WTF is this movie about?

Watching this new trailer made me think of the movie again. I had only watched the movie twice, and even so I cannot piece together what the movie is supposed to be about. I would really like to read what some other peoples interpretations of the film are.

No movie trailer I’ve ever seen is as unique and at the same-time extremely dated as the one above.

OK, i’m assuming you’re a troll, because 1. the second trailer has nothing to do with the movie, and if you’ve supposedly seen the movie once, you would know this, and 2. it’s pretty obvious what this movie is about if you’re on the “auteurs” (i refuse to acknowledge Mubi), then you would know at least something about david cronenberg, as all of his films have a fairly similar theme.

but for the rest of you, i will put this out there-
in the commentary for videodrome, cronenberg says “no technology can ever be fully understand until it’s applied to the human body”.
pretty good quote, eh?
basically, his movies deal with the future of technology and flesh. it’s obvious to anyone who thinks at all that within the next few decades we will have technology roaming around through us. nanobots, cybernetics, cloning organs etc. and who’s to say what will happen to our perception when we’re merged with technology?
i think that’s the whole point of videodrome.

Heh. My original thought when I saw the thread title was,

“Video:
application to: New Flesh, The”

But Johnny beat me too it with precisely the same answer in the opposite of brevity, elaboration.

—PolarisDiB

woody was working that theme in 1973: orgasmatron

orgasmatron: best part of sleeper!

i misquoted “no technology can be fully UNDERSTOOD until it is applied to the human body”

anyway, to elaborate,
videodrome was made when home video first came into existence (existenz?). so that was an early version of technology entering the home. before that it was telephones and record players. not only technology, but a technology that requires you to sit there absorbing information, while doing nothing else. next would be video games. then the internet. assuming that these technologies keep going further and further, imagine what will happen next? virtual reality? there are already people who play online games so much that they let their newborn children starve to death! when virtual reality is a.,.. well, reality, i can only imagine how many people will let their own bodies waste away while playing virtual world of warcraft.

“Videodrome” plays with many concepts that were circulating in the 80’s (some of them still are): mind control, the supremacy of TV and man-machine interactions. Cronenberg adds his surreal aesthetics to those themes and brings a flesh and guts perspective, concocting horror out of everyday appliances.
There’s virtually no filter between the information transmitted via TV and the spectator’s mind. There was the fear that people’s ideas and wills would be totally controlled through this system. Cronenberg merged the medium, the message and the spectator into one entity (both metaphorically and biologically)- our brains are the TV and vice-versa. From that moment on the barriers of reality are completely shattered and confusion sets in. In a way “Videodrome” is also a film about fighting against the system and the powers that be, infused in the conspiratorial tradition that cyberpunk had just revived a few years earlier.

carlos- exactly. that’s why i love cronenberg. most great directors spend time dwelling on the present or past. but cronenberg, like arthur c clarke and isaac asimov and william gibson, consider what the future will be like. which is definitely terrifying to think about now, before our bodies/minds are used to the changes to come.

@Johnny

“it’s obvious to anyone who thinks at all that within the next few decades we will have technology roaming around through us. nanobots, cybernetics, cloning organs etc.”

I wonder if it would really be so obvious to anyone who thinks at all if it weren’t for cyberpunk in general and, specifically, William Gibson. It’s way too easy to just look at this SF and tell yourself that it’s gonna happen like that, and that everyone who doesn’t agree is unschooled and naive. I feel pretty confident that the future will definitely not be like this, if for no other reason, because alarmists like you (and even Cronenberg) have instilled somewhat of a fear of technology into society, not to mention the fact that nobody would want that type of technology. I guess it’s a minor quibble, but I like think that I think at all, and I strongly disagree with your prediction for dystopia.

