We become what we
behold.
(McLuhan, 2001:
20)
1. INTRODUCTION: CRONENBERG TAKES MCLUHAN AT HIS WORDS
In Understanding Media,
his landmark study of media as «the extensions of man», Canadian media theorist
Marshall McLuhan first coined the catchphrase so dear to the world of
advertising: «the medium is the message» (2001: 7). The publication of his next
book with the tongue-in-cheek title The Medium is the Massage
transformed McLuhan into a media «guru», as he became a fixture on television
panel shows discussing the impact of media on popular culture, politics and
personal psychology, even giving an extended interview to Playboy magazine.
McLuhan argued that the impact of communications media on our lives is
omnipresent: «All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their
personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and
social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected,
unaltered. The medium is the massage» (2008: 26). Media, McLuhan maintained, «massage»
our thinking into quiescence by encouraging us to examine their content rather
than their nature qua media, thus putting critical reflection on their
unforeseen consequences to sleep. Media’s very omnipresence blinds us to their
influence on life and thought; media’s impact, McLuhan believed, tends to
remain unperceived and unthought.
It
is no exaggeration to say that McLuhan’s work had a major impact on his
compatriot, the film-maker David Cronenberg. This is not surprising for two
reasons. The first is that Cronenberg attended the University of Toronto at the
same time that McLuhan taught there. Though Cronenberg didn't attend McLuhan’s
lectures, he certainly did fall under the media scholar’s spell as he recalls:
«suddenly Marshall McLuhan was the guru of communications and was on all the TV
shows and in all magazines» (Grünberg, 2006: 66); in another interview, he admits
he «read everything [McLuhan] wrote» (Browning, 2007: 64). The second reason
concerns the film-maker and theorist’s shared conception of technology: for
both McLuhan and Cronenberg, technology plays an inseverable part in our
make-up as a species. Technology endows us with what McLuhan called vital
«extensions» of our senses only by severing (a verb with obvious
Cronenbergian connotations) us from old ways of perceiving and thinking about
the world (2001: 4). These techno-extensions alternately expand and contract
consciousness as they «shift the ratios among all the senses» (McLuhan, 2001: 71).
«I
don’t believe anybody is in control», Cronenberg told Chris Rodley, «That’s
what McLuhan was talking about when he said the reason we have to understand
media is because if we don’t it’s going to control us» (Rodley, 1992: 67).
Cronenberg was referring to McLuhan’s conception of media as «minor religions»
at the altars of which we worship each time we direct attention towards
screen-content through which the new gods talk to and «control us»:
To behold, use, or
perceive any extension of ourselves in technological form is necessarily to
embrace it. To listen to radio or to read the printed page is to accept these
extensions of ourselves into our personal system and to undergo the «closure»
or displacement of perception that follows automatically […] By continuously
embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servo-mechanisms. That
is why we must, to use them at all, serve these objects, these extensions of
ourselves, as gods or minor-religions. (2001: 50-51).
The notion of technology
as something that we come to serve, even something to which we willingly
submit, would inspire some of Cronenberg’s best work, not least Videodrome, the director’s most «McLuhanesque» film.
The insectoid talking typewriter in Naked Lunch; the organic video game
console in eXistenZ; the diary written in
hieroglyphics mirroring the protagonist’s arcane mind in Spider; the
breathing voluptuous TV set in Videodrome—these
are among the most obvious incarnations of the film-maker’s philosophical
concerns. For if Cronenberg’s oeuvre can be said to embody a philosophical
position, then one could do worse than describe it as a kind of phenomenology
of the media subject. To watch a Cronenberg film is to «become interwoven with
the «I» of the characters» (Pearson, 2012: 166), who are all too often
subjected to an impressively vicious form of psychic and physical malaise of
technological origin. In this sense, many of Cronenberg’s films can be seen as
case studies of technology-induced disease: «David Cronenberg», as Gabriel Bortzmeyer aptly puts it, «presents a nosology of the media
subject» (my translation, 2021).
McLuhan’s
influence on Cronenberg is no secret and virtually all major studies of the
director’s oeuvre to date recognize this fact. Such recognition, though,
typically amounts to little more than the aforementioned acknowledgment of
shared concerns about the fact that, in McLuhan’s words, «Whole cultures could
now be programmed to keep their emotional climate stable» via the manipulation
of communications media and/or the implementation of technological prostheses
for nefarious ends (2001: 30)[1].
What is missing in Cronenberg studies, and certainly in discussions of Videodrome, is an examination of the ways in which
Cronenberg actually adapts the account of television in Understanding
Media, as well as in its bestselling sequel, and of how McLuhan’s
two books can be seen as source texts informing the film’s dialogue, motifs and
even plot points.
In an uncharacteristic
first person aside, McLuhan reflects: «I am curious to know what would happen
if art were suddenly seen for what it is, namely, exact information of how to
rearrange one’s psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended
faculties» (2001: 63). I want to suggest that Videodrome
presents the viewer with the spectacle of just this: it unveils in
visceral cinematic imagery the concealed nature of media that McLuhan’s text
discloses by means of aphorism and figurative image. In doing so, the film foreshadows
«the next blow» to our collective psyche, this time in the guise of tactile
interactive screens fitted onto globally connected gadgets (i.e. smart phones,
smart watches, smart glasses, Neuralink implants)
anticipated by the nominally tactile television medium as theorized by McLuhan[2].
