VIDEODROME

Max Renn, owner of a cable porn TV channel, accidentally discovers a clandestine station that broadcasts only torture, mutilation, and murder. Overcoming his initial repulsion, he becomes fascinated by the morbidity of the images broadcast, investigates their origin, and gradually comes to understand, on his own skin, how that TV signal is in reality a kind of tumor that enters his brain like a drug, leading him, in a paroxysmal spiral of madness, to dependence and murder. One of Cronenberg's most complex films, master in bringing to life the themes dear to his poetry (the mutation of the body, tumorous excrescences that insinuate themselves into the human being until they modify its appearance and behaviors), borrowed and expanded towards a postmodern logic that puts forward the absolute condemnation of the television medium (which, precisely at that time, early 1980s, was beginning to definitively penetrate individual consciences), a true artificial prosthesis of the senses and hypnotic instrument from which it becomes impossible to escape. The fall of an excellent James Woods into madness is for Cronenberg the fall of the human race itself, inexorably attracted by violence and morbidity (as it will be, further exaggerating its meaning, in "Crash") and unable to control its mind. Woods first inserts a videotape inside his own body, then physically enters the television (thanks to the excellent special effects of Rick Baker), and the reality that surrounds him takes on indefinite and dreamlike contours where the boundary between morality and perversion is annulled in favor of an uncontrolled voyeurism that compromises the brain cells of the man naturally driven to his own destruction. Thus, Cronenberg announces with great foresight the dangers inherent in the spasmodic use of the television medium, and twenty years later we cannot but affirm that he was fully right. Television devours us at every moment, and James Woods in "Videodrome" is just one of the many victims, swallowed by the loss of all division between reality and fiction.