David Cronenberg is famously for his obsession with the body and flesh as it relates to themes related to science fiction and horror. His early low budget films Shivers and Rabid are placed among the vanguard of the “body horror” sub-genre with Dead Ringers and his remake of The Fly viewed as instrumental in bringing it into the mainstream. This focus on the deterioration of the flesh as the root cause of mental disintegration is often exhibited in graphic imagery that has been found as viscerally powerful use of the cinematic medium as often as it has been described as repellant to the point of verging on pornographic.
A wide chasm of debate has stands between the most widely expressed interpretations of Cronenberg’s focus on flesh and fantasy. On one side sits those who read Cronenberg’s films as subconscious manifestations of a repressed conservative psyche in which a liberal aesthetic is waged in constant battle and cannot help but produce reactionary imagery confirming stereotypical male fears of castration and suspicion of the female. On the other sits those say his imagery are manifestations of stereotypical male fears of castration and suspicion, but presented with conscious awareness as an ironic exposure of that very same reactionary hypocrisy. Videodrome is often singled out as the most coherent examination of Cronenberg’s obsession with the relationship between the flesh and the mind and if that is so, then both sides are wrong and the answer is much simpler.
Legendary film critic Robin Wood asserts that the “true subject of all horror films is the fear of the release of repressed sexuality.” Horror tradition is based upon that released repression being given form and substance as the Other. Vampires, werewolves, zombies, ghosts—all the classic monsters are all manifestations of repressed desires given form and the capacity to inspire fear. From a Freudian point of view, then, all these monsters as well as those with a shorter history are really just of the mind and what is the mind but part of the body.
Enter Videodrome. Videodrome is not the first film to explore the potential for the Other and the person whose fears projected it become indistinguishable. This idea traces back to Mr. Hyde who springs full forth from the mind of Dr. Jekyll and inhabits the same body—as twisted and corrupted as that body may be. The primary difference between the Jekyll/Hyde movie and Videodrome, of course, is that the audience as well as the character can tell the difference. Cronenberg’s greatest influence on the horror film is taking this concept of the norm and the Other to a level in which neither the audience nor the character can be sure which is which.
What Videodrome seems to be suggesting quite strongly is that Cronenberg’s obsession with repulsive imagery relate to the body undergoing extreme transformations is that all horror is biological in origin and stems from primal fears buried too deep within the mind to escape in any other way. Since sexuality is means of creation and transformation of the body, it stands to reason that the means of fears escaping through the body would also take on sexual connotation. At least, that is what Cronenberg’s influence over his direction of a story that originated in his own mind as a child watching images from forbidden US TV signals invading his home after his own Canadian networks had signed off the night seems to strongly suggest. Repression is the location of all horror, but it is not the Other, it is our self.
