We are living in the era of the blip, what Alvin Toffler has labelled blip culture.1 Toffler has written of our bombardment by these ‘short, modular blips of information’,2 but for others the blip is more pervasive and more crucial in its implications. Into the 1990s, the human subject has become a blip: ephemeral, electronically processed, unreal.3 Numerous writers have noted this implosion, the passage of experiential reality into the grids, matrices and pulses of the electronic information age. Exploration outward has been superseded by the inward spiral of orbital circulation – in cybernetic terms, the feedback loop. The world has been reconstituted as a simulation within the mega-computer banks of the Information Society, and terminal identity exists as the mode of engagement with the imploded culture.
Jean Baudrillard writes of orbital circulation as the matrix of the implosive process,4 which implies a constant turning-in, and Arthur Kroker adds the valuable metaphor of ‘black hole’, that massive gravitational anomaly which draws all into it, from which no information can reliably emerge. Below the event horizon lie only abstraction and hypothesis; direct experience is, by definition, impossible. Acknowledging the strength of McLuhan’s axiom, ‘the medium is the message’ (‘the key formula of the age of simulation’),5 Baudrillard notes that it is not only this implosion of the message in the medium which is at stake, but also the concurrent ‘implosion of the medium and the real in a sort of nebulous hyperreality…’.6
Television, still the axiomatic form of electronic simulation, due to its mass penetration and continually functioning national and global networks, is therefore not to be seen as presenting an image or mirror of reality (neutral or otherwise), but rather as a constituent portion of a new reality. Society, the arena of supposed ‘real’ existence, increasingly becomes ‘the mirror of television’.7 ‘The result of this image bombardment’, Toffler wrote in Future Shock, ‘is the accelerated decay of old images, a faster intellectual through-put, and a new, profound sense of the impermanence of knowledge itself’.8 In the science fiction horror film Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1982), media prophet Brian O’Blivion informs us that ‘Television is reality, and reality is less than television’. Soon, ‘everyone will have special names … names designed to cause the cathode-ray tube to resonate’. A new subject is being constituted, one which begins its process of being through the act of viewership. ‘The TV self is the electronic individual par excellence who gets everything there is to get from the simulacrum of the media’, write Kroker and Cook.9
The technologies of the mass media have thus been crucial to the maintenance of instrumental reason as a form of rational (and hence natural, invisible and neutral) domination. ‘Domination has its own aesthetics’, wrote Marcuse, ‘and democratic domination has its democratic aesthetics’.10 The plurality of channel selections serves as a kind of guarantee of the freedom of the subject to choose, to position one’s self within the culture, while the constant flow of images, sounds and narratives seemingly demonstrates a cultural abundance and promise. Yet the choice is illusory: to view is to surrender. Early on, Baudrillard wrote: ‘It is useless to fantasise about state projection of police control through TV … TV, by virtue of its mere presence, is a social control in itself.’11
Guy Debord’s 1967 manifesto, Society of the Spectacle, begins by acknowledging the passage into a new mode of phenomenological and commercial existence. ‘In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.’12 The citizen/viewer, no longer engaged in the act of producing reality, exists now in a state of pervasive separation – cut off from the producers of the surrounding media culture by a unilateral communication and detached from the mass of fellow citizen/viewers as the new community of television families and workplaces arise invisibly to take their place.
