How come nobody is mentioning how David Cronenberg predicted “coomers“ too?
Media brainwashing is genuinely a scary concept. And, I don’t mean like, standard propaganda brainwashing that we’ve already become accustomed to, I mean brainwashing to a point of psychological delirium.
The more we discover how the human brain works, the more capable we become in understanding how to manipulate it, and as technology rises, welp, that only grants creators further leeway into indulging in these affairs. I bet when this movie came out, people thought: “Mind control? From television? Please.” But, now, us 21st century paranoids are like, “Mind control? Yeah, I can see it happening.” The human brain ain’t the toughest tool in the shed! If we can already create near identical artificial intelligence, what’s stopping some genius internet troll from using that knowledge to rework our inner mechanisms by posting a visual piece of hypnotism for the world to see? We’re already addicted to technology; step 1 has essentially been completed. It could take just one click to walk into a trance and we would never see it coming.
As for the movie itself, it’s great! I give it kudos for being basically this never-ending run of hallucinatory confusion in which it’s never clarified what is real and what is fake; you’re just pushed to learn that what we optically see will always be our reality, no matter how unscientific it may be — media manipulation helps prove that. And again, it also spawned that interesting thought idea I mentioned earlier, so as far as social commentary goes its pretty relevant. Once it turned into The Terminator halfway through though you could tell Cronenberg was just self-obsessing in lingering this perplexing nightmare on for as long as he needed to to hit runtime capacity. It was disturbing to watch though, I must say; it felt like I was witnessing something forbidden, something I shouldn’t have seen.
Anyways, at the end of the day, I’m pretty sure “watching videodrome” was just another way of this movie saying “taking hallucinatory edibles,” but hey, that’s only my opinion.
Also, what the frick? That was Blondie? I seriously had to IMDb the cast of Videodrome to confirm it was her! Man, I guess I really am just a fake fan.
Verdict: B+
“Videodrome” is now available to stream on The Criterion Channel.
Burning the Celluloid 
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