Resume discussion.

drunken- i see your point. however, science fiction is the most influential form of fiction in the history of the human race. almost every huge scientific breakthru has been based on/inspired by/predicted by science fiction.
of course it’s not gonna happen LIKE THAT. but, the people that create these new technologies have probably read science fiction. people were writing about landing on the moon for about a hundred years before it happened. people were drawing aliens in caves thousands of years ago.

and by the way, i’m not an alarmist. i do think that the future holds a lot of “sci fi” concepts being made into reality, but i don’t think it will be like a horror movie, like videodrome.
but it will change our ways of living, and our perception of technology.
i love my cellphone.

and i don’t think cronenberg is particularly scared of technology. he’s just putting stuff out there in an exaggerated way. that’s the beauty of fiction.

The best science fiction isn’t about the future but about the present. The great writers/directors in the genre were always projecting the relevant issues of their lifetimes into the future and that’s actually what should be done. For those who, like me, love to study mankind’s history, one of the first conclusions that can be reached is that the basic anguishes and problems of human existence as individuals and as a society are always the same. Science fiction alters some of the variables on the equation transporting thar basic skeleton into future/alternate landscapes, but the doubts are essentialy the same.
The so called “alarmism” of Science Fiction is essential to our society, for it oftenly broadens our perception of the causes and consequences of technological advances. I don’t agree when sci-fi is blamed for a possible fear of technology. People aren’t afraid at all! In fact they immediately embrace new products and inventions without considering the pros and cons. That’s why the real impact of certain technological advances in our social and even biological structures can only be fully understood many decades past their original appearance. In fact, more than anticipating this gadget or that contraption, science fiction predicts very accurately the frequently nefarious side effects of scientific and technological advances.

That second trailer is one of my favorites ever…I once had a chance to ask the producer of the disc if she had any more info about who created it, where Criterion got it, where it ever aired, but I blew it. I really want to know more about the song too, and computer graphics from that era just kill me. So pure. So good.

Anyways, yeah, it’s definitely in part about man’s perennial ability to form dependent, erotic relationships with inanimate objects…and subsequently his tendency to instill in those objects an emotional charge, confuse them for something with a soul of their own in spite of knowing that they are his own creation.

carlos- this is one of the reasons i love 2001. you CAN predict the future of humanity. all you have to do is look at the past. what happened 2000 years ago? war and genocide and rape. whats gonna happen in the next thousand years? war, genocide, and maybe less rape than before, because mankind won’t allow it, thank god. but still, war genocide and rape. rape of people, rape of planets, and rape of species we might find out there.
but AI is the future of humanity. scientists want to create new life, that’s all there is to it. it WILL happen.

^Well, there will still be love, and works of art about love, that will be ignored in favor of nonsense about war, genocide and rape.

The discussions brought about in this thread is part of the reason why I love this movie. It’s sleazy, scary, tense, and thoughtful. It’s contains one of the best depictions of technology fusing with humans that I’ve ever seen. Anything that makes a human’s life easier will almost always be embraced. The sad part is, many people would love for a machine to think for it and do it’s work for it. That’s where the problem may lie at in the future, IMO.

“We make inexpensive glasses for the Third World and missile guidance systems for NATO.” is as good a quote as I’ve ever come across in any walk of life or art.

The New Flesh! Isn’t it obvious?

What ever you want it to be about baby.

I admire this man for being able to make an abstract statement, but at the same time I find his statements lame.

What’s this thread about again?

Personally, I believe that Cronenberg is more interested in epistemology and how a person comes to understand themselves than he is in technology per se. It is the way that technology may change our understanding of ourselves and the world that is the important part of his “sci-fi/horror” phase. He is still doing the same things, but he’s now using other forms to examine the issue. A History of Violence, Spider, M. Butterfly, etc. are all a continuation of his previous themes, not a divergence.

Our selves as a technology.

did i say science fiction is the most influential fiction in the history of humanity? i suppose that would actually be religion.

What’s your distinction between the two?

ooooh ouch johnny!

