Saul of Tarsus received God in an epileptic fit on the Damascus Road,
a gush of sheer power that left him blinded and hobbled. Max Renn
takes it in the loins, like a woman, a moaning, throbbing videocassette
thrust so deep into his tender guts he gasps. That gasp is equivocal,
of either pain or pleasure (the two were never so closely knotted as in
this film), but the act is unquestionably a violation. Saint Paul
never complained of being fucked, and he did recover his sight, if not
his name. But the two rapes accomplish the same end: the victims
become the proselytes and pain gives way to sanctity. The seed of
God transforms both men into His tools.
If there's blasphemy in this (which of course there is), it's a
kind of Albigensian Heresy, the martyred voice of the true believer. Who
could doubt the devotion of Cronenberg with his ecstatic gore, his delicate
sadism? Who but the zealot would find a paragon of beauty in ritual
suicide? Those banal bourgeois critics who denigrate the gloom and
despair of Cronenberg's vision (and they are legion), inadvertently reveal
their own monoscopic ignorance. There are few more impassioned perverts
in cinema, and even fewer saints manqués.
Videodrome, for all its corruption, is a very Catholic film. Not the Catholicism of Anna Ryan, sitting on her stoop in Bay Ridge saying the rosary for her grandchildren and cursing the Jewish neighbors, but a distinctive answer to the Church which so avails itself of the same symbology, ethics and esthetics that difference in meaning is finally elided. Cronenberg's nearest kin, Buñuel, showed the same Latin comprehension of Catholic materialism while exhibiting a more unfettered, livelier sense of humor. Cronenberg and Buñuel both find it impossible to sever the spiritual from the fleshly, the inside from the out. Both directors penetrate to the mystery of sexual passion, of the erotic freight of the wound. Yet they insist that the greatest perversity, as here in Videodrome or in Buñuel's Cet Objet Obscur du Désir, resides in the attempt to divorce flesh from spirit. One may not have one without the other.
Brian O'Blivion, despite his insistence on the primacy of the video image, keeps in his reliquary a collection of sacred sculpture and objects -- imagery, certainly, yet of a variety almost solely tactile, solid and palpable. Even the wallcoverings are not strictly painting, but rather tapestry, a two-dimensional representation notable for its physical depth (in the weave) . This place, the picture's first, and only overt, reference to conventional, Catholic religion, prepares us for the more sub rosa religious implications to come. For Videodrome is not only a signal, or a broadcast. It is a religion, capable of inducing trance states and the kind of devotion only the most successful cults inspire. And for Videodrome, this is the time of miracles. Not only does the signal give rise to brain tumors in those exposed to it, thus manifesting itself in the body; it alters the physical world. Renn is transformed into a human VCR. Nicki Brand disappears (an instance of Videodrome's power of physical destruction rather than creation) . Brian O'Blivion dies. This physicality always functions in Videodrome as a process of incarnation, which in turn leads us back to Bianca O'Blivion' s apparently cryptic statement to Renn: "You are the Video Word made Flesh." Her transparent reference to Jesus, and the subsequent inescapable equation of O'Blivion and his Cathode Ray Mission with John the Baptist, proselytizing the unwashed, forces the viewer into the obscene association of the sleazy Renn with the anointed Christ -- a jolly bit of yuck-yuck were Cronenberg not so damned solemn. As it stands, our new messiah is revealed as a pistol-packing pornographer without even the guilt of Scorsese's Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ: this God will not build crosses to do a penance in shame; he's too coy even to whip a willing victim, at least at first. He becomes the Son of God as subway vigilante, yet without Bernard Goetz's "philosophy" (which is, remember, what Mascha says Renn lacks and Videodrome delivers) of justice and retribution. He's a savior for the postmodern age, about all anyone left would know to ask for, the Son of God made man as man is constituted now: solipsistic, frightened, self-indulgent and debased. A prophet of the "screen," the mask between "me" and "it," where "I" am the dominant, sanctified side of the equation. The postmodern veil, after all, is a form of protection for the paranoid: it shields me from the other out there trying to acquire me. I am the Holiest of Holies.