From the point of view of
adaptation, Videodrome is unique in
Cronenberg’s oeuvre, because, unlike the director’s adaptations of literary
texts (The Dead Zone, Dead Ringers, Spider, Cosmopolis),
the film is a bona fide cinematic adaptation of—and not merely, as I aim to
show, a work «inspired by»—McLuhan’s writing. The article begins by drawing on
the relevant literature in adaptation studies in order to provide a suitable
framework for this atypical case of cinematic adaptation. What further
complicates and enriches matters is the fact that there exist not one but two «Videodromes»: after Cronenberg completed the first draft of
the original screenplay (which would undergo further revisions during filming)
he agreed for the novel adaptation to be released at the same time as the film.
He invited the respected fantasy writer Dennis Etchison, then writing under the
pseudonym Jack Martin, to Toronto; Martin, working with the original script,
completed the novel in time for the film’s release in 1983 (Lucas, 2008: 119).
What this means, in fact, is that Martin’s novel is as close as the viewer can
get to the film’s original text: by comparing the ways in which Videodrome the film and Videodrome
the novel both differ from and echo each other, this article seeks to
demonstrate the significance of McLuhan’s work for a richer understanding not
only of Cronenberg’s chef-d’oeuvre, but of the process of cross-media
adaptation itself.
This
article is inspired by a provocative remark made by Steven Shaviro
in The Cinematic Body. In the chapter devoted to Cronenberg, Shaviro writes: «The brutally hilarious strategy of Videodrome is to take media theorists such as
Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard completely at their word, to overliteralize their claims for the ubiquitous
mediatization of the real» (2006: 138). A discussion of Baudrillard’s idea of
media-created simulations becoming more real than flesh and blood is beyond the
scope of the present essay; as far as McLuhan is concerned, Shaviro’s
remark reveals more than he intended by it. Cronenberg’s film not only makes
palpable the claims made in Understanding Media about the nature and
cultural impact of media: it actively adapts and appropriates McLuhan’s style
of thinking and manner of expression. Cronenberg literally takes McLuhan
at his words.
2. ADAPTATION, DIALOGUE,
APPROPRIATION
Considering
Videodrome through the lens of adaptation
poses a challenge. Unlike other Cronenberg adaptations, we are not dealing with
a transposition of a literary text to the big screen. Instead, the film adapts
the argument and metaphors deployed in Understanding Media as disturbing
mise en scène. The
film’s novelization by Jack Martin too sheds light on Cronenberg’s adaptation
of McLuhan’s work, in that it gives the viewer access to the film’s «original»
text: reading Videodrome the novel, that is,
allows us to glimpse elements of the original screenplay that informs the
imagery we see, thereby attesting to the intermedial nature of the interpretive
act.
Setting
aside the ambiguous and rather unhelpful notion of fidelity to a source text,
Robert Stam proposes that we instead think of adaptation practice as
translation, or what he also calls «intersemiotic
transposition» from one sign system to another (2000: 62). Since we are
concerned with a cinematic transposition of theoretical ideas, this is a more
promising way of understanding how one kind of metaphor (conceptual) can become
another (visual). «Imagery is important to me, ultimately because of the metaphor»,
Cronenberg remarks, «In a way, imagery is not even imagery. It has a
metaphorical weight» (Grünberg, 2006: 70). Indeed, the metaphorical imagery in Videodrome is «weighty», as we will see, precisely
because it enters into dialogue with the oracular conceptual language used to
describe the nature of television in McLuhan’s text.
Drawing
on Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva, Stam suggests that a fruitful way to
characterize intermedial adaptation is the notion of «dialogical process», an
ongoing contestation of verbal meaning and intertextual exchange (2000: 64).
However, intertextuality and its kindred notions of «a tissue of texts», the
palimpsest, and so on, tends to minimize specificity, inferring as it does a
nebulous galaxy of texts as potential sources of allusive meaning. This fact
prompted Gérard Genette to constrain the concept of intertextuality to mean the
co-presence of two texts, for example in the form of quotation, allusion, or
even plagiarism (Stam, 2006: 65). A related concept introduced by Genette is «hypertextuality»: here, Genette distinguishes between a «hypotext», defined as a clearly identifiable source or
proto-text, and a «hypertext», a new work based on the source text (1997: 5). Videodrome thus seems to commit us to a
triangulation of concepts: the film’s key hypotexts,
I have suggested, are Understanding Media and The Medium is the
Massage, because a close reading of these texts promises a fuller
understanding of the film’s themes and plot. But McLuhan’s works also act as hypotexts for Videodrome
the novel (which, incidentally, opens in a paratextual signalling of its hypotext with the epigraph «the medium is the massage»).
Our third adaptation vector, then, is the relationship between the film and the
novel as both relate to their source texts.
Now,
it might be objected that, unlike in customary adaptation practice where a
film-maker adapts a literary text and where there is an unambiguous
relationship between hypo- and hypertext (i.e. the characters, and sometimes
even the titles, have the same names, the plot is more or less similar), an
adaptation of a theoretical text risks diluting the specificity of the concept «adaptation»[3]. Recognizing the many pitfalls to be negotiated when trying to talk
about adaptation, Julie Sanders suggests the concept of appropriation.
