My past exposure to David Cronenberg consists of The Dead Zone and A History of Violence, which I liked; Eastern Promises, which I found OK but unmemorable; and eXistenZ, which I thought ill-executed and needlessly disgusting. I was also aware that he did the 1996 Crash and Naked Lunch, suggesting that he has a thing for drugs and "trips" as well as (anti?)violence. He's something like David Lynch and something like Darren Aronofsky. So I approached with some trepidation a movie whose premise would not be used nowadays.
Max (James Woods) runs a niche Toronto cable station always looking for shocking material. One day he sees a video, allegedly a pirated TV series, showing people chained and whipped to death for hours. He figures that's right up his target audience's alley, so he plans to air it. A correspondent traces it to Pittsburgh, and Max's masochistic girlfriend (Debbie Harry) goes to audition...and doesn't return. Another correspondent says the program involves actual murder. Max seeks further answers in person, despite the obvious risk. No, nobody seeks to give him the torture shown on TV; they have a much more insidious agenda, starting with the hallucinations he experiences right after his first viewing....
Videodrome turns out to have a lot in common with eXistenZ. Both feature zealous Luddites chanting, "Death to [X]!", because the advancing technology (VR games in the case of eXistenZ) is not harmless sublimation but a blurring of reality that manages to be addictive without obvious appeal. I have to wonder whether Cronenberg really has felt the same way, despite his use of the cinematic medium. In each case, the audience never finds out for sure how much is supposed to be "real."
From an artistic standpoint, Videodrome must be the better of the two. It has a more complicated plot and more imaginative ramifications. Indeed, I think eXistenZ suffers in part because Cronenberg didn't really know video games and their trends well enough.
OTOH, Videodrome is harder to watch. The televised torture is too banal and lacking in detail to bother me, but the hallucinations are considerably grosser than anything in eXistenZ. At least, I like to believe they're all hallucinations, as the alternative crosses the line into sheer fantasy, but sometimes it's unclear what must "actually" be happening. Anyway, good thing I've already seen The Thing and other '80s body horror.
One key factor in the plot is a pseudo-Christian cult that believes that the next stage of humanity is to live only in a video format, as I understand it. The founder admits to having a brain tumor and spouts "logic" that doesn't make sense to me; how has the cult made such headway? It adds another level of bizarreness to the gestalt, as well as an opposite set of extremists to counter the Luddites. I guess Cronenberg wants us to decide for ourselves whether we'd join either side. I certainly hope he doesn't favor the suicidal position.
Now I wonder if Cronenberg meant to simplify and tone things down for eXistenZ because audiences were overwhelmed by Videodrome. The latter does provoke thoughts, but it's hard to take those thoughts seriously in a world so far removed from the one I know -- and in a world I'd rather not visit or think too hard about. I'll give it some credit for thrills, tho. The Fly is still a maybe for my October viewing; beyond that, I don't think I'll give Cronenberg another spin.
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