The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
David Cronenberg · a film · 1983 · about 88 minutes · written and directed by David Cronenberg
Mode
Body horror made the vehicle of a theory of media; paranoid thriller, satire of cable television and ritual of transfiguration in one
Mythos
Initiation through possession: the man who seeks the forbidden image, is entered by it and dies to the old flesh; the dead prophet who speaks only as recording; the siren who is also the guide
Phase
From a station’s search for something stronger to sell, through a pursuit, a possession and a conspiracy, to a suicide in a rusted hulk framed as rebirth
Presentation
Feature film in colour, about 88 minutes, the theatrical cut of 1983; photography by Mark Irwin, editing by Ronald Sanders, music by Howard Shore, special makeup effects by Rick Baker
Register
From boardroom comedy and a talk show set to dreadful elevation in flesh and machine; flat Toronto light under a cold synthesised score
Scale
One man’s perception, a city’s screens, the body
Governing Proposition
The president of a small Toronto cable station goes looking for a pirated signal of torture and murder, finds that watching it has entered his body, and is told by a woman on a television that his death will be a new birth. The wager of the film is that a culture of the screen is not looked at but lived in, that what is watched remakes the body and the self of the watcher, and that the seller of images and the censor of them run one apparatus.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Max Renn, played by James Woods, runs Civic TV, Channel 83, a small Toronto station that sells sex and violence. In the boardroom he buys Japanese softcore and jokes with his partners, and what he wants is something tougher than what he has. The film opens as satire of a trade, quick and cynical, and Max is its most fluent dealer, a man who believes that he chooses what he watches.
Harlan, the station’s technician, played by Peter Dvorsky, runs a pirate dish that pulls signals from the air, and one night it brings in something called Videodrome: torture and murder in a red clay room, and no story at all. Max watches it as a buyer watches stock. He wants it for his channel, and he wants to know where it comes from.
On a television talk show he meets Nicki Brand, played by Deborah Harry, and Brian O’Blivion, played by Jack Creley,, a theorist of media who appears only on a monitor beside the other guests. O’Blivion is present only as an image; he speaks of the screen as the retina of “the mind’s eye”. Nicki wants the signal as Max wants it, and more. The station’s search for a product has become two people’s appetite, and the man on the monitor has already said what the rest of the film will show.
Movement II
Nicki leaves for Pittsburgh, where the signal is said to come from, to find it, and she does not return. Max pursues the source through Masha, who passes him on to the next room. The trade in images has led him to an image he cannot buy, and each step takes him further in.
The trail leads to the Cathode Ray Mission, O’Blivion’s charity, where the homeless are fed television: rows of booths, each with a set, each set with a face before it. The poor are given screens as they might be given soup, on the doctrine that a life outside the broadcast is no life at all. It is the film’s clearest picture of its claim, played as charity and as satire at once.
Bianca O’Blivion, played by Sonja Smits, keeps the Mission and her father’s tapes. O’Blivion is dead, she tells Max; he goes on speaking through a library of cassettes that she keeps. The prophet who would appear only on a monitor has become nothing but recording, and his daughter keeps the tapes as a priesthood keeps scripture. From here the film turns.
Movement III
From here the film stops telling what is shown from what Max sees. On tape he sees himself whipping, and what he sees and what happens can no longer be told apart. There is no dissolve, no change of light, no marker of a dream. The audience is placed where Max is placed, and from this point it can no more trust the image than he can.
A videocassette in his hand breathes and swells. The television set swells toward his face, and Nicki’s lips fill the screen until he presses his head into it. Rick Baker’s effects make each of these exact and physical, plastic and glass made flesh in flat light. The machine for watching is now a body that wants him.
Then the slit opens in Max’s abdomen, first seen as he holds a gun to it, a vertical wound like a mouth or a video slot, and his hand goes into it to the wrist. Slot, mouth, screen and wound rhyme from here to the end. The man who sold images has become a receiver of them, opened and made to take in what is pressed on him.
Movement IV
Barry Convex, played by Leslie Carlson, runs Spectacular Optical, a company of eyeglasses and missiles, and with Harlan beside him he explains. Videodrome is the instrument of a puritan crusade: the broadcast of torture is meant to purge a soft public of those drawn to it, and Harlan has been working for Convex all along. Max is to be its instrument.
They insert a programming cassette into the slit in Max’s belly and send him to kill his partners. His gun fuses with his hand, cables growing from it into his forearm, and he does what he is told. The pornographer and the censor are revealed as one apparatus: the purge works by broadcasting the thing it would purge, and the man who sold the images is made the weapon that removes their buyers.
The film steadies here, and it costs something. Long speeches from Convex and Harlan tell what the images had already shown, the sides are drawn, and the shootings are staged as a thriller stages them. The frame of reality the first hour dissolved is held in place long enough for a plot to be explained. What remains unsettled is whether any of it, the explanation included, is perceived or broadcast.
