WTF is this movie about?

I’m game. Please explain!

—PolarisDiB

I read or heard a story once (I think in a Cronenberg interview) that when he met Scorsese, Marty commented that he should be creeped out meeting the guy who made Videodrome. Cronenberg said something to the effect that the guy who made Taxi Driver would be one to talk. I thought about it & came to think that Videodrome is Taxi driver for Media Studies majors.

I haven’t sat through either one in awhile, or notepad-viewed them, but to be brief, Bickle (who does seem more unbalanced at first) , but is driven mad by the (rather titllating) depraved world around him in 70s New York to the point of (possibly imagined or delusional) violent outburst. Max Renn (perhaps saner seeming out the beginning) is driven mad by the influx of (titlating) decadence of our modern mediasphere to the point of (possibly imagined or delusional) violent outburst. Personal isolation and misanthropy do help this along, but those may or may not be inherent qualitities of these men or products of the society around them.

Both somehow convince themselves to be heroes of the cause of removing the decadence but it is unclear, by the end, whether they didn’t just become part of the problem….

I guess a significant difference there, however, is that Bickle is truly and outwardly disturbed by what he sees around him, whereas Renn is practically in love with it.

—PolarisDiB

“Videodrome is Taxi Driver”

Eh, not convinced. You’re really stretching to make a connection between these two films. Just sayin’!

I was never totally sure Travis didn’t like it on some level or another

Deckard: I do not think it’s a stretch, but,

Ricky: I think the major difference in effect is the fact that Scorsese’s movie is clearly making a statement against the sort of world Bickle lives in as well as his being subsumed by it, whereas Cronenberg always straddles the line between technophobia and technophilia (and sometimes gets close to downright technocracy). “Long live the new flesh” is as much a coda as it is a warning. “Suck on this” is very clearly a bad thing.

However I do see what you are saying, and find it interesting.

—PolarisDiB

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

Yup.
Very glad to have this come up. I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently. Several of Cronenberg’s movies are keyed into the Oswald archetype and the Cold War era paranoia around the JFK assassination…maybe via Ballard’s obsessive use of the imagery in ATROCITY EXHIBITION and elsewhere. At any rate, the hallucinating secret/double-agent is certainly also very strong in NAKED LUNCH and EXISTENZ (less hallucinatory secret/double-agent in EASTERN PROMISES), while DEAD ZONE intrigues with its own take on presidential assassination, even if it’s originally king’s material. Plus, just general head explodyness in SCANNERS (okay, maybe that’s a stretch).

Two of the best movies about the deadly combination of a dude, a gun, and a totally wrong idea.

What I would not totally agree with in the comment is that while both movies share many more similarities than one might initially expect (or even ultimately agree to, per the example of folks in the thread who don’t buy this connection), they are also totally different. I guess “remake” is not the term I’d use at all…more like distorted reflections of each other.

“Bickle (who does seem more unbalanced at first) , but is driven mad by the (rather titllating) depraved world around him in 70s New York to the point of (possibly imagined or delusional) violent outburst. Max Renn (perhaps saner seeming out the beginning) is driven mad by the influx of (titlating) decadence of our modern mediasphere to the point of (possibly imagined or delusional) violent outburst.”

I don’t totally agree with this either. I think the great similarity of both movies is that these are characters who suffer serious (though in the case of Renn apparently dormant) mental illness, and the audience comes into their stories at the moment when a perfect storm of circumstances has brewed to make those illnesses have deadly consequences. Point being, I really don’t see society to blame in either case…these guys were time-bombs just set to go off eventually. Society wasn’t paying enough attention to them until it was too late. Sure, Max Renn’s successful and seems to have passed off as a pretty normal dude, but then again, who really knows just how deeply VIDEODROME is set in his particularly extreme subjectivity from the opening frame. It’s is NOT a reliably logical cinematic universe.

Well…

Similar currents but a different ocean.

—PolarisDiB

Similar currents.
Different ocean.
KILLER double-feature.

Trufax.

—PolarisDiB

Yeah, remake may have been too strong a word, but I do think the framework & thematic similarities are there. Scorsese doesn’t seem to mess with subjectivity as much as Cronenberg (Shutter island?) but I’ve never been completely sure that we ought to take the events of Taxi Driver as a straight narrative.