Videodrome

Videodrome is the film that guessed the shape of the next forty years, and it did it by being a very grubby thriller about a man who programmes soft pornography for a UHF station.

James Woods is perfectly cast as Max Renn — not a hero, barely a protagonist, a man whose entire professional judgement is about what an audience will tolerate. His business is finding things that are slightly too much. When he pirates a signal called Videodrome, which is a static-lit room where people are tortured without plot, his first response is not horror. It is acquisition.

Cronenberg's idea, stated flat out by the film's prophet figure, is that the screen is part of the nervous system — the television screen is the retina of the mind's eye, therefore it is physically real, therefore what happens on it happens to you. The film then builds that out literally: a signal that produces a brain tumour that produces hallucinations that produce a new organ.

It is about tapes and it knows what tapes are

Everything in the film's texture is analog: cassettes, static, a tube television that breathes, a videodrome that is only reachable as a broadcast. The slit that opens in Max's abdomen is a cassette slot. Rick Baker's effects are wet, latex, pulsing and dated in exactly the way that makes them more disturbing rather than less.

And Brian O'Blivion — a media theorist who refuses to appear in person and exists only as thousands of tapes, played by Jack Creley and visibly built out of Marshall McLuhan — is the most prescient character in horror. He is dead for most of the film and still broadcasting. His daughter keeps the library and plays him on request.

Where it gets away from itself

The last twenty minutes are close to incoherent and the film stops distinguishing hallucination from event, which is deliberate and also a loss of traction. The conspiracy's mechanics are explained twice and clear neither time. And Max is unpleasant enough that the film has no emotional centre — you watch what happens to him rather than fear it.

For the same prophecy about screens, nothing in the index comes close; for the same flesh-as-frontier, The Fly is Cronenberg doing it with a character you like.

The short answer: Max is told by Nicki, on a television screen, that he must leave his old body and become "the new flesh" — and that to do so he must kill himself. He raises the pistol grafted to his hand, watches a television show him his own suicide, says "long live the new flesh", and shoots himself. The film cuts to black immediately. Whether anything in the last reel happened is not established.

What does "long live the new flesh" mean?

It is the Videodrome conspiracy's goal and the film's most-quoted line. The new flesh is a body remade by the signal — one that has incorporated the screen rather than merely watching it. O'Blivion presents it as evolution; Barry Convex's faction wants to use it as a weapon. By the end Max has been told that his current body is an obsolete stage and that killing it is how he advances.

Is Max hallucinating the whole film?

Partly, and the film deliberately refuses to say where it starts. The tumour is established as the cause of the hallucinations, and the tumour is caused by the signal, which Max really watched. So the hallucinations are real in their cause and false in their content, and the film stops marking the boundary after the midpoint. The abdominal slit, the breathing television and the flesh pistol are all presented identically to things nobody disputes.

Who is Brian O'Blivion?

A media prophet who died before the film begins and exists as a library of thousands of videotapes, played on request by his daughter Bianca. He invented Videodrome as a benign evolutionary tool, was killed by the faction that took it over, and continues to appear and give instructions. He will not speak to anyone except on television, on principle.

Does Max actually kill himself?

He fires, and the film cuts to black on the shot. What it does not do is show a body. Given that the preceding five minutes include him watching a television set perform his suicide before he performs it, the ending supports reading the gunshot as an actual death, as a transition into the new flesh, or as another broadcast. Cronenberg has been content to leave it there.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

Reality anchor 090 is near the ceiling — only 5 works score higher. The film abandons any stable account of what is happening at roughly the midpoint and never restores one.

Viscera 076 is high — 89 works score lower. The effects are wet and frequent: the abdominal slit, the pulsing cassette, the hand-pistol, a chest that opens.

Era bias 014 is deep analog — only 25 works score lower, which is almost funny for a film about media technology. It is entirely a film of tape, static and tube screens, and could not be remade in any other format.

Tone 038 is less bleak than you would expect — 87 works score lower. Cronenberg is dry rather than despairing, and there are jokes.

The threat at 050 is exactly the midpoint, which is the right score for a conspiracy run by people using a signal nobody fully controls.

Pace 048 is close to the middle. It plays as a thriller until the hallucinations take over.

On jump scares: none. Nothing in the film is interested in startling you.