Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Videodrome and the Canadian Fear of American Media Culture

Canadian media culture has long been inundated, if not overwhelmed, by American broadcasting. Equally long-lived has been the debate surrounding the social value of media culture as an information tool or a corrupting force. American forms of journalism and entertainment have been simultaneously a bastion of higher production qualities and a pariah of cultural corruption. “What is also clear is that the fear of Americanization is closely related to a distrust (regardless of national origin) of emerging forms of popular culture” (Story 9). In 1980 the German film The Tin Drum was deemed pornographic by Ontario’s film review board and banned (CBC). Soon after came the 1983 release of the Canadian-produced movie Videodrome which addresses a social anxiety regarding American video and broadcasting imports in the graphic detail provided by the horror film genre. In his pivotal essay “An Intoriduction the the American Horror Film,” Robin Wood refers to the “Other” as the identifiable threat in horror films and the symbolic representation of social anxieties (Wood 199). These anxieties frequently involve such ostensible threats as homosexuality, feminism, racial integration, and economic threats to the capitalist structure (Wood). In Videodrome, the “Other” is an integral part of the American capitalist structure – the American mass media and broadcasting industry. It is an “Other” that would typically be naturalized in Wood’s definition. Videodrome articulates a Leavisist Canadian fear of American broadcast media in the 1980s as an invasive and corrupting force.

The dominant presence of American cinema and television broadcasting in Canada is unapologetically visible. In his 1998 article, “Redefining Cinema: International and Avant-Garde Alternatives,” Stephen Crofts claims that
other varieties of nation-state cinema production fight over the remainder [of audience markets], their principal enemy being Hollywood, which dominates most anglophone [sic] markets and exerts considerable influence through the United States’ world-wide strategic, economic, and cultural links (Crofts 392).
In order for this observation to be relevant to a discussion of Videodrome, it requires the broad conflation of television broadcast with cinema distribution. Videodrome invites such a slide. The broadcast signal that initially infects the protagonist, Max Renn, is eventually replaced with videocassette cinemas inserted directly into Max’s body. At the very least Croft’s observation elucidates the dominance of popular American entertainment culture worldwide. In such an environment, it is easy to see how the Canadian media and broadcast entertainment industry might well deem the American cultural influence a threat to its sovereignty.
The subjective position in Videodrome is explicitly a Canadian one. Two of the three producers, Claude Héroux and Pierre David, are Canadian, as is writer-director David Cronenberg. If there is any validity to the auteur theory, then the film must certainly have a Canadian perspective. Canadian actress Sonja Smits portrays the odd heroine Bianca O’Blivion. Her character is pivotal in fighting against the Videodrome forces. Although the protagonist is played by American actor James Woods, his diegetic counterpart is specifically Canadian. Within the diegesis of the film, Max Renn is the president of a Toronto television broadcasting station. He becomes enamored of a pirate broadcast signal that he initially believes to be transmitted from Malaysia. It is quickly revealed that its actual source is Pittsburgh. At one point Max acquires a video from an enigmatic media critic named “O’Blivion” in which O’Blivion articulates the primary fear the film depicts. “The battle for North America will be fought in the video arena. The Videodrome” (Videodrome). Eventually, the Videodrome invades Max’s body and destroys him. The indictment is not only of the invasive power of media broadcasting in general, but of its specifically American source.
In the case of American popular culture hegemony over the Canadian broadcasting media, the theoretical perspective of Antonio Gramsci is particularly a propos. “Gramsci … uses the term ‘hegemony’ to refer to the way in which dominant groups in society, through a process of ‘intellectual and moral leadership’ … seek to win the consent of subordinate groups in society” (Storey 10). “Those using this approach see popular culture as a site of struggle between the ‘resistance’ of subordinate groups and the forces of incorporation operating in the interests of dominant groups” (Storey 10). The relevance to a discussion of Videodrome is twofold. Firstly, the entire thematic of the film demonstrates a resistance to a perceived hegemony of dominant American media broadcasting that attempts to incorporate Canadian media broadcasting. The Videodrome literally incorporates Max. His body becomes physically involved with the Videodrome signal. By the end of the film, his physical existence is entirely subsumed by the Videodrome world (Videodrome). Secondly, the film implies a Canadian “intellectual and moral leadership” threatened by a hedonistic American media culture, in this case the Videodrome, and attempts to initiate a new hegemony – a “common sense” that American popular culture is dangerously corrosive (Landy 8).