Movement V
Bianca turns him. She reprograms Max, and he becomes the weapon of the other side, repeating its words: “Death to Videodrome”. He kills Harlan, and then Convex, who splits open in the showroom, his body bursting from within. The counter-crusade wins, and the film does not say whether it has freed him or programmed him a second time.
Max hides in a derelict ship in the harbour, a rusted hulk with a television in it. On the set Nicki appears and tells him to go to “the new flesh”. The siren of the signal has become its guide. The film’s last law is now its only one: the image speaks first, and the body follows.
The television shows Max shooting himself, then bursts with entrails. Max does what it showed. The shot is the film’s argument in a single act, the image preceding and authoring the deed, and its question is left open: suicide, transfiguration, or the conspiracy’s success. A man who sold the screen to others has been entered by it, has died to the old flesh, and has been told that this is a birth.
Act III · The Twelve
Run the subtractive test on the first hour and it holds. The station’s hunger for stronger material, Harlan’s pirate dish, the talk show at which O’Blivion is present only on a monitor, Nicki’s appetite for the signal and her going to find it, the Mission’s booths of screens: each carries the claim that the image is entering the body, and none could go without loss. The movement into the hulk and the last shot are required. What holds the axis here is the last third. The Spectacular Optical plot arrives as exposition, and its moving parts, the reprogramming and the murders in turn, could be rearranged without loss; Masha is a device for reaching the next room.
Score: 7.7 / 10
What the film brings into the open can be stated and has held: that a culture of the screen is lived in, not looked at; that what is watched reorganises the body and the self of the watcher; and that the pornographer and the censor share one apparatus, since the crusade to purge a soft public works by broadcasting the thing it would purge. O’Blivion states it, the screen as the retina of “the mind’s eye”, and the form discloses it more fully: the cassette that breathes, the set that swells toward Max’s face, the slit that takes the tape as a mouth takes food. The male body made receptive is its most exact disclosure. Held below the bar because part of the truth arrives as a mood of contamination, and the last act explains what the images had already shown.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The register is dreadful elevation, and it rises often. Max presses his head into the swollen screen and Nicki’s lips; the videocassette pulses in his hand; the opening in his abdomen takes his hand to the wrist; the gun grows cables into his forearm; Convex splits open in the showroom; the set in the ship bursts with entrails before Max follows its picture. Howard Shore’s score, synthesised textures over strings, gives a cold and continuous pressure that holds the heights together, and from the first broadcast to the last shot the film climbs rather than resting on one scene. Held below 8.0 because the heights are often admired as made things before they are felt, the red clay room is grim rather than terrible, and the dread of the middle slackens into thriller procedure.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The myth is built, not cited. Its structure is initiation through possession: a man who sells images seeks a forbidden one, is entered by it, dies to the old flesh, and is told by a woman on a screen that his death is a rebirth. “The new flesh” is load-bearing, since the last scene is a ritual suicide framed as transfiguration. The dead prophet who speaks only through recordings, his daughter keeping the tapes as a priesthood keeps scripture, is the oracle made new by a cassette library. Nicki is siren and psychopomp at once, and the wound in the man’s belly turns the sexual archetype over. The particular stays particular. Held a tenth below the bar by the programmed assassin of the fourth movement, a genre borrowing rather than built myth.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is the horror film, Cronenberg’s own body horror in Shivers, Rabid and Scanners, the paranoid thriller of the 1970s, Burroughs’s soft machine and addictive image, and Philip K. Dick’s unstable realities. The turns are large: body horror made the vehicle of a theory of media; a studio release whose frame of reality dissolves at the midpoint and never returns; a hero whose degradation is, on the film’s last terms, his ascent; the male body made the site of penetration and pregnancy. The stake was real: the director’s largest budget to that date, a Universal release, James Woods as star and a rock singer as lead, and a film that failed commercially and was cut for its rating. What keeps it from the top is grammar: the stalking, the conspiracy and the shoot-outs are still the genre’s.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that the viewer cannot tell what is broadcast from what is perceived. From the whipping tape onward Max’s hallucinations are shown in the grammar of his waking life, with no marker, no dissolve and no change of lens, so that the audience stands where he stands and comes to doubt the image as he does. The ending makes this the content: the television shows Max shooting himself, and then he does, so that the image precedes and authors the act. Told with a stable frame, this would be a thriller about a drug; told this way it is about the medium that tells it. The cost is that the form is otherwise a genre thriller’s, and the late exposition steadies a frame the first hour unsettled.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Forty-three years of return are evidence, and the yield has grown as the technology changed. The questions stay open: where the hallucination begins and whether anything after the whipping tape is real; whether the last shot is suicide, transcendence or the conspiracy’s success; whether Bianca’s new flesh is a liberation or a second programming; what the film says about the appetite for violent images, which it both indicts and feeds. It has sustained readings in media theory, often set beside McLuhan and Baudrillard, in feminist and queer criticism of its male body opened as female, and, since the internet, as an account of a life lived in feeds and screens. Formally it yields in the rhymes of slot, mouth, screen and wound. The conspiracy’s mechanics do not repay a second look.