Appropriation refers to a more diffuse kind of adaptation, where «the
appropriated text or texts are not always as clearly signalled or acknowledged
as in the adaptive process. They may occur in a far less straightforward
context» (Sanders, 2006: 27). The lack of such clear signalling in Videodrome would seem to qualify it as a case of
appropriation, rather than adaptation proper. There is a further important
distinction between appropriation and adaptation: an appropriation does not
seek to retell or reproduce the same content as the original text; instead, it
presents a reworking, a reinterpretation and even a critique of the source text
(Sanders, 2006: 28). Videodrome, from this
perspective, is certainly not a mouthpiece for McLuhan’s ideas about modern
communication media; in fact, the film often playfully satirizes the «guru» of
media studies. And yet, if we fail to consider how much the film owes to Understanding
Media and The Medium is the Massage, we risk not seeing all that the
film has to show us. To appreciate the full extent in which Cronenberg employs
McLuhan’s writing, it is perhaps best to see his film as an appropriation of a
style of thought carried out by means of the visual adaptation of the language
in which this thought is expressed. That is to say, in appropriating McLuhan’s
pronouncements about media Cronenberg’s film adapts (us to) the media
theorist’s figurative language as cinematic image.
3. THE VOICE OF
THE MEDIA PROPHET
Before
examining the film’s imaging of McLuhan’s concepts, it seems apt to begin with
the figure of the man himself (see fig. 1). McLuhan’s stand-in in Videodrome is of course Professor Brian O’Blivion, whom we meet early on in the story. Max Renn
(James Woods), president of CIVIC-TV, a channel specializing in risqué television
programmes, has been invited to participate in a panel discussion on a late-night
talk show hosted by Rena King (Lally Cadeau). He is joined by Nicki Brand
(Debbie Harry), a pop psychologist with masochistic tendencies, and the famous
media expert Professor O’Blivion, who joins the panel
via what we assume is a live television broadcast. Having O’Blivion
appear throughout the film only on television is an ingenious representation of
the heavily mediatized persona of McLuhan (who would himself go on to make a
famous cameo appearance in Woody Allen’s 1997 classic, Annie Hall).
According to Tim Lucas, the original script describes O’Blivion
«as a cross between Marshall McLuhan and Andy Warhol» (1983: 35), though it
must be said that casting Jack Creley in the role certainly gives him more of a
McLuhan look (see fig. 2). King asks O’Blivion
whether he thinks that erotic and violent TV content lead to the
desensitization and dehumanization of its viewers; his response is nothing
short of McLuhanesque: «The television screen has become the retina of the
mind’s eye»—a clear echo of McLuhan’s statement in The Medium is the Massage:
«In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen» (2008: 125).
McLuhan’s
overt representation in the film is certainly not without irony. Later in the
story, Max learns from O’Blivion’s daughter, Bianca
(Sonja Smits), that her father has been dead for over a year and that all his
television appearances were pre-recorded on videotape. Max then plays one such
recording and watches O’Blivion deliver another
volley of seemingly connected statements, beginning with a repetition of the
aforementioned comment that left the talk show host understandably nonplussed:
The television screen is
the retina of the mind’s eye. Therefore the television
screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore
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 (Cronenberg, 1983).
The
film cuts to a close up of Max, who snorts in contempt. In the novel’s
rendition of this scene, narrated in free indirect style, we read: «The way he
put it, it sounded eminently logical. Or did it? […] He’s a pro. Media prophet,
isn’t that what they call him? It’s a little spooky» (Martin, 1983: 100). The «spookiness»
Max refers to is the fact of listening to a dead man address you on videotape.
But the «spookiness» also points to more than this: in the novel, O’Blivion is given the following extra lines of dialogue:
«For those who have a natural propensity for its imagery, [television is] a
kind of bio-electric heroin. Your brain has already become an electron gun.
Your retinae have become video screens» (Martin, 1983: 101). In one sense,
these lines can be read as a parody of McLuhan’s portentous style of writing;
to read them as such, however, is to miss the fact that they are a paraphrase
of McLuhan’s actual concepts. When watching television, McLuhan (not O’Blivion) writes: «You are the screen. The images wrap
around you. You are the vanishing point» (2008: 125); elsewhere, he describes
the content of a medium as «the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to
distract the watchdog of the mind» (2001: 19).
McLuhan’s
media theory is filled with language of this kind, with imagery suggestive of
invasion, mutation, transformation, building up a picture of a body under
constant bombardment by information signals coming from without, even as it is
made to extend its faculties of sense perception without acquiescing to do so.
4. TELEVISION AND
THE BODY
If
there is a single passage in McLuhan’s work that might be taken to be
representative of Cronenberg’s oeuvre, and that could well be read as its
unstated motto, it is this one:
With
the arrival of electric technology man extended, or set outside himself, a
live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is
so, it is a development that suggests a desperate and suicidal autoamputation,
as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs
to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous
mechanism (my italics, 2001: 48).
«A
live model of the central nervous system», «autoamputation», «outrageous
mechanism»: one struggles to find more fitting phrases to characterize
Cronenberg’s cinematic universe. Cronenberg’s cinema often presents us with
visions of «outrageous mechanism» (Crash, Crimes of the Future)
assaulting and altering the human body, and it repeatedly shows us how the
extensions of «the central nervous system», made possible by technology, lead
to grotesque bodily transformations and the consequent mutation of identity (The
Fly, eXistenZ, Scanners).
