248 Videodrome

[cdnchris]

Blu-ray

[MitchPerrywinkle]

So I saw this for the first time about a month ago during a horror movie marathon with some friends, and though I had seen some of Cronenberg's other films ("The Fly" and "A History of Violence") I was still disturbed by this film. It's a strange film, and I'm not sure if it entirely works (it seems a little too abstract in places for it's own good), yet it bears a strong social critique beneath the gore and special effects. It's downright eerie how prophetic the film was twenty years before "Saw" and "Hostel" hit theaters and how people would dub them with the moniker of "Torture Porn". Cronenberg knew that our culture was very rapidly beginning to lose the distinction between sexuality and violence (much like the main character's distinction between reality and hallucination), and how both could be easily exploited by the media for money and power. Yet even when we 'rebel' against the system

Spoiler

as James Woods does near the end,

there's always someone else to take it's place. In the end, it may already be too late.

Overall, a highly intelligent social indictment of the media and how it influences our perception of reality. I might have to see it again in the future to determine if it's a masterpiece, but I'm certainly glad Criterion has it in their catalogue.

[manicsounds]

Very glad they kept the Betamax looking case with the slipcase for the Blu-ray. It was one of the best packaging designs out there, and the lovely and disturbing menus are intact too.

[JesusoFmonteVideo]

Blu-ray.com

[manicsounds]

Apparently, the Universal Europe edition of "Videodrome" has significantly more picture than the Criterion, making it look like the Criterion severely zoomed in for information.

[dwk]

Way too much headroom in the Universal Europe release.

[stevewhamola]

I wouldn't discredit the Criterion entirely. CC's edition is advertised as a "restored high-definition digital transfer of the unrated version" approved by both director and cinematographer. And if the framing was wrong on the DVD, surely it would have been corrected on the Blu (ala Rushmore).

[mfunk9786]

Way too much headroom in the Universal Europe release.

This. Those stills look awful.

[tenia]

Way too much headroom in the Universal Europe release.

This. Those stills look awful.

Clearly. Probably post-processes to death, as usual with Universal. I'm really afraid of what will be released from them newt year. They announced a marvelous year of tremendous restaurations, but if they can't handle properly a transfer, what's the point ?

Anyway, I still have an issue with the Criterion (which I don't own yet in HD) : comparing the CC VS Uni, the CC seems heavily cropped, but more than this, the cropping being not centered, the compositions seems now quite off-centered.

[GG Pan]

I love that sense of there being a 'big event' occuring but that after such a scene there is an aftermath and that different people around 'the event' have experienced or witnessed the scene in different ways. It adds a sense of verisimillitude but also is an interesting way of showing how information about the event is expanding beyond the semi-public space of an exclusive, invitation only kind of event to the wider knowledge of the outside world - that very brief moment when a shocking event is still a relatively intimate experience and there is a world outside that is still relatively innocent of the knowledge of what has taken place.

This is something I've noticed more on my (many) repeat viewings of Videodrome. I find something darkly funny about it, that Barry Convex's gurgled screaming is still being picked up by the microphone & amplified by the auditorium speakers, and everyone in the lobby seems strangely uncurious about this gurgled shrieking, as if it's part of the trade show. :)

Repeat viewings have led me to find more of the humor in Cronenberg's films. I think you have to watch Videodrome 3 times before you can really pick up on the humor. The first viewing should be a totally immersive & unsettling mindfuck of an experience. The 2nd viewing is to watch the film with a different perspective and/or appreciate the craftsmanship & artistry of cast & crew.

And I haven't even mentioned the additional 2 viewings with the excellent audio commentaries. James Woods is a rare actor who can delivery a commentary as intelligent, observant & engaging as the director [too bad Debbie Harry's less perceptive comments are spliced in].

I LOVE this film.

[black&huge]

Question: is the transfer outdated/could use an update? I am wanting to get this for the flash sale going on right now. Looked at the beaver comparison caps to the arrow blu which says and looks identical and i know the arrow has more features so which version should I get?

[dwk]

Very few titles wouldn't benefit from a new 4K scan, but the transfer is fine. As for your second question, I think the Cronenberg commentary on the Criterion is of far more value than anything exclusive to the Arrow.