The spectacle controls by atomising the population and reducing their capacity to function as an aggregate force, but also by displaying a surfeit of spectacular goods and lifestyles among which the viewer may electronically wander and experience a simulation of satisfaction. Within the conditions of late capitalism, ‘the satisfaction of primary human needs is replaced by an uninterrupted fabrication of pseudo-needs which are reduced to the single pseudo-need of maintaining the reign of the autonomous economy’ (thesis 51, my emphasis). ‘The real consumer becomes a consumer of illusions’ (thesis 47). Kroker and Cook describe the 1980s self as ‘a blip with a lifestyle’.13
Science fiction (from the 1950s), like critical theory (from much earlier), has frequently portrayed the mass media as a pacifying force; an opiate. In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), for example, the wife of the book-burning fireman is addicted to both tranquillizers and television. This juncture of technology, control and addiction evokes the writings of William S. Burroughs, whose incantatory prose reveals a world – a galaxy – completely given over to the pervasiveness and vulnerability of addiction. Addiction is pervasive in that it transcends the use of narcotics: one can be addicted to money or to dope; there are orgasm addicts, control addicts and image addicts. Vulnerability exists because when the desperation of addiction is brought into being, the potential for manipulation escalates. ‘The pusher always gets it all back. The addict needs more and more junk to maintain a human form … buy off the Monkey. Junk is the mold of monopoly and possession.’ Burroughs then analogises addiction and capitalist control: ‘Junk is the ideal product … the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk nec-essary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy … the junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product.’14
The nexus commodity/addiction/control is replicated in Debord’s post-Frankfurt School analysis. The spectacle is the ultimate commodity in that it makes all others possible: advertisements generate the conditions for consumption, and thus for production as well. The spectacle stimulates the desire to consume (the one permissible participation in the social process), a desire which is continually displaced onto the next product, and the next. It is infinitely self-generating. Ultimately, the spectacle takes on the totalising function of any addictive substance; it differs from dope only in that its addictive properties remain hidden within the rational economic structures of capitalist society. Contrast the metaphors of Burroughs to these of Debord: ‘The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life’ (thesis 42). ‘The spectacle is a permanent opium war which aims to make people identify goods with commodities and satisfaction with survival…’ (thesis 44). ‘[T]he spectacle is the main production of present-day society’ (thesis 15). ‘The spectacle subjugates living men to the extent that the economy has totally subjugated them’ (thesis 16).
The spectacle-addict recurs in science fiction, and the more sophisticated works begin with the premise of voluntarism. The addiction to the video-narcotic means that the control apparatus is already emplaced and invisibly operating to secure the false consciousness of cohesion, democratic order and freedom. Works such as Fahrenheit 451 or Orwell’s 1984 ignore the crucial postulate of Marcuse’s democratic domination: an effective ideological state apparatus replaces the need for the overt exercise of power. As Burroughs observed, ‘A functioning police state needs no police’.15
According to Marshall McLuhan, our (post)modern technological capabilities function as ‘the extensions of man’.16 ‘During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space’, while today, ‘we have extended our central nervous system in a global embrace, abolishing both time and space as far as our planet is concerned’.17 The metaphor reassures by fostering an acceptance of media culture as a natural evolutionary state. To extend the nervous system outside the body further empowers the brain and further centralises the individual.
Other theorists are less sanguine. Debord clearly posits unilateral forms of communication as an intrusive force: ‘Lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle’ (thesis 8). Technologies might hold the possibility of revolutionising society but, since ‘freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one’,18 the possibility also exists that it will serve to consolidate rather than disseminate power. Power is the operative lack in McLuhan’s discourse, rendering his vision compelling but incomplete. Baudrillard’s writings share McLuhan’s fascination with technological change, but always accompanied by a massive awareness of power’s reification. He differs from Debord in several ways which distance him from a traditional Marxist position. First, technology replaces economics as the structuring force of the discourse on power. Second, there is Baudrillard’s rejection of ‘use-value’ in favour of a position which guarantees no rigid site of meaning.19 Finally, he argues that power has been subsumed by technological forces to such a degree that it is no longer the province of the state, much less the citizen.20 In Baudrillard’s imploded universe, human power has itself become a simulation.21 Power now resides in a technology which holds humanity in its thrall. The media are invading; there will be no survivors.
This shift accounts for the changing style of Baudrillard’s prose from a rationally argued Debordian resentment at the reifying deployment of spectacular power, to a hyper-technologised, jargon-ridden language which refuses the possibility of a critical position. Baudrillard’s text aspires to the condition of science fiction, and ultimately becomes performative of the process he once merely described.
The usurpation of power by the new technologies of information control leads Baudrillard to reject the neural metaphors of McLuhan. In its place, another biological trope is employed. What exists now is ‘a viral, endemic, chronic, alarming presence of the medium … dissolution of TV into life, the dissolution of life into TV’.22 The media are no longer the extensions of man, man instead extends the media in becoming a ‘terminal of multiple networks’.23
Burroughs has frequently deployed virus as a metaphor for all the infiltrating forces of control to which people are subject. Junky, Naked Lunch and Cities of the Red Night all incorporate viral figures, but it is in the Nova trilogy,24 and especially in Nova Express, that the control virus appears as an image: a media-form controlled by invading alien forces. Biology and the media are linked through the node of the image. Images are tangible and material, neither ephemeral nor temporary. A death-dwarf is a literal image-addict (‘images – millions of images – That’s what I eat…’ [Nova Express (NE), p. 68]).