Things were the same, in a sense, in Jesus' time. The Pharisees didn't hassle every jongleur and street-preacher, only those claiming to be God and threatening the established order. But the message of the New Testament is one of overcoming the flesh, of transfiguration into spirit. Cronenberg's avatar, Nicki, may require Renn to destroy himself, but only with the promise of a new flesh, in some unexplained way a transfigured body, just as physical as the ejaculation of guts and organs the TV emits. One wonders whether the suicide is an attempt at purgation, a grab at purity --expunging the corruption of Videodrome to restore the simple, veritable body. I find it impossible to state categorically just where Cronenberg and Nicki intend to lead us. Perhaps the very mystery is its own answer: faith, after all, is the essence of both religion and art.
Nicki, for all her "overstimulation" and hearty sexuality, is a mystic at heart. Were it not for Videodrome and its boring, mindlessly repetitive images of paltry sadism, she might be a Tantric Buddhist, using sex as an instrument of samadhi in search of self-negation. It's not that pain is all she can feel any longer, though this may very well be. But pain is extimate, something she finds within herself not of herself--because of its peculiarity, its non-banality, pain leads away from the rigid, concrete self towards the unfinalized and mystic other, the potential being. Pain is the voice of God. The cigarette on her pearly breast is the Burning Bush.
Max, on the other hand, begins the film as a voyeur. His television wakes him up and puts him to sleep ("CIVIC TV -- The one you take to bed with you") . He loves the "view" from Brian O'Blivion's sanctuary, without making the connection that it's a "God's-Eye View" overlooking and supervising all the activity in the Mission below. Max's job is watching, looking at videos, at stills -- which he smears with blood-red pizza sauce, and so connects looking and bleeding with his other facility, consuming. Yet he is never an active agent in his pre-Videodrome incarnation. He's no more notable than a simple carpenter toiling in obscurity, although Max's species of obscurity includes appearances on local talk shows. Not until Nicki says, "You wanna try some things?" does he begin to act. It's this very action which signals the beginning of his Videodrome infection, accompanied by his first hallucinations. Prior to this moment, he's been a receptacle, an unspectacular if sleazy trashcan catching the ordure of Toronto's video underground. Nicki says he's a threat to her, but only because he's so voracious, so insatiably empty. In fact, his emptiness is what guides her to her own fulfillment, beyond Videodrome. Convex pitches Videodrome as a transformative engine, but he's unaware of what he's dealing with: he and Harlan must analyze the data from Max's hallucination before they can effectively use him. Not perhaps until the moments of their deaths do they realize the true spiritual power of Videodrome. When Max feeds himself to the Nicki-lips in the TV, he has been transformed from the consumer to the consumed ("This is my body. Take this and eat of it"). That this feels a sexual act does not alter the fact that it is also selfless, or at least outwardly directed: a foreshadowing of the climactic suicide. Where once he was the user, Max becomes the used, and one of the great, though telling, curiosities of the film is his lack of resistance to this change. He does not struggle with conscience or the abolition of his freedom. When Bianca calls him her murderer, he corrects her, saying he's just a TV station owner, he "do[es]n't kill people --" thereby disavowing culpability for his actions. But the moment he dies his first death, with his chest wounds revealed on the screen of the TV, Max changes. He becomes something at once "soft" and "tough," in the sense Harlan uses both terms to define the problem with North America and Videodrome's solution: morally open and vacant, yet active and outwardly directed. Max joins with the Father (Brian O'Blivion) and the Holy Spirit (the Videodrome signal) to form a new Trinity. But as with his Nazarene analogue, Max's body must die if he is to reach "a new level."
The suicide sequence finally and completely explodes the distinction
between TV and life. Max's self-destruction plays out first on the
video, then in life -- identically, down to precise camera angles, cuts
and dollies-in. The only difference between the video and "life"
sequences is the presence of the frame of the television cabinet; yet this
alters neither picture size nor mise-en-scène. What was once
a recording/playback device has become creative and active, while erstwhile
experience is now a record. If the suicide of video releases a gout
of meat and organs, then fleshly suicide exposes... what? Perhaps it has
released Videodrome.
copyright 1998 by C. N. Blakemore