from the pen of icarus blake

Videodrome is a 1983 science fiction/body horror film directed by David Cronenberg at his most fucked.  I love it for all the reasons I love Cronenberg’s other work: the viscera, the artistry of corn syrup and slime, the sexual innuendo of horror, and the vigorous application of latex.  It’s a favorite Halloween haunt, but so delightfully anachronistic to watch on 4K HD Blu Ray Disc.

The film follows Max, a pirate from a bygone era, slurping up all the best slop produced by the fear of Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll that sparked a nationwide Satanic Panic over exactly what our youth were consuming through the new media frontier of home video.  He discovers a signal that makes him hallucinate — the reality of these hallucinations is up for debate in the text — and his life spirals into that of a mass murderer where media and reality merge into the hyperreal.  Long Live the New Flesh.

The emblems the movie uses to represent hypermodernity and urbanism in the gray, plantless cityscape of the setting are outdated by forty years now.  The Cathode Ray Mission, box TVs mounted in polished wood stands, dials and buttons molded from clicky black plastic, big boxy video cameras on tripods, libraries of videotapes.  Inescapable analog, all wires and whirring machinery that implants itself into the very flesh and bones of our protagonist.  His love interest perishes, then lives again, integrated into the buzzing screen.  The gun merges into the flesh of his hand, each new videotape that violates his flesh shifts his loyalties.  His politics.  His programming.

Videodrome is wet.  As my friends and I say, this is a Wet Movie.  The screens bleed, the characters’ faces are creased with lines and shiny with sweat, they ooze and weep ugly until they embrace the new flesh at which point, all that pain shifts into a static-ringed shot of perfect suffering.  Alluring red stripes across flesh with dainty streaks of blood.  Cherry candy, all perfectly made up and mouthwatering just outside the bounds of our stinking animal lives.  A hand that beckons into hyperreality until it devours your flesh, leaving you for static on a dead channel, until you are a sopping wet human being no longer.

And here I am.  Writing this on a sleek black laptop.  Staring into the light of an LCD screen.  Where is the static?  The perfect faces of pretty people stare back at me, no wrinkles or pores, if they bleed they bleed pretty.  There is no feel, no smell to these things, they vanish into my pocket.  What part of me is not plugged in?  With nearly 15GB of data in my computer — the compilation of ten years of thoughts, of dropped projects, of self — I, well.

Long Live the New Flesh, I suppose.