Videodrome
d. David Cronenberg, 1983
David Cronenberg's Videodrome is a very strange, but satisfying, film. It deals with a lot of the same themes that Cronenberg uses in most of his films; including last year's A History of Violence, which explored the nature of violence, one of the many things touched upon in Videodrome.
The movie follows Max Renn (James Woods), a sleazy TV producer whose cable channel runs mostly soft-core pornography and violent shows. He is interested in finding the new big thing for television, and he thinks a show called Videodrome may be just that. The "program" shows torture in a very realistic way (as it turns out, it is real) and it is what most of the thematic fodder revolves around.
In its use of strong and violent images (most of them hallucinations Renn has), Cronenberg is able to craft a powerful allegory about the power of the media and about man's impulses and inherent reactions to a program like Videodrome (Cronenberg considers himself a "complete Darwinian). The very fact that the film itself is called Videodrome adds a hint of irony (the program shows violent images, and the film shows the program) and a statement about the broad implications of most of the problems in the world.
