David Cronenberg
Videodrome

Before discussing this true "Cult Movie" of the '80s, it would be good to make a small introduction regarding the director and his very particular and personal style. David Cronenberg is a Canadian director, cinematographer, film producer, actor, and screenwriter. His unique and unmistakable style began and makes him one of the leading figures of a film genre called "Body Horror" where the psychological element is often accompanied by a bodily mutation. This element is indeed a constant that almost always reappears in the works of this director, among which we remember "The Fly," a famous Science Fiction of the '80s.

VideoDrome is a film from 1983, although limited overall by the technology available in the early '80s, the concept that makes this film brilliant manages to go beyond these limitations, as it is absolutely futuristic for its plot and in some ways plausible both today and in a hypothetical future, perhaps not too far away. This film, therefore (like other works by the director), confronts the viewer with the theme of the mutation of flesh and the fusion between it and technology. A strange combination, therefore, between man and what he produces.

I don’t want to dwell much on the plot of the film, also because I might ruin its beauty for those who haven’t been able to see it yet, so I will express myself more generally starting from the director’s point of view and what he attempted to convey to the viewers. The story that Cronenberg starts with revolves around VideoDrome indeed. VideoDrome is the key to understanding the film's meaning, so let's try to understand first of all what VideoDrome is.

VideoDrome is a pirate satellite broadcast that transmits torture, mutilations, rapes, on pornographic settings and/or themes. But what makes VideoDrome peculiar and unique is that indeed (as the cynical protagonist of the film -Max Renn- played by an excellent James Woods will later realize) is that the transmissions are real. VideoDrome shows real things, things that happen in reality somewhere in the world, and through this pirate program, they are broadcast. There is another fundamentally important thing that VideoDrome can do, which is its ability to emit electromagnetic waves that, in the long run, cause hallucinations to those who watch it. In this film, the director wants to talk about the actual power of television, the power it has over the masses, and catapults reality into the TV, hence, in this case, it is Television that is more real than reality, a brilliant inversion of roles that contributes to the uniqueness of this film.

The VideoDrome Program will later be revealed to be only a covert governmental attempt to manipulate the masses and eliminate a portion of the population deemed immoral, as they sought out these "borderline" programs, causing them first hallucinations and then actual brain tumors, thanks to the action of electromagnetic waves. But such a program could have been used later for other types of people as well, becoming a tool of control in the hands of a few. In summary, VideoDrome was created to change people's perception.

And indeed, that's what Television has done and continues to do in the reality of our days. Cronenberg will later revisit this same theme with the film eXistenZ, from 2002, concerning virtual reality. Returning to the film, essentially Videodrome is a well-constructed hallucination by the director, ever disturbing in many parts, a critique also of what Television or other means with which it would be easy to control the masses do and are capable of doing, a warning.

And it is this detail that makes me personally consider this film a dystopian film. The so-called "icing on the cake" is in the ending, as it is an open ending for free interpretation by the viewer, a detail I personally appreciate greatly in films and thus gives it, so to speak, another point in its favor. A must-see film and one to include in your personal collection.