As Burroughs demonstrates, science fiction becomes the discourse best equipped to contend with this new state of things. Samuel Delany and Teresa de Lauretis both argue that the genre is defined by rhetorical heightening and a continual linguistic play resistant to any totalisation of meaning.25 Something further is added in what we may term the science fiction of the spectacle, a subgenre which includes works by Burroughs; J. G. Ballard; James Tiptree Jr (Alice Sheldon); Philip Dick; David Cronenberg; Norman Spinrad and others. Representation and textuality become the explicit subjects of the text; discourse will comprise the content as well as determine textual form. The inherent rhetoricity of the genre is extended as the text turns in upon its own production and status. The science fiction of the spectacle often demands the recognition of its own imbrication in the implosion of the real. These discursive strategies are dominant in contemporary critical writing as well: Baudrillard’s essays, for example, bear rhetorical resemblances to the fictions of Dick and William Gibson, resemblances which are hardly coincidental.
Burroughs has generated his mythology for the space age around the nexus of junk, virus, addiction, control and surrender: ‘Hell consists of falling into enemy hands, into the hands of the virus power, and heaven consists of freeing oneself from the power, of achieving inner freedom, freedom from conditioning.’26 In the Nova trilogy, ‘image is virus’, and ‘junk is concentrated image’. Baudrillard nearly quotes Burroughs when he writes about ‘this viral contamination of things by images’.27 The Nova Police reports: ‘This virus released upon the world would infect the entire population and turn them into our replicas’ (NE, p. 48).
The virus is a powerful metaphor for the power of the media, and Burroughs’s hyperbolic Manicheism does not completely disguise the accuracy of his analysis. Whether the viral form is an actual living proto-cell or simply a carrier of genetic information, it clearly possesses an exponentially increasing power to take over and control its host organism. The injection of information leads to control, mutation, and passive replication: the host cell ‘believes’ that it is following its own biologically determined imperative; it mistakes the new genetic material for its own. The image/virus is posited as invasive and irresistible; a parasite with only self-replication as its function.
Compare this to Debord’s economic analysis, where the pervasiveness of the spectacle serves the similar function of creating a deceptive cohesion for the purpose of infinite self-regeneration. The hegemony of the subject is illusory; indeed, imagistic; while control over these images is elusive; in fact impossible. The recurrent image of the virus (the virus of the image), biologises the rise of spectacle and the consequent waning of autonomous reason. The subject becomes a ‘carrier’ of spectacle, of image, of pseudo-reality. This is what Eric Mottram has called ‘the virus transformation into undifferentiated man, the terminal image of man as patient-victim’.28 Earth’s fate is all too clear: ‘The entire planet is being developed into terminal identity and complete surrender’. (NE, 19) Terminal identity: an unmistakably doubled articulation in which we find both the end of the subject and a new subjectivity constructed at the computer station or television screen. Again the human is configured as a ‘terminal of multiple networks’.
McLuhan wrote that Nova Express takes place ‘in a universe which seems to be someone else’s insides’,29 recognising that Burroughs’s work represents an inversion of his own. He further notes that: ‘The human nervous system can be reprogrammed biologically as readily as any radio station can alter its fare.’ In this statement, which anticipates Videodrome, there is an acknowledgement of political and social control which is rare in McLuhan, and which allows a perception of the unasked question which lurks behind a reading of his works: whose nervous system is this, anyway?
The similarities between Burroughs and filmmaker David Cronenberg are certainly extensive. The invasion and mutation of the body, the loss of control, and the trans-formation of the self into Other are as obsessively deployed in the works of the latter as in those of the former. Christopher Sharritt has written that the pervasive concern for both is ‘the rise of the addictive personality cultivated by dominant culture and the changing structures of power … [Neither] finds a solution in organised revolt since the new technological environment absorbs and dilutes ideological principles and abstract values’.30 Similarly, Baudrillard has written that
All the movements which bet only on liberation, emancipation, the resurrection of the subject of history, of the group, of speech as a raising of consciousness … do not see that they are acting in accordance with the system, whose imperative today is the overproduction and regeneration of meaning and speech.31
Language is, in multiple senses, the definition and controller of the self, the site of identity; and Baudrillard’s pessimism and rhetorical surrender are commensurate with Burroughs’s tactics. Like Baudrillard, Burroughs assimilates the linguistic excess of science fiction, but goes further than Baudrillard towards the demolition of communication. The appropriation of other authors and other texts wrecks the hegemony of both writer and novel, while the technique of the cut-up, in its explicit evocation of surgical procedure which links textual and corporeal bodies, obliterates the linear coherence which generally defines the identity of the text. Relations among signifiers are lost, each now exists in glittering isolation: the rational telos of the narrator is replaced by a rhetorical intensification which foregrounds and reveals the random bombardments of the spectacular society. Mutation becomes an act of sabotage, and the cut-up becomes a crucial immunisation against the invasive forces of the media-virus.
