VIDEODROME (1983)

“The television screen has become the retina of the mind’s eye. Therefore, the television screen is part of the physical structure of brain. Therefore whatever appears on television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore television is reality and reality is less than television,” said Prof. O’Blivion introducing ‘Videodrome’ in one of the key scene of this film.

Written and directed by David Cronenberg, it’s a groundbreaking film of 80’s independent Hollywood movement. Its disturbing tale of horrible transformations brought by too much exposure of television violence. Max Renn is producer of porn programmes for Channel 83 offering his viewers everything from soft-core pornography to hardcore violent sex. In order to survive with rival channels, he’s constantly in search of real things which viewers can’t get anywhere else. Once accidentally he comes to know about a programme called ‘Videodrome’ which absorbed him completely. It backfired him when his abdomen suddenly grows a vagina like opening into which video cassettes can be inserted. What happens next is not a thing to reveal. Witness it on your own.

Like many other great films it’s one of the controversial film made way ahead for the audience to digest the grotesque and horribly perverted porno future of commercial television and internet fixation where things are available at one click of your remote control or mouse. Watch those cubicle shaped television screening compartments of Prof. O’Blivion’s Cathode Ray Mission, appears like today’s private space of cybercafés.

Today the reality television has bugged our attention and audience is never so desperate or ready to get manipulated. As Professor O’Blivion said in the film, “Public life on television was more real than private life in flesh. After all there is nothing real outside perception of our reality. Is there?” The film raised many pertinent questions about lenient censorship and money mongering commercial producers who’s telecasting such erotic perversion or violence leading towards ‘desensitization’ or ‘dehumanization’. In my opinion it’s a film which puts Cronenberg on certain equal ground with great Kubrick, the critic of human’s next phase of materialistic, technocratic progress. Watching this, he’s new entry in my favorite contemporary Hollywood directors’ list.

Cronenberg is auteur director by all means who coalesced the plot of this film with images full of sado masochistic, bizarre violent images, body mutilation and sexual torture and it’s perhaps the paragon in that respect. It got heavily censored cuts at the time of its release. It’s not exaggerating to call it a reference material for sicko directors like Takashi Miike. Unusually shocking, technically mind-blowing, thematically brilliant the film is an intriguing combination on all aspects.

It’s absolutely brilliant Cronenberg film any cinebuff has to watch without fail. Warn you to beware of all those unusual grotesque imagery that will suck you.

Ratings-10/10