It's probably a fairly obvious choice, but Videodrome remains unmatched in the filmography of David Cronenberg. It is the film that most acutely combines his themes of posthumanism, symbiotic parasites, sexual deviance and rubbery, weird prosthetic body horror into one strange, haunting and futuristic narrative. It was also surprisingly prophetic of today's hyper-technological culture, despite being released in 1983. For what is basically a film that fuses phobias about exploitation pornographic videos with S&M imagery and shots of James Woods pulling fleshy guns out of VHS slots in his chest, it's amazingly refined. Unlike the coldness of Crash, every machine in the film breathes and swells, making it very difficult to tell where human ends and robot begins. It is compelling stuff, and it's so impressive that Cronenberg pulls things off so well. While the themes are similar to those of eXistenZ, the lower budget and more "rubbery" effects make Videodrome feel more authentic, more weird, more REAL. As noted, it's also surprisingly prophetic of our relationship with technology today. As theorist Nathan Jurgenson argues,
Videodromes depiction of techno-body synthesis is, to be sure, intense; Cronenberg has the unusual talent of making violent, disgusting, and erotic things seem even more so. The technology is veiny and lubed. It breaths and moans; after watching the film, I want to cut my phone open just to see if it will bleed. Fittingly, the film was originally titled "Network of Blood, which is precisely how we should understand social media, as a technology not just of wires and circuits, but of bodies and politics. Theres nothing anti-human about technology: the smartphone that you rub and take to bed is a technology of flesh. Information penetrates the body in increasingly more intimate ways.
As such, Videodrome stands apart as being Cronenberg's most vivid, most affecting, and most enduring piece of cinema. Long live the new flesh.
