Flatline_Constructs 2.7 Stimulating the Gothic Body: Videodrome

Cronenberg: “we know that by the use of electrodes in certain areas of the brain you can trigger off a violent, fearful response without regard to other stimulants.”[149]

Dick: "[H]allucinations, whether induced by psychosis, hypnosis, drugs, toxins, etc. may be merely quantitatively different from what we see, not qualititatively so. In other words, too much is emanating from the neurological apparatus of the organism, over and beyond the structural, organizing necessity [...] No name entities or aspects begin to appear, and since the person does not know what they are - that is, what they're called or what they mean - he cannot communicate with other persons about them. The breakdown of verbal communication is a fatal index that somewhere along the line the person is experiencing reality in a way too altered to fit into his own prior worldview and too radical to allow empathic linkage with other persons." [150]

Jameson: “The originality of Philip K. Dick was then to have reunited the twin fear of addiction and of schizophrenia (with its reality-loops and hallucinatory alternate worlds) in a lethal combination which Cronenberg’s media nightmare transcends, replaces, and intensifies all at once, translating it into the society of the spectacle or image capitalism.” [151]

Cronenberg’s Videodrome has achieved its “canonic”[152] status because of its almost emblematic staging of the convergence of cybernetic and Gothic themes. Cronenberg’s almost complete stripping away of the conventions of the Horror genre - his abandonment of the expressionistic style revived in the almost directly contemporary Blade Runner - might give the misleading impression that he has in some sense left behind the trappings of the Gothic, but Videodrome’s eschewal of particular Horror conventions goes alongside a reinforcement of the principal Gothic theme of anorganic continuum. Exactly like the expressionist cinema whose conventions it has displaced, Videodrome follows Worringer’s Gothic line as it passes across the so-called animate and inanimate. But it shares with Gibson a sense that it is ultramodern cybernetic technical assemblages that are making the distinction between organic and inorganic increasingly unstable. In particular, it focuses on media - especially the so-called postmodern media of TV and video, and the still nascent technologies of Virtual Reality - as assemblages which reconfigure the body in new ways, opening it up to desiring-trajectories that have as their corollary a new - cybernetic - account of power.

Videodrome’s most powerful scenes directly invert the image of the prostheticized body Freud presents in Civilization and its Discontents. In Videodrome, Max’s body, in what may be a pointed, and corrective, reference to McLuhan’s media-organicism, is not extended, but invaginated. Here is a body literally overwhelmed by an unmanageable quantity of stimuli: an image of what happens when McLuhan’s “Freudian censor” is unable to sieve out damaging intensities. But if Videodrome’s central images of the body are an inversion of the organicized Freudo-McLuhanite extensionalist body, they are also - deliberately parodic - literalizations of the body posited in the discourse of censorship and image regulation. “With Videodrome I wanted to posit the possibility that man exposed to violent imagery would begin to hallucinate,” Cronenberg has said. “I wanted to see what it would be like, in fact, if what the censors were saying would happen, did happen.”[153] What, that is to say, if the body could not be only triggered, but actually mutated, by TV and video-signal? In Videodrome, Cronenberg’s background in making Horror films - albeit of an aberrant kind[154] - crosses over into a ficto-theorization of contemporary media in terms of Gothic affect. Here, we bring into play another McLuhan: the McLuhan who had understood popular media to be based, like cheap Gothic novels, on what , following the Deleuze of the Bacon book, we might call a logic of sensation.

As early as The Mechanical Bride (1953) - his first full-length attempt to provide a symptomatology of media psychopathology - McLuhan had written of "the curious fusion of sex, technology and death” in media artifacts. Newspaper layout - effectively a form of collage according to McLuhan - operates via “editorial ghoul techniques”, “poetic associations of linked and contrasting imagery”. McLuhan cites one magazine example, “in which the central picture was a wounded man coming home 'to face it all another day down another death-swept road.' Flanking him was a sprawling pin-up: 'Half a million servicemen wrote for this one.' And underneath him in exactly the same posture of surrender was a nude female corpse with a rope around her neck: 'Enraged Nazis hanged this Russian guerrilla.” McLuhan speculates that this “may well be what draws people to the death shows of the speedways and fills the press and magazines with close-ups of executions, suicides and smashed bodies. A metaphysical hunger to experience everything sexually, to pluck out the heart of the mystery for a super-thrill."[155]

Pornography and Gothic fiction stand behind the media machineries McLuhan describes, as technologies for the targeting and heightening of stimulation. Gothic fiction, like pornography, is sold as a body-stimulating machine, its “super-thrills” not directly sexual, but “spine-chilling” or “hair-raising.” (Although, as McLuhan hints, and as we shall explore more fully below, for Videodrome and Ballard, the tendency in hypermedia/sensation culture is towards an abstract sensation and away from a naturalized sexuality, towards a cyberoticism or hypersexuality that precisely puts in question the limits of the sexual as such.)

