Editorials
The Influence of Television in David Cronenberg’s ‘Videodrome’
The main influence of television as a technology has perhaps never been explored more perfectly than in David Cronenberg’s 1983 film, Videodrome. Through the character of Max Renn and his discovery of a channel broadcasting a snuff film called Videodrome, Cronenberg takes influence from Marshall McLuhan to illustrate that technology is an extension of man. The director asks: What are the effects of television on the audience? How will it impact human evolution? And who controls this technology?
The film follows Max Renn, the owner of Toronto’s Civic TV, a fictional station that specializes in violent and sexually explicit programming. The channel’s slogan is “The one you take to bed with you,” and while the content may be shocking, Max says that he “[gives] [his] viewers a harmless outlet for their fantasies and their frustrations.” But he’s not satisfied with what he’s providing his audience. He wants something more intense than the softcore porn he usually airs. And then he finds Videodrome, a pirated broadcast shot in a small red room, with women being tortured by men dressed in black. While the program may not appear to have a message, Max is being sent one by the mysterious and secret organization that is broadcasting the torture porn. He develops a brain tumour, triggered by a hidden signal embedded within the program, which causes him to experience disturbing hallucinations.
The inventor of Videodrome, Professor O’Blivion, explains to Max that the program has helped grow a new organ in his mind, an extension of himself, opening him up to a new way of thinking. He becomes a pawn of corporate greed and the capitalist takeover of society, and a creation of what the film calls “the new flesh.” As an article in The Millions puts it, Videodrome is perfect viewing during a time when our southern neighbour’s president is “a man baptized by television…”
Marshall McLuhan’s ideas about the media environment are transformed from paper onto the screen in Max’s struggle to stop an international plot to release Videodrome’s signal on to the masses. Medium truly becomes the message in Cronenberg’s body horror flick. Mikel J. Koven writes that McLuhan “is an apostle of despair, declaring that our nervous systems are wholly entangled in a mosaic mesh which is essentially beyond our control.” McLuhan discusses the idea of there being two mediums: hot and cold. While he doesn’t consider television a hot medium, I would argue that it fits more so the description of Videodrome. The philosopher says that a hot medium “is one that extends one single sense in ‘high definition,’” that is to say, a “state of being well filled with data…”And while in the film, Professor O’Blivion describes television as “part of the physical structure of the brain,” the film actually takes this one step further by programming Max like a VCR by inserting a video cassette into his chest, making him data filled – a part of Videodrome – and by extension, technologically linked to television.
While Videodrome is a film that was made during the time when VHS was in its prime, if we substitute it with today’s technology, it’s pretty much the same. Speaking specifically about television, while cable may no longer be the norm, we are constantly being fed content on streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and big corporations like Disney are releasing their own services. Cable and home phone bills are being replaced by an endless list of media subscriptions. In a piece for Little White Lies, Adam Woodward explains that we are in a time of “unparalleled interconnectivity in which information is transmitted, processed and shared quicker and more widely than ever before.” Woodward goes on to add:
“In Cronenberg’s dark satire on consumerism and the cult of technology, Max reflects both the director’s concerns over the electronic dissemination of information (especially via faceless, morally-dubious corporate entities) and his compulsion to create provocative, erotically-charged art.”
Television influences the viewer in many ways: advertisements influence our spending habits, campaigns influence us politically, shows influence our views, and so on. Television’s influence is also seen in Videodrome with Max’s hallucinations. It is unclear to the viewer, and Max himself, whether or not his hallucinations are a product of reality; similarly, how we question whether or not something we see on television is real life. The signals being transmitted by Videodrome cause him to see himself in the programme, see himself hitting someone when he hasn’t, see his hand transform into a gun, and be able to stick his head into his television set. Just like advertising and the audience, Max abdicates all rights over his own body, as it’s now in the public domain. “The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye,” as Professor O’Blivion puts it. He wants everyone in the world to be exposed to Videodrome’s emission, which brings about, as authors Carsten Meiner and Kristin Veel put it, a kind of “authentic capitalist discourse” about “available brain time,” as in, “brain time up for grabs – for advertising” which Videodrome perfectly illustrates. Cronenberg creates an environment where television and real-life merge into one, disrupting our construction of space and time.
Cronenberg has been quoted as saying, “Since I see technology as being an extension of the human body, it’s inevitable that it should come home to roost.” The film refers to this as “the new flesh” and right from the film’s opening shot, Videodrome “imagines a near future in which technology has infiltrated every aspect of daily life.” It’s surprising, as a film made in the early ‘80s, with an emphasis on video cassettes, should seem outdated, but he uses this black rectangular piece of hardware as a metaphor for the human body with its internal moving parts. While we are no longer dominated by a fear of being sucked into these images, as Max is literally sucked into his television, this has been replaced by a paranoia that what we see on screen is no longer reliable. Television is an evolutionary force, and while Professor O’Blivion would say that “life on TV is more real than life in the flesh,” we begin to question technology and its influence on our minds as we succumb to images every day and begin to confuse our own reality with what we see on the screen.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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