an international
and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 3, February 2006, ISSN
1552-5112
Scarring the New Flesh:
Time Passing in the Simulacrum of Videodrome
“In the final scene of Videodrome, the television set explodes
and burns, but this is only part of a repetitive video loop in which Max is
trapped. He shoots himself after seeing
himself shoot himself on TV. The
quasi-religious doctrine of ‘the new flesh’ pushes Max to a limit, but holds
out no promises as to what he will encounter on the other side. The film ends with the sound of his
gunshot—perhaps a finality, or perhaps a rewind to one more playback.”
—Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic
Body[1]
The
ending of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome
(1982) would seem self-evidently nihilistic—the marker of postmodernity. The main character, Max Renn (played by James
Woods), apparently commits suicide after seeing an image of himself show him
how to do it on a television screen.
Afflicted with a tumor behind his eyes which causes him to see
hallucinations and to lose all sense of reality, Max resorts to a fatal, self-inflicted
head wound to alleviate the pain and confusion of his existence. But this occurs offscreen, in the darkness,
after the image fades out. We hear only
the gunshot. For Fredric Jameson, this
is a “blank screen that registers James Woods’ salvational suicide.”[2] Max Renn may
be dead, but what life does he still have? As Steven Shaviro notes above, Max’s “death”
may be “a finality, or perhaps a rewind to one more playback.” And if the end of Videodrome is always a rewinding to another presentation, then the
film in a sense is always already playing itself in an endless loop, since the
end (as they say) is the beginning. And
yet this is not just to say that Videodrome
foregrounds simulation, repetition, or any other theoretical model of
representation (or resists such a model)—this is more precisely to say that Videodrome is always out there, always
in circulation, always doing work of some kind.
That there is still much to be said, I believe, about the cultural value
of a cult 80s horror film which has been run through the postmodern ringers ad infinitum is a testament to the
effects it achieves. Paradoxically, as I
will argue, Videodrome’s continued
circulation at once both intensifies Videodrome’s
postmodernity, and challenges it to go further.
Of
course, one of Videodrome’s many
mysteries is that Max may not be dead, even if his physical body has
expired. One of the lingering practices
of postmodern thought still present today, it is difficult to speak of
“closure” at the end of Videodrome, which itself immediately questions
whether or not Max really dies. “Closure
in the postmodern,” wrote Jameson about Videodrome
in the early 1990s, “[. . .] has itself become a questionable value, if not a
meaningless concept. It will be
desirable therefore to speak of a closure-effect, just as we speak of mapping
out or triangulating, rather than perceiving or representing, a totality.”[3] So, what
closure is effected in the film, if Max isn’t quite dead? After Max has acquired the tumor from watching
episodes of the “Videodrome” episodes and begun having horrific hallucinations,
he is hailed by Bianca O’Blivion (Sonja Smits), the daughter of the film’s
media theorist, Professor Brian O’Blivion, to become “the new flesh”—a state of
pure simulation, always already in transmission. This is how Prof. O’Blivion lives his life,
on an endless series of videotapes. He
cannot exist and interact in the bodily flesh; he can only be
broadcasted—monologue being the “preferred” form of communication.
“A new subject is being constituted” in Videodrome, writes Scott Bukatman, “one
which begins its process of being through the act of viewership.”[4] The act of
representation becomes inseparable from the act of being, as O’Blivion spreads
his word through videotape. His daughter
thus encourages Max to do the same, becoming the new flesh of simulation. Writes Christopher Sharrett, “Bianca in
effect ‘baptizes’ him by showing him how to become the ‘new flesh’ (a very
Burroughsian concept), that is, to acquiesce to his visions and physically
merge with his technological nightmare.”[5] The
distinction between Max’s hallucinations and reality evaporates, and suicide of
the bodily flesh seems a necessity to take on this new flesh. “Max doesn’t merely lose any point of reference
outside what is imprinted on the video screen,” Shaviro writes, “he comes to
embody this process directly, as he’s transformed into a human video machine.”[6] It is entirely
possible that when Max kills his human form, he is freeing himself to exist only
in transmission (in a form that the television image of himself, telling
himself to kill himself, suggests has taken shape already). “The more images are flattened out and
distanced from their representational sources,” adds Shaviro, “the more they
are inscribed in our nerves, and flash across our synapses.”[7] This new flesh
then is inseparable from the image itself.
However, Sharrett reads the film (and the conclusion)
nihilistically, not allowing for a rebirth—“the tortured subjectivity into
which Max Renn dissolves is Cronenberg’s new vision of apocalypse.”[8] Instead of
merging with new technological potential, Videodrome
offers “the impossibility of spiritual evolution.”[9] As I will
return to later, however, I believe that Videodrome
is at once both a certain nihilism and that certain nihilism passing in time,
and thus opening out away from that nihilism.
“Videodrome is an extraordinarily rich, poetically dense film,
filled with acerbic wit,” he adds, “yet unequivocally pessimistic.”[10] This seems fair
enough if we accept at face value that Max does kills himself in a fit of
delusion and insanity, and thus ceases to be.
Yet closure is questionable, and we are invited to a playback. If Max does take on a different life of his
own, in circulation (if he does become “the new flesh” of simulation),
matters become quite different. Videodrome
may not be about the end of life, but about the beginning of life, just as
Shaviro notes how the ending of the film might be really just a replay. Clearly, in Videodrome, the medium is
(literally) life—“life on TV is more real,” O’Blivion says, “than life in the
flesh.” O’Blivion exists on videotape in
the film, and that appears to be Max’s destiny as well. Max is destined to be reborn as a simulacrum.
“The body is not erased or evacuated,” writes Shaviro, “it is rather so
suffused with video technology that it mutates into new forms, and is pushed to
new thresholds of intense, masochistic sensation.”[11] Like
O’Blivion, Max emerges as simulation, as television image, and as such is fated
to circulate and proliferate endlessly in culture.
