Videodrome

Brian O'Blivion is the first character in cinema to understand that a medium is not a delivery mechanism but an environment, and to draw the conclusion that an environment, given enough time and exposure, does not merely contain its inhabitants but physically constitutes them. He appears only on television — a wall of monitors in a room somewhere, playing cassettes he recorded before his death, each one labelled and filed by his daughter, Bianca, who runs the Cathode Ray Mission, a shelter where the homeless can watch television because O'Blivion believed that access to the screen was a basic human need, like food, like warmth. This is not satire. Cronenberg does not satirise, which is one reason his films age better than films that do. O'Blivion is a media theorist in the tradition of Marshall McLuhan — Toronto-based, which is not a coincidence — and his thesis is the thesis McLuhan arrived at by analysis, pushed to its somatic conclusion: the medium is not the message; the medium is the flesh. The television screen is the retina of the mind's eye. Whatever you watch, you become. The signal rewires the nervous system, and the rewired nervous system produces a new body, and the new body is the real product of the broadcast. This is what O'Blivion means when he says the battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena. He is not talking about propaganda. He is talking about physiology.

Max Renn does not understand any of this. He is a programmer — in the broadcasting sense, the person who decides what airs — for a small cable station in Toronto, and his professional life is a search for content that will hold attention. His market is the margin: whatever network television will not show, he will. This makes him a pure attention-economy operator, decades before the term existed. He is not interested in what the content means; he is interested in what it does, which is capture eyeballs in a landscape of infinite channel options. When he intercepts the Videodrome signal, what excites him is its intensity. It has no plot, no characters, no structure — just a room and a victim and an act of violence — and he recognises immediately that this is what his audience wants. He is right, but his analysis stops at the transaction: I provide, they consume, the metrics go up. What he does not see, and what the film spends its middle third demonstrating, is that the signal is not content. It is an interface. It does not transmit an experience to the viewer; it opens a channel between the signal and the viewer's body, and the channel runs in both directions. Max's abdomen develops a slit — a vaginal opening in his torso — that accepts videocassettes. His hand fuses with a pistol. His hallucinations are not hallucinations; they are the output of a nervous system that has been physically reorganised by exposure, and the thing doing the reorganising is the broadcast itself. Cronenberg films this body horror with clinical restraint, because he is not trying to shock; he is trying to describe. The description is: the user has become the platform.

This is the argument we are now having about attention, screens, and what happens when the interface colonises the organism, and it is worth noting that Cronenberg had it in 1983, before the internet, before smartphones, before the algorithmic feed, before any of the mechanisms that would make the argument unavoidable. What he saw was the structural logic, not the particular technology. A system designed to capture attention will, if it is effective enough, reshape the attentional apparatus of its users, because attention is not a resource that is spent and then replenished; it is a capacity that is trained by use. A nervous system that attends to Videodrome becomes a Videodrome-shaped nervous system, and from inside that nervous system, Videodrome is reality, and reality is less than Videodrome. This is not metaphor. It is the operating principle of every engagement-optimised feed in existence: the system that captures your attention most effectively is the system that feels most real, and the one that feels most real is the one you will attend to next, and the cycle does not have an exit condition because the organism and the medium are co-evolving. Max's body horror is the honest version of what the metrics call engagement: a physical dependency on a signal that is simultaneously the product and the cause of the nervous system that needs it.

The film's final line is its product roadmap. Long live the new flesh. Max says it before he shoots himself, or appears to, in a sequence that may be real or may be another layer of the signal's reorganisation of his perception. Cronenberg leaves the ontological status of the ending deliberately unclear, because the point is that ontological clarity is no longer available. Once the medium has become the body, there is no external position from which to assess what is real and what is broadcast, because the instrument of assessment — the nervous system, the mind, the self — is itself a product of the broadcast. This is the limit condition of every platform that has optimised for immersion rather than utility, and Cronenberg named it forty years before the industry arrived there. O'Blivion's daughter, Bianca, is still running the Cathode Ray Mission at the end of the film, still providing screens to the homeless, still operating on the belief that access to the medium is a form of nourishment. She is the most unsettling character in the film precisely because she is the most compassionate, and her compassion and the Videodrome conspiracy are not in opposition; they are the same thesis at different intensities. The medium feeds you. The medium becomes you. The only question is which signal gets there first.