Videodrome appears in the film as the updating and technicization of McLuhan’s “fusion of sex, technology and death.” The videodrome signal is the ultimate interactive technology; distributed via fleshy cassettes that pulse with obscene nonorganic animation, it is a hyper-intense “media” apparatus, a crossbreed of video, virtual reality and (anti-biotic) contagion. Videodrome’s inventor is Brian O’Blivion (“not the name I was born with ... some day all of us will have special names, names that will cause the cathode ray to vibrate”) a media guru who has been described both as “an obvious McLuhan figure”[156]and as “a thinly disguised Baudrillard,”[157] (which tells us as much about the close relationship between Baudrillard and McLuhan as it does about Cronenberg’s film). According to his daughter, Bianca, O’Blivion saw Videodrome as “the next stage in man’s evolution as a technological animal... a new organ, a new part of the brain.” When Max first encounters O’Blivion, on a TV talk show, he is, we subsequently learn, already dead. The “first victim of Videodrome” survives as a set of video recordings (“he made thousands of them”), appearing “on TV only on TV”.

As the head of a small cable channel, Renn is turned onto Videodrome by its promise of a new and extreme combination of sex and violence; tricked into believing it is an illicit broadcast coming out of the third world, he thinks of it at first as snuff TV: “no plot, characters, torture, murder .. very, very realistic”. Although Videodrome appears at first to be (merely) a particularly hardcore variant of S/M porn, pornography here is only ostensibly (or initially) to do with biotic sex, functioning instead as a probe-head through which techniques for the maximization of stimulation (and - concomitantly - its management) can be explored. Videodrome’s purpose is to “open the neural floodgates”, to trigger “receptors in the brain and spine”. Recalling the McLuhan-Ballard correlation of mass media with sexualised violence, (a convergence explored more fully by Cronenberg in Crash), Videodrome points to an eroticization of everything that immediately de-privileges sex in its bio-reproductive mode. “It’s not exactly sex,” Renn warns his lover Nicki Brand (Deborah Harry) of Videodrome.“Says who?” she counters, echoing Ballard’s deterritorialization of sex in The Atrocity Exhibition (of which more shortly).

“We live in overstimulated times,” Nicki Brand tells Max. “‘I want you Max,’ she breathes. ‘Come to me. Come to Nicki.’ Her lips fill the screen, and All boundaries are removed as the diegetic frame of the TV screen vanishes from view: the lips now fill the TV screen in a vast closeup.” Biotic sex becomes displaced by a hallucinatory, generalized cyberotics; in one scene “the set begins to pulsate, to breathe [...] veins ripple the hardware cabinet [...] a videogame joystick waggles obscenely.” [158]

Believing that it can programme Renn as one of its assassins, Spectacular Optical - the megacorporation that is ultimately revealed to be behind Videodrome (“we make inexpensive glasses for the third world and missile guidance systems for NATO”) - deliberately infects Max with the signal that will transform him into New Flesh, seducing him using the image of radio announcer Nicki Brand. Renn has a series of increasingly intense hallucinations, which he eventually connects to his consumption of the videodrome programming. Ultimately, Renn, re-programmed by O’Blivion’s daughter, Bianca, turns on his new masters, killing Spectacular Optical’s Barry Convex. Or so it would appear; we are so deep into “Philip K. Dick-like reality loops”[159] that we can’t be sure what is happening for [hyper]real. Perhaps much of the film, including the apparent assassinations, are merely hallucinations, safely monitored by Barry Convex using a prototype VR helmet and recording device.

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[149] Cronenberg, in Rodley, Cronenberg on Cronenberg, 94.

[150] Philip K. Dick, The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, New York: Vintage/ Random House 172

[151] Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic, 30

[152] Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic, 27

[154] Cronenberg’s early features, such as Shivers and Rabid were key contributions to the so-called genre of “ body horror.”

[156] Douglas Kellner, “David Cronenberg: Panic Horror and the Postmodern Body”, 94

[157] E. Ann Kaplan, “Feminism/ Oedipus/ Postmodernism: The Case of MTV”, in Kaplan, E. Ann, (ed.) Postmodernism and its Discontents: Theories, Practices, London/ New York: Verso, 1988