Videodrome graphically addresses the popular culture theoretical notion of “what Marx termed the fetishism of commodities, the ways in which commodities seem to take on a life of their own so as to seem natural and organic,” especially in capitalist economies (Landy 8). O’Blivion's daughter, Bianca, articulates her desire to achieve her deceased father’s goal to have video interlocutors replace every aspect of human social interaction (Videodrome). The corollary to commodity fetishism is the way in which human beings are reduced to objects in the production machine. Shortly after her exposure to Videodrome, Nicki Brand, played by Debbie Harry, almost immediately departs to incorporate herself into the product and audition for a part. By doing so, she facilitates Max’s physical absorption into the Videodrome media nightmare. In one iconic scene, Max is drawn into an erotic image of Nicki on his television screen; his face and head merge with the picture tube. Even the semiotics of her name is a blatant metaphor of this commodity fetishism. Where one might be loyal to ‘Kleenex brand’ facial tissue, Max cannot resist ‘Nicki Brand’ Videodrome. Slowly the physical boundary between reality and the world of Max’s Videodrome hallucinations becomes indistinguishable. O’Blivion informs Max that
The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye. Therefore the television screen is part of the structure of the brain. Whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore television is reality and reality is less than television. Max, … your reality is already half video hallucination (Videodrome).
Eventually, Max becomes the instrument of the destruction that the Videodrome visits upon him and he goes on a killing spree. He attempts to turn the violence back upon the source by reprogramming himself, with Bianca’s assistance, to execute the human agents of Videodrome, but he is unable to save himself in the process. In both his bodily physicality and his actions, Max merges with and becomes the Videodrome itself (Videodrome).
Videodrome also indicts American media culture in terms of the “false consciousness” and the reification offered by commodity fetishism (Storey 3). Initially, the Videodrome appears to fulfill both Max’s professional and personal desires. The video stream represents the type of avant-garde fare that he wishes to broadcast in order to corner a viable commercial market, and it appeals to him on a personal psycho-sexual level which bleeds into his sexual intrigues with Nikki. Max also enjoys a false sense of security when the broadcast source is understood to be as remote as Malaysia. The discovery that it is from Pittsburgh is almost immediately followed by a dire warning to avoid the Videodrome from Max’s eccentric pornography adviser Masha. “Max, Videodrome is something for you to leave alone. It is definitely not for public consumption ... I think it’s dangerous Max, Videodrome ... It’s more political ... It has something that you don’t have, Max. It has a philosophy, and that makes it dangerous” (Videodrome). The proximity and powerful hegemony of American media entertainment poses an immediate and palpable threat. Nevertheless, Max succumbs to the lure of easy satisfaction. Max’s “consumption of mass culture is a form of repression; the empty texts and practices of mass culture are consumed to fill an emptiness within, which grows ever more empty the more the empty texts and practices of mass culture are consumed” (Storey 31). Videodrome depicts this emptiness quite literally. As Max recedes further into his hallucinatory world, a vaginal opening appears in the front of his torso in front of his stomach. As this stomach hungers, Max fills the emptiness with a handgun, an icon of difference between American and Canadian culture, and later the evil agents of Videodrome fill it with videocassettes that program Max’s behaviour. The connotations regarding “the monstrous feminine” as articulated by Barbara Creed in her essay “Horror and the Monstrous Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection” are obvious but are more pertinent to a discussion of feminism in horror film than of this particular examination of popular culture. In any case, it is the American Videodrome that presents itself to Max as the satisfaction of his desires, only to empty him of his own identity further and further until it ultimately destroys him.