Positing
an age of the new flesh, Videodrome
is both about the simulacrum and is itself a simulacrum. These are both the assumptions and the
conclusions of my inquiry. They may be
apparent enough—yet my explicit concern here is how saying that today in 2005
is radically different from saying that in the 80s or 90s, when writers such as
Jameson, Shaviro and Sharrett were first compelled to write about Videodrome. In other words, how the film is about the simulacrum and how the film is itself a simulacrum is of course complicated, and
unpacking these conclusions means not just to regurgitate earlier pieces on the
film, but also to challenge notions of the simulacrum and, with it, notions
about postmodernity. I am arguing that Videodrome’s postmodernity is a
particular kind of postmodernity—more precisely, it is a particular period of postmodernity. Even Shaviro himself, today, acknowledges Videodrome for what it is—something from
“Cronenberg’s earlier work.”[12] It is a
simulacrum—but it is a simulacrum in time. By circulating in the present, the film Videodrome
reveals its past. “Thus the image has to
be present and past, still present and already past, at once and the same
time,” Gilles Deleuze writes of the crystal image in Cinema II: The Time-Image, “If it was not already past at the same
time as the present, the present would never pass on. The past does not follow the present that it
is no longer, it coexists with the present it was.”[13] The crystal
image of film is a flat depth whereby the present and the past passing come
into relief together. The past of Videodrome—that nihilistic,
Baudrillardian moment co-exists with the film we watch today. In circulation, in endless replaying, Videodrome is at once present and
past. This is what re-approaching Videodrome today forces us specifically
to re-consider.
How does time affect the new flesh? By scarring it. “A scar is not the sign of a past wound,”
Gilles Deleuze writes in Difference &
Repetition, “but of ‘the present fact of having been wounded.’ We can say that it is the contemplation of
the wound, that it contracts all the instants which separate us from it into a
living present.”[14] There are
profound implications with juxtaposing the metaphors of Deleuze’s “scar” (time
presently having past) with the mantra of “the new flesh” (existence in a pure
state of simulation and repetition) which permeates Cronenberg’s Videodrome. By foregrounding the cultural role of the
simulacrum, the sci-fi/horror picture presents us with a world where the copy
has supplanted the original permanently in a state of simulation. By scarring this new flesh, however, I am
arguing that time is always already at work in the simulacrum, and that as Videodrome continues to age, it
highlights postmodernity’s age as well.
And yet, I am not simply arguing that either Videodrome or postmodernity has passed; I am arguing that we cannot
think of either particular body outside time, and that both entities—by their
presence—increasingly affect a time through their passing. My method will be largely reception-based—how
have others received Videodrome (and
to a lesser extent, postmodernity) and how those receptions increasing affect a
sense of time. Videodrome seems to articulate a “new flesh” of simulation outside
time, but that flesh seems scarred by this sense of time which emerges from
watching the film today. Videodrome isn’t a film “about” time (in
the way that a cotemporaneous film such as Somewhere
in Time [1980] is explicitly “about” time); and yet as I will show, in Videodrome, I see time. How is time presently in a state of passing
in Videodrome, and how does that scar the new flesh (the simulacrum) in
the film? How do we see time in Videodrome,
and how does this reconfigure our understanding of postmodernity? In this paper, I will explore the role time
plays in relation to the simulacrum and to postmodernity, with a primary focus
on the work of Videodrome. I want
to show how time scars the simulacrum in Cronenberg’s film as that which has
passed. Videodrome can be seen as
a film which typifies an earlier period of postmodernity. So while we can still look to Videodrome, and we can still look to
postmodernity, it is always already
through the crystal image of time, the present fact of passing. Time affects our viewing and re-viewing. Time pushes us out; Videodrome pushes us to touch a different postmodernity . . .
* * *
There is first Videodrome’s
past. In a very early academic essay,
“The Terror of Pleasure: The Contemporary Horror Film and Postmodern Theory,”
Tania Modleski first noted that in Videodrome, the “video itself becomes
monster.”[15] Modleski
posited Videodrome as an important
film in emerging postmodern discourses of the mid-1980s, working off of Roland
Barthes’ discussion of pleasure and jouissance
in The Pleasure of the Text, which she saw as an exemplary postmodern
text. “The contemporary text of horror could
aptly be considered an anagram for the schizophrenic’s body,” Modleski wrote,
“which is so vividly imaged in Cronenberg’s film.”[16] This emphasis
on the schizophrenic, so prevalent in discussions of postmodernity (such as in
Jameson’s Postmodernism), marked the chaotic uncertainty—filled with
slippages and ruptures—of the self’s role and identity in this theoretical
period. Naturally, Videodrome
would thus speak to a death of the fixed subject. This then opened up the possibilities of the
“ruptured body” (which leads, I would argue, to the self as pure simulation,
effect over cause)—“the hero’s situation becomes that of the new schizophrenic
described by Jean Baudrillard in his discussion of the effects of mass
communication.”[17] Videodrome, added Jameson in a separate book, translates
addiction and schizophrenia into “a society of the spectacle or image
capitalism.”[18] This
uncertainty, this panic, in the postmodern caused feelings of terror, for
Modleski; it also caused for her Baudrillard (as for Jameson, Debord). In a particular time, Videodrome
created the effects of Baudrillard in criticism. Moreover, Videodrome
reflected a period of postmodern thinking as expressed by Marshall McLuhan,
Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord. For me
today, Videodrome can be read still—as others have—as a product of
postmodernity. Yet my point is not so
much to repeat this argument as it is to show how Videodrome is at once
both an articulation of that period and simultaneously something completely
different. Videodrome can be read
as a postmodernity in time—stretching at least as far back as Modleski in the
early 80s.