[Gregor Samsa]

Very few titles wouldn't benefit from a new 4K scan, but the transfer is fine. As for your second question, I think the Cronenberg commentary on the Criterion is of far more value than anything exclusive to the Arrow.

The Criterion commentaries are excellent, but the Arrow does have important extras in its own right like the deleted scenes from the TV version.

[dwk]

Guess I'd forgotten those scenes from the TV version. Still, I think I'd still prioritize Cronenberg's commentary over the deleted scenes. But that is just me.

[therewillbeblus]

This film continues to grow on me considerably over time and I now see it as a kind of parent film to Assayas’ demonlover which obviously owes a lot to it. This lives in less of an intangible space of existential dread (which isn't saying much, considering that film dominates that title) and opts for more external manifestations as attempts to make tangible the anxiety of moral flexibility toward nihilism in the wake of globalization. The narrative doesn’t necessarily feel cohesive but its unpredictability and at times nonsensical threaded directions feel more and more in step with the idea of identity disintegration that comes with relieving oneself of values and convictions, and this is presented exceptionally well. The commentary on media as both an outlet to project our Freudian sexual and aggressive drives, as well as a weaponized influence of mind-controlled violence, is spoken about openly but the threat of this isn’t fleshed out to obnoxious levels and instead the film exists in murkier space of contradictory people, which could even be read as scratching at humanistic if they weren’t so aloof and given more space to emerge from their mysteries; but the “deviant” kinks are recognized without an overflow of camp and certainly not judgment (Debbie Harry's character in particular is one that is allowed to be complex in her nature, embracing the hypocrisy in mankind which I see as incredibly validating and humanistic, but her eccentricities and vague sense of self trump that reading and overshadows a very interesting character). In some ways this is the closest Cronenberg came to making a John Waters film. The exciting twist here is that in the overwhelming abundance of content, the absence of philosophy causes the characters to turn towards the only ones that exist: those of extreme sensations, philosophies of videodrome, psychosexual impulses of escapism through self-destruction; or on the other hand, an ironic desperation in manipulating and sabotaging the public as the only way of preventing the social apocalypse through nationalist global comparison.

The film not only validates cynicism specifically around cultural fear, but it’s lightweight and entertaining enough to welcome a nightmarish rollercoaster ride in safety (the opposite of the Assayas film), while remaining unsettling in giving few holds for the audience to grasp onto character, so we instead identify most with the atmospheric pressure which is weaponized to prompt us to confront our own philosophies. Though because these are vague and there isn't a forced position we are trapped in, we can choose our adventure to be one of admiration and awe rather than self-analysis, and the film works broadly enough on both levels to make an impact, even if not as piercing of one as other films that spark existential dissection verging on crisis. I'm not sure if this is a strength or not, but there's enough room for readings across that spectrum. And the idea of where women fit into this picture as objects, signifiers, guides, the independent variables that initiate change in the male or the dependent ones on which society controls (or both) is a whole other conversation I don't have a great handle on, aside from that - probably rather generous - reading of Harry's role.

[flyonthewall2983]

An expanded version of the soundtrack is on Apple Music and I presume elsewhere on streaming. Maybe not the wisest thing to listen to in the middle of the night but my god is it compelling film music.

[Adam X]

I remember listening to the Crash soundtrack while on the road. Bus, car, I don’t remember, but it certainly added a certain mood to the trip.

[swo17]

4K upgrade coming Oct 10

[flyonthewall2983]

This would make a very interesting double feature with Annihilation

[flyonthewall2983]

A couple funny things happened accompanying last night's viewing of the 4K disc, the first being that the disc stopped a few times right in the middle of the movie. I did the old Nintendo trick of blowing into the system and cartridge so I could get back to those crude digital fantasies. The other is as I put it back in my now sizable Criterion collection, one I would probably be jaw on the floor as it would be back when I joined this place, the paper art work was torn and on the other side it was all black so appropriately I flipped it around from the cover with the VHS labeled “Long Live the New Flesh”.

