David Cronenberg
Videodrome

THE REVIEW

"The television screen is now the only true eye of the human mind".

In this era of reality shows and ongoing media spectacles, it was prophetically stated by David Cronenberg through the words of Prof. Oblivion in the distant 1982. Television merges with reality until it becomes "more real than reality itself."

The apex of the "perception of reality" through the screen is 'Videodrome', in which Max Renn (played by James Woods) is first its unsuspecting user and messenger, and then becomes its executioner. Max Renn embodies the reality filtered through magnetic waves; he is both spectator to what happens to him and simultaneously protagonist.

The film develops on two strictly interconnected planes where Max Renn, owner of a television network that feeds to the public the most corrupt and concretely satisfying content out there – increasingly extreme porn and general violence – plays the main role on both. Inside Videodrome, he's a flesh and blood man channeling everything he's broadcasted through the cathode-ray tube, that is, sex and brutal violence.

Outside the television box, however, Max only has the appearance of a man but, in truth, he is the transformation of the same appliance, a puppet used by Videodrome to spread its video-message through his TV channel. The video has been turned into flesh to be exported into the ordinary and make Videodrome more real than the real itself. However, this project is not completed because man lets his carnal side prevail in view of reaching a new level, a new flesh, which can be obtained through the killing of Videodrome and the death of the old flesh.

Videodrome is a suffocating, nauseating, obsessive work. It overflows with all the components that distinguish Cronenberg's philosophy, so much so that it is considered the manifesto of his filmography. According to many critics, one of the most recurring aspects in the films of the Canadian director is pessimism, deriving from the traumatic experience he had in his youth when he saw his father die slowly from an incurable disease.

In my opinion, however, the message he wants to reveal to us, through evident obsessions and apocalyptic visions, is only seemingly negative. The hope, in fact, through pain and bodily metamorphosis, is to achieve a new life, through the birth, precisely, of a new flesh.

For this reason, we can only shout "Death to Videodrome, long live the new flesh…".