Bukatman too once posited Cronenberg in the tradition
of these thinkers. “At times Videodrome
seems to be a film which hypostatizes Baudrillard’s own polemic,” he
wrote, “here, with remarkable syntactic
similarity, Baudrillard and a character [Prof. O’Blivion] from Cronenberg’s
film are both intent upon the usurpation of the real by its own representation;
upon the imbrication of the real, the technologized and the simulated.”[19] In The
Geopolitical Aesthetic (one of his earlier postmodern works), Jameson
argued that the film “carefully explains its ‘themes’ to us—the social
perniciousness of television and mass culture generally, McLuhanite reflections
on physical changes and perceptual mutations.”[20] Shaviro,
meanwhile, put this same didacticness in the film (Prof. O’Blivion’s lectures)
in a more playful light, suggesting the film itself is in on the joke:
Cronenberg relentlessly materializes not just information
systems, but the entire range of referentless media images that are so often
said to constitute the postmodern world.
Simulation is forced to display its body. The brutally hilarious strategy of Videodrome is to take media theorists
such as Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard completely at their word, to over
literalize their claims for the ubiquitous mediatization of the real.[21]
Following Modleski, Barbara Creed
extended the effects of Videodrome—“he has become—to cite Baudrillard—a
‘pure screen, a switching centre for all the networks of influence.’”[22] Like the
experience of Videodrome, Baudrillard
is always being replayed. “What is the
new flesh?” asked Bukatman, “One postulation might hold that Max has attained
the paradoxical status of pure image—an image which no longer retains a
connection with the ‘real.’ Videodrome comes striking close to
moving through the four successive phases of the image characteristic of the
era of simulation as described by Baudrillard.”[23] Everywhere in
criticism on the film, the same theorists remained in circulation. It is almost as though McLuhan and
Baudrillard were themselves affective—not as people but as ideas. They hovered within the film and provoked
people into quantifying these famous theories in the course of their own
readings of Videodrome.
Noting Cronenberg’s “sensitivity to the atmosphere of
the postmodern,”[24] Christopher Sharrett similarly sensed the figures of
this period in Videodrome. Like the other writers, Sharrett noted that
Prof. O’Blivion was “a figure deliberately modeled on the late Marshall
McLuhan.”[25] Here, though,
we find a much darker take on the film, its director and on postmodernity. “While Cronenberg has professed an interest
in McLuhan’s theories,” Sharrett wrote, “it is difficult to ignore the
criticism he offers of the media and the soft-headed utopianism of his McLuhan
figure. The film is especially deft in
satirizing the one-way nature of the media, their inability to foster genuine
communication, and their tendency to turn the spectator into consumer and
voyeur.”[26] This reading
led Sharrett to different conclusions about Videodrome. “It seems apparent, particularly as we read
such critics as Jean Baudrillard and Jean Francois Lyotard,” he wrote, “that
the characteristics of the postmodern style are written under the sign of the
apocalypse—or at least have affinities with a certain millennic temperament.”[27]
For Sharrett, the end of Videodrome was Max simply losing his sanity and killing himself;
there is no salvation in the image, which “remains a delusion.”[28] In contrast to
others at the time, Sharrett saw in Videodrome
a larger tendency towards nihilism and apocalyptism in postmodern film. “We find in Cronenberg’s work an
extraordinarily rich body of mythic content,” he added, “that interfaces with
apocalyptic thought.”[29] While
Shaviro felt that the film jokingly literalized theory’s relationship to
technology, Videodrome for Sharrett “is decidedly not a film that lauds
technology and shows its development coextensive with intellectual progress.”[30] Sharrett’s
cynicism, however, is not isolated. “Videodrome’s
political and social implications, taken up and augmented from Scanners,”
wrote William Beard more recently, “are also much more serious: deep and
widespread, offering a kind of postmodern paranoid model of manipulation of
helpless private individuals by predatory corporate forces under conditions of
universal technological penetration and colonization.”[31] And at a
certain time, these critiques may have been true, but I think there is still
positive and affirming work that Videodrome
did and continues to do. Something that
has evolved over time, not unlike how Professor O'Blivion evolves on tape in
the film. His name itself points to an
earlier nihilism—a lack of substance or depth.
Yet he is not negated, but rather seems to proliferate over time as his
images duplicate and spread out. The
very fact that it has survived in time allows the film to slip out of the
nihilism once thrown around its neck.
Today, I do not see a postmodern in Videodrome as much as I see what other
postmodernists saw. I see that it had an effect—by 1992, Jameson
himself had acknowledged Videodrome’s “canonical, well-nigh classical
position” within postmodernity.[32] As Beard put
it, “Videodrome has attracted perhaps more commentary than any other
Cronenberg film to date. Its
thematization of media as an ubiquitously intrusive and identity-threatening
force, of the transformations enabled and threats posed by information
overload, of the dissolution of borders between simulacra and the real and
between spectacle and the body, of the politics of image manipulation, of
sexuality and subjectivity as unstable cultural constructions is irresistibly
attractive to postmodern cultural theorists.”[33] By 2001,
Beard was able to reflect back on Videodrome’s
lasting appeal to postmodernists and cultural theorists, even while he
continued to circulate the idea that Videodrome was still being marked
by its postmodernity, which for him “introduces an element of reflexivity”[34] and ushered in a period of Cronenberg’s films’
newfound “self-understanding.”[35] Even after
almost 20 years past the film’s initial debut, Beard continued to reiterate
how:
Marshall McLuhan is of course the starting point for
Cronenberg here (and Brian O’Blivion is clearly a ‘radical’ pastiche of McLuhan
as ‘media prophet’), but scholarly commentators have immediately gravitated to
Foucault, Debord, and especially Baudrillard as providing models according to
which the film can be explicated. [36]
Thus the postmodernity of Videodrome remained (and remains through
this essay) in circulation, almost to the point of cliché. Videodrome
highlighted Debord’s insistence on representation as a substitute for human
interaction and lived experience, McLuhan’s understanding of media as an
extension of the self, and Baudrillard’s contention that the image has
supplanted reality. This was the
rhetoric of the day. “Media images no
longer refer to a real that would be
(in principle) prior to and independent of them,” wrote Shaviro, “for they
penetrate, volatilize, and thereby (re)constitute that real.”[37] Both then and
now, the video flesh is made real. “The
scene is real because it is televised,”[38] Bukatman wrote, “Diegetic reality shatters in a
gesture which reflects on the experience of the real through the experience of
the cinematic.”[39] He went on to
say, “Cronenberg, then, does not reify the cinematic signifier as ‘real,’ but continually
mutates the real into the image, and the image into the hallucination.”[40] So, as
Bukatman (and others) fairly argued, Videodrome
compels us to consider how reality and the image have collapsed into one
another. But, where can the film go from
there? Beard showed an awareness of the
dangers in always already recirculating the same texts and the same theories
(however legitimate or sturdy): “Indeed,
this [method of using Foucault, Baudrillard, McLuhan and so forth] is putting
the cart before the horse, since the project of so much theoretical writing in
the field of popular culture is not to use theory to explicate texts, but
rather to discover texts that will illustrate theory. In this respect, Videodrome is an
object of almost pornographic appeal for scholars seeking an explicit textual
embodiment of some of the most powerful contemporary currents of cultural
theory.”[41]
I suppose I too am guilty of such
self-gratification. I was not fighting
off the writings of the likes of Modleski, Jameson, Beard, Bukatman, Creed,
Sharrett and Shaviro. Quite the
opposite—what initially drew me to Videodrome
was precisely its ability to (re)invoke (yet again) a particular moment in the
postmodern period when Baudrillard and McLuhan were common currency, and the
simulacrum was the buzzword du jour. Yet unlike past scholars such as Beard, I am
not attempting to establish here Videodrome’s
present (see below), but rather its past.
