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David Cronenberg: Author or Film-maker?
By Mark Browning Intellect Ltd
Copyright © 2007 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84150-173-4
CHAPTER 1
Videodrome: 'Not a love story – a film about pornography'
'My greatest ambition is to turn into a TV programme'.
The focus of this chapter is Videodrome (1982). This is not an example of a text being 'translated' from a literary entity into a cinematic one but the analytical focus here will be on potential links between Cronenberg's work and a range of analgous texts including the work of media prophet Marshall McLuhan, some of the early short stories of Clive Barker and J. G. Ballard and Brett Easton Ellis' novel American Psycho (1991). The relationship of Videodrome to the generic area of pornography will be also discussed, particularly in connection with the writings of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.
For Stephen King, '[t]he only director I can think of who has explored this grey land between art and porno-exhibitionism successfully – even brilliantly – again and again with never a misstep is the Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg'. However, on considering Videodrome specifically, critics seem to find it strangely puzzling and usually view it as an ambitious failure. Some commentators, like Julian Petley, 'find it profoundly uninteresting, deeply unattractive and generally quite underwhelming'. Bearing in mind Cronenberg's last-minute re-writing, the censorship that the film received in its various versions and Cronenberg's own dissatisfaction with the project, Videodrome is perhaps best viewed as a partially successful experiment, with more ideas than space to breathe, a luxury that Cronenberg could afford in later years with the commercial success of The Fly (1986) behind him.
'Everybody's going to be starring in their own porno films ...' Pornography and Cronenberg
In Ballard's High-Rise (1975), there is mention of 'a continuity girl' working in pornographic films, who 'has to note the precise sexual position between takes', a difficulty Cronenberg has mentioned in connection with his direction of the apartment scene in Crash (1996). On being complimented on his direction of this scene, Cronenberg claims not to have seen Andrew Blake-directed pornography but admits 'I've done sex scenes before, you know, like in video'. He does not expand upon what these were but the casting of porn star Marilyn Chambers in the lead role in Rabid (1976), although admittedly not his first choice for the part, and his own role as the 'disembodied, wide-eyed porno freak', Tom Cramer in Blue (Don McKellar, 1992), does seem to indicate at least a passing knowledge of the genre.
Cronenberg has shown interest in the structures and stylistic tropes of pornography over many years. Referring to the opening of Shivers (1976), Victor Sage notes that 'we have at least two narrative codes being played with: the promo film and the porn film'. A middle-aged man struggling with a woman dressed as a schoolgirl (a porn cliché itself) is intercut with a couple being shown around the building. The name of the clients, the Swedens, like the group watching Volvo crash videos in Crash, alludes to the stereotypical association of Scandinavia with the porn industry. As Mark Kermode notes, Cronenberg's breakthrough into mainstream cinema was achieved 'through the taboo orifices of the horror and soft-core porn genres' due to 'having failed an audition as a porno director for Canadian skin-flicks company Cinepix'. In an interview with Cronenberg, Susie Bright jokes that 'maybe in your dotage we could corral you into making just an unabashed cock and cunt porn film', to which he answers in a manner which makes it unclear whether he is being serious or not: 'well, I like watching those myself ...'
However, it is simplistic to see Cronenberg's use of displaced genitals, such as Max's slit, as pornographic in itself. Marty Roth's notion that 'the border between horror film and pornography is a blurred one', is useful here. Both genres share an inability to achieve complete narrative closure and Steven Shaviro notes that 'horror fans know that the dead always walk again, even as consumers of pornography know that no orgasm is ever the last'. He also observes that '[v]iolent and pornographic films literally anchor desire and perception in the agitated and fragmented body'. Both horror and pornography are about arousal, more specifically provoking fear and a sexual response respectively, and are the two prime genres that speak about and through the body. Ian Conrich underlines the 'relationship between the opened bodies of pornography and splatter-obsessed hard core horror' that Richard Gehr calls 'carnography', which suggests that a text like Videodrome, featuring as it does bodies that are tortured, with a protagonist whose stomach opens without apparent reason and an antagonist who, upon death, bursts open with cancerous tumours, could be deemed pornographic. However, Cronenberg's 'new flesh' redefines how this might manifest itself.
Is Videodrome pornographic?
We see how the porn industry works in Max's first meeting of the day with Hiroshima Video, whose name reflects the poverty of taste in the environment in which he moves but also the sense of an over-stimulated environment to which Nicki refers later. The meeting itself is portrayed like a drug deal. The merchandise is kept in a suitcase and the deal revolves around price and the purity of the product, which is validated by a test of a key batch, the last one, talismanic number 13. The request seems strange as it takes the tapes out of order but reflects the serial nature of pornography and that the order of episodes is unimportant. The product is discussed in terms of mass production and of regular supply ('thirteen with the possibility of another six'), expressing Debord's notion that 'the real consumer becomes a consumer of illusions ... and the spectacle is its general manifestation', so that 'the spectacle is the developed modern complement of money ...'