Felt less darker in the 4K image then how I experienced it before, on admittedly a rather puny color tv. On the 65” appendage it has obviously more depth but I can appreciate that this manages to have a scope in the story that the streets of Toronto might betray on some level as opposed to something “futuristic”, or indeed like Blade Runner, a movie which this shares some common ground with. That aside this stands pretty well alone in other regards and I see it's influence in today's science fiction, no less some of the very real things we deal with now.

[denti alligator]

This UHd vs Arrow‘s?

[flyonthewall2983]

Repeat viewings have led me to find more of the humor in Cronenberg's films. I think you have to watch Videodrome 3 times before you can really pick up on the humor. The first viewing should be a totally immersive & unsettling mindfuck of an experience. The 2nd viewing is to watch the film with a different perspective and/or appreciate the craftsmanship & artistry of cast & crew.

I've got my eye on the Arrow release on ebay, going for decent enough prices might snatch one in the spring. This quote struck out as being true for me, especially with the lengthy time in between and maybe what is my own desensitization to what one might consider tough. It's maybe one of those films that gives me pause about it long after seeing it. And seeing more in it, like the humor even in the face of the horror. Watching David in interviews never feels like a chore because of the natural storyteller he is but just also how damn funny he can be about it and himself too.

This film continues to grow on me considerably over time and I now see it as a kind of parent film to Assayas’ demonlover which obviously owes a lot to it. This lives in less of an intangible space of existential dread (which isn't saying much, considering that film dominates that title) and opts for more external manifestations as attempts to make tangible the anxiety of moral flexibility toward nihilism in the wake of globalization.

This could not be any truer now then it was four years ago. The lurid, “video nasty” feeling of both films embed the nightmarish quality of this* and the much more tech-noir feeling of Assayas’ film. Beneath all of that kind of pokes for me at self-reflection on what I can handle to watch. To how this applies in a time so different from 40 years ago, when there is as little mystery about the depths of which man will go as we see also it's triumph. Neither director has done much about the latter from what I have seen of their work, and maybe is better or best for it.

*The Toronto is strong in this one as it is in his best stuff, but it was as jarring to see how different it feels from when we see the more hallucinatory scenes then when we watch Max on the streets of Toronto (having since seen Taxi Driver I feel like those moments might have been reflected especially when we see him outside towards the end) , or even in the Cathode Ray Mission which just looks like an empty gymnasium/church.

[Mr Sausage]

I talked about sloganeering in Christopher Nolan's films a month ago, especially the way it flattens and stifles The Dark Knight even as it ends up being an efficient way to communicate ideas. And the idea of slogans came up again when I was thinking about Videodrome, another film that revolves around a set of slogans or slogan-seeming statements, and whose slogans are also central to how the film communicates its ideas. So why is Videodrome so much more intelligent and successful while The Dark Knight struggles and fails to overcome its self-imposed verbal simplicities?

Let's take the film's most mysterious slogan, "Death to Videodrome--long live the New Flesh!" The reason the slogan is so mysterious is that its actual content is not meant to be shared by the audience. Like Thomas Pynchon's 'the system' and 'the counterforce', you can intuit that Videodrome and the New Flesh are political adversaries on different sides of a culture war, and what side of that war they generally inhabit, but the specifics of their ideologies or their vision for humanity's future are mostly unimportant. The meaning of this particular slogan is that it is a slogan, and those who repeat this slogan are not the architects, but the tools. Max Renn's sloganeering just signals his loss of autonomy as he's subsumed in political warfare, shouting his allegiance even as loses the capacity to weigh or consider any ideas at all. The content of the slogan is immaterial; what matters is how slogans work, how they signal allegiance and gesture at a body of ideas without advancing or explaining these ideas.