Could we see time present in earlier postmodern texts such as
Cronenberg’s films, or have earlier periods of postmodernity become a time
which is presently passing in the (present) image of Videodrome today?
By returning yet again to the object with an “almost
pornographic appeal” to postmodernists past and present, I am not trying to illustrate
what Videodrome is, so much as I am
attempting to excavate in the back of the crystal image what Videodrome was. While I hope Videodrome will in a way “illustrate theory,” I am open to what
theory it will ultimately lead to. I am
trying to resist the theory prematurely, but I am also aware of how the timing
of Videodrome compels me to another
way of thinking. Writing shortly after
the film’s initial release in the early 1980s, Sharrett wrote that “Videodrome
quickly became a commercial and critical failure, although it is certain to
gain respect as an innovative work to judge from its already apparent cult
following.”[42] We can clearly
say now that Videodrome did gain that
respect; and it did so through the film’s continued circulation. It provoked people into seeing Baudrillard
and McLuhan through the work that it did.
Or, more simply, it just induced pleasure of some kind. And I believe the film continues to do work. I am hoping that Videodrome in circulation both looks back to a past postmodern
passing, and a new postmodern yet to pass.
This postmodernity is still present, but it is present as having past
when Videodrome is seen today (or
when those old books are re-opened and re-read today). Just as I believe that Videodrome may have moved into respect, may have moved beyond the
nihilism Sharrett had once described and into the new sensory experience
Shaviro articulated, I believe the film can move again.
* * *
There are other ways to see Videodrome, and they work with the ways articulated above. When looking at the film’s conclusion and
how we do not see Max shoot himself for good, Bukatman writes that “beyond
representation itself, such an image could not be represented, and thus the
film ends. Videodrome, then,
enacts the death of the subject and the death of representation simultaneously,
each the consequence of the other.”[43] The ending of Videodrome—the sound of a gunshot but
not the image, the repetition, the replaying of that moment—pushes Bukatman
into the unrepresentable, into (I would add) virtuality. Max is reborn in simulation and repetition
and, as such, thus exists outside representation. “It is ultimately the body without an image,”
Brian Massumi writes about Ronald Reagan’s emerging awareness of his own
presence on the silver screen, “that takes his body.”[44] The potential
of Max (as with Reagan) takes over his existence, the possibilities of
circulation and reproduction, what he could be.
In the dark screen, with the unseen death shot, Max assumes a body
without image. And likewise there are
ways in which we can begin to think “beyond representation itself,” into the
virtual, into what Videodrome could
be—its potentiality. What does Videodrome affect? “What is being termed affect,” Massumi
writes: “is precisely [. . .] the
simultaneous participation of the virtual in the actual and the actual in the
virtual, as one arises from and returns to the other. Affect is this two-sidedness as seen from the side of the actual thing,
as couched in its perceptions and cognitions.
Affect is the virtual as point of
view, provided the visual metaphor is used guardedly.[45]”
We can approach Videodrome affectively; we can approach postmodernity
affectively. “If cancer in The Brood was an articulation of
affect,” Shaviro writes, “in Videodrome
it materializes the very act of perception.”[46] Likewise, the
tumor in Videodrome approximates
affect in the film’s narrative. The
tumor (like affect) is what emanates from the “Videodrome” broadcasts and which
then pre-personally constitutes perception (hallucination) for Max.
But what do we sense when we see the film today, or
when we read the criticism today? What
tumor is implanted behind our eyes as
we watch Videodrome? “As processional as it is precessional,
affect inhabits the passage,” Massumi writes:
“It is pre- and postcontextual, pre- and postpersonal, an excess of
continuity invested in the ongoing: its own.
Self-continuity across the gaps.
Impersonal affect is the connecting thread of experience. It is the invisible glue that holds the world
together. In event. The world-glue of affect is an autonomy of
event-connection continuing across its own serialized capture in context.”[47]
When I speak of affect in Videodrome, I am speaking of that which
moves alongside Videodrome, that which
inhabits our experience of Videodrome,
that which constitutes us as individual viewers of Videodrome, that which provokes us to thought, that which provokes
the “spiritual automaton.” Deleuze
refers to the spiritual automaton in Cinema
II: The Time-Image, where he suggests that this concept emerges from
automatic movement. At this point in his
discussion of film, automatic movement is now a given in the image itself. Since movement is implied in the duration of
the cinematographic image, since the image creates movement by its very nature,
he argues, movement must necessarily be automatic. The film is always already movement.
