« Spaghetti and Tapeballs | Main | "Post-Cinema" Wiki Contribution »
Sep
13
Cronenberg reactions
Apologies to all you Cronenberg fans out there, but... I really feel physically sick after watching Videodrome and a tiny part of me is screaming in fear that I'm going to start hallucinating that my stomach is going to open up and eat the keyboard I'm typing on.
I don't even know what it is that makes them so hard to watch... it probably has something to do with the fact that I'm very easily trapped in the web of unreality and my imagination will take given imagery to unprecedented heights of effectiveness. (or maybe everyone is like that?) Even though some of the body parts and other gore looked so plastic and fake... it was still incredibly nasty and was successful in provoking a very visceral response.
eXistenZ was a little easier to digest (har har). I suppose I liked it a little more, if one can "like" such films. And the term that was mentioned at the end of that one... "reality deformists"... hit me like a ton of bricks. What a perfect phrase for what happens in these movies. What a terrible idea that describes, if it ever came to fruition.
The only thing I want to say about Videodrome is that I noticed a funny similarity to Snow Crash in the methodology. I was having a hard time just understanding what was going on to Max Renn, but realized it was something similar to what was described in Stephenson's novel... both of them featured an electronic and/or virtual mechanism for physically affecting people in the real world. In Videodrome, it was a TV signal that created a tumor by which people could be programmed to do things, whereas Snow Crash featured a computer virus that when viewed by player avatars would literally crash the brains of the players behind them.
And uh, yeah, Videodrome came first. :P
There was also the parallel of Max Renn to Neo... both of them being "the one" to turn the system around. And yeah, Videodrome obviously came first there, too.
::checks the syllabus:: Oh good, no more Cronenberg. Steve Anderson, my stomach thanks you.