But what about Brian O'Blivion's "The TV screen is the retina of the mind's eye"? Max Renn's "Long live the New Flesh!" is not meant to help structure our experience of the story the way "Not the hero we need, but the hero we deserve" is with Nolan's film. But O'Blivion's statement obviously is. The difference I'd say is that O'Blivion's statement isn't a slogan, actually, but simply gnomic. Like many cultish public intellectuals, O'Blivion speaks in the aphoristic style of a prophet. His statements don't signal allegiance or gesture at ideas, they work to ferry you into a deeper and more discomforting set of ideas that are meant to change your life. Gnomic utterances can help spread an idea, but the idea is the thing, and ideally you will be drawn deeper into that idea. You see this in how O'Blivion and his statement is a reference to and a mild parody of Marshall McLuhan and his widely misunderstood gnomic statement, "The Medium is the Message." Actually I think Cronenberg's variation is much better because its body metaphors ground the abstraction, while McLuhan's is hard to get a handle on without his subsequent explanations (eg. when McLuhan says "medium", he doesn't just mean arts, but also things like the lightbulb and the locomotive, info that helps tell you he isn't saying that art is fundamentally about itself, which is how he's often misinterpreted). Anyway, point is that O'Blivion's statement is the theoretical side of the film's themes, while all the extreme and bizarre imagery is the embodied side giving the theories a physical force in the world. Cronenberg wants to make you feel his ideas, even if that means eliciting primal reactions like disgust; so the gnomic utterances can't work as slogans as they're always in a process of being transformed into physical expressions. Slogans aren't necessarily fixed, true, they can shift and accrue an increasingly complex set of meanings, but that shift comes through exterior changes in social context and language use. In Videodrome, ideas become embodied forms through an internal process, one where statements are demonstrated and then restated in altered forms to be redemonstrated until you arrive at a larger idea that encompasses but isn't fully contained in the original gnomic saying. But it's also a lot of fun because people are pulling guns out of their chest vaginas and tvs have guts in them, and it's wild that this is also somehow theoretical, you feel.

The Dark Knight does work through actual ideas, I should say, specifically the process through which society transforms its heroes into scapegoats as part of a purifying ritual. But when a character says "Not the hero we need, but the hero we deserve", it's not meant to lead you deeper into those ideas, just signal that this is a part of the movie where that theme is being dealt with. The slogans flatten an already programmatic set of themes (white knight/dark knight opposition that collapses into willing martyrdom to purify the community), and while a character may come to an increased understanding of them, the slogans themselves don't acquire any new meanings. This is a lot less fun, because while it's a thrill to figure out how the hell a flesh hand grenade fits into media theories, it's not all that thrilling to watch a superhero use a slogan to declare what idea he represents in this particular act of the movie.

[colinr0380]

I do like the idea that we are seeing the events of Videodrome through the perspective of a 'footsoldier' who has been conscripted into the bigger ideological war going on between O'Blivion's insurgent/underground forces (with their own indigent army who can be mobilised) and Spectacular Optical's slick and corporate figures. And as the unwitting hitman of the battle, Renn is someone who has no ideological principles of his own other than an attraction to sex and violence whomsoever it is directed at, and can therefore be 'programmed' (and re-programmed, rather than de-programmed) into whatever is needed at a particular time.

The "Retina of the Mind's Eye" quote is a really interesting one, only more relevant now than during the video age. Where the television screen is inherently passively blank and amoral, and its pixels can be used to create images of anything. Morally and Politically (and Imagistically, from classy softcore, to underground broadcasts, and eventually non-gatekeeped content at all, if we press forward to the internet age), the screen is a canvas for larger forces to express themselves on and through. In that sense Renn is perhaps more precisely a combo TV-VCR machine who is both the equipment that can be programmed and the screen that expresses the mutation imposed from the outside will of others - but whilst the screen is a true blank, Renn's individuality is expressed through his specific interests, and he has to be somewhat manipulated into carrying out his actions through his programming that plays on those interests.

Are Max Renn's proclivities, and psychological makeup entire, something that he has brought to the technology; or has he always been fed a stream of imagery since birth that created his personality from outside, even before the Videodrome situation came along? This is the way that Videodrome particularly ties together with many of the themes in Crash, where we are left to muse on whether the characters there are using cars to express themselves as a form of cultural rebellion; or whether they are more so culturally indoctrinated by advertising and fetishised imagery that the automobile is now the ultimate way to express their desires.

