Film Road to Halloween: The Influence of Television in David Cronenberg’s ‘Videodrome’ (1983)

The road to Halloween is paved with good films. Wherein we countdown to the spirited season with a hundred doses of horror. 62 days to go.

The main influence of television as a technology has perhaps never been explored more perfectly than in David Cronenberg’s 1983 film, Videodrome. Through the character of Max Renn and his discovery of a channel broadcasting a snuff film called Videodrome, Cronenberg takes influence from Marshall McLuhan to illustrate that technology is an extension of man. The director asks: What are the effects of television on the audience? How will it impact human evolution? And who controls this technology?

The film follows Max Renn, the owner of Toronto’s Civic TV, a fictional station that specializes in violent and sexually explicit programming. The channel’s slogan is “The one you take to bed with you,” and while the content may be shocking, Max says that he “[gives] [his] viewers a harmless outlet for their fantasies and their frustrations.” But he’s not satisfied with what he’s providing his audience. He wants something more intense than the softcore porn he usually airs.

“The director asks: What are the effects of television on the audience? How will it impact human evolution? And who controls this technology?”

And then he finds Videodrome, a pirated broadcast shot in a small red room, with women being tortured by men dressed in black. While the program may not appear to have a message, Max is being sent one by the mysterious and secret organization that is broadcasting the torture porn. He develops a brain tumour, triggered by a hidden signal embedded within the program, which causes him to experience disturbing hallucinations.

The inventor of Videodrome, Professor O’Blivion, explains to Max that the program has helped grow a new organ in his mind, an extension of himself, opening him up to a new way of thinking. He becomes a pawn of corporate greed and the capitalist takeover of society, and a creation of what the film calls “the new flesh.” As an article in The Millions puts it, Videodromeis perfect viewing during a time when our southern neighbour’s president is “a man baptized by television…”

Marshall McLuhan’s ideas about the media environment are transformed from paper onto the screen in Max’s struggle to stop an international plot to release Videodrome’s signal on to the masses. Medium truly becomes the message in Cronenberg’s body horror flick. Mikel J. Kovenwrites that McLuhan “is an apostle of despair, declaring that our nervous systems are wholly entangled in a mosaic mesh which is essentially beyond our control.” McLuhan discusses the idea of there being two mediums: hot and cold.

“While Videodrome is a film that was made during the time when VHS was in its prime, if we substitute it with today’s technology, it’s pretty much the same.”

While he doesn’t consider television a hot medium, I would argue that it fits more so the description of Videodrome. The philosopher says that a hot medium “is one that extends one single sense in ‘high definition,’” that is to say, a “state of being well filled with data…”And while in the film, Professor O’Blivion describes television as “part of the physical structure of the brain,” the film actually takes this one step further by programming Max like a VCR by inserting a video cassette into his chest, making him data filled – a part of Videodrome – and by extension, technologically linked to television.

While Videodrome is a film that was made during the time when VHS was in its prime, if we substitute it with today’s technology, it’s pretty much the same. Speaking specifically about television, while cable may no longer be the norm, we are constantly being fed content on streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and big corporations like Disney are releasing their own services. Cable and home phone bills are being replaced by an endless list of media subscriptions.

In a piece for Little White Lies, Adam Woodward explains that we are in a time of “unparalleled interconnectivity in which information is transmitted, processed and shared quicker and more widely than ever before.” Woodward goes on to add:

“In Cronenberg’s dark satire on consumerism and the cult of technology, Max reflects both the director’s concerns over the electronic dissemination of information (especially via faceless, morally-dubious corporate entities) and his compulsion to create provocative, erotically-charged art.”

“Cronenberg creates an environment where television and real-life merge into one, disrupting our construction of space and time.”

Television influences the viewer in many ways: advertisements influence our spending habits, campaigns influence us politically, shows influence our views, and so on. Television’s influence is also seen in Videodrome with Max’s hallucinations. It is unclear to the viewer, and Max himself, whether or not his hallucinations are a product of reality; similarly, how we question whether or not something we see on television is real life.

The signals being transmitted by Videodrome cause him to see himself in the programme, see himself hitting someone when he hasn’t, see his hand transform into a gun, and be able to stick his head into his television set. Just like advertising and the audience, Max abdicates all rights over his own body, as it’s now in the public domain.

“The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye,” as Professor O’Blivion puts it. He wants everyone in the world to be exposed to Videodrome’s emission, which brings about, as authors Carsten Meiner and Kristin Veel put it, a kind of “authentic capitalist discourse” about “available brain time,” as in, “brain time up for grabs – for advertising” which Videodrome perfectly illustrates. Cronenberg creates an environment where television and real-life merge into one, disrupting our construction of space and time.

“While we are no longer dominated by a fear of being sucked into these images, as Max is literally sucked into his television, this has been replaced by a paranoia that what we see on screen is no longer reliable.”

Cronenberg has been quoted as saying, “Since I see technology as being an extension of the human body, it’s inevitable that it should come home to roost.” The film refers to this as “the new flesh” and right from the film’s opening shot, Videodrome “imagines a near future in which technology has infiltrated every aspect of daily life.”

It’s surprising, as a film made in the early ‘80s, with an emphasis on video cassettes, should seem outdated, but he uses this black rectangular piece of hardware as a metaphor for the human body with its internal moving parts. While we are no longer dominated by a fear of being sucked into these images, as Max is literally sucked into his television, this has been replaced by a paranoia that what we see on screen is no longer reliable.

Television is an evolutionary force, and while Professor O’Blivion would say that “life on TV is more real than life in the flesh,” we begin to question technology and its influence on our minds as we succumb to images every day and begin to confuse our own reality with what we see on the screen.