From this predetermined quality of the film, then, there arises “in us”[48] a spiritual automaton, which:
“[. . .] no longer designates—as it does in classical
philosophy—the logical or abstract possibility of formally deducing thoughts
from each other, but the circuit into which they enter with movement-image, the
shared power of what forces thinking and what thinks under a shock; a nooshock.”[49]
Certainly, there is a way in which we can
begin to think here about how Deleuze is specifically bringing the audience
into the discussion of cinema. He is no
longer just articulating the essence of cinema or of the philosophical concepts
in cinema, but rather is moving on to the ways in which we ourselves as
audiences are compelled into thinking about that essence or those
concepts. If the crystal image is one of
those concepts which we see in Videodrome,
or that through which we see the direct time-image and time passing as
co-existents, for example, then the spiritual automaton is that which arises
from the experience of seeing time in such a way.
And
yet Deleuze is not neglecting, of course, the ways in which the spiritual
automaton is still to an extent in
the cinematographic image. Though it
arises in us, he also argues that the spiritual automaton is the “artistic
essence of the image” realized once movement becomes automatic.[50] Or at least I
believe it is the spiritual automaton to which he is referring in that passage,
because the artistic essence of the image is “producing a shock to thought, communicating vibrations to the cortex,
touching the nervous and cerebral system directly.”[51] When he was
writing about Videodrome, Shaviro argued
that:
…the function of vision [in the film] is no longer to
show, but to excite the nerves directly. Sight is not a neutral source of information,
but a gaping wound, a violation of the integrity of the body. In this implosive embodiment of vision, spectacle
is indeed abolished, but so is the digital coding that Baudrillard sees as
taking its place, for there are no more simple images, no more simulation
models, no more surfaces.[52]
What is provoked in Videodrome instead is affect—the nerves and the body excited and
violated—and this constitutes the spiritual automaton in Shaviro. In the film, Max “is seduced, stimulated,
‘turned on’ by the affective overload of new sensations in new organs. Such a subject position is also that of the
viewers of Videodrome.”[53] Shaviro
recognized the affect of Videodrome
on himself as well as on Max—communicating
vibrations. “Cronenberg’s strategy
is the perverse opposite of Brecht’s,” he added, “it shatters identification
and ‘alienates’ the spectator by virtue of too great a proximity to bliss and
horror, and not because of any rational distancing from them.”[54] As Deleuze
argues in the passage quoted above, the automaton is a shock to thought
then—the nooshock—a shock from (or
in) the film. For Shaviro, I suspect, Videodrome’s shock to thought is “too
great a proximity to bliss and horror.”
However, it is not simply the film’s affect on him. Deleuze also mentions that the “automatic movement gives rise to a spiritual automaton in us, which reacts
in turn on movement.”[55] The spiritual
automaton is also “in us.” How can we
begin to reconcile these understandings of the spiritual automaton which
initially seem to be contradictory?
The
easy answer, of course, would be that the spiritual automaton is both in the
film image and in us, while simultaneously not in either. Like the movement-image, which generates our
perception (more so than we perceive it), the spiritual automaton generates our
thinking through shock. And yet we are
also given in us to a power of thought and of thinking that is independent of
the essence of the cinematographic image.
“It is the capacity, this power [of thought], and not the simple logical
possibility, that cinema claims to give us in communicating the shock,” Deleuze
writes, “it is as if cinema were telling us: with me, with the movement-image,
you can’t escape the shock which arouses the thinker in you.”[56] Even while we
are propelled by the shock of Videodrome
which we “can’t escape”—the violence, the grotesqueness, the sadomasochism—we
still tap into the thinker within ourselves.
Or precisely because Videodrome
is so shocking we cannot help but think about what is so shocking in the
film. The spiritual automaton is at once
both the essence of the image and that which arises within ourselves. Or put another way, perhaps the spiritual
automaton is that—thought—which is generated within ourselves by the artistic
essence of the image.[57] This would
explain why we keep watching James Woods, and yet somehow see Jean Baudrillard
instead. More precisely, we watch Prof.
O’Blivion, and yet we somehow see Marshall McLuhan. The image generates thought—this is one way
to define the spiritual automaton in the film.[58] Videodrome generates images of McLuhan
within us. And yet, for me, there is
more than a Canadian media scholar from the 1960s within when I watch
Cronenberg’s film. What is it in Videodrome that provokes, in us, a
“spiritual automaton”?
I
think of Baudrillard every time I see Prof. O’Blivion on one of his TV screens
in Videodrome. Or, Videodrome
creates in me an image of Baudrillard every time I see it. Baudrillard is an affect, the
unrepresentable, the virtual—what is there in the film which I sense but do not
directly see. But in Baudrillard, and in
Videodrome, I also see time. The film creates time within me. Videodrome
creates time for others, too. We can say
that it is a more “historical” way (for lack of a better word) to look at Videodrome. But I prefer to think of time as affective,
not cognitive. “Becoming becomes history,”[59] writes Massumi, and I sense that Videodrome is likewise experiencing such
a becoming. Following the research of
Ian Conrich, Michael Grant positions Videodrome historically, noting how
the film was released during “the height of this so-called moral panic” of the
“video nasties campaign of the early 1980s.”[60] Meanwhile,
Conrich himself posits Videodrome within the emergence of Fangoria magazine in the early 1980s,
again seeing the film as—to some degree—a historical document.[61] In a very
recent Film Criticism article,
Steffen Hantke implicitly suggests that Videodrome
is dated, pointing out how the visual effects in this and other Cronenberg
films are specifically pre-CGI: “On a
banal level, the relative degree of an effect’s conspicuousness is directly
related to its cost. Up to Dead Ringers in 1988, special effects in
Cronenberg’s films avail themselves only minimally, if at all, of CGI and
instead use make-up, body casts and prostheses, and full or partial body
models.”[62]
Many of those devices would be not needed
or even effective in the post-CGI era of filmmaking. In other words, effects like those in Videodrome—however
revolutionary at the time—seem low-budget and primitive to the viewer
today. Though not crucial to his
argument, it is curious that Hantke would note this. Time has caught up with Videodrome, and with scholars.