McLuhan’s
discussion of the impact of media on consciousness hinges on a distinction he
makes between «hot» and «cool» media (2001: 24-26). A «hot» medium, like radio
or photography, tends to discourage active audience participation: it presents
its content in a relatively straightforward, «high definition» manner. A «cool»
medium, on the other hand, allows for greater participation and interpretive
scope, and McLuhan considered television to be exemplary in this regard. Before
the advent of high-definition TV, television presented a grainy low quality image shown on a relatively small screen. Unlike
the crisp image projected on the cinema screen, the image emitted by TV is low
in visual data, requiring the viewer to «fill-in» missing details; the TV image
is, moreover, «closer» to the viewer in space so that you can even touch it.
Cinema is, then, a «hotter» medium than television[4].
This
is how McLuhan describes the nature of what we see on TV: «The TV image
requires each instant that we “close” the spaces in the mesh by a convulsive
sensuous participation that is profoundly kinetic and tactile, because
tactility is the interplay of the senses, rather than the isolated contact of
skin and object» (my emphasis, 2001: 342). Videodrome
portrays this kind of tactile impact on consciousness by the sensory «extension»
of television. The film opens with an extreme close-up shot of a TV screen: we
see the face of a young woman addressing the camera; it is Max’s secretary,
Bridey (Julie Khaner), calling him with a scheduled
wake-up call. The establishing shot does two things: first, the close-up of the
TV screen foregrounds the film’s concern with mediation: Bridey’s face speaking
directly into the film’s camera via a television screen is like the director’s
way of saying, with McLuhan, that «no medium has its meaning or existence
alone, but only in constant interlay with other media» (2001: 28). Second, the
opening scene places the viewer within the same space inhabited by the
protagonist: we feel as though we too are being addressed by the speaker, whose
grainy image seems more tangible than the cinema screen on which it appears. As Gorostiza
and Pérez write, the opening scene «provoca que el
espectador se convierta en un personaje que, como Max, tiene delante una
pantalla que podría en cualquier momento interactuar con su vida» (2003: 167)[5]. From this point onward, the television set becomes a living and
breathing character in its own right, interacting vicariously with the viewer.
In
the history of cinema, there is perhaps no other film that has portrayed the
tactile aspect of television quite as memorably as Videodrome.
Throughout the film, we see Max stroke, caress, kiss, grope, whip and finally
shoot the television set. The film’s iconic moment is the scene where Max
kisses Nicki Brand’s televised lips: the scene begins with the point of view
shot of Brand speaking to Max as she invites him to join her «inside»
television, signalling the beginning of his becoming a slave to the «Videodrome» signal. Next, there’s the medium shot of Max
kneeling before the set as he bends forward, his face making intimate contact
with the screen’s fleshy exterior[6]. Finally, we see a close-up of Max’s face buried inside the TV screen as
his fingers prod its pliable surface (see fig. 3).
McLuhan
stressed television’s tactility: «TV is, above all, an extension of the sense
of touch, which involves maximal interplay of all the senses» (2001: 364); «In
television there occurs an extension of the sense of active, exploratory touch
which involves all the senses simultaneously, rather than that of sight alone»
(2008: 125). The reason McLuhan identifies television with the sense of touch,
rather than sight or hearing, is to underscore the fact that the TV image,
unlike the projected image of cinema, is emitted from within: «the
viewer is the screen» (McLuhan, 2001: 341). The old CRT screen produced static
so that when touching it you would occasionally receive a not unpleasant
sensation of shock, making physical contact with the electronic signal of the
cathode ray tube. This is why television, more so than cinema, speaks of
humanity’s intimacy with media, of its welcome occupation of our most private
living spaces and of its serving our most secret, even
shameful desires (we are concerned here with the age before the global home
invasion by smart phones). In another flight of mixed metaphor, McLuhan writes:
«The TV viewer […] is bombarded by atoms that reveal the outside as inside in
an endless adventure amidst blurred images and mysterious contours» (2001:
357). The violent opening image shape-shifts into the metaphor of «an endless
adventure» across a topography of «blurred images and mysterious contours»,
conveying the implicit eroticism of TV, what McLuhan also refers to as «the
indomitable tactile promptings of the TV image» (2001: 344). Martin’s
novelistic rendition of Max kissing Brand’s televised lips portrays the
symbiosis between the virtual world of television and the corporal world of the
viewer very effectively:
As
he grasped the breathing sides of the set, her larger-than-life lips distended
to meet his forehead, the glass of the tube melting and ballooning outward to
touch his skin […] Max’s eyes closed. He no longer needed them to see. Nicki
Brand fired through his eyelids as though they were no longer there, a mere
technicality. He licked the screen, the soft screen, distorting the plastic
face of Nicki Brand as he strained toward the possibility of acceptance and
release in her, caressing her, sinking deeper into the pores and pulsing veins,
the wet membranes of her flesh. The mouth widened in response. Her teeth
opened, revealing the glistening sea of her tongue, the video scan lines
growing wider, separating horizontally and opening to receive him between their
strobing, deeper and deeper into the swelling red lips, until he was totally
engulfed by the darkness in her throat (Martin, 1983: 102-3).
Visualizing
this scene, we no longer distinguish the seam between the virtual and the real
as the world of TV engulfs the world of flesh: as one commentator puts it, in
Cronenberg’s world «los medios
son cuerpos virtuales de
las imágenes tanto como transformadores de la percepción
corporal subjetiva» (Russo, 2017).
