By David Cronenberg, 1983.
Starring Leslie Carlson, Jack Creley, Peter Dvorsky, Deborah Harry, Sonja Smits, James Woods.
Rating: 8/10, 8/10.
I have something to play for you.
Debbie Harry certainly picked an interesting movie for her first major film role. She plays a secretly sadomasochistic public morality exponent who falls into a bizarre affair with the owner of a pornography television channel, then runs off to audition for what she thinks is a faked extreme torture television show, and ends up either dead or living within television or both or neither or some combination of all those options or none of them. And she’s damn good at it, creepily dreamy and peaceful at all times, in a Julianne Moore/Lili Taylor/Toni Colette in a sexy dark alley kind of way. Though I must say it was a little weird to see her breasts ("Those are Debbie Harry’s boobs!" is what I believe I said when they showed up), and I kind of have a feeling that her ears were already pierced, but these are minor quibbles.
But her role is relatively small. Much more important is James Woods, as that pornography channel owner. He’s the one who hallucinates the whole movie. Or some of it. Or none of it. He’s the one who has a big stomach vagina (not really, but it’s a damned yonic opening in his stomach) open up and get videotapes shoved into it. He’s the one who kind of has sex with a television, and whose hand grows into a gun until they’re inseparable. Or, y’know, maybe the one none of that happens to.
The neat trick with movies whose viewpoint characters are hallucinating (or are they?) is, of course, that it’s difficult or impossible to tell what’s really happening and what isn’t, and, as an extension of that, difficult to tell what that distinction means. It’s a good schtick, I’m a fan of it (except when it’s in, like A Beautiful Mind), and Cronenberg pulls it off wonderfully here. I’m sure that to anyone who’s seen more than one Cronenberg movie that’s kind of an unnecessary statement, they’ll be like, well of course he pulls it off, he does in all of his movies, or at leat most of them, to which my response is, shut up, I’ve only seen this one, give me a chance.
Ahem. Sorry. Long live the new flesh.
Anyway, as I was going to say before the rabid Cronenberg fans in my head* assaulted me, the hallucinatory quality of the film is one of the things that makes it awesome, but also one of the things that makes it very difficult for me to talk about, especially after just one viewing, and that almost six months ago (my reviews are SO BEHIND). I desparately want to see this movie over and over and over again and invest a lot of thought into it, but I haven’t done that yet. So there’s not much I feel like I can say, other than the fact that I think it’s worth seeing a bunch of times and thinking about.
One other thing, actually. This movie was, like most (but not all) movies that are actually good, originally released theatrically. I’d be interested to talk to someone who saw it in the theater, way back when I was one year old, because it seems made so specifically to be seen on a television screen. It’s all about television as a medium (well, not all about...it’s also about violence and tumors and sex, among other things), for one thing, and, more importantly, there are all these wonderful shots that frame the television screen and a small amount of the background around them. These shots make you very aware of what’s going on both on and off the TV screen as you watch. That is, normally when one watches TV, one very rapidly loses a conscious sense that what they’re doing is looking at a screen that is contained in a larger object that is confined in space to a location that has a specific set of surroundings. If that made sense. The TV, in a non-literal but still very powerful way, becomes the viewer’s reality. Videodrome both reinforces and destroys this feeling, as the framed shots of televisions focus our attention even deeper while simultaneously making us realize that our attention is being focussed. It’s a bizarre and not entirely pleasant feeling, but one that, of course, I’m glad I experienced. So because of all that, I have difficulty imagining what it would look like in the movie theater, which is an entirely different setting, and where the screen is even a different shape (this is one movie where I think the transition to pan-and-scan was justified), which would make those framing shots work differently. Maybe I’ll be able to catch it, like, as a midnight movie somewhere, or something. If I do, I’ll report back on it.
Beyond all that, the "new flesh," as presented here, is just an ingeniously creepy and fascinatingly compelling idea, whether the events of the very end are as Woods’s character seems to think they are or not. Yeah.
*You realize, of course, that the reason there are rabid Cronenberg fans in my head is that I’m 100% positive that if I see a few more of his movies, I’ll turn into one (a rabid fan, I mean, not one of his movies). Carry on.