In a much different article from the mid-1990s, Marty Roth examined the
different types of representation in Videodrome:
Despite the general erosion of the real, we can
easily tell the difference between reality and representation: representation
is faulty television reception, a TV picture that is bad in both the technical
and moral/aesthetic senses. Videodrome
is the name of the film and a video series that we watch in the film. The difference between them is that the
quality of the second transmission is noisy and grainy: reality is unmarked,
apparently unmediated, perception, while representation is both textured and
distorted.[63]
While I’m not sure that I agree with
Roth’s formulation of the distinction between representation and reality as
embodied in Videodrome, I do think his discussion points us in some
fascinating directions. Roth is looking
at Videodrome in the late 1990s, and
notes the imperfections in the video images in the film. Like Hantke, he cannot help but see (affectively, that is) the
primitiveness of Videodrome’s
technical world. It is a primitiveness I
can see as well. Roth sees something off in the image, which for him marks it
as representation. I would suggest that
what he sees, and what we see, is time.
And there are subtler ways in which time affects my
reading of Videodrome, and my
readings of readings of Videodrome. Shaviro noted how “Max is programmed by the cassette to be a killer for Spectacular
Optical.”[64] In 2005, the
word “cassette” generates in me a sense of a different time. In fact, what I see in Shaviro’s work is time, every bit as much as I see it in Videodrome—I see a scholar working in a
different period of postmodernity, where figures such as Baudrillard still
retained a currency that seems to have fallen into cliché today (or disappeared
entirely). “Videocassettes and TV
monitors begin to throb like living, breathing flesh”[65] in Videodrome, he added. I can see that videocassette throbbing—an
historical artifact throbbing in time.
And as it is rewound and replayed, it increasingly throbs with time. The affect
of time in Videodrome is more complicated than just the dated
technology, of course, but I see Shaviro locating Videodrome as both a Baudrillardian moment, and simultaneously
pushing us beyond Baudrillard.
Baudrillard’s formulation of the simulacrum does not work for Videodrome in the way that Deleuze’s
might. I would argue very simply that in
each case above what the scholar saw and is seeing is time; what affects them
is time.
* * *
The differences repeating Videodrome:
The “Criterion” Edition DVD of Videodrome (2004)
“[In Videodrome,]
we gaze, not at people, but at a conspiracy made into a whole world, in a landscape
of media objects now endowed with a delirious life and autonomy of their own.”
—Jameson, The
Geopolitical Aesthetic[66]
I would like to finish the body of my essay with a
case study—using a close analysis of the kind of work Videodrome continues to do in circulation today, and how this increasingly affects a sense of time. In respect to reception, time is certainly
more relevant to Videodrome now than
it was then. I wish to examine the 2004
“Criterion” edition DVD of Videodrome,
which is packaged on the cover to simulate an 80s “beta” tape—a bootleg copy
such as that which captures the “Videodrome” transmissions we see in the
film. We also see old television color
bars on the package. In other words, the
very packaging of Videodrome seems to simulate time—it
says to us that the film, while still present, is of the past. If anything, the legitimacy conferred upon
the film by being “worthy” of a Criterion edition would seem to authenticate
the film as an important document which is not only in time, but which
(literally) has stood the test of time.
“The Criterion collection,” the DVD states, is “a continuing series of
important classic and contemporary films.” The point of a Criterion version is
not only to mark a film as important, but to further preserve it for time. Criterion’s reputation from film restoration
plays a big part in this equation. And
indeed this version of Videodrome prominently advertises on the back
that it is a “new high definition digital transfer of the unrated version, with
restored image and sound and enhanced for widescreen televisions.” The two disc set features objects both from
the original debut of the film and from the new re-release—containing within
itself both “Forging the New Flesh, a new half-hour documentary featurette,”
and “Fear on Film, a 26 minute roundtable discussion from 1982.” The features on the Criterion Videodrome
thus reveal themselves as a time-image—we see in the present documentaries both
past and present. We “Forge the New
Flesh” presently at the same time that “Fear on Film” is seen passing. We see the time of old publicity photos
returned to the present by the advent of digital video technology.
The DVD is accompanied with a forty-page booklet
which features essays on the film. This
inclusion, too, seems to highlight the film’s legitimacy as a classic. Carrie Rickey’s 1983 essay from the Village
Voice is revised and reprinted. The
sense of Rickey’s past essay existing within the present essay also creates an
image of time to accompany Videodrome.
The new version opens with the declaration that “although it wasn’t
obvious upon its release in 1983, Videodrome is a key work in the
Cronenberg oeuvre.”[67] At work here
is an attempt to remove Videodrome from the new flesh of simulation, and
reposition it within the timing of the director’s career, as it
“anticipated [not, anticipates] Cronenberg’s mature masterpieces, The
Fly (1986) and Dead Ringers (1988).”[68] Rickey
repositions Videodrome as explicitly prior to later films, heightening and
intensifying its age, while also making the (Freudian slip?) mistake of
referring to Videodrome in the past tense—the film once
anticipated Cronenberg’s later films, but apparently does not do so anymore.
Rickey’s reworked work is accompanied by an essay by
Tim Lucas (appropriately subtitled “Reflections on Videodrome”), which
opens with, “in 1981, it seemed to me that a new era of fantastic cinema was
upon us,”[69] and then is followed by a historical (and nostalgic)
discussion of his experiences with the making of Videodrome in the
earlier 80s. For these writers, it is
now impossible to think of the film outside the time is which it was born, even
as it continues to be reborn today.