Brian O'Blivion, with his banks of pre-recorded tapes that can be brought out for particular important occasions, is fascinating now in that it feels reminiscent of Hari Sheldon in Foundation and his psychohistory predictions of the future (and similar to children having to handle the legacy of famous parents and re-present their ideas in newly physicalised forms for the current moment, as we are about to witness in the upcoming Kubrick Box), but it is also similar to those notions of re-creating a person entirely based on recordings of their words, as if the meme of them can be just as good a replacement for the real person, if not even better (which was something that The Stepford Wives also dealt with). In the current age of deepfakes and A.I. re-creations, that is becoming even more relevant (especially in the way that, as with the beginnings of the VCR, it got its initial expression in the way it could be used for adult entertainment), and that itself gets into notions of being able to make, at least somewhat convincing facsimiles of, people say and do whatever they are programmed, or re-edited, into saying and doing. O'Blivion has ascended to a virtual state, but is less his own man anymore than an expression of his daughter's continuance of his legacy.

O'Blivion inevitably cannot get into a dialogue anymore (although of course "the monologue has always been his preferred form of discourse"!) but that also means that he has to remain an aloof figure making those gnomic pronouncements, and cannot ever have any new or developed ideas (or mutate!) himself. Like many a cult or religious leader, after growing ever closer to his subject he has grown into it, and O'Blivion has become his own body of work, for others to get out of it what they wish. Another canvas, but not blank and instead another one with pre-existing elements that can be worked like levers - ideological and political, as compared to Renn's pre-existing fetishes.

And that is before we even get into the idea of the effect of these ideological battles upon their audiences, and how signals within the tapes or broadcasts interact with the individual viewer to create bespoke, tailored hallucinations! But also hallucinations that in their direct intimacy with the individual somewhat obscures the more corporate-ideological agendas underlying (and underwriting) the technological innovation!

[Mr Sausage]

This is the way that Videodrome particularly ties together with many of the themes in Crash, where we are left to muse on whether the characters there are using cars to express themselves as a form of cultural rebellion; or whether they are more so culturally indoctrinated by advertising and fetishised imagery that the automobile is now the ultimate way to express their desires.

I think the McLuhan-ish point is that these are two steps in the same process. Once a medium has extended humanity, it becomes the way humanity interacts with itself and the world, including when it rebels. Like people who want to rebel against what the internet has become by founding alternative spaces on the internet. People who give up the internet entirely seem less like rebels than, I don't know, quaint. Anyway, because Max Renn is programmed, we don't see him achieve any form of self expression, but whatever that would be, it would have to happen within the terms that he now perceives the world: sex, violence, and technology bound into an organic whole. That said, while the tenor of his hallucinations is induced, their specifics must come from his own consciousness: only Max would dream of sexually merging with his gun and tv.

I was thinking a few months ago how Crash is a prophetic film like Videodrome. Not prophetic like fortune telling, but in the sense of seeing down the meat of things. Roger Ebert said the movie was about a sexuality no one actually has, but I think it's more like the sexuality we're all fated to have. Any medium of sufficient power is going to bind us together through our shared experience of reality within its lense, but it can alienate us as we increasingly see our personal interactions as mediated. Cronenberg shows us that if the desire for connection or intimacy is powerful enough, as it is in sex, it will bridge that alienation the only way it can, by turning the mediating element into the shared object of sexual experience. Crash isn't fetishization in Freud's sense, it's the desperate need of burnt out people to achieve authenticity within the inauthentic techno-pop-cultural world that mediates all their experiences, and to do that in the only way left: to work it all up into the intensest experience of it possible, beyond any use these mediums were designed for. And while this brings this odd group of people together into an intense intimacy, what they're all mutually pushing towards is, ultimately, a truly private experience: a violent orgiastic death becomes the only truly private experience in a hyperconnected environment.

It's all very weird, but I don't think Crash is meant to be about alien sexuality or something the way baffled critics read it back in the day. I think the really audience-alienating thing is the way the characters approach this deeply conceptual thing in such an unintellectual way. No one really talks about what they're thinking or feeling because talking has ceased to be the medium through which they communicate the deepest parts of themselves. We see these people communicating wholly on their own terms, which in a sense locks us out, but we're also free to wonder at what point we'll be communicating in much the same way as our technology forces on us a more and more heavily mediated interconnectedness. We've already been incorporating our mediums into our sex--how long before we're all forced to turn the mediums into the method of sex if we're to get anywhere with it. Uncomfortable thought.