Cronenberg replaces this emphasis on the physicality of language with an attention to the image of the body. While he constructs an elaborate semiotics of the body in all his work, it is only in Videodrome, to date, that he fully addresses the construction of the body of the text: the cinematic signifier. In Cronenberg’s films, the eruptive and incisive mutations which the body undergoes rival Burroughs’s cut-ups for their violence, randomness and capacity to produce chaos. The penile organ emerging from Marilyn Chambers’s armpit in Rabid (1976), the extruded ‘children’ of The Brood (1979) and the genetic cut-up represented by the human/fly melange in The Fly (1986) all enact the breakdown of human hegemony through the deployment of new technologies. Burroughs wrote: ‘The realisation that something as familiar to you as the movement of your intestines the sound of your breathing the beating of your heart is also alien and hostile does make one feel a bit insecure at first.’32
These transformations cannot be completely subsumed within the mind/body dualism of Cartesianism, as one critic proposes to do.33 Such a humanistic balance fails to account for the evident and pervasive antihumanism of Cronenberg’s production, as demonstrated by the recurrent fears of human contact, sexuality or physicality in any form. David Cronenberg is the filmmaker of panic sex (Kroker’s pungent phrase) with the body as the overdetermined site for the expression of profound social anxiety.34 The subject of the Cronenberg film is hardly human action: it is instead, as Sharritt states, the structures of external power and control to which the individual (in body and soul) is subjected. The dissolution of identity into new forms is connected to the rise of new technologies, and this has become evident in three of his more recent films, Scanners (1980), Videodrome and The Fly, in which the apparent mind/body dichotomy is superseded by the trichotomy of mind/body/machine. Carrie Rickey is closer to the mark when she writes that Cronenberg is: ‘a visionary architect of a chaotic biological tract where mind and body, ever fighting a Cartesian battle for integration, are so vulnerable as to be easily annexed by technology.’35 The mind/body struggle is a blind for the larger Burroughsian issues of addiction, technological control and the malleability of reality and identity.
Videodrome presents a destabilised reality in which image, reality, hallucination and psychosis become indissolubly melded: the most estranging portrayal of image addiction and viral invasion since Burroughs. ‘Videodrome’, a TV programme, itself broadcasts brutal torture and sadism in a grotesque display which exerts a strong influence upon its viewers. Cable-station operator Max Wren desires ‘Videodrome’: as a businessman he needs it to rescue his foundering station; as an individual he finds himself drawn irresistibly to its horrors. Connected to Wren’s quest for the source of ‘Videodrome’ is a profoundly ontological passage beyond spectacle to the ultimate dissolution of the boundaries which might serve to separate and guarantee definitions of ‘spectacle’, ‘subject’ and ‘reality’ itself.
At times Videodrome seems to be a film which hypostatises Baudrillard’s own polemic. Here, with remarkable syntactic similarity, Baudrillard and a character from Cronenberg’s film are both intent upon the usurpation of the real by its own representation; upon the imbrication of the real, the technologised and the simulated. The language is hyper-technologised but anti-rational; moebius-like in its evocation of a dissolute, spectacular reality:
Jean Baudrillard: ‘We are here at the controls of a micro-satellite, in orbit, living no longer as an actor or dramaturge but as a terminal of multiple networks. Television is still the most direct prefiguration of this. But today it is the very space of habitation that is conceived as both receiver and distributor, as the space of both reception and operations, the control screen and terminal which as such may be endowed with telematic power…’.36
Professor O’Blivion: ‘The battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena – the Videodrome. The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye. Therefore the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore television is reality and reality is less than television.’
Both, in fact, seem to be following Debord’s programme that ‘When analysing the spectacle one speaks, to some extent, the language of the spectacular itself in the sense that one moves through the methodological terrain of the very society which expresses itself in spectacle’ (thesis 11) – precisely why science fiction has obtained such a lately privileged position. Baudrillard embraces a high-tech, alienating and alienated science fictional rhetoric to explore the very paradigm of high-tech alienation, while Cronenberg’s horror films about the failure of interpersonal communications are an integral part of an industry which privileges the spectacular over the intimate, and pseudo-satisfaction over genuine comprehension. Both construct discourses of anti-rationalism to expose and ridicule any process or history of enlightenment occurring through the exercise of a ‘pure’ reason.
