Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Videodrome
1983 · David Cronenberg · Videodrome on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice the TV screen as the brightest thing in frame. (camera)
Cronenberg and cinematographer Mark Irwin keep returning to a television glowing in a dim room, organizing entire compositions around the act of looking at a screen.
Payoff: Your own eye is being trained to watch exactly the way Max watches. In the reading: the lectosign (readable image). The reading calls this a lectosign: an image that has stopped offering an obvious action and instead asks to be read.
Notice the cold grays and greens against bright red flesh. (light)
Irwin shoots in muted institutional tones, gray, sickly green, screen blue, so that any red, blood or skin, registers with unusual force against the flat palette.
Payoff: The clinical color scheme makes the film's grotesque moments look calm rather than sensational.
Notice how ordinary scenes and visions cut together the same way. (cutting)
Editor Ronald Sanders refuses the usual dissolve or wobble that would flag a hallucination, cutting each strange moment exactly like an ordinary one.
Payoff: You lose the cue that would tell you what to trust, right along with the main character. In the reading: falsifying narration. The reading calls this falsifying narration: real and hallucinated events presented as equally true, with no way to tell them apart.
Watch Max's fast talk slow into quiet, bewildered stillness. (performance)
James Woods plays Max as a nervy opportunist at the start, then gradually curdles his energy into passivity as the character loses his grip on what is real.
Payoff: The performance itself charts the story's whole arc, from a man in control to a man submitting.
Notice how the TV and tapes are staged like bodies. (setting)
Cronenberg treats the television as a desiring body and the videocassette as living tissue, staging machines with the same weight and presence usually given to a person.
Payoff: Technology in this film behaves like flesh long before the story confirms it.
Once you have seen it
Watch Max's hand fuse into the pistol he's holding. (staging)
Rick Baker's practical effects turn the gun into an extension of Max's own body, so the organ meant to let him act becomes the very thing consuming him.
Payoff: The tool that should let him act instead finishes taking him over. In the reading: cinema of the body. The reading calls this cinema of the body: dread located directly in the mutation and betrayal of one's own physical form.
Notice O'Blivion only ever appears on prerecorded tape. (staging)
The media prophet exists solely as a wall of videocassettes playing his own recorded image, a man who claims he isn't even sure he exists.
Payoff: A recording and a living presence become impossible to tell apart, which is the whole point of him.
Listen for the phrase Max repeats at the very end. (sound)
The film closes on a chanted mantra about a new kind of flesh, offered without any framing that tells you whether it is triumph or horror.
Payoff: Cronenberg refuses to resolve whether this is liberation or annihilation, and leaves both readings standing.
Carry this in: Watch the TV screen in every dim room. It's usually the brightest thing there.