Thus, even the booklet itself simulates, in its visuals and layouts, the
old technology of the film. And playing
the DVD itself, one finds the motif of time continued—the menu pages of the Videodrome
DVD are not crisp and clear, but seem to recreate the wavy, grainy, unstable
images of “Videodrome” and the technology which perpetuated it. This is an implicit perspective increasingly
taken up by others who write about Videodrome
today, including Rickey and Lucas.
Though they continue to articulate how the film challenges our sense of
reality and the tensions between the mind and the body, they also wish to
articulate Videodrome as a moment in
the early 1980s when they first discovered it, and articulate it as a moment
within Cronenberg’s larger filmography.
Interestingly, a 2000 short film called “Camera”
accompanies the film on the new Criterion DVD.
The film was probably included with Videodrome because it was
directed by Cronenberg, using regulars from his crew, and stars Les Carlson,
who played Barry Convex (the chief villain) in Videodrome. The title itself—“Camera”—clearly foregrounds
issues of representation. Yet the film
is not reproducing the same nihilistic or unrepresentable themes which seem to
haunt Videodrome. “Camera” is a
film expressly about time. Clearly
showing the wear and tear of the last 15+ years on his face since the earlier
horror film, Carlson plays an older man (maybe himself) who thinks back upon
his long life in representation, and how representation made him older
and more aware of his age. He sits at a
kitchen table as kids run around, waiting as the children prepare to photograph
him with a 35mm camera. “One day,” he
says to open the short, “the children brought home an old camera.” He later mentions again how the camera is
old, and how “the camera itself had aged.”
By “growing old together” with the camera, Carlson also suggests that
time is in reproduction and vice versa.
The film follows the kids as they haul the camera
into the house. “I used to be an
actor,” Carlson adds, emphasizing again his age, “the best days are behind
me.” Carlson displays anxiety about the
kids playing with the camera. “If you
look at it in a cold light,” he says, as a cold light bounces off the
background and onto the digital camera (the use of digital film is itself a new
marker of time), “Photography is death.
It’s all about death. Memory and
desire . . . aging . . . and death.” He
emphasizes that this is all the more haunting for an actor, someone who sees
himself forever shown back to him, as though always looking into frozen
mirrors. “I had a dream,” he admits
quietly: “[. . .] a long time ago, before I had achieved
anything professionally. I dreamt I was
in the cinema, watching a movie with an audience. And suddenly I realized I was aging rapidly,
growing horribly old as I sat there. It
was the movie that was doing it. I had
caught some kind of disease from the movie and it was making me grow old,
bringing me closer and closer to death.
I woke up terrified.”
On the one hand, the “disease” from the
movie makes “Camera” a perfect companion to Videodrome, which is also
about a man infected with a virus from images he sees. Yet, the infection is much different—Max Renn
has his perception altered. Carlson has his sense of time altered. Time which seemed so irrelevant to Convex and
Spectacular Optical in Videodrome now floods over Carlson as the years
progress. If the virus in Videodrome
is a perfect actualization of television and affect, this moment in “Camera” is
a perfect realization of the time-image.
The movie in Carlson’s dream creates in him time itself, allows time to
take him over, and thus generating time at a rapid rate, which causes him to
age likewise. “Look at me now,” he then
says, “look where I am now.” He is on an
image, and he is showing his age. He
implores the audience to see time—“you see?
The dream is coming true.” The
image of “Camera” is not merely representing age, but creating age in
Carlson—accelerating his aging and his awareness of his aging.
“When you record the moment,” he says later, “you
record the death of the moment.” The
moment is frozen in the image, but as that moment is continually replayed, time
is generated anew. The moment becomes
increasingly that which is present and that which passes to the past in the
present. “Camera” then appropriately
ends with Carlson being photographed with the 35mm camera—its soft, glossy,
professional look contrasts strikingly, grotesquely, with the harsh immediacy
of the digital camcorder. It is fitting
precisely because Carlson repeats the film’s opening lines—“one day, the
children brought home an old camera . . .”
Thus, as in Videodrome, the film ends in repetition. We are compelled to think about the endless
circulation of the film and its image—that which will generate time anew. Carlson will forever be dying in the presence
of this frozen image. And, likewise in Videodrome,
the repetition of the film’s conclusion asks us to consider what is generated
by the repetition of images. Of course,
I have argued here that what is generated is time. “Camera” is a perfect companion piece to this
particular moment in Videodrome’s distribution. Though it is never explicitly stated
anywhere, I think this short film (which, like the earlier sci-fi flick, is a
film about media and mediation) is a response to Videodrome, and more specifically, to the timing of Videodrome. Is it Videodrome
which he dreams of watching (in his nightmare)?
Does he dream of watching a younger self? It is in part—but not only—the “younger
selves” in Videodrome (such as a
young James Woods), which I sense compels me to see time in the film. The brief film makes it impossible for
contemporary viewers of both the film and of the short together not to see time
in the images, to see time in Videodrome (and in Les Carlson)—to see
recorded “the death” of Videodrome.
Even the latest version of Videodrome—the Criterion
simulacrum—continues to circulate the image of Videodrome as a film in
time, its death moving further and further back into the presence of the
film.
* * *
But if Videodrome is time present as that
which has passed, then what can we still say about postmodernity—that older 80s
postmodernity of Jameson and Baudrillard—of which (as older critics above have
shown) the film is so exemplary? What
does Criterion say about Jameson? As
noted, Jameson himself once wrote about Videodrome as a marker of a
different period of postmodernity. Yet,
in The Geopolitical Aesthetic, Jameson also asked rhetorically, “who
would wish to argue that Videodrome represents a serious contribution” to
the development of postmodern and mass communication thought?[70] Clearly,
he believed, no one would argue that.
