Reflections on Videodrome

Videodrome deals with reality and its layers, and how to manage reality in a world of constant mediation. Our perception of the world is constantly mediated by our senses (that is the only way we know anything about reality). Technologies of mediation, such as television (computers, internet, etc) alter our views of reality in ways that are still to be fully understood, with social, philosophical and anthropological consequences that are far reaching and dramatic. The case of the first Iraq war was paradigmatic: the war was brought closer to everyone’s home because it was constantly on television. The war helped to change the mediascape by building the reputation of CNN and its model of 24 hour journalism. The way the public consumed the war changed: If during the Vietnam war the pictures published in magazines were a major force behind social and cultural movements, during the 1st Iraq war the images coming from the TV screen made it the first real time war in history. The images were used extensively by groups pro and anti war, and the idea of a precision drive strategy gained force by being “illustrated” by the cameras placed in bombs and airplanes, and by the reports coming from the field. This is all before the emergence of the Internet as we know it, which made possible a constant connection between every node on the web. Distance was made irrelevant, and the amount of information available was multiplied manifold. The possibilities of connection and mediation were also multiplied, and the way we experience what is real is more and more medium dependent.
The genre of reality TV is also symptomatic of our current cultural context of total and ubiquitous mediation. In the 1960’s and 1970’s artists like Andy Warhol proposed filmic experiments by shooting people as they slept, commenting on the real vs the image, and his comment that in the future, everyone will have 15 minutes of fame anticipated in many decades blogs, vlogs, Myspace/Facebook/etc, reality TV and other such developments that are part of our daily activities.

A world where we are constantly mediated also begs the question of the body: what is the place of the tactile, of the flesh, of the material experiences we were once used to? Are tactile, materialized experience more real than mediated ones? Does reality depend on materiality, or can mediation put us in touch with multiple layers of reality, making “the real” more and more obsolete? Do technologies augment and enhance our experience of reality, or are they alienating us from that same reality? Is Prof. O’blivion “real”, is he alive through his videotapes? Although VHS technology looks vintage 20 or 30 years later, the questions posed by the film are even more relevant today than they were at the time of its making. The framing of the question through outdated technologies also helps us to demystify the apparent universal truth of high technology: the permanent idea that more advanced technologies will deliver us from our condition as limited biological beings, that technologies can heal all evils of the world, that old technologies can be fixed by new ones become more “made up”, or “un-real” when we see them being played out with videocassettes. It seems that every new technology renews the possibility of overcoming reality.
The myth of technological deliverance is questioned in the film by the political project of O’blivion. Technology is not a neutral tool: it can serve political means, it has potentials that are constantly harnessed by different actors, for different purposes. Whether its an ideology of total inclusion, of easy profit through gratuitous porn and violence, of personal unlimited pleasures enabled by images on the screen (even if they depend on the torturing of others), or any other, every technological infrastructure is inhabited by and made functional by people, and people relating to other people. From that we get all the complexities of desires, power relationships, politics, ethics, philosophies, etc etc.
Perception begs the question of the body. How does the flesh enter into this economy of mediation? Flesh begs the question of desires, be they violent, sexual, etc. Cronenberg constantly investigates, as an artist, the imagery of technologies and bodies, exploring the aesthetic possibilities of that intersection in many different variations. Sex is always present, and usually in relationship to technologies that invade bodies, have pleasure with the body, make the body pleasurable in new ways, expand the body’s tactile capabilities. His take on technology is interesting because of the way he makes technologies fleshy and sexual. Technical objects breathe and heave, they have veins, fluids, intentions, agendas.