Within a thinly veiled Canadian nationalist agenda of the film resides a scathing Leavisist indictment of American media culture. In Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, John Storey describes Leavisism as a philosophy in which “the twentieth century has been marked by an increasing cultural decline” and “Mass civilization and its mass culture pose a subversive front” and a threat to more respectable forms of cultural authority (Storey 22, 24). Northrop Frye characterizes Canada as doubly-colonized by both the British and the Americans (Frye 14). In her book Cinematic Uses of the Past, Marcia Landy tells us that “common sense [is] polysemic … a residue of previous conceptions of the world” (Landy 8). If there is any vestige of British “common sense” in Canadian culture, it might well be invoked as an anti-American ideology. As early as the 1920s, when the cultural traces of British colonialism held strong in Canada, “American patriotic symbols were cut from films, since these might be considered damaging to pro-British Canadian nationalist sentiments” (Whitaker 25). By villainizing American media culture, the film implies a Canadian moral superiority in its popular culture media broadcasting and the inevitable cultural decline American media culture will bring. In Videodrome Max’s choices of programming have already made him somewhat of a pariah as depicted in his televised interview early in the film (Videodrome). When he invites the culturally destructive American Videodrome into the Canadian setting, he seals his doom. At the end of the narrative, Max takes refuge in a derelict boat that emphasizes his Canadian location. It is marked by a sign that reads “Condemned Vessel by order of Toronto Harbour Commissioners” (with specifically Canadian spelling) (Videodrome). Shortly thereafter, a Videodrome hallucination of the ostensibly already deceased Nicki Brand guides him through the act of shooting himself in the head.
The media culture depicted in Videodrome is characterized as doubly egregious for both its invasive media format and its American source. The movie indicates a Canadian fear that American culture will supersede its own and that Canadian culture may be becoming just as degenerate. In Concepts of National Cinema, Crofts makes reference to “Bakhtin’s dialogic mode” which he quotes Willeman as defining as the use of “one’s understanding of another cultural practice to re-perceive and rethink one’s own cultural constellation” (Crofts 393). Videodrome makes American media culture its blackguard in order to interrogate Canada’s own lacking censorship policies, the welcoming of American hegemony, and the potentially culturally devastating effects of video mass media. The film depicts an American media culture that is entirely corrosive and from which there is little hope of Canadian culture escaping. The irony of the message resides outside of the film’s diegesis in the fact that the medium used to deliver the message is cinema itself. The question thus remains as to how Canadian culture can survive the perceived threat of American media culture if it can only spread its message through the very instrument it fears.



Works Cited
"CBC Radio – The Current – Whole Show Blow-by-Blow". The Current. CBC. 7 August 2004. Radio.
Creed, Barbara. “Horror and the Monstrous Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection.” The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. 35-65. Print.
Crofts, Stephen. “Concepts of National Cinema.” The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. Eds. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. 385-395. Print.
Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Toronto: Anansi, 1971. Print.
Hebidge, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1979. Print.
Landy, Marcia. Cinematic Uses of the Past. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Print.
Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, fifth edition. New York: Pearson Education Ltd., 2009. Print.
Videodrome. Dir. David Cronenberg. Universal Studios, 1983. DVD.
Whitaker, Reg. “Chameleon on a Changing Background: The Politics of Censorship in Canada.” Interpreting Censorship in Canada. Eds. Klaus Petersen and Allan C. Hutchinson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 199. 19-39. Print.
Willeman, Paul. “The National.” Looks and Frictions. London: British Film Institute, 1994. Print.
Wood, Robin. “An Introduction to the American Horror Film.” Movies and Methods Volume II. Ed. Bill Nichols. London, England: University of California Press, 1985. 195-220. Print.

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