∇
troperville

∇
tools

∇
toys

SubpagesFilm
Main
NightmareFuel
YMMV

main index

Narrative

Genre

Media

Topical Tropes

Other Categories

random

Subpages:

Film: Videodrome

Television can change your mind... Videodrome will change your body!

"Death to Videodrome! Long live the New Flesh!"

Videodrome is a horror/sci-fi film directed by David Cronenberg.

It is a surreal movie, one of the poster children for Body Horror. Like all of Cronenberg's movies, it has a strong intellectual undercurrent. The film deals with Marshall McLuhan's philosophies and examines the relationship between television and its audience. Cronenberg was greatly influenced by McLuhan's theories.

More specifically, the film follows the CEO of a small cable station who stumble upon a broadcast signal that is broadcasting extremely violent and horrific things. He investigates. As you might expect from Cronenberg, things get worse...

This film provides examples of:

Actor Allusion: Reiner Schwartz's character is named Moses, a reference to City TV founder Moses Znaimer.
Affectionate Parody / No Celebrities Were Harmed - Brian O'Blivion is a parody of Marshall McLuhan, whose ideas are the central theme of the movie. He only exists in video tapes, parodying McLuhan's famous proclamation: "I refuse to appear on television, except on television."
Body Horror
Brown Note - Videodrome itself. We get to see why, and it's as horrible as it is said to be.
Chekhov's Gun - Max Renn loses his gun in an early hallucination inside the cavernous tumor in his stomach. Guess where he gets his gun from before the climax.
Double Entendre - "Civic TV, The one you take to bed with you."
Deconstructor Fleet - For late '70s exploitation movies. Oddly enough, it is now much better known than films like Mondo Cane or the first Faces Of Death.
Exploitation Film - Civic TV's stock in trade is exploitation TV.
Fantastic Aesop - Not used by the film itself, but by the bad guys, who figure that if they make a torture porn show that kills the viewer, nobody will watch torture porn anymore.
Gorn - Played with.
Grey and Grey Morality: There's never any clear evidence that Bianca O'Blivion is better than Barry Convex. At the very least, she's willing to use Max just as Barry is.
Head-Tiltingly Kinky: Nicki gets off on mutilating and piercing herself, as well as watching Torture Porn.
Nicki: What's this? "Videodrome"?
Max: Torture. Murder.
Nicki: Sounds great.
Max: Ain't exactly sex.
Nicki: Says who?
I Just Shot Marvin in the Face - Done on purpose for extreme horror. At one point James Woods basically has sex with the cancerous vagina growing out of his own belly with a gun.
Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane - Yes, they're visions, but... is that really Nicki talking to him beyond the grave, or just his own psychosis?
Mind Screw - The blurring between fiction and reality only increases during The Climax.
Moral Guardians - The purity league headed up by Barry Convex.
More than Mind Control: The opposing factions use Max by "programming" him with VHS cassettes.
New Media Are Evil - Deconstructed
Non-Actor Vehicle - Deborah Harry
Nothing Is Scarier - The orange letters of the title card of the titular TV Show, with nothing but the buzz of your cathode ray-tube to accompany it.
Old Shame - One of the Japanese porn dealers is played by David Tsubouchi. Just over a decade later, he'd be elected as a Member of Provincial Parliament in Ontario, where he was appointed Minister of Consumer and Commercial Relations. This made him responsible for the Ontario Film Review Board, the agency which assigns film ratings in the province. Cronenberg butted heads with the OFRB and other Canadian review boards many times in the late '70s and early '80s and accused them of censorship.
Organic Technology
Place Worse Than Death: Pittsburgh is treated this way throughout the film. It is where the videodrome signal comes from, and "See you in Pittsburgh" is later used in lieu of the regular "See You in Hell".
Punny Name - Brian O'Blivion? Barry Convex? Is this a comedy? No. Possibly a Shout Out to Thomas Pynchon. Justified in the first instance because Brian O'Blivion has explicitly renamed himself.
Science Is Bad / New Media Are Evil - The seeming surface moral is that modern information technology is eeevill. But, later it turns out: not so much.
Shout Out - To several famous exploitation movies.
- That, and CIVIC-TV is a play on City-TV (a Toronto-area station that played porn movies at the time when Videodrome was made).
  - It still does, only now it's not just a "Toronto-area" Station, but has a City-Tv Vancouver, Montreal, etc.
Show Within a Show
Smug Snake - Barry Convex
Spiritual Sequel - eXistenZ. This is made particularly clear because it starts with a scene that looks very like the climax to this movie.
Snuff Film - Videodrome is snuff television.
Surreal Horror - As Max's psychological descent steepens, plot points and settings grow more and more absurd.
The Tape Knew You Would Say That - TV prophet Brian O'Blivion communicates solely through videotaped messages—even in order to participate in an interview early on in the film.
The Television Talks Back: Nicki disappears when going to check out Videodrome, then appears to Max in his TV, and asks for a kiss. He does...and then things start to get really bizarre. Brian O'Blivion also starts to directly converse with Max in this way later on.
Max: Be careful. It bites.
There Are No Therapists - The only person coming close in the movie gets corrupted the fastest.
Through the Eyes of Madness - The film is shown from the perspective of the protagonist, Max Renn, who has certainly gone batty at some point. Everything up to the first Brian O'Blivion tape he watches can be assumed to be real as he's still only slightly affected by the signal. But when Bianca tells him that his life could become "100% video hallucination", suddenly it looks more and more likely that the bizarre plot twists (i.e. an evil conspiracy operating out of an opticians', his best friend being part of this conspiracy, murdering people with flesh/metal hybrid weaponry) is all part of a massive psychotic break triggered by the Videodrome signal. Maybe.
23: The first scene is Max's secretary telling him his schedule for the day, Wednesday the twenty-third. On video tape.
Unreliable Narrator - See Through the Eyes of Madness, above.
Vagina Dentata - Just about the only trope played straight. Except that it's on a man. In his abdomen.