after everyone left projectfilmschool, i decided to listen to the commentary for videodrome by david cronenberg. this turned into a slow progression of me getting more and more excited and remembering how much i love david cronenberg and his films. so much so, that i have no idea where to start in this little recap of the film and the ideas it discusses.
what i am going to do is throw out some very general quotes about the film, cronenberg himself and issues of technology and the body. even if you didn't see the film last night, please feel free to comment or discuss, esp if you have seen other cronenberg films (and of course videodrome)
*( 1-4 come from carrie rickey's essay entitled ,5-7 are quotes i hurriedly tried to write down from cronenberg's commentary)
1) "The bizarre and troubling mutations of body and machine manifest in Cronenberg movies graphically illustrate how he intentionally exteriorizes the body's functions of processing information, absorbing medication, and operating technology. Far from advocating repression, Cronenberg movies argue that the revolution begins at home—right in our central nervous systems and psyches."
2) "In Videodrome, Cronenberg riskily goes one step beyond in identifying power structures that are, essentially, invisible. While exalting the awesome dynamics of the body—its sexual energy, its capacity for the extrasensory, its suggestibility—Cronenberg implies that the body is a transient state between individual existence and the creation of a "new flesh" in which the television screen is, literally, the retina of the mind's eye. In the trancelike, if confounding, universe of Videodrome, the only way to resist eradication is to transform oneself into pure electronic energy. Understand that Videodrome was released sixteen years prior to the matrix
3) "Centrally, Videodrome is about those who would control access to all broadcasting, who can unscramble all the scrambling devices, who can wash all the satellite dishes and incrementally transform all TV dropouts to tune in. Led by a benign-looking despot named Barry Convex, these cable totalitarians revel in the fact that they can search for and destroy their natural adversaries because thrill-seeking counterculturalists are easy marks for hidden signals beamed during the more radical television entertainments. Videodrome is the Orwellian 1984 blueprint contextualized."
4) "Riddled with such paradoxes, Cronenberg movies are unforgettable manifestos of how attempts at corporate control inevitably result in corporate anarchy—and vice versa. You could get a brain cramp from trying to tease out whether a Cronenberg scenario privileges repression nor expression.
5)"i like reinventing the human body"
6) "technology isnt really effective, it can't really expose its real meaning until it has been incorporated into the human body" (ie hearing aids, pace makers, glasses)
7) "technology has really taken control of evolution - our minds create change in the human body"
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