Later, Harlan asks Max after being exposed to the Videodrome programme, 'Are you in some kind of drug warp?' Certainly, William Burroughs' descriptions of drug withdrawal accurately evoke Max's altered perceptions of video technology: 'sense impressions are sharpened to the point of hallucination. Familiar objects seem to stir with a writhing furtive life. The addict is subject to a barrage of sensations, external and visceral'. Max's explanation of Civic TV's status on The Rena King Show continues the sense of pornography, rather than Burroughs' preferred metaphor of drugs, as a prime paradigm of capitalist economics: 'It's a matter of economics. We're small and in order to survive we have to give people something they can't get anywhere else'.
The viewing of 'Samurai Dreams' acts as a bridge between the hotel deal and the Civic TV management as we track back from the screen to see Max and his associates around a table. Street level operations interconnect with corporate business. Max muses whether they will 'get away with it', as if cheating their audience with a product that is in some way inferior or diluted. Max's listless dismissal of 'Samurai Dreams' expresses on behalf of his consumers (and possibly himself) a level of sexual ennui that is later articulated in Crash. There appears to be little pleasure in fooling his audience as he asks rhetorically, 'Do you want to get away with it?' On repeated viewings, it is possible to recognize the girl as the subject of one of the photos in Max's kitchen earlier, implying possibly that the woman is a known star or alluding to a sense of precognition on his part (i.e. that the product has become predictable).
The Head of Production at Universal Studios, Bob Rehme, demanded cuts to the 'Samurai Dreams' sequence, when a doll is lifted to reveal a dildo beneath. Ironically, in a film about the potential effects of the media, such an image of female self-pleasure might have helped Cronenberg's reputation with critics like Robin Wood. The cuts to the scene for the version shown on BBC2 mean the actions of the girl are incomplete but guessable, making the effect of the scene even more coy and Max's frustration with its 'softness', even more appropriate. For Roth, 'Videodrome is all about pornography, about the difference between hard and soft pornography, the pornography of the present as opposed to that of the future'.
Roth is only partly right here. Max and his two colleagues express different views on the film, which represent an historical perspective on pornography. One expects that it will get them an audience they never had before (the present), another rejects it as 'not tacky enough ... to turn me on' and moralizes that 'too much class is bad for sex' (the past). These represent the traditional positions of white middleclass/aged males, whose tastes have historically dominated the US porn industry. Whilst Max is looking for 'something that will break through. ... something ... tough' (the future), a film poster behind him shows a variation on Raglan's book cover for 'The Shape of Rage' in The Brood (1979), with an upturned hand and 'Something' in large print. Literally, the 'something' which he seeks in the remainder of the film is already indicated behind him: a bodily need to interact with filmic spectacle. This contrast is underlined later with the stylistic differences between Masha's 'Apollo and Dionysius', (representing 1970s-style porn), the 'Samurai Dreams' extract (which reflects a yearning after some kind of oriental novelty, but is fundamentally conventional and even coyly romantic) and the Videodrome programme (which, for Max, seems to be 'what's next'). Max rejects Masha's mythic or biblically motivated scenarios, as he is looking for something a lot more 'contemporary'.
Ballard has stated that 'I believe that organic sex ... is becoming no longer possible simply because if anything is to have any meaning for us, it must take place in terms of the values and experiences of the media landscape ...' Ballard's The Kindness of Women (1992) mediates ideas of death and pornography through the image of television. The final project of television presenter Dick Sutherland is a series of programmes filming his own death. As Ballard states 'in 1979 the idea of an explicit filmed record of the last weeks running up to one's death seemed virtually pornographic'. In effect, this is what we have of O'Blivion. We do not know the correct chronological order of the tapes we see of him or when they were made but the final one shown depicts his death (assuming it is not faked or Max's hallucination). Dick accepts 'that the electronic image of himself was the real one' in contrast to Ballard himself who has 'always been reluctant to appear on television'. A friend of Dick, Cleo Churchill, exclaims in disgust 'he's actually going to make a snuff movie ... he's staging a sex-death in which he's raped out of existence by the whipped-up emotions of those peak-time viewers'. Sutherland's project anticipates AIDS narratives like David Wojnarowicz's Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (1991), where a terminally ill individual is taped in his dying weeks to perpetuate his image after death.