Television pervades Videodrome. O’Blivion is the founder of the Cathode Ray Mission, a kind of TV soup kitchen for the city’s derelicts: ‘Watching TV will patch them back into the world’s mixing board.’ Television is often a medium of direct address. Wren is awakened by a videotaped message. O’Blivion refuses to appear on television ‘except on television’, his image appears on a monitor placed beside the programme’s host (in a gesture reminiscent of Debord’s own prerecorded lectures).37 As Wren awaits his own talk show appearance, he chats with Nicki Brand, but an interposed monitor blocks our view. The image on the monitor is coextensive with its own background, however – Magritte-like – and consequently, the conversation is between a live Wren and a video Brand. Such examples offer a preliminary blurring of the distinction between real and televisual experiences.
This parody of McLuhan’s global TV village serves as backdrop to the enigma of ‘Videodrome’, which is finally revealed to be a government project. The explanation for ‘Videodrome’, is at least as coherent as any from Burroughs: Spectacular Optical, a firm which specialises in defence contracts, has developed a signal which induces a tumour in the viewer. This tumour causes hallucinations which can be recorded, then revised, then fed back to the viewer: in effect, the individual is reprogrammed to serve the controller’s ends. Burroughs offered a similar vision: ‘you are a programmed tape recorder set to record and play back/who programs you/who decides what tapes play back in present time.’38
But as Barry Convex of Spectacular Optical asks Wren, ‘Why would anyone watch a scum show like ‘Videodrome’?’ ‘Business reasons’, is Wren’s fast response, but his interest transcends the commercial. Coincident with his exposure to the ‘Videodrome’ signal is his attraction to Nicki Brand, an outspoken, alluring personality for C-RAM radio.39 Trans-gression thus enters Wren’s life in at least three ways: socially, via his soft-porn, hard-violence cable TV station; sexually, through his forays into sadomasochism with Brand; and the political and sexual transgressions of ‘Videodrome’ itself. The three levels are linked in a spiralling escalation which culminates in Wren’s own hallucinated appearance on ‘Videodrome’, whipping, first Brand, then her image on a television monitor. Brand is the guide who leads Wren on towards his final destiny; after her death, her image remains to spur him on. Her masochism might indicate a quest for sensation: this media figure admits that: ‘We live in overstimulated times. We crave stimulation for its own sake.’ Brand wants to ‘audition’ for ‘Videodrome’: ‘I was made for that show’, she brags, but it might be more accurate to say that she was made by that show. Wren is told that ‘They used her image to seduce you’.
The ‘Videodrome’ programme is explicitly linked by both Wren and Convex to male sexual response (something ‘tough’ rather than ‘soft’) and penetration (something that will ‘break through’). Wren takes on the ‘tough’ sadistic role with Brand, and yet there is no doubt that it is she who controls the relationship, she who dominates.40 Similarly, the power granted to the ‘Videodrome’ viewer to observe and relish its brutality masks the programme’s actual function: to increase social control and establish a new means of dominance over the population. Wren is superficially the master of Brand and ‘Videodrome’, but ultimately master becomes slave. In a Baudrillardian revision of the Frankenstein myth, even Brian O’Blivion is condemned: the creator of ‘Videodrome’ is its first victim.
The Third World flavour of the mise-en-scène of the ‘Videodrome’ programme, found in its low-tech electrified clay walls and the neo-stormtrooper guise of the torturers, exists in distinct contrast to the ‘Videodrome’ technology, which is electronic and invisible, disseminated ‘painlessly’ through the mass media. ‘In Central America’, Wren tells Brand, ‘making underground videos is a subversive act’. In North America too, it would seem, as the ‘Videodrome’ signal is subversive of experience, reality, and the very existence of the subject.
It is the voluntarism of the television experience which permits the incursion of controlling forces. A strictly political-economic reading of Videodrome would find little difficulty in situating the work within Debord’s model, but Videodrome moves beyond the classically political through its relentless physicality. Following his exposure to the ‘Videodrome’ signal, Wren begins a series of hallucinations. Wren assaults Bridey, his assistant, and in a series of shot/reverse shot pairings, Bridey becomes Brand, then Bridey again. Disorien-ted, Max apologises for hitting her. Bridey answers, ‘Max … you didn’t hit me’. As O’Blivion tells him: ‘Your reality is already half-video hallucination.’
