Your Stomach Ate My Hand, You Jerk
I am working on something much bigger for later in the week but here is a short review. And yes i have been on a Criterion Kick.
VIDEODROME - DIR. DAVID CRONENBERG (1983 CRITERION COLLECTION)
I hadnt caught this film in a while and i am pretty sure the last time i saw it was on a vhs copy (appropriate i guess since this film is filled with vhs, some that breath). My first piece of advice is not to watch this film and then immediately go to bed.
Bad Idea.
I had some genuinely strange dreams that night. I believe there was one where my cat merged with my TV remote and chased me around the house spewing some sort of soupy substance at me. This was really confusing. My remote and my cat love me, so the odds of them conspiring to mess with me are very low. Another involved Debbie Harry, who stars in Videodrome. Oddly she was just standing around. I always thought if they made a Peanuts movie that she should play Lucy. Their head shape is similar.
Anyway this is such a visual mind fuck of a movie that i wanted to keep checking my limbs to make sure that weird new appendages werent sprouting out. When James Woods shoots Barry Convex in the head and his body explodes into a rampaging cancer that grows out of his chest i thought i had seen it all. And this is way past the point where Woods' TV becomes a living thing and he sticks his head inside the screen to satify it. Yup. I defy anyone to definitivly say what is going on in this film, and i guess thats the point. Television is the retina of the mind, it says. It changes its reality so often i never knew what to believe. Its odd that i like Cronenberg yet hate David Lynch. The ambiguity is exactly what i hate about Lynch, yet i am ok with it here. I think it comes down to the fact that I feel that there is an underlying meaning and purpose to Videodrome, while most Lynch movies feel over indulgent, chaotic and have no purpose but to confuse.
Here we have a simple plot of man runs tv station, man watches video which controls his mind and then man grows slit in stomach which hides his gun and grinds peoples hands. You know, that old story. James Woods is really the perfect choice to play a sleazy TV exec. Read any interviews the guy gives now and you will see that he is a creepy fellow.
Have you ever noticed that James Woods has always looked the same? Its almost as disturbing as his gun attaching itself to his hand in this film.
Cronenberg has certainly grown 'mature' as a filmmaker over the years, evidenced by A History of Violence which was my favorite film of last year. But if you've come late to him check out Videodrome and especially Scanners. He has been the master of the freaked out for years. There is some tricky social commentary here about the relationship between us and the detached entertainment we consume. I don't want to get into a BS discussion of reality Tv, cause this is a blog and its been done. But watch Videodrome and try not to think about your viewing habits and if it effect you. I certainly did.
EXTRAS
Nice production notes from on set reporter which inlcludes many sickening things they cut out. Best of all is the uninterupted Videodrome video as well as the full length Samuri Dreams softcore porn that they shot just for this film.
The packaging simply rocks. The outside cover (pictured above) is nice, but the slip out clamshell case is made to look like a VHS copy of Videodrome. If i ever meet anyone from the design team at Criterion I am going to give them a hug.
OVERALL
Entertaining, confusing, disturbing and thought provoking. And i didn't even mention Debbie Harry putting out a cigarette on her breast. B+
posted by Thelonious Q Twittlebotton, Esq @ 4:19 PM
5 Comments:
Well, unlike the guy who criticized you for your Royksopp review on TFM, I'll give you a pass on the Lynch-hatin'. I love his work but then I know a lot of people whose tastes I respect who can't stand it. I've read a great deal of academic (read: stultifying) study of his work and written some papers on him. I'm always open to discussion of his ouevre if you're ever so inclined.
I know a lot of people who love Lynch. The closest i have ever come to enjoying his films is if i decide to look at all of them, no matter what is happening or where they take place, as Science Fiction.
I started thinking that way because of all his films i enjoy Dune the most, even though IT MAKES NO SENSE. But in outerspace in the future nothing has to make sense. So if i imagine that all his films take place in a sort of giant alien zoo experiment i can kind of go with the flow.
Blue Velvet is passable for me because Dennis Hopper is great. But Lost Highway? come on. And don't even get me started on Mulholland Dr. That movie made me angry. I could feel that it was an exercise in style with no point very early.