When Masha tries to warn Max that Videodrome is dangerous because it has a 'philosophy', he asks, 'Whose?' Eventually, she provides him with O'Blivion's name but the programme does not really express his philosophy. He can only comment upon it and ultimately claim to be 'Videodrome's first victim', garrotted by a masked assassin, revealed as Nicki now with red hair (evoking the sensuality of the red dress she wore in the chat show). This 'philosophy' may appear at first to refer to de Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795) but what we actually have is a narrative blend that is both Sadean and masochistic.
Masochism
Continuing the blend of sadism and masochism of some of Cronenberg's television work, such as 'The Lie Chair' and 'The Victim', the Videodrome programme is set in a torture chamber. Harlan's description of the Videodrome signal as plotless and containing nothing but 'torture, murder, mutilation ... it's a real sicko, for perverts only', is ironically juxtaposed with Max's evident pleasure ('Absolutely brilliant ... No production costs ... You can't take your eyes off it'). In her historical analysis of torture, Elaine Scarry describes how 'the contents of the room, its furnishings are converted into weapons', which is exemplified by Videodrome's electrified walls and bars where victims can be tied. In order to convert pain into power, the torturer must make pain visible 'in the multiple and elaborate processes that evolve in producing it', such as the whip in Videodrome.
In Masoch's most famous text, Venus in Furs (1870), the protagonist, Severin, is emotionally humiliated by an aloof but beautiful woman called Wanda. Their relationship is always based on the key notion of consent, manifested in a written contract and although there are interludes of consensual physical punishment, involving whipping, these are relatively few in number and brief in duration. However, to employ gender roles narrowly and to regard masochism as feminine and sadism as masculine is too simplistic as both categories contain elements of one another. Masoch's heroines are surrounded by images of cold, for example, in Venus in Furs, Wanda's body and pallor are described as 'marble', and yet in Crash, a predominantly Sadean text (see chapter 4), Catherine's demeanour could also be described as glacial. Similarly, in Videodrome, an exploration of masochism, Nikki inflicts pain on herself by burning (or, as her name suggests, branding), she wears warm colours, and her hair changes colour to red when she appears on the Videodrome tape.
In Videodrome, the notion of consent is ambiguous. It seems unlikely that the women seen being tortured on the Videodrome programme are volunteers, but Nicki is certainly keen to be involved. Her claim 'I was made for that show' to which Max replies, 'No one on earth was made for that show', creates the sense that she has literally been 'made' as a non-human device of Spectacular Optical, which ties in with the contrived plot twists of her as an enemy 'agent'. Moreover, by using the 'life as a game show' metaphor, Cronenberg raises an existential question within the framework of a televisual 'contract' with the viewer, both in the general sense of the cliché of providing an entertainment product but also specifically here in the game show subgenre when Max jokes about no one coming back the following week. In Masoch's narrative, Wanda and Severin make a contract in which he agrees to be her slave indefinitely and forfeit his life if she wants it, constituting a virtual suicide note. Severin's masochistic ideal is expressed in the Biblical allusion of Samson and Delilah, in which the man is betrayed and ultimately killed by the woman. At the end of Videodrome, Max follows Bianca's orders to kill Convex and his own associates before ending his own life (an instruction given through the mediated image of Nicki).
Theodore Reik describes four key features of masochism: the 'special significance of fantasy', the 'suspense factor', the 'demonstrative' way in which the masochist shows his or her suffering and the 'provocative fear', how the masochist commands to be punished. All of these features appear in Videodrome. The narrative of Venus in Furs begins with a fantasy of a beautiful woman that is not signalled as a dream until the narrator is woken by a servant. In the second chapter, we see a painting with the title 'Venus in Furs' that depicts the woman from the dream and his friend, Severin, from several years before. The narrator concludes that 'it appears my dream was prompted by your picture'. Videodrome begins with a sequence that could be construed as a dream and Max's hallucinations could stem from the pictures of porn actresses that adorn his kitchen and dominate his professional life. Before encountering his ideal woman, Severin finds his fantasy in a photograph entitled 'Venus with the Mirror'. Although Max meets Nicki on the set of a chat show, we first see her through the mediated image of a television monitor. Severin admits that Wanda has 'brought my dearest fantasies to life', as Nicki awakens and validates Max's sado-masochistic tendencies. Linda Ruth Williams asserts that Nicki's primary function is not to be looked at (Debbie Harry's extra filmic role as lead singer of Blondie) but to be 'masochistic seer' in the senses of initiator, voyeur and prophet. However, unlike Videodrome, Masoch ends his narrative by having the hero break out of his state of willed subjugation and closes the frame story with a salutary lesson about manipulative women: '[i]t was as though I were awakening from a long dream'.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from David Cronenberg: Author or Film-maker? by Mark Browning. Copyright © 2007 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
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