A videotaped message from O’Blivion suddenly becomes more interactive. ‘Max’, he says, all trace of electronic filtering gone, ‘I’m so happy you came to me’. O’Blivion explains the history of the ‘Videodrome’ phenomenon while being readied for execution: the executioner is Nicki Brand. ‘I want you, Max’, she breathes. ‘Come to me. Come to Nicki.’ Her lips fill the screen, and the set begins to pulsate, to breathe. Veins ripple the hardwood cabinet; a videogame joystick waggles obscenely. All boundaries are removed as the diegetic frame of the TV screen vanishes from view: the lips now fill the movie screen in a vast close-up. Wren approaches the set as the screen bulges outward to meet his touch, literalising the notion of the screen as breast. His face sinks in, his hands fondle the panels and knobs of the set as the lips continue their panting invitation.
Later, Wren’s body literally opens up – his stomach develops a massive, vaginal slit – to accommodate a new videocassette ‘programme’. Image addiction and image virus reduce the subject to the status of a videotape player/recorder; the human body mutates to become a part of the massive system of reproductive technology (‘you are a programmed tape recorder’). The sexual implications of the imagery are thus significant and not at all gratuitous: video becomes visceral.41
Cronenberg moves the viewer in and out of Wren’s hallucinations, creating a deep ambiguity regarding the status of the image. It is easy to accept his attack as real, although the transmigration of identities clearly marks Wren’s demented subjectivity. Yet the attack was entirely hallucinated: the ‘real’ cinematic image is unreliable. In the extended hallucination of the eroticised, visceral television, the filmmaker gracefully dissolves the bonds which contain the spectacle. The TV screen is contained by its own frame, but Cronenberg’s close-up permits the image to burst its boundaries and expand to the non-diegetic limits of the cinema screen. In a later hallucination, a video-Brand circles Wren with whip in hand, proferring it for him to wield. The image moves from video hallucination to cinematic reality within a single shot; the shift in visual register marks the spectacle’s passage from visual phenomenon to new reality. Wren accepts the whip, but Brand is now no longer present in corporeal form; she only exists, shackled, on a TV screen. Wren attacks the bound(ed) image in another moment which recalls the visual punning of Margritte.
Cronenberg, then, does not reify the cinematic signifier as ‘real’, but continually mutates the real into the image, and the image into the hallucination. There is no difference in the cinematic techniques employed, no ‘rational’ textual system, which might distinguish reality from hallucination for the film viewer. Each moment is presented as ‘real’: that is, as corresponding to the conventions of realist film making. These unbounded hallucinations jeopardise the very status of the image: we must believe everything or nothing. Through these textual mutations, these estrangements of cinematic language, the science fiction of the spectacle destabilises the field of representation by constructing a set of indefinite semantic constructs.42
Wren hallucinates his appearance on ‘Videodrome’, but is ‘Videodrome’ a programme composed entirely of recorded hallucinations? If so, then there is a progression from hallucination, through image, to reality: the scene is real because it is televised, it is televised because it is recorded, it is recorded because it is hallucinated. In its themes and structure, the film serves as a graphic example of Baudrillard’s viral immixture of TV and life (which echoes Burroughs’s injunction that ‘image is virus’). Baudrillard adds that the media is a virus which ‘controls the mutation of the real into the hyperreal’. The viral metaphor is strikingly apt when applied to Videodrome – the literalised invasion of the body by the image, and the production of tumours which produce images. Image is virus; virus virulently replicates itself; the subject is finished. We remain trapped within a universe which seems to be someone else’s insides.
Body and image become one: a dissolution of real and representation, certainly, but also of the boundaries between internal and external, as the interiorised hallucination becomes the public spectacle of the ‘Videodrome’ programme. In the post-spectacle society all such boundaries dissolve: ‘We will have to suffer this new state of things, this forced extroversion of all interiority, this forced injection of all exteriority … we are now in a new form of schizophrenia.’ Our response changes: ‘No more hysteria, no more projective paranoia, properly speaking, but this state of terror proper to the schizophrenic: too great a proximity of everything, the unclean promiscuity of everything which touches, invests and penetrates without resistance.’43 The subject has ‘no halo of private protection, not even his own body, to protect him anymore.’44
The slippage of reality which marks the textual operations of Videodrome can certainly be associated with the commensurate process in the writings of the saboteur Burroughs, who repeatedly declared that we must ‘Storm the Reality Studio and retake the universe’.45 Burroughs’s cinematic metaphor reaches a kind of apotheosis in Videodrome, as the images flicker and fall, their authority ultimately denied, but there is no glimpse of a Reality Studio behind the levels of reality-production.