5. THE VERBAL
SCREENING OF VIRTUAL IMAGES
As
the above excerpt illustrates, Martin’s adaptation captures the film’s imagery
in words exceptionally well—especially considering the fact that Martin did not
get to see the film and only had Cronenberg’s script to work with when writing
the novel. But perhaps this is not that surprising: it is safe to assume that
most readers of Martin’s adaptation of the original screenplay of Videodrome come to read the novel only after
watching the film. McLuhan liked to reiterate that «the “content” of any medium
is always another medium» (2001:8) and «no medium has its meaning or existence
alone, but only in constant interplay with other media» (2001: 28). This kind
of media «interplay» is most apparent when we engage with adaptation, where a
particular text/film acts as the grain against which critical reading must rub.
«As we read», Stam writes, «we fashion our own imaginary mise-en-scène of the novel on the
private stages of our minds» (2000: 540). Stam is describing what we do when we
read a literary text, but when it comes to Videodrome’s
plot and characters, the privacy of our minds’ «stages» is somewhat
compromised. Reading the novel, it is a challenge not to imagine James
Woods’ engrossing portrayal of the protagonist and not inwardly picture Debbie
Harry as Nicki Brandt: the film’s iconography provides the viewer with the
visual aesthetic according to which the novel’s success, as an adaptation, is
measured. As one reads (assuming one has seen the film before reading the
novel) one’s recollection of the film’s scenes continually contests one’s
visualization of the novel’s restaging of them.
And
yet we do see something in the novel that we did not see in the film. Consider
the excerpt above: Brand’s teeth open, revealing «the glistening sea of her
tongue, the video lines growing wider, separating horizontally and opening to
receive him between their strobing, deeper and deeper into the swelling red
lips». If the film is distant in memory, one might well imagine that this special effects widening of video lines was something
that we actually saw on the screen, though we did not. Similarly, when reading
a descriptive passage like the following one, it is easy to misremember the
film:
As
[Max] watched in disbelief, a TeleRanger console TV
set rose up out of the water, out of the blue Algemarin
foam like a hulking electronic Venus on the half-shell. The set swelled,
breathing and snorkling as befitted a marine creature
of its substantial size.
On
its screen was a close-up of a woman, an anguished expression wracking her
features, a leather strap tight around her wrinkled neck.
Masha
(my italics, Martin, 1983: 166).
At
the time of reading Martin’s novel, having last watched Videodrome
several years ago, I could not say whether this scene was in the film or not
(it is not). It certainly felt like it should be[7].
The
metaphor in the passage above has been italicized to draw attention to the
virtuality that is inherent in a verbal description to a much greater degree
than is possible in film; as Stam puts it, «The words of a novel […] have a
virtual, symbolic meaning; we as readers, or as directors, have to fill in
their paradigmatic indeterminacies» (2000: 55). Like the preceding example of
the scene of Max kissing the fleshy television set, this scene is another
instance of the literary device known as ekphrasis. Though it is often used in
the more restricted sense of a verbal description of a visual artwork,
ekphrasis designates, in Bolter’s definition, «the description in prose or
poetry of an artistic object or striking visual scene; it is the attempt to
capture the visual in words» (1996: 264). Ekphrasis is synonymous with an
intensely visual and emotionally resonant description, bringing to the fore the
«interplay» between media which is always a key part of adaptation criticism. Hence,
Liliane Louvel describes ekphrasis as «an intermedial
mixture of word and image» (2018: 246) while Claus Clüver defines it as process
of «intermedial translation» (2017: 465).
Perhaps
the most important recent critical contribution to the study of ekphrasis is
Ruth Webb’s Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical
Theory and Practice, where Webb traces the earliest known uses of
ekphrastic speech and writing, showing the heuristic value of ekphrasis for
modern cinema, media, and literary studies. Most simply, ekphrasis can be
defined as «a speech that brings the subject matter vividly before the eyes»
(Webb, 2016: 1). As the two examples from Martin’s Videodrome
attest, the most effective way of conveying visuality verbally is by means of
descriptive metaphor, particularly if said metaphor happens to be intermedial: «like
a hulking electronic Venus on the half-shell», the striking comparison that
personifies and estranges its object (an '80s TV set) by invoking Botticelli’s
Venus, allows the reader of the novel to experience the sensation of «seeing»
an animate TV rising out of Max’s bathtub through his eyes, such that this
image conveys «the imperceptible and almost ineffable: the speaker’s state of
mind at a precise moment in the past» (Webb, 2016: 191).
What
is crucial about ekphrasis, then, and what makes it a valuable tool when
considering cinematic adaptation and/or novelization of film, is the fact that
it immerses us inside the mind of the protagonist. Ekphrasis is impossible
without a distinct point of view: what we see in ekphrasis is «not so much an
object or scene or person in itself, but the effect of seeing that thing», Webb
notes (2016: 127)[8]. Indeed, all that we see when we read Videodrome
is focalized through the eyes of Max Renn: the novel is narrated in a free
indirect style at times almost taken over by first person narration, as Max’s
voice vies for dominance with the voice of the third person narrator. The
following passage illustrates how focalization is used throughout the text:
«Now I’ve done it, thought Max forlornly. Caffeine nerves, insomnia . . . look
what happens to you. Get a grip on yourself, boy» (Martin, 1983: 38). Martin’s
decision to use free indirect style is true to Cronenberg’s own conception:
Lucas, who interviewed the director on set during filming, observes that
«Cronenberg had the notion of making a first-person film that would show an
audience the subjective growth of the hero’s madness» (1983: 34). As Cronenberg
himself described it: after the first 40 minutes of conspiratorial plot, the
viewer suddenly finds himself within «a relentlessly first-person point of
view» (Rodley, 1992: 94). The use of free indirect speech, together with
ekphrastic visualization, thus ensure that the reader is continually exposed to
the contagion of Max’s hallucinatory world.
