Videodrome: Body Horror, Masochism, Insanity, and Unreliable Narration

David Cronenberg’s 1982 film Videodrome takes ideas of cyborg figures and subversive identification with disabled characters into rather different territory. The film tells of Max Renn, the programmer of a pirate exploitation TV channel, who stumbles across a mysterious TV signal called “Videodrome,” which shows women being tortured and killed. As he investigates Videodrome, Max learns from a renegade media theorist that viewing the signal is changing him physically, causing a brain tumor that results in bizarre hallucinations. Max finally cannot tell these hallucinations from reality; meanwhile, a sinister corporation persecutes him and he finally kills himself in a messianic move to become reborn as “the new flesh.”

Part art film, part science-fiction/horror, and partly financed by a Hollywood studio but with a solid following among cult and academic audiences, Videodrome is a solid example of a fantastic film in the unreliable narrational mode (for a fuller examination of these films and their narrative devices, see Church, 2006) that has proliferated increasingly over the last decade or so. Straddling both mainstream and art-house acceptance, these films are typically cross-generic hybrids that blend traits of art film narration and classical Hollywood narration to produce marked narratological effects. All of these films share fragmented narratives that are focalized through extreme subjective devices (like dreams, memories, and psychosis) that only become known to the spectator (often through a reality-changing “twist”) at the end of the film (if at all), finally either providing audiences with clues to reconstruct the shattered plotline or leaving the narrative entirely open-ended and up to personal interpretation. As in Videodrome, the lines between objective normative reality and subjective mental states are blurred indistinguishably in unreliable narrative films, leaving gaps and a lack of closure in the narrative that must be actively filled by the perceiving spectator based upon a carefully controlled stream of cues emanating from the consciously deceptive text. Other examples of these films include Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999), The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999), Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2001), Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001), Jacob’s Ladder (Adrian Lyne, 1990), and Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972). Other Cronenberg films to use unreliable narration include Naked Lunch (1991), eXistenZ (1999), and Spider (2001).

While these films may not necessarily be “fantastic” in a definitive sense (even if many of them belong within traditionally fantastic genres), they nevertheless produce effects synonymous with the melding of imagination and reality that denotes the fantastic. The substantial framing of diegetic reality through the subjective lens of mental processes—often exposed in a shocking moment of revelation that entirely subverts the normative nature of that previously believed diegetic reality—leads to an overall fantastic tone. Compare, for example, how many unreliable narrative films directly employ fantastic tropes in their subjective refiguration of reality through mental processes—as in the portrayal of protagonists slowly realizing their own crossing over into the afterlife in unreliable narratives like Jacob’s Ladder, The Sixth Sense, Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, 1962), Siesta (Mary Lambert, 1987), Abre Los Ojos (Alejandro Amenábar, 1998), and Stay (Marc Forster, 2005). Even films that would seem to demand the normative constraints of social realism, such as the award-winning biopic A Beautiful Mind (Ron Howard, 2001), become fantastically imbued once a narrative’s subjective framework is exposed and mental processes subvert the spectator’s sense of diegetic reality. The direct influence of the supernatural may not factor into unreliable narratives at all, but devices of extreme protagonist subjectivity strongly bordering on solipsism are all present: dreams (e.g., Mulholland Drive), flashbacks (e.g., Memento), and psychosis (e.g., A Beautiful Mind) are the most common devices employed.

This latter device is of the most interest to me here. I have thus far focused primarily upon the representation of physical disability, but mental or psychological disability is also noteworthy, especially with mental illness and psychosis appearing so commonly in films now that the 20th and 21th Century medicalization of physically disabled bodies has removed them from some of their earlier “freakish” connotations, leaving “psychological freaks” as a supposedly less offensive source for representations of apparent human aberrance. The interior quality of “invisible disabilities” like mental illness can allow for a greater degree of “passing” as nondisabled, which is often the case early on in unreliable narratives that use psychosis as a subjective focalizing device; the mentally disabled protagonist is typically just as unaware of his/her psychosis as the audience, thus concealing the narrative’s mysteries until both protagonist and audience come to the shared realization of just how misleading their sense of (subjectively experienced) diegetic reality has been all along. As in fantastic films in general, unreliable narratives do not necessarily use clinical diagnoses of mental disabilities, many instead using “psychosis,” “madness,” and “insanity” as broader classifications to denote the otherness of the disabled characters. For example, the protagonist of A Beautiful Mind is given the medical diagnosis of schizophrenia to explain his imaginary friend and persecution fantasies, the characters in Identity (James Mangold, 2003) are revealed to be the multiple personalities of a convict with dissociative identity disorder, and the protagonist of Memento has an acquired short-term memory loss disorder. However, less clinically defined are the mental illnesses in films like Fight Club and Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997), both of which feature split personalities, and in others like Videodrome, where the cause is a permanent and lethal brain tumor; even the very first unreliable narrative, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1919), was framed through the subjective viewpoint of an incarcerated madman. It is notable that in many other unreliable narratives that do not necessarily involve either the supernatural or mental illness, madness and insanity are often attributed to the identity-shattered protagonists and they often end up in asylums—for example, the time-traveling Cole in 12 Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1995) and the hero of The Jacket (John Maybury, 2005).