Reality-slippage, with its echoes from Plato’s cave, is also the province of science fiction author Philip K. Dick, another obvious influence on Cronenberg. Dick’s paranoid sensibility explores the alienation which results from seeing through the spectacle. The central characteristic of his protagonists involves their crises of subjectivity which begin when the real violently dissolves around them. Such a metaphysical dilemma does not represent a failure to map oneself onto the world, but is interwoven with ontological change and primarily with the rise of spectacle and the expansion of the technologies of reproduction.
Dick challenges the instrumental rationalism of spectacular society through estranging rhetorical structures which construct a maze of decentred ambivalence in which multiple characters interact in a futile quest to fix reality, and therefore themselves, in place. The reader is plunged into the neologistic excess which characterises the science fiction text. These terms cannot be read through, for the unfamiliarity they engender is precisely their purpose. The discursive ambiguities of Videodrome surely derive from Dick’s, and Burroughs’s, spectacular/structural deformations.
Dick’s novel UBIK (1969) is dominated by telepaths and half-lifers, dead people who retain some residual brain function and exist in a cryogenic partial existence. Joe Chip (a blip culture name if ever there was one) is subjected to reality erosion, as temporality itself seems to reverse its valence. Only UBIK, a product packaged in historically appropriate forms (aerosol, ointment, elixir), can briefly restore the familiarity of the present day, and so the narrative propels its characters on a quest for answers and for UBIK. UBIK first seems to stand as a Platonic meditation on the rift between appearance and reality. Objects are shadows of an ideal form. Chip’s refrigerator devolves from computerised servant to freon-based cooling system to icebox: a reversed succession of manifestations of the Idea of a Refrigerator. Appearance, image and spectacle are homologous terms when placed in dichotomous opposition to ‘the real’. If UBIK simply remained with this Platonic analysis, it would only be notable for its ultimate reification of a reality which underlies shifting levels of appearance. But UBIK undermines such idealism. A character’s ability to alter the past implies the existence of myriad presents, none more real, finally, than any other.
The depressing truth is that Chip is trapped in half-life, his ‘reality’ subject to the whims of a deranged, but stronger, psyche. He might be privileged to look upon the final level, the Reality Studio where reality is staged: but reality is nothing more than the fantasies of a madman. A final shift moves the reader out from Chip’s half-life experience to his employer’s position in the ‘real world’. The living human finds currency adorned with the image of Joe Chip, just as Chip had earlier found money bearing his employer’s image. ‘This was just the beginning.’ Final reality is itself only a shadow; the reification of the real is replaced by a recursive structure of infinite regression. UBIK presents, not a dichotomy of appearance and reality, but an unresolved dialectic.
Further, UBIK gains its force and originality by examining the central importance of the idea of reality, while resisting its existence. UBIK is in demand because it fixes reality (in both senses of the word: it repairs the real and locks it in place). Appearance is not simply negated as a deception, but is posited as a necessary condition of existence.
Five years after UBIK’s publication, Dick reworked it as a screenplay for Jean-Pierre Gorin. In a manoeuvre recalling the cinematic mutations of Burroughs’s screenplay-novel, The Last Words of Dutch Schultz (1975),46 Dick wanted his work to end by regressing to black-and-white stock, silent footage, flickering effects, and by finally bubbling and burning to a halt. The screenplay retains some of this: a drive through a simulated landscape features the repeating backgrounds of inexpensive television cartoons; a character speaks with defective sound synchronisation; another scene is ‘very dim, as if ‘bulb’ is weak in ‘projector’’.47 Film becomes a physical substance which bears traces of reality, but which remains pure appearance. Dick’s manipulations, like Cronenberg’s, deny cinema’s status as transparent conduit of truth.