6. THE MEDIATED
REAL
«After
all there is nothing real outside our perception of reality», O’Blivion’s video-ghost tells Max. As we read the novel and
as we watch the film, it is difficult to say at what exact moment Max’s
hallucinations begin to seep into the narrative world, turning reality into
television-dream. After Max watches the first «Videodrome»
transmission recorded by his assistant, he begins to experience a series of
visceral visions. A suggestive example is the scene, early in the novel/film,
where Nicki Brand arrives at Max’s apartment and they watch a videotape
recording of «Videodrome».
A
woman is being tortured by two masked men in a basement-like room with a red
clay wall; while the muted violent imagery plays in the background, «as
ubiquitous now as electric wallpaper», Max and Brand have sex, and something
strange begins to happen:
He
lifted from her and saw now the pools of condensation forming like heat mirages
around the cushions. The floor melted and sloshed with
electrified water. The dark walls of his apartment seemed to close in, the
ceiling lowering, reflecting the flickering of the candles like the
phosphors of a television image: warm, deeper than orange, and finally
red as a darkroom. The sofa and furniture blurred into insubstantial
shadows, then fell away completely, leaving them naked under the light
of the red room (my italics, Martin, 1983: 71).
So
strong is this sensation of finding himself inside the room shown in the «Videodrome» recording that Max expects to hear «the
slogging approach of heavy boots [of the torturers]. But they did not come. Not
this time» (Martin, 1983: 72).
In
Webb’s characterization, ekphrasis «evokes sights, sounds and sensations of
absent things that, moreover, have the power to make us feel “as if” we can
perceive them and share the associated emotions» (2016: 168). The ekphrasis of
Max’s hallucinatory vision, with his bedroom taking on the quality of a
televised image, is similarly synesthetic: words like «heat», «melted», «sloshed»,
«flickering», «warm», «blurred» and «light» invoke touch, hearing and vision,
imitating verbally the multisensory immersion of TV. «Television», McLuhan
writes, «demands participation and involvement in depth of the whole being»
(2008: 125), which is exactly what ekphrasis tries to make possible in the
novel.
In
the film, Cronenberg portrays this kind of «involvement in depth»
characterizing this scene by a juxtaposition of two distinct images. First, we
see a long shot of Max and Nicki Brand in bed, with the TV set showing the «Videodrome» imagery in the background. Then the scene
changes: Max and Brand are no longer in his bedroom but in a room resembling
the «Videodrome» torture-chamber. The dark crimson
floor and black rectangular space upon which the figures lie, accompanied by
Howard Shore’s brooding soundtrack, create an eroticized, threatening
atmosphere: we’re inside Max’s mind, in a cinematic equivalent of ekphrastic
visualization, for what we are here given to see is the world fallen prey to,
and dominated by, the iconography of televised reality. As if to underscore the
point, the film then cuts, briefly, to a long shot of the same space but now
without the two bodies: the room is shown through the mesh of the CRT screen,
which, in effect, tells us that Max’s world belongs to television (see fig. 4).
Shaviro captures the idée fixe expressed in this
scene, which also characterizes Videodrome as
a whole: «The point at which subjective reality becomes entirely hallucinatory
is also the point at which technology becomes ubiquitous, and is totally melded
with and objectified in the human body» (2006: 141).
We
begin to see more clearly how the effect of ekphrasis, as it is used in
Martin’s adaptation of the film, mirrors McLuhan’s account of the impact of
television, as it is portrayed cinematically by Cronenberg. The conception of
communication upon which ancient rhetorical practice was based—and which, I
claim, is shared by McLuhan—is one where language is conceived «as a
quasi-physical force which penetrates into the mind of the listener, stirring
up images that are stored there» (Webb, 2016: 128). When reading ekphrastic
prose, Webb observes, we experience «language passing like an electrical
charge» between the text and the reader; ekphrasis, moreover, can even lead to
the temporary «enslavement» of the listener by the speaker (2016: 129). If all
these points are taken together, it would seem as if antiquity’s conception of
ekphrasis foreshadowed McLuhan’s theory of media as the «extensions of man»,
not least his account of television as «the most recent and spectacular
extension of our central nervous system» (2001: 345).
Videodrome the novel and Videodrome the film express,
respectively, the visualization made possible by synesthetic description and
the cinematic rendering of conceptual metaphors. In doing so, they point to how
the two media, writing and cinema, form an inseverable part of our picture of
the real and the space we occupy within it via their mediation.
7. A MCLUHANESQUE
PLOT
Having
examined how Videodrome can be said to have
appropriated McLuhan’s theoretical concepts, both in dialogue and cinematic
image, I would like to address my claim that the film’s plot echoes the
discussion of television in Understanding Media. The chapter McLuhan
devotes to TV is by far the longest in the book; it is also where his language
is most Cronenbergian. Beginning the chapter with an image of a child gazing
raptly at a TV screen and concluding with the grisly broadcast of the murder of
Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby, McLuhan portrays television as an uncanny
medium-intruder into the home that affects society insidiously and unawares.