And yet, though Videodrome may not have made a new contribution
to thought, it did keep old thoughts in circulation, all the while accumulating
time itself. Time in Videodrome
increasingly becomes something we see and which compels us to
thought. I am not exactly arguing that Videodrome
is dated (though it is that as well); I am trying to argue instead that time
increasingly passes in the presence of Videodrome. And this in turn compels me and others (such
as Rickey and Lucas) to think of the film historically. Moreover, I am compelled to consider if
postmodernity has passed within itself, too.
Has postmodernity passed, or does postmodernity in its presence show
itself passing? Postmodernity is in an
awkward situation. How can postmodernity
continue to suggest the end of history when it itself is receding into the
past? To a certain extent, I am
attempting to position Videodrome as an historic artifact, a relic from
an earlier time, and as a particular moment in postmodernity. But it is also an artifact with continued
relevance, continued presence, today.
Yet, by suggesting a historical angle to the film, I am not trying to
lament or mourn what Videodrome once was, but rather I am trying to
consider what the film today continues to do to the past.
In the late 1980s, “it [was] at least empirically
arguable that our daily life,” wrote Jameson in Postmodernism; or, the
cultural logic of late capitalism, “our psychic experience, our cultural
languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than by categories
of time.”[71] Yet Jameson’s
timely pronouncement cannot itself resist categories of time. Like Videodrome, we cannot see postmodernism
(or Postmodernism) outside this time.
Whereas once “the new spatial logic of the simulacrum [could be]
expected to have a momentous effect on what used to be called historical time”
which had become “a vast collection of images, a multitudinous photographic
simulacrum,”[72] I can now see that those “vast collection of images”
have themselves re-produced time. We
still have the spatial logic of the simulacrum—we still have Videodrome
in circulation as video, as film, as TV, as Universal DVD and as Criterion
DVD. But these new spatial positions
have since generated (and generate) time.
For Jameson, “the past as ‘referent’ [found] itself gradually bracketed,
and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts.”[73] Lest
it be overlooked, let me emphasize that I do not disagree with Jameson
here. Instead, I am asking about what
has happened since. What is the
past fact of having been wounded which is still present in these texts? The referent is still gone—it will not
return. But the texts are still
present—they will not leave. In their
timing and in their repetition, since Videodrome and Postmodernism,
these texts have re-created time (that is, created time anew) in their
affects. As long as we see the
simulacrum in culture—both see Videodrome’s
“new flesh” (however old) and see the circulation of the new flesh (Criterion,
for example)—we will still see the possibilities of postmodernity in our
presence. And yet, paradoxically, we can
no longer afford to see this postmodernity outside time; for to attempt to do
so, to see an atemporal postmodernity, is to not see postmodernity, at
all, anymore.
I believe postmodernity can continue to be viable if
we too see it as a time image, if we see Jameson as present, and Jameson as
passing in his own presence. Does Videodrome
“record the death” of Jean Baudrillard?
In a sense, yes. What we see in Videodrome
is the pastness of McLuhan, and Baudrillard, and Debord. But, their pastness is still present. I am not criticizing their theories or
attempting to rewrite them. In fact, I
have implicitly argued that their continued presence here speaks to their
continued relevance (however posited).
Instead, I am (not so) simply going into the past of postmodern theory
and bringing forth the simulacrum as a present of the past. Yet even this is not quite true—I am actually
attempting to articulate how (for me) Videodrome goes back into its own
past, and pulls back out the simulacrum, as a new flesh showing the scars of
time. The simulacrum now is not
the death of an actual referent so much as it is the birth of a virtual
feeling. The texts of an older
postmodernity presently do work within the context of a time which cannot
outrun the precession of the simulacrum or stand outside the society of the
spectacle, but which is a time that is in fact generated (in us) by the
simulacrum and the spectacles themselves.
So what I am ultimately attempting to articulate here is a new
reterritorialization of postmodernity.
Or, at least, the possibility of reaching out to touch the limits of a
new postmodernity not yet quite conceived, but only felt. I am suggesting that the emergence of affect
theory—a reclamation of Jameson’s earlier waning (itself misunderstood)—compels
us to a different postmodernity, even if momentarily.
Affect (time as affect) allows us not to
destroy the simulacrum as an analytical tool, but rather compels us to ask what
is outside the simulacrum, if not quite the indisputable, transparent
“referent” or “Real.” I am trying to
understand how I specifically see postmodernity differently than an
earlier generation of postmodern scholars (Shaviro, Sharrett, Modleski, Jameson
and so forth). And what I see that they
didn’t (couldn’t) see then is time.
They could see only the suicide of James Woods, the endlessly repeating
suicide of James Woods. But I see a young
James Woods, and I can see how far that endless repeating has come today. I can see how the continued death of Woods
actually makes it impossible for him to really die. After every time I see Videodrome
“record the death of the moment” of Max Renn’s suicide, I immediately see Max
Renn alive again. We must have him alive
to die again—always. Thus, we have the
most perfect visual actualization of the simulacrum and its logic. And yet every time I see this moment, I also
see a younger and younger James Woods—thus time also is generated
in the simulacrum—scarring the new flesh.
The “categories of time” must be reintroduced to a new, still emergent
postmodernity which could thrive in the 21st century, long after “a
new depthlessness” (the “new flesh,” perhaps?) and a “consequent weakening of
historicity.”[74] Time
increasingly prioritizes itself in another postmodern cinema today—both in
postmodern films released in the last few years (such as Lost in Translation
[2003] or Eternal Sunshine of the
Spotless Mind [2004]) and in those films from the 70s and 80s still present
today, such as Videodrome. Time
is present in Videodrome—but it is present in the film as passing and having past. Postmodernity is present in Videodrome
as having past. Yet time is still
present, and postmodernity is still present.
And time compels us to a new postmodernity not yet present in the
presence of the older one. Perhaps
there, we will feel Jameson’s “closure-effect.”
an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text
and image
Volume 3, February 2006, ISSN
1552-5112
Notes