style. the scenes of sex and violence were absolutely gratuitous. max is a dislikeable guy and none of the characters have any real personality; it's heavily, heavily driven by the plot device in the title, videodrome itself.

and yet... there is just so much to enjoy about this movie. the slow, horrific shift as max became somebody obsessed with television to becoming the television himself -- absolutely fucking insane. i literally gasped when i realized what they were doing with convex and harlan asking max to "open up" so that they could insert a cassette tape into him the same way that he'd done so many times before. instead of being the passive observer, he was forced into the role of an actor, something that he'd forced so many other women to do for him in the past. he's a fucking exploitative cable tv host! you see it in his first interview, he doesn't know what it's like to be quite literally objectified the way that he objectifies all the people in the films he broadcasts, telling people like masha that their shows weren't "extreme" enough!

another thing i really loved was the way that sex and intimacy were so twisted by violence throughout the movie. nicki is the most obvious example of this -- the "come to nicki" euphemism being so obvious, drawing max towards the television, the implication of an orgasm mirrored by the act of suicide as the television blows itself out. max, too, became like nicki -- the hole in his stomach looking like labia, the cassette inserted into him bulging with breast-like shapes as he becomes part of the television the same way that nicki did. the blurring of the line between observer and actor, who's-acting and who's-acted-upon, as personified by the way violence was brought from the screen to warp max's reality.

that constant, constant tension between what's real and what's fake -- what's unacceptable and what's acceptable -- was genuinely so crazy. having literally EVERYONE in the film be disgusted by acts of "real" violence was such a genius play. max insisting that videodrome was "fake" and not wanting nicki to go on it, even though he LITERALLY AIRS FILMS LIKE IT FOR A LIVING. convex telling max that he doesn't like "freaky" things, even as he insists that max witness it for himself -- ultimately bending him into a weapon just so he doesn't have to do any of the killing with his own hands. even bianca looking down and shaming max for becoming one of convex's puppets -- just to do the same thing with her own cassette, her own hands. ugh. i wonder if the implication at the end was that bianca was still controlling max... making him see nicki on the screen and shoot himself in the head. she did quite literally do it once before.

it's such an interesting dissection of how people perceive media, how things can be "acceptably" fascinating and titillating up until the point where it starts impacting reality -- upon which they have to be shunned. where is the line drawn? why do we allow ourselves to keep making exploitative films (the awful slashers and splatter sexploitation films of the 80s) when we think of what's happening in them to be "disgusting," when we don't want people to act on these kinds of urges in real life? is videodrome an outlet, or is it affecting how we see reality? is the new flesh really anything new at all... or is it just violence turned towards a new end, one where television is allowed to exacerbate the natural impulses that convex had triggered in max already, moving the puppet from one goal to another without taking the gun out of his hand?

anyway. i fucking loved it, would absolutely watch it again. shoutout to the cathode ray church being such a cute play on catholic church and how the television is implied to be the next dimension, the heaven that we go to after we die. shoutout to how the last act of violence we see on screen is LITERALLY THROUGH a screen, with the movie blacking out before we can watch max fucking kill himself. Shoutout to the scene where the gun wires itself into max's hand so he HAS NO CHOICE but to interact with the world through violence, he doesn't have a choice otherwise. cultural decay and the proliferation of sex and violence on television (with its resulting normalization and the dehumanization of its actors) might be a problem, but the human fascination with the grotesque and sexual and violently intimate will live on the way the flesh does.