+3
Videodrome is powerful stuff. It is kind of an ideal of what cinema can and should do more often. It is loaded with confusions and contradictions and impossible to process images, but it never loses sight of the truth that it is telling. As lost as we become in its hall of mirrors, we understand the world it is showing us on screen, and the terror that it is only reflecting back to us something we already implicitly understand about our own lives, and their slow fusion with the media we consume, and the technology we become beholden to. It mattered then, and it obviously matters now, and while I find it at times an almost impossible film to parse every detail to understand absolutely everything that has happened in it, it remains a movie I understand deeply and bring with me to my nightmares every night.
Cronenberg is of course, always great. No matter how much he cloaks his movies in an intellectual frigidity, and makes his audience keep their distance with his images of bodily decay and metamorphisis, they are always brilliant at portraying the humanity that is trapped inside of these things. There is a terrible understanding of the world in his movies, that both empathizes with humanity while simultaneously turning its gaze away from it. They are like being filled with the urge to scream and finding you don't have a mouth.
In short, Videodrome is great. And while it's not my personal favorite, it's very arguably Cronenberg's best.