What is most fascinating about unreliable narratives that use mental illness or disability as a focalizing device is that the framework of extreme subjectivity needed for the film’s narrative deception involves such an intense spectatorial identification with the disabled protagonist. Perhaps nowhere else in modern cinema (certainly not in mainstream cinema, nor in social realist films) are viewers invited to identify so strongly with a disabled character, to share the subjective experience of that disabled character’s “reality” so dramatically that it affects both the form and content of the film. (One film that veers toward this level of extreme identification is Harmony Korine’s 1999 film Julian Donkey-Boy, although it is not a proper unreliable narrative because its protagonist’s schizophrenia is known to the audience from very early on.) After the shattering of diegetic reality, the spectator’s resulting sense of disorientation and perceptual instability is even a sensation sometimes casually compared to (temporary) insanity and madness—hence the “mindfuck” nickname given to this style of narrative, as if producing similar effects in the viewer as supposedly experienced by a mentally unstable person with a “fucked” [sic] mind. Of course, these are films made by nondisabled persons for a nondisabled audience, as the broadly negative depictions of mental disability should suggest. The portrayals of disabled characters’ “insane” or “psychotic” mental states are reductive and sensationalistic, relying primarily upon cinematically realizing the mysterious and “fantastic” qualities popularly associated with the psychotic mind. Just as the physically disabled body is culturally linked to the fantastic and the domain of imagination, the mentally disabled mind is supposedly capable of imaginatively conjuring up all manner of fantastic effects by virtue of its purportedly unstable, solipsistic grasp on normative reality. The representation of mental disability in unreliable narratives is yet another telling example of the sort of liminal/subliminal intersection found in fantastic film’s realization of imaginative processes within a normative realism. Though it is used in largely exploitative ways by nondisabled filmmakers for nondisabled viewers, the extremely subjective identification with disabled characters provided by unreliable narratives could potentially be a viable tool for politically motivated filmmakers to bring positive representation of mental disability to a wider (nondisabled) audience.

In Videodrome specifically, the cyborgian intermeshing of human flesh and machine technology is vividly and grotesquely realized. Liminal (normative reality) and subliminal (Max’s hallucinations) become solipsistically indistinguishable from one another in the same way that unreliable narratives and/or fantastic films both blend normative realism and mental processes, individual authorial fantasy and collective visions; the film’s direct linking of sadomasochistic spectatorship to direct bodily affect highlights the film spectator’s cyborgian positioning as a human subject interconnected with the cinematic apparatus (which Cronenberg would also explore in the virtual-reality unreliable narrative of eXistenZ). Virtually all of Cronenberg’s films use “body horror” to highlight the vulnerability of the human body, often by showing grotesque unions of flesh and technology; in Videodrome, this occurs as a vaginal slit opens in Max’s stomach to allow videotapes to enter, a gun that bloodily fuses to his hand, a headset used to record his hallucinations, and so on. As Cronenberg (1993) says, Videodrome is about “the evanescence of our lives and the fragility of our own mental states, and therefore the fragility of reality” (p. 144). In his use of body horror and depiction of horrifically perverse images, Cronenberg deftly connects the sadomasochistic process of film spectatorship (especially in the solipsistic “realities” of unreliable narratives like Videodrome) to the transindividuating potential of the grotesque carnival body (which shows the collective fragility of corporeal embodiment), and to questions of whether fantastic films (like Cronenberg’s earlier sci-fi/horror films) can actually incite the spectator to real social deviance. This question of the spectator’s relation to “dangerous” images and their supposed potential to cause dangerous behavior also places Videodrome within the generic subