David Cronenberg’s erotically-charged social satire is a cautionary tale for the internet age. Since I see technology as being an extension of the human body, it’s inevitable that it should come home to roost.” David Cronenberg was referring to his 1988 film Dead Ringers when he offered up this fascinating insight into his work, but to a varying degree it applies to all of his early films, from Shivers and Rabid to The Brood and Scanners. Yet it’s Videodrome which perhaps best encapsulates this self-reflexive statement. Released in 1983 and hailed as the decade’s answer to A Clockwork Orange by none other than Andy Warhol, Cronenberg’s eighth feature further enhanced his reputation as North America’s foremost purveyor of body horror while simultaneously establishing him as the thinking person’s genre filmmaker. It is a bold, cerebral examination of human kind’s masochistic, subservient tendencies. Right from its immersive opening shot, Videodrome imagines a near-future in which technology has infiltrated every aspect of daily life. On a screen within the screen, a colourful ident for CIVIC-TV (“the one you take to bed with you”), a Toronto-based station specialising in shlock programming, flashes up before a woman (Julie Khaner) serenely delivers an automated wake-up call. Cronenberg may not have been actively trying to predict the future, but this scene contains an eerily prescient blueprint for the likes of like Siri, Alexa and other intelligent personal assistant systems. taken from: lwlies.com
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February 2020
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