The whole problem could be that my sister was obsessed with Twin Peaks and as a younger kid it frustrated me with how little sense it made. But i was not the target audience for that show.
Science fiction? I'd say the occult is much more Lynch's domain. He seems intent on making an alternate reality look like so much like ours that we're never sure if we're here or *there*. Surely sci-fi is explicitly what Cronenberg is doing. I think what's crucial to both is that neither actually does take us to outer space but rather brings the otherwordly right to our doorstep, they invade us.
I think what throws people off most with Lynch are his asides, which can seem trivial or distracting even to his most staunch apologists. His obsessions with violence and exposing the corruption (imagined or otherwise) behind bland facades can be wearing. Ultimately the most damning thing i can ask about him is, to what degree is he in control of his work?
That said, you should revisit Mulholland Drive with an open mind. As a cinema fan I think you may appreciate it's damnation of Hollywood more on subsequent viewing. Dancer in the dark may be the only film in recent years whose ending is more unexpected, saddening and troubling. It's on thing not to like it, but quite another to deem it a mere exercise in style. Lost Highway isn't my favorite; it loses it's way in the last two reels and Balthazar getty is terribly miscast. It's crucial that we see Bill Pullman's character lurking behind the eyes of the guise he has taken to escape punishment and Getty is not the actor to do that. A young Philip Seymour Hoffman would have been perfect. Warm up the time machine!
I would also submit that The Straight Story is highly underrated. It's rare to see a film so in touch with *red state* characters, that explores and reveals their complexity rather than holding them up for ridicule as is usually the case. Only The Grey Fox has ever done richard Farnsworth such justice. Lynch's work ca be generaly divided into two camps, those which end in redemption for their protagonists and those which deny them that reward.
The soapbox is now officially put away. I have an inherited Videodrome video to watch this weekend, spurred by your write-up (I haven't watched it in over fifteen years) and right now I have to go do my best to set the cause of popular music back a few years. Really diggin' this blog...
Oh yeah, Twin Peaks (and Fire Walk...) gets props if only because it's probably the most disturbing depiction of incest from the victim's perspective I've seen. Somewhat undercut by the possession angle I suppose.
When i say sci-fi i mean in the sense of say 'Dark City' where it is a recognizable human world, but run by aliens to see what makes people tick. But you are correct in saying that it takes one sidestep away from reality while maintaining part of the real world.
Oh i don't know. Maybe for the sake of argument i would watch Mulholland dr. again, but i had such a strong negative reaction to the film. I will admit that Naomi Watts audition scene was one of the most stunning things i had seen in a film for a while. Suddenly you realize she is an amazing actress, Never would have guessed that from Tank Girl.
I did enjoy the Straight Story. It was something i would have never expected from Lynch. I too would ride a lawnmower hundreds of miles to see Harry Dean Stanton.
As for Twin Peaks i would really need to re-examine it. My sister still talks about it to this day (she organized one of the letter writing campaigns to keep it on air, althought i am not sure if that wasnt in some part due to her unrelenting crush on Kyle Mac.)
I think someone who could be a neo-Cronenburg is Chris Cunningham, but who knows if he will ever make a full length feature. Rubber Johnny was strange enough
Dark City makes sense, and who expected that (slept on) gem btw? Speaking of films I need to revisit. The audition scene is indeed the showstopper, the moment that stuck with me, and her performance as a whole is what makes the film work for me. Lynch's tragic components are always so squalid, he undercuts the simply sad and heart-tugging with the abject.
Upon further reflection I do have to question the presence of Billy Ray Cyrus. It's disturbing in the way that Richard Pryor's cameo in Lost Highway seemed like bad taste more than anything else.
Twin Peaks is up and down. The second season is almost entirely a bad joke on fans and there's a marked drop-off with the episodes Lynch didn't direct himself. I'm certain a large degree of my infatuation with the series was correlative to the bevy of ingenues he assembled. I'm much less of a sucker for screen beauty in my dotage.
In the end I'm just glad that people keep giving these two money to make films. Watching Shivers and Eraserhead on Channel 50 in Detroit as a pre-teen I would have never guessed.
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