Anyway, I guess I don’t really mean to call you (or Cronenberg) out as alarmists, but I do think that it’s way too easy to say that that type of thing will happen without actually considering history or sociology. Mostly I was just annoyed with the phrase “it’s obvious to anyone who thinks at all” because I feel like that’s the conclusion you would come to if you don’t think. Also, I don’t agree that SF inspires actual scientific breakthrough… I feel pretty confident that we would have landed on the moon with or without SF, and aliens still wouldn’t exist whether cavemen had drawn them or not.

To jump into the conversation between Carlos and Johnny:

First of all, on topic to this thread, keep in mind that Cronenberg’s movies are as technophiliac as they are technophobic, and the phobia stems mostly from anxiety about the transition phase between two states of being—it’s not, “OMG the new flesh is going to hurt!” but “OMG the process of suturing technology and flesh together is going to hurt!” It’s the story of the fear, exhiliration, and anxiety we face going into an unknown technological future just as our countless movies about meeting evil murderous space aliens nevertheless bely our desire to find them.

“I do think that it’s way too easy to say that that type of thing will happen without actually considering history or sociology”

I think that’s precisely why the post-human seems so self-evident—because we’ve pretty much taken leaps and bounds to get there. With advances in genetic and stem-cell research, increased virtual reality, the cloud-consciousness of the Internet, the constant viral updates of our immune system via shots, the intense manipulation of organic and inorganic environments, and yes, the transcendence of gravity itself into exploration of extraterrestrial space, it seems like humanity is becoming more than just organism in ecosystem, but a hybrid human/technological (cyborg) entity capable of interacting and affecting both spaces.

" I don’t agree that SF inspires actual scientific breakthrough… I feel pretty confident that we would have landed on the moon with or without SF, and aliens still wouldn’t exist whether cavemen had drawn them or not"

Science fiction and science fact inform each other, and that is one of the more appealing aspects of science fiction. Oftentimes science fiction derives its ideas from contemporary scientific or technological advances and plays around with the, as Greg X said, epistemological effect of those things. Furthermore, science fiction and its “speculative” nature is largely a process of positing trends in human nature that lead towards our favorite utopic/dystopic narratives—transferring a recent or localized issue into a future landscape to analyze it’s supposed final effect. These things indeed surround our contemporary anxieties and worries while appealing to the creation of new mythologies. However, the fascination we exhibit towards that numenous advanced future is often tempered by our own assumptions ill-fit for the actual process of advancement, which is why we end up not with the submarines of Wells’ 10000 Leagues under the Sea, but U-boats from Germany; we end up with robots but not bipedal or android ones; we end up with Facebook, not the Matrix.

The irony of contemporary, post Cold War space travel, for instance, is that it’s seen as a “New Frontier”, the Western genre placed into an even bigger space, but there is no real infrastructure that would support libertarian space travellers—the extreme technological requirements needed to create a precipitous liveable environment on another world would require a very demanding centralized control and strict laws completely unnegotiable for wannabe pioneers. What’s going to get us beyond the moon is not the spirit of adventure, but low class miners being sent by a corporation to mine asteroids for raw materials, and probably destroyed in the process—long after the scientists and developers have paved the way via a series of specific goals that make space travel only really “pleasurable” in the sense that maybe we’ll continue to get celebrities and rich people taking month long vacations for a hop on the moon (further than that, extremely unlikely).

Unless, you know, all that new age religious belief in quantum realities that misses the point of quantum physics allows us to dance around the moons of Jupiter if we squeeze our eyes and wish really really really hard. Nevertheless, choreographing human movement with the stars is the ideal goal, though the reality is going to trend towards what our future actually holds, which is informed by how we speculate and communicate our desires to see it through science fiction, but constrained by pure physical limitations.

Nevertheless, indeed, long live the mothafuckin’ New Flesh.

—PolarisDiB

“The battle for the mind of North America”

It’s also definitely about schizophrenia. It is very similar to NAKED LUNCH and SPIDER in its ability to shift without any indication from a protagonist subjectivity anchored in consensual reality to a subjectivity of totally misguided madness.

I really love Videodrome but in a lot of regards it’s a Taxi Driver remake.