I love this movie! When I first saw it in 1983, I had no idea what it was about. Back then, we didn't have words like "virtual reality" and "cyberspace," at least not in every day usage but the concepts were beginning to filter in due the popularity of video games.
But what we didn't know then, and what we couldn't have guessed were the dangers in even the concept of a "virtual reality." Once one starts down that line of reasoning nothing can ever be taken for granted. What Philip K. Dick warned us about in the 1960's was brought to the screen in the 1980's by David Cronenberg.
When television prophet, Dr. Brian Oblivion, opines "television is reality. And reality is less then television" he is heralding in our current age where the line between fantasy and reality is almost fails to exist.
Videodrome is the story of war for the mind. On the one side, representing control is Barry Convex, who wishes to shape the world by controlling what people see. Convex is a glasses salesmen who essentially tells us he is the Devil in using the words of Lorenzo de Medici, "love comes in at the eye" and "the eye is the window to the soul" as his formula for control: First you tempt with the forbidden fruit, then, when your victim has bitten, you take their soul. This is done via the organ of the eye because the mind will take as fact whatever the eye shows it. This is why it is so essential today for the faculty of critical thinking to become damaged via such institutions as the public school system and television.
Unfortunately, the opposing side does not seem to offer freedom, but some other sort of control. A kind of confusing, chaotic and recursive control. Dr. Brian Oblivion, the inventor and first victim of Videodrome is murdered by Convex prior to the movie, and now exists only in the virtual world of video tape. For 1983, this was the best way to convey the virtual world, as only kids played video games and most computers barely did 64K of memory. The bad thing about using videotape to represent the virtual world was that tape does not convey the fluidity of the convention.
But I digress, for Oblivion, freedom seems to be some sort of unending recursive loop, the kind you get when you hold two mirrors in front of each other. The Oblivion side does seem to be trying to help, at least, as the Doctor's daughter, Bianca Oblivion runs the Cathode Ray Mission, that tries to "patch" the indigent back into society by serving them a generous supply of orange juice along with their TV.
One of the reasons it is difficult to tell who the good guys are, or even if there are any good guys, is that the story is told through the eyes of Max Renn and Max is cynical little man, played expertly by James Woods, whose only concern is taking his porn cable channel to the next level and maybe getting Nicki Brand into bed. Max allows himself to become a pawn in this war and by the end of the movie it becomes clear that Max has left his humanity behind.
Sex and violence form the back drop of the movie, especially perverted sex. At least twice, Max is offered "nice" sex to show on his cable channel and both times he turns it down. The importance of perverted sex and perverted violence as a plot point is that it opens certain neural receptors in the nervous system that allows the videodrome signal to get in. The bad guys in the movie, Convex and Renn's video pirate, Harlen, both moralize against this perverted sex and use it as a hook to get Max "infected" with the videodrome signal. "Why would anybody watch such a thing" one of the bad guys preaches to Max. This was particularly effective when I first saw the movie at the age of eighteen. I wondered if the videodrome signal was encoded in the movie.
I believe Videodrome will go down in history as the first of virtual reality movies and is still one of the best. It not only predicted the chaos of our current time, but also the lone nut assassin epidemic that happens with increasing frequency, but as the model for Dr. Oblivion, Marshall McLuhan, said: ESP is old hat when effect precedes cause.
Videodrome remains one of the best offerings from Cronenberg but is not for everyone.
But what we didn't know then, and what we couldn't have guessed were the dangers in even the concept of a "virtual reality." Once one starts down that line of reasoning nothing can ever be taken for granted. What Philip K. Dick warned us about in the 1960's was brought to the screen in the 1980's by David Cronenberg.
When television prophet, Dr. Brian Oblivion, opines "television is reality. And reality is less then television" he is heralding in our current age where the line between fantasy and reality is almost fails to exist.
Videodrome is the story of war for the mind. On the one side, representing control is Barry Convex, who wishes to shape the world by controlling what people see. Convex is a glasses salesmen who essentially tells us he is the Devil in using the words of Lorenzo de Medici, "love comes in at the eye" and "the eye is the window to the soul" as his formula for control: First you tempt with the forbidden fruit, then, when your victim has bitten, you take their soul. This is done via the organ of the eye because the mind will take as fact whatever the eye shows it. This is why it is so essential today for the faculty of critical thinking to become damaged via such institutions as the public school system and television.
Unfortunately, the opposing side does not seem to offer freedom, but some other sort of control. A kind of confusing, chaotic and recursive control. Dr. Brian Oblivion, the inventor and first victim of Videodrome is murdered by Convex prior to the movie, and now exists only in the virtual world of video tape. For 1983, this was the best way to convey the virtual world, as only kids played video games and most computers barely did 64K of memory. The bad thing about using videotape to represent the virtual world was that tape does not convey the fluidity of the convention.
But I digress, for Oblivion, freedom seems to be some sort of unending recursive loop, the kind you get when you hold two mirrors in front of each other. The Oblivion side does seem to be trying to help, at least, as the Doctor's daughter, Bianca Oblivion runs the Cathode Ray Mission, that tries to "patch" the indigent back into society by serving them a generous supply of orange juice along with their TV.
One of the reasons it is difficult to tell who the good guys are, or even if there are any good guys, is that the story is told through the eyes of Max Renn and Max is cynical little man, played expertly by James Woods, whose only concern is taking his porn cable channel to the next level and maybe getting Nicki Brand into bed. Max allows himself to become a pawn in this war and by the end of the movie it becomes clear that Max has left his humanity behind.
Sex and violence form the back drop of the movie, especially perverted sex. At least twice, Max is offered "nice" sex to show on his cable channel and both times he turns it down. The importance of perverted sex and perverted violence as a plot point is that it opens certain neural receptors in the nervous system that allows the videodrome signal to get in. The bad guys in the movie, Convex and Renn's video pirate, Harlen, both moralize against this perverted sex and use it as a hook to get Max "infected" with the videodrome signal. "Why would anybody watch such a thing" one of the bad guys preaches to Max. This was particularly effective when I first saw the movie at the age of eighteen. I wondered if the videodrome signal was encoded in the movie.
I believe Videodrome will go down in history as the first of virtual reality movies and is still one of the best. It not only predicted the chaos of our current time, but also the lone nut assassin epidemic that happens with increasing frequency, but as the model for Dr. Oblivion, Marshall McLuhan, said: ESP is old hat when effect precedes cause.
Videodrome remains one of the best offerings from Cronenberg but is not for everyone.