Videodrome · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the television set that learns to breathe. In Max Renn's apartment the screen swells, bulges toward a giant pair of soft lips — Nicki Brand's mouth, filling the frame — and Max leans in and presses his face to the glass. He kisses it. The glass gives like skin. Cronenberg shoots this the way Mark Irwin shoots everything else in the film: cool, even, in the same sickly institutional light he gives the cramped offices at Channel 83. Nothing in the grammar tells you you've left the real. That withheld cue — the camera's flat documentary calm holding a monstrous image exactly as it held an ordinary one — is the entire method, and it is the thing Deleuze can name for you.

Begin with what the film stops being. Videodrome opens as a movement-image in good standing. Max is a detective figure, a sleazy programmer following a pirate signal to its source, perceiving a situation and acting to change it — the noir circuit at full power, situation leading to action leading to the next situation. Deleuze calls the engine of that cinema the sensory-motor link, and he also charts its collapse. The crisis of the action-image is what happens when a character can no longer react adequately to what he perceives. Watch Max curdle from nervy fast-talking opportunist into bewildered passivity. By the second half he doesn't investigate; he submits. He becomes a seer — a voyant, a watcher and endurer rather than an agent — trapped in pure optical and sound situations where there is nothing to do but look at the screen and feel his own flesh rearrange. The hand that fuses with the pistol is the literal end of the sensory-motor circuit: the organ of action eaten by the thing it was supposed to operate.

Once action can no longer sort the world, truth goes with it. Deleuze's term for the principle that takes over is the powers of the false. Ordinary cinema runs on a quiet contract — what the camera shows, happened. Bazin built a whole realism on that trust. Cronenberg voids it. Ronald Sanders cuts Max's tumor-visions as continuous with the scenes around them, never granting the dissolve or the wobble that would let you bracket a moment as fantasy. The result is falsifying narration: events and hallucinations are presented as equally, mutually true, and you are denied any vantage from which to verify either. This isn't sloppy plotting. The undecidability is the creative act — the film makes "is this real" the wrong question and trains you to stop asking it.

The figure who shows you the machinery is Brian O'Blivion, the media prophet who appears only as a wall of pre-recorded videotapes. "I am not even sure I exist," he might as well say; he is dead and still broadcasting. Here the film touches the crystal-image — Deleuze's name for the moment an actual thing and its own virtual image become impossible to tell apart, the way a face and its mirror collapse into one shimmering object. O'Blivion is a man who is wholly his recording. The breathing TV, the brightest object in every dim room, is a mirror that reflects desire back as flesh. Personality stored on magnetic tape, replayed, indistinguishable from a living presence: the crystal, in cathode-ray form.

And because the screen no longer behaves — no longer offers a stable image to act upon — it asks instead to be read. Deleuze calls this the lectosign, the image that has lost its sensory-motor obviousness and become legible, a thing to decipher rather than react to. Irwin's recurring composition, the television-within-the-frame glowing in the gloom, organizes the whole film around that act of reading a surface. McLuhan stands behind it; the screen is the message and the message is in the body.

Which is where Cronenberg's own invention lives. His genius was to make body horror a form of thought — the cinema of the body, where dread is located in the mutation and betrayal of one's own form. Rick Baker's practical effects (the vaginal cassette slot opening in Max's abdomen, the pulsing tapes, the hand-gun) are not gore for its own sake; they are arguments rendered in foam latex and pneumatics. Max's postures — penetrated, plugged-in, submitting to the device — invert the relation of operator to apparatus until the human is the interface. "Long live the new flesh" is the film's whole media theory compressed into a mantra.

Thread the lineage and the debts come clear. Peeping Tom gave him the camera that kills the thing it records, the gaze that implicates the watcher; Cronenberg turns it into a signal that murders whoever views it. Persona bared the apparatus — the burning strip, the screen-within-screen dissolving identity — and The Parallax View showed assembled imagery literally reprogramming a brain. His own Shivers, The Brood, and Scanners built the idiom: the parasite bursting the abdomen, rage made flesh, the nervous system as receiver. Videodrome fuses them.

What it seeded is what makes it feel like a transmission from ahead of its time. Built entirely from analog hardware — Betamax, UHF, satellite piracy — it dreamed the neuro-image before the word existed: a film that moves through a diseased mind rather than depicting one, recombinant, database-like, refusing the outside. (That label is later scholarship, not Deleuze's.) Plug in the digital networks of the next forty years and the prophecy seems to complete itself. Cronenberg made the screen an organ of the body, and once you've watched Max press his face into that breathing glass you can never again sit in front of a screen as if it were only out there in front of you. That is the better pair of eyes the film hands you. Long live the new flesh.