avid Cronenberg's fifth feature film opens appropriately with the shot of a TV "talking head." A timed videotape of Bridey (Julie Khaner), secretary to Max Renn (Woods), director of Toronto's sleazy Channel 83, wakes him and informs him of his current schedule. From this moment on, Max's life will be dominated by malign videos, notably the psychosis-inducing "Videodrome" production, which is first shown him by Harlan (Dvorsky), a hacker-pirate employed by the channel to tap rival satellite transmissions. Intrigued by Videodrome's amateurish mélange of sex and violence--with the crucial, unresolvable question being whether the show is real or faked--Max is forced to postpone further investigation in order to appear on a talk show. Onstage, he meets and brazenly propositions radio personality Nicki Brand (Harry). The two quickly become lovers, and Nicki, exhibiting a masochistic bent, is naturally also intrigued by the Videodrome concept. She soon leaves for the city where Videodrome originates--Pittsburgh, of all places--and exits Max's life in any corporeal form.
Meanwhile, Max plunges deeper into the mystery of Videodrome, with disturbing personal repercussions. Hallucinations--first experienced while making love to Nicki--begin to plague him, as do odd bodily eruptions. Desperate for information, Max visits the Cathode Ray Mission, a Skid Row charity run by Brian O'Blivion (Creley) and his daughter Bianca (Smits). Here he is more confused than enlightened, especially by the notion of Brian existing only as a library of tapes.
During a ghastly night at home, when his body reveals startling new capacities, Max receives an invitation from one Barry Convex (Carlson), who offers to supply firsthand information on Videodrome. Max goes to meet the slimy eyeglass magnate and learns more than he bargained for, especially after a session under a hallucination-recording helmet. This visit accelerates Max's unnatural decline, culminating in various climactic murders, explosions and immolations.
Video killed the movie star
Cronenberg is a director obsessed with the bleeding interface between media and reality, and with the anxiety of the body, of being a spirit in the material world. His later adaptations of such resonant novels as William Burroughs's Naked Lunch and J.G. Ballard's Crash all emanate directly from his earlier, journeyman work such as Videodrome, where all his signature themes exist in somewhat unrefined form.
In the nearly two decades since Videodrome's debut, many of the topics, tropes and warnings explored in this film have become consensual wisdom, so it's hard to view the work objectively today. And of course, the irony of watching on videotape a film about the evils of videotape is an extra layer of perception that was not available to original viewers.
The best way to enjoy this somewhat campy artifact nowadays is in bits and pieces. On the level of sheer acting, two performances stand out. Gaunt and manic, James Woods, on-screen in literally every shot, projects the same hectic, feverish, obsessive mentality that Roy Thinnes exhibited in The Invaders. And Deborah Harry as the icy S&M bitch-goddess plays easily off her New Wave fame and persona. Howard Shore's lugubrious organ music nicely complements the action in gothic shadings. And Rick Baker's special effects--breathing televisions, cyborg slime-guns, pulsating meat-cassettes--withstand comparison to current digital wizardry.
The plot, such as it is, falls apart on intellectual and logical terms. The once-risqué "decadent" film clips no longer shock. And such scenes as the climactic eyeglass trade show where Max confronts Convex--complete with cheesy Vegas dancers who were once intended to show the fakeness of middle-class existence--now just look silly. Nonetheless, there are scenes in this film that continue to hit with full force, mostly those involving Max's bodily deformations.
In this age of "interactive television," no one has yet surpassed Cronenberg's concept of smooching Deborah Harry's responsively plastic cathode-tube lips.
