#Yes the Cathode Ray Mission feels like an Unknown Armies faction don't @ me

[uncleasriel]

So, I just saw this movie. What a weirdly misogynistic, grotesquely surreal, but still mentally stimulating experience. Thoughts and reactions and spoilers ahead!

Ultimately, I think this is film is a little too neatly explained in the "asshole TV exec gets brain tumors, suffers schizoid hallucinations & commits violence". While parsing out which layers of reality are truly delusional and which are real things which brush against his hallucinations seems like a neat mental exercise, the structure of 'man goes mad and commits heinous acts acting on delusions' is something which I've seen explored so often in the forty years following the film's release that I'm afraid to say it's almost become a cliche.

I don't want to dismiss the film as not worth watching - it clearly has a power, and it touches on some engaging ideas about the unreality of moving picture media & the unhealthy role unregulated media The special effects, while surprassed by some of Cronenberg's later work, are still as grotesque and nightmarish as ever. I just find the overall plot of the film can be too neatly explained as "Max Renn's sublimated anxieties over his career as an amoral peddler of violent smut literally metastasize and consume his sense of reality." It just feels too easy to dismiss the more surreal sequences as symptoms of psychosis, instead of McLuhan-esque digressions on the nature of mass media.

Perhaps that's a failing on my part. There's certainly a critique of the kind of marketplace which pushes firms to air more and more extreme sexual & violent content to make ends meet, and I get an air of desperation about Max Renn. He has a mad desire to make it as a 'little guy' pushing back against a media landscape as staid and monolithic as Canada's. Echoes of Toronto's City TV & its provocative egomaniac figurehead Moses Znaimer are obvious.

But the person of Renn is repugnant. He is a money man focused on finding the extreme flavor of provocative so he can get people watching his his channel, incapable or unwilling to entertain the possibility that the depersonalized, sadomasochistic pseudo-snuff on the Videodrome channel could show genuine acts of torture and violence. His gross sexually forward comments with radio host Nicki Brand reek of a sleazy 80s entertainment mogul, and her bizarrely tolerant acceptance of them felt as wholly unreal as the videodrome nightmares.

It felt like an indictment of Cronenberg as a man, using actress Debbie Harry as a meat-puppet, spouting sexualized dialog as an outlet for some unhealthy psychosexual impulse. When Nicki reveals herself to be a sadomasochist at Renn's apparment, her behaviour feels similarly unreal - she feels like a lonely man's vision of an imaginary girlfriend, throwing herself at sadomasocistic perversion without a sense of personality beyond it. A shame, since the scene where Renn gives her an ear piercing comes off as genuinely sensual; a demonstration of a person relishing the comingling of pleasure and pain in an intimate act made enjoyable both partners.

Her character leaves the film soon after this, "travelling to Pittsburg" (where the disturbing broadcasts are said to come from), only to reappear in Renn's delusions as a character acting out disturbing scenes on television. Soon Renn begins to delve into the mystery of this bizarre TV channel, such as tapping an ambiguously Eastern European film distributor for leads and uncovering the delightfull odd Cathode Ray Mission a soup kitchen for the television-deprived homeless.

As spectre of a Marshall McLuhan figure (charmingly named Brian O'Blivion) evasively maneuvers through is daughter Bianca, , conspiracies and delusions pile on as mysterious night visitations and corporate power-players threaten to overhwelm Max Renn's world. Ultiamtely, they turn him into a vessel controlled by a vaginal stomach-pouch stuffed, played with meda emboded in mind-controlling Betamax tapes stuffed into his abdominal cavity. Cronenberg's famed body horror chops come into focus, and as Renn's reality breaks the throughline of tumor-induced psychosis looms large.

It's still gripping to watch, however. Max's degrading mental state reads to me as the man coming realize he hates what he does for a living; he externalizes his self-loathing into useful conspiratorial scapegoats and transfiguring himself into the techno-organic Christ who saves the soft, weak world via violent retribution. The creepy proclamation "Death to Videodrome! Long live the new flesh!" is the right kind of reactionary sound that appeals to every soft-important maniac with a gun, and (paired in with the nightmare imagery) catapults itself towards a grimly inevitable conclusion.

I can't say I felt comfortable watching this film. While the body horror is still wonderfully wet and sickening, the parts that truly disgusted me were more of how character manifested. Max Renn is a misogynist and a sadist, self-important and pitiable. Other male characters like Harlan, Raphael & Moses come off as similarly sleazy and unpleasant. Women meanwhile are either delusionally unrealistic like Nicki or Bianca O'Blivion, underserved by the script like Max's Secretary Bridey James , or are fridged unceremoniously like Max's Eastern European artisinal smut-peddler Rena King.

While it was compelling to watch Max's fall into madness, I kept wishing I could see more of these people away from Max, living their own narratives. It's foolish to expect a selfish & delusional man like Max Renn to respect let alone understand the interiority of others, but I'd still like to see it. Brief glimpses of what could be, like Japanese businessmen selling Max an erotic video series (and being put off by how he only cared about the erotic scenes, rather than the plot) came to mind - there is a world beyond Max Renn, a fascinating one of a media landscape pushing new ground and of the hot and dangerous new vistas of excitement, titlilation and transgression to be had.

Still, what we get is one of the most iconic Canadian horror films - lightning in a bottle from 1983, repackage on Criterion Collection DVDs to electrify and energize TV screens with a hallucination as raw and surreal now as it was four decades ago.

Careful...it bites.

Videodrome (1983) dir David Cronenberg