VIDEODROME

Videodrome is an incredibly strange and almost disturbing surreal interpretation of how the media and television has an affect on its viewers. The plot follows Max Renn, the president of a Canadian television series, as he searches for programming to make his soft-porn station into something more extreme. The beginning of the movie touches on subjects of the media becoming too extreme.

While many said that station 83’s seedy content was destructive to the public, Max argued otherwise. He proposed that because viewers had his programming as an outlet, they would be less likely to act out elsewhere. Station 83, he reasoned, was doing society a favor, rather than the other way around. This case can be made still today regarding Hollywood’s compounding use of sex and violence in place of plots in new movies.

Max eventually discovers Videodrome. Thinking at first that Videodrome is just actors performing sadistic sexual acts, he soon learns that the show is actually real torture and murder. When he searches for more answers, he finds that watching Videodrome in fact gives its viewer a brain tumor, causing strange hallucinations.

The climax of the movie shows Max killing his partners at the Television Station because of the affect Videodrome’s programming had on him. When he tries to kill the daughter of Brain O’Blivion, the last person standing in the way of Videodrome’s success, she in turn reprograms Max. In the end, Max’s hallucinations cause him to kill himself.

Those who programmed him determined Max’s fate. He was at first drawn in by the bizarre and outrageous content of Videodrome, but then found that he was being drawn deeper and deeper into something else entirely without even realizing it. Similar to Max’s goals being determined by those who had programmed him, TV viewers today are subject to the same thing. Many viewers may not even realize the immense amount of hidden marketing and secret agenda’s being released into their mind when watching television or movies, telling them what to want and need.