UBIK performs an effective deconstruction through its very structures, but it is in that commodity of commodities, UBIK, that the work rejoins the analysis of the spectacle performed by Debord, Baudrillard, Burroughs and Cronenberg. UBIK is the product which permits the maintenance of appearance and, in the novel, each chapter begins with an advertisement for this mysterious and ubiquitous balm. In becoming a consumer, the subject overcomes perceived lack, fixes appearance, becomes an image. The commodity defined reification for Marx; labour’s abstraction is contained in its inertia.48 Commodities and spectacles reassure and threaten by confirming a relation to the world through a temporary pseudo-satisfaction lasting only until the can is empty or a new commercial is on. UBIK stands as the ultimate example: the ur-commodity. UBIK becomes the work of commodity fetishism, featuring a product whose function is only to sustain the illusion of coherence. ‘I came to UBIK after trying weak, out-of-date reality supports’, beams a happy and secure(d) housewife.
In the screenplay these commercials interrupt the action, but also serve as a superimposition, a layering of images which blocks appearance. ‘We understand that despite [the image’s] fidelity to graphic representationalism, it is incomplete’ (p. 31). The spectacle is displayed in spectacular fashion, faithful to reality but, through its apparent incompletion, not interchangeable with it. ‘Something has come between us and what we have been watching, something in a sense more real or anyhow real in a visibly different sense.’ Diegetic reality shatters in a gesture which reflects on the experience of the real through the experience of the cinematic, as in Video-drome.
Reprogrammed by Bianca O’Blivion in Videodrome, Max Wren prepares to take the next step. ‘You’ve become the video word made flesh’, she tells him. ‘Death to ‘Videodrome’ – long live the new flesh.’ The terror must be overcome, the attachment to the body surrendered. Wren makes his way to a rusted hulk – a ‘condemned vessel’ – in the harbour. The decaying walls match the colour of his jacket. Wren is another ‘condemned vessel’, trapped within the confines of the old flesh, an outmoded conception of the body and the self. Aboard the vessel, Max fires at his own temple and there the film concludes; ambiguously, unsatisfyingly. What is the new flesh?
One postulation might hold that Max has attained the paradoxical status of pure image – an image which no longer retains any connection with the ‘real’. Videodrome comes strikingly close to moving through the four successive phases of the image characteristic of the era of simulation as described by Baudrillard.49 First, the image functions as ‘the reflection as a basic reality’. Clearly, until the hallucinations begin, the viewer trusts the cinematic image as the sign of truth. Doubts may be raised concerning the enigmatic image of the ‘Videodrome’ programme, its ostensible Third World aesthetic belied by its Pittsburgh transmission point. Here the image ‘masks and perverts a basic reality’. In the third phase, the image ‘masks the absence of a basic reality’, which has, in fact, been the argument behind the works explored here. The film propels its audience along this trajectory, possibly achieving the status of Baudrillard’s fourth phase, in which image ‘bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum’. Beyond representation itself, such an image could not be represented, and thus the film ends. Videodrome, then, enacts the death of the subject and the death of representation simultaneously, each the consequence of the other.
Videodrome presents a destabilised reality in which image, reality, hallucination and psychosis become indissolubly melded, and it is on this level that the film becomes a work of postmodernism, rather than simply a work about it. The subversion of conventional structures of filmic discourse here corresponds to the ‘progressive’ use of language in science fiction where a neologistic excess and literalisation of language foreground the reading process in a discursive play which resists the totalisation of meaning. The viewer of the film is analogous to the viewer of the TV show: trapped in a web of representations which infect and transform reality. Cronenberg evidences an extensive concern with this dissolution of boundaries in all of his films. Plague viruses and parasites demonstrate the vulnerability of the body to invasion from without; telepathy and physical projection break down the dichotomy between public and private; subjectivity and temporality collapse; man merges with machine; a teleporter is proclaimed to end all concepts of borders. A particular yearning cuts across Cronenberg’s body of work (work of the body); a desire for dissolution which is always accompanied by a fear of the void.
The final stage of Baudrillard’s four phases of the image, wherein the image no longer bears a relation to an unmediated reality, is the hallmark of the age of postmodernism. The potential trauma which might be expected to accompany this realisation is frequently elided by a regression to simple nostalgia, as both Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson have noted.50 Arthur Kroker has further written that ‘The postmodern scene is a panic site, just for the fun of it’; an era of crises for their own sake, where the injunction of crisis now ironically serves to cover over the abyss of non-meaning.51 Conversely, the insistent figurations of Baudrillard, Burroughs, Cronenberg and Dick represent a stunning hypostatisation of the concerns of postmodern culture, and constitute a discursive field which retains the power to unsettle, disorient and initiate the crucial action of questioning the status of the sign in sign culture: a spectacular immunisation against the invasive powers of the image virus.
Notes