Contrasting the more linear thought-processes associated with print culture, he
writes: «The introspective life of long, long thoughts and distant goals, to be
pursued in lines of Siberian railroad kind, cannot coexist with the mosaic form
of the TV image that commands immediate participation in depth and admits no
delays» (2001: 354). In McLuhan’s depiction, we are presented with the full
immersion of consciousness «inside» TV, with the mind enveloped in and touched
by its bluish glow. It is important to emphasize here that McLuhan does not
consider television to be pernicious qua medium; media, after all, are tools
which can be used for both virtuous and vicious purposes. McLuhan’s point is
that media, conceived as «extensions» of the central nervous system,
necessarily alter «our sense-lives and our mental processes» (2001:
362).
If
the chapter devoted to television in Understanding Media can be said to
have plot, then it might be summed up as follows: the story begins (like Videodrome) in the intimate interior of the home: a
child is mesmerized by the moving pictures on the tube which come to affect the
way the child processes information, even how she perceives space. Television
is then shown to influence the grown-ups’ world: fashion, clothing, cars,
lifestyle, politics, even daily routines. From the time of the Renaissance—a
period encompassing the invention of the printing press as well as the
perfection of perspective in painting—the Western mind was encouraged to
conceive the world visually: one beheld a uniform space upon which
objects appeared in various configurations and, crucially, one remained
separate from this space in beholding it. Television, on the other hand, in
projecting and extending the sense of touch, «is total, synesthetic, involving
all the senses», immersing the viewer in what she is watching (McLuhan, 2001:
365). Television is so involving, in fact, that it can compel the viewer to
lose his own individuality as he identifies with ritualized audience
participation: the television viewer is content to commit to the «tribe» of the
audience (McLuhan, 2001: 366). It would be wrong, however, to suppose that TV
breeds passivity; as McLuhan argues: «TV is above all a medium that demands a
creatively participant response. The guards who failed to protect Lee Oswald
were not passive. They were so involved by the mere sight of the TV cameras
that their lost their sense of their merely practical and specialist task»
(2001: 368). McLuhan is being ironic, of course: the guards did not act
appropriately precisely because they were already «acting» in the spectacle of
the scene that the TV cameras were in the process of creating.
In
Videodrome, Max’s trajectory as a character
can be seen to mirror the story of television as sketched by McLuhan. His is a
transformation from somebody who programmes (and, of course, avidly consumes)
late-night television content to somebody who becomes programmed by the «Videodrome» signal. O’Blivion
reveals to Max (via television) the hidden truth behind «Videodrome»:
it turns out that being exposed to the transmission induces a brain tumour,
which causes the visceral hallucinations. After watching «Videodrome»,
Max begins seeing a series of increasingly violent visions, eventually acting
them out and murdering two colleagues at CIVIC TV, his assistant Harlan, and
ultimately Barry Convex, CEO of Spectacular Optical, a nefarious enterprise
which seeks to use «Videodrome» to control society.
(«We make inexpensive glasses for the Third World and missile guidance systems
for NATO. We also make Videodrome», Convex
blithely informs Max.)
In
a suggestively titled chapter, «The Gadget Lover», McLuhan writes: «Man
becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the
plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms» (2001: 51).
McLuhan’s reproductive metaphor is given memorable expression in the film’s
visual aesthetic, obsessed as it is by the idea of coupling with technology and
losing the ability to distinguish between self and medium, so that the self becomes
the medium through which those in control can act (see fig. 5). In such imagery
as Max’s infamous flesh gun, the breathing video cassette, the vein-streaked TV
set, and, most spectacularly of all, the animate vaginal slit in Max’s belly, Videodrome gives flesh to McLuhan’s metaphor-fuelled
concepts by «overliteralizing» them, in Shaviro’s phrase; in doing so, the film makes palpable for
the viewer what the reader of Understanding Media and The Medium is
the Massage is left only to imagine. «The TV image», McLuhan writes, «is
[…] a ceaselessly forming contour of things limned by the scanning-finger. The
resulting plastic contour appears by light through, not light on, and the image
so formed has the quality of sculpture and icon, rather than picture» (2001:
341). As we have seen, McLuhan repeatedly emphasized the tactility of
television[9] and the way in which Cronenberg conveys this in the film is i) by means of ingenious prosthetic make-up such as the
scene of Max's kissing the television lips of Nicki Brand, or the explosive
shot of the flesh-gun stretching the TV screen as Max shoots himself by
shooting at the screen; and ii) by filming the TV screen in extreme close-up
and simulating the effect of sitting «in front of the tube» in one’s own living
room.
Seeing
a giant close-up of a TV screen in a movie theatre is not a little
disconcerting. One reason for this is the fact of being confronted with the
medium itself: in seeing a close-up of Bridey’s televised face, at the
beginning of the film, or in looking at the close-up of Max pointing the
flesh-gun at his temple through the mesh of TV, we attend to the texture of the
medium as much as, or even more so, than we do to the content of what we are
shown. What is significant about these scenes is precisely the fact that they
show televised-images lending their content a kind of patina of tactility. The
film’s closing scene presents us with two versions of the same shot: we first
see a close-up of Max’s face with the flesh-gun raised to his temple on the «Videodrome» TV set; then, in the final shot, the same
close-up is used but this time without the «filter» of the TV screen[10]. The unexpected effect of this
is that, instead of the latter shot seeming more «real» than the former, it is
actually the televised close-up that bears the weight of the tangible: in
seeing Max shoot himself on the «Videodrome» set,
which explodes in a spray of guts, we feel as though his fate has already been
sealed. Max has become television: the living word, the film’s metaphor for the
human, has become the New Flesh.
