Hooptober... And Then There Were Nine

58th Kill

James Woods transforms into a giant asshole before our very eyes. Or maybe that Cronenbergian abomination has always been there under the surface. But enough politics, let's talk about the movie.

This is only my second time watching Videodrome and, once again, by the time this thing wound up, I can't say I had much of a grasp on what the fuck was going on; what Videodrome was, what the hell Brian O'Blivion's deal was, who's responsible for that orifice on James Woods' disgusting torso, and so on. I don't know if that's because the film is very obscure on these points, or if it's just because Videodrome seems to send me into some kind of trance. It's a film that talks to me on a sub-conscious level - it bypasses my frontal lobes and shoves its cables into my cerebellum and sets my basal ganglia a-jangling.

After a while, I started hallucinating, and developed a tumor. I believe the visions caused the tumor, and not the other way around.

Which is perhaps the thing I find most exciting about Videodrome. As a film which seeks to explore notions of mass communicative media and the passage of information and ideas via screens and electronics into the human consciousness, it seems the most elegant way to do so is for the film itself to intrude into your consciousness in a profoundly different way. By manipulating images and sound in these outrageously horrific and counter-instinctual forms, the experience of receiving and processing them feels somehow less controlled - as in, we as the audience have less control over how these concepts take root in our minds than in a "normal" film. It's almost invasive.

I'm transfixed by Mark Irwin's cinematography in this film. The aesthetic of Videodrome is characterised by human clutter in dim spaces, with the brightest light coming from the preponderance of cathode ray tubes, static, test patterns. The film is lit by its own imagery, and that inorganic light becomes a solid entity itself - an object to touch and be touched by. A transgression of evolutionary processes - a new environmental factor to shape our development, but something with no footing in geology, biology or planetary physics. "The New Flesh" could be a phrase with positive connotations, but it sounds suspiciously reminiscent of Orwellian political ideology - new is not always good. New could mean extinction.

It's a film I remain somewhat in awe of. Does Cronenberg himself even fully understand the fictional philosophies on show in Videodrome? Is he totally clear on the allegory and the symbology? Probably, but even if he isn't, the film feels like an extraordinary success. I can't peel my eyes away from it.

After all, there is nothing real outside our perception of reality, is there?

Best Kill (may contain traces of spoiler)

It's gotta be the demise of Barry Convex - after getting shot by James Woods' handgun (or should I say, gunhand), he is turned inside out by a sudden catastrophic tumorigenesis. An astoundingly horrifying image and surely a special effects achievement to rank alongside Rick Baker's more famous transformation sequence in An American Werewolf in London .