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Released in 1983, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: the film made the horror film a means of thinking about the medium, fused body horror with a theory of the image, and showed that a feature could give up a stable frame of reality inside a genre picture. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a cult that grew from a commercial failure into continuous presence, a place in the teaching of film and media, a reach real and lasting through genre and art horror, and a phrase, “the new flesh”, taken into criticism as a name. Held a tenth below the bar because that reach ran mostly through genre and art horror, and its pressure fell on what the cinema could be about more than on its form.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The film as released survives whole: the theatrical cut and a later unrated version both circulate, the latter restoring footage trimmed for the rating rather than losing any, and a television version padded with alternate material has not replaced the work. Presence over forty-three years is continuous but narrower than the widest: a failure on release, then a steady cult, home video in every format, a Criterion edition, revivals and teaching. The surface is fixed to a technology, Betamax, cable channels and cathode-ray sets, and that is charged; the charge is partly offset because the film is about that technology, and its meaning has outrun the hardware. The bar is met exactly.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The making bears weight where it matters most. Rick Baker’s practical effects, the breathing cassette, the bulging screen, the hand fused to the gun and the opening belly, are among the most exact of their decade and remain persuasive. Shore’s score is spare and cold; Mark Irwin’s photography makes Toronto a city of offices, warehouses and hotel rooms in flat light, the right ground for the hallucinations; James Woods plays a cynic whose quickness becomes panic without a break. The charges hold it below 8.0: a low budget visible in sets and crowds; Deborah Harry’s line readings limited beside Woods; exposition in the last third carried by long speeches from Convex and Harlan; the shootings at Civic TV and in the showroom staged plainly.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the boardroom comedy at Civic TV, where Max buys Japanese softcore and jokes with his partners, and the last shot in the rusted hulk. One law holds them: what is watched is entered into the watcher, and the market in images and the body that consumes them are one system. The Mission, the talk show and the torture room obey it, and the range it governs is wide, from the satire of a cable station to a ritual death. The strain is in the conspiracy. Spectacular Optical’s crusade runs on thriller law, with motives stated and sides drawn, and Bianca’s counter-programming sets a good signal against a bad one that the rest of the film, where the image corrupts whatever it touches, does not allow.
Score: 8.0 / 10
An 88-minute film of one man’s perception holds more orders than its scale suggests: consciousness, in Max’s perception and its failure; the body and sexuality, made the site of the whole argument; the economy of images, a small station, a pirate dish, a trade in pornography from abroad; politics, a corporate crusade against a soft public run through an optics and weapons company; the sacred in parody, in the Mission and the gospel of the new flesh; the city. The body, the market and the mind are integrated well. What keeps the axis lowest: the family is absent, history is absent beyond the moment of cable and video, the public the conspiracy targets is never seen, and the politics is stated in exposition rather than held. The figure describes the form.
Score: 7.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve at 8.7, The Imperishable at 8.5, and The Archetypal Deep, The Living Form, The Bottomless Well and Pressure on Tradition at 8.4. A genre film turned into a theory of the image at real cost; an initiation through possession built into the plot, ending in a suicide framed as rebirth; and a form that never tells the viewer what is broadcast from what is seen, until the screen shows the act before the act.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.2: consciousness, the body, the economy of images, politics, the sacred in parody and the city are held, but the family and history are absent, the public is never seen and the politics is stated in exposition. Above it, The Inevitable at 7.7, where the last third’s conspiracy is assembled rather than compelled, and The Sublime and The Made at 7.9, where the heights are often admired as effects and the late exposition, the action and the sets fall below the effects that carry the film.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.7 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.4, The Made at 7.9, The Inner Law at 8.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Swerve at 8.7 clears the bar of 8.5 and The Imperishable meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 fall a tenth short, and The Unconcealment at 8.3 two tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.7, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.2. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.2 from a sum of 97.8, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Videodrome as released in 1983, the theatrical cut, about 88 minutes, from the first broadcast on Civic TV to the last shot in the hulk: written and directed by David Cronenberg, a Canadian production by Filmplan International, produced by Claude Héroux, released in the United States by Universal in February 1983, photographed by Mark Irwin, edited by Ronald Sanders, with music by Howard Shore and special makeup effects by Rick Baker; with James Woods, Deborah Harry, Sonja Smits, Jack Creley, Leslie Carlson and Peter Dvorsky. Shot in Toronto, where it is set. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. The theatrical cut is the work scored; a later unrated version, which restores footage trimmed for the rating, would change no figure, and a television version padded with alternate material is not the work. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain, and briefly. Details that could not be verified, among them the exact running time, shot length and scene count, the box office and budget, the extent of the footage the unrated version restores, how the script and the ending were settled during the shoot, any acknowledged debt to McLuhan, and the particular later films said to descend from this one, are not given.