8. CONCLUSION: AN
ADVENTURE IN «THE UNIFIED SENSORIUM»
McLuhan
insisted that what distinguished the image on television from the cinematic
image is the former’s low resolution: the TV image, unlike the light captured
on film stock, is an easily discernible «mosaic mesh of light and dark spots»
(2001: 342). He believed that should television one day improve to the point of
what we now know as HD-quality, we will no longer be dealing with the medium of
television. Yet McLuhan’s account of the television of the 1960s is arguably
even more fitting as an anticipation of the medium’s evolution into the
interactive touchscreen that presently dominates the globe. «In television
there occurs an exploration of the sense of active, exploratory touch which
involves all the senses simultaneously»: if we substitute «smart phone» for «television»
here we can see how prophetic McLuhan could be, however inadvertently.
Today,
the Internet, encompassing social networks and data streaming services, is
something we consume (and something that consumes us) bodily, as we cradle
screen-content in our hands and touch it with our fingers. «Cronenberg was able
to foretell our electronic evolution», Nick Ripatrazone
argues, «the quasi-Eucharistic way we «taste and see» the Internet […] Videodrome shows what happens when mind and device
become one» (2017). Recent advancements in communications media bespeak the
contemporary relevance of McLuhan’s vision of the impact of television on
consciousness. However, as eloquent and far-seeing as that vision is, it is
constrained by its own medium of expression: the linear printed word which
houses this thought. Cronenberg, I have argued, translates that linearity into
cinematic image, hyperbolizing McLuhan’s metaphors of sensory extension as
grotesque mise en scène.
In this way, Cronenberg’s film «adapts» the viewer to McLuhan’s picture of the
violent impact of media on consciousness.
When
Max is taken to see Barry Convex at the headquarters of Spectacular Optical, he
is shown the enterprise’s latest invention (see fig. 6): a glowing helmet
contraption that looks like an eerie prototype of a contemporary VR headset
(recently rebranded as a «mixed-reality» spatial computer). The helmet, Convex
explains to Max, does two things. First the wearer is shown scenes of violent
and/or sexual imagery intended to overstimulate the nervous system: the violent
footage triggers hallucinations, which the helmet then records. The helmet thus
becomes a repository of its wearers’ most secret desires and dreams, dreams
that become the property of Spectacular Optical, which broadcasts them via the «Videodrome» signal. What may have seemed like wide-eyed
dystopian fantasy in 1983 has become reality. Contemporary AI technology is
already capable of reproducing high quality images from an MRI scan of brain
activity: a subject is shown a picture of an animal, for example, and the AI
system translates the neuronal glow detected by the MRI into a more or less
accurate digital reproduction of the original image[11].
As
impressive as the film’s imaginative anticipation of technological innovation
is, it does not capture what is most significant about Cronenberg work. Recall
the director’s remark: cinematic imagery is important, he says, when it has «metaphorical
weight»; for McLuhan, similarly, «All media are active metaphors in their power
to translate experience into new forms» (2001: 63). Showing us how one medium
(television) impinges on consciousness, Cronenberg’s film has metaphorical
weight in precisely this sense: it shows the viewer how media translate and
adapt sensory experience and thereby change us into new forms—often in the most
brutal and perversely stimulating way possible.
Cronenberg,
I think, would be sympathetic to McLuhan’s claim that «not even the most lucid
understanding of the peculiar force of a medium can head off the ordinary “closure”
of the senses that causes us to conform to the pattern of experience presented»
(2001: 359). «Print asks for the isolated and stripped-down visual faculty»,
whereas today we find ourselves within «the unified sensorium» (McLuhan, 2001:
336) of the world of haptic screens. If ekphrasis sought to make the reader a
virtual witness to what was being described, as if the reader could forget the
language-screen making the description possible in favour of the visions
immanent within it, then the image in Videodrome
asks the viewer to remember the living word before, or even as, it becomes the
New Flesh. It may be impossible to extricate ourselves from the media which
compose the texture of reality, yet it is possible, as both Videodrome
the novel and Videodrome the film attest, to
portray the texture’s weave.
IMAGES
Fig. 1. Marshall McLuhan leans on his own televised
image. Photograph by Bernard Gotfryd, 1 January 1967.
Public domain.
Fig. 2. Jack Creley as Professor Brian O’Blivion, McLuhan’s stand-in in Videodrome
(David Cronenberg, 1983).
Fig. 3. Max Renn (James Wood) kisses and fondles the
television screen (David Cronenberg, 1983).
Fig. 4. Max Renn’s bedroom portrayed as a televised
image of the torture-room in the «Videodrome»
transmission
(David Cronenberg, 1983).
Fig. 5. The flesh-gun suicide on the «Videodrome» TV set shown in the film’s closing sequence
(David Cronenberg, 1983).
Fig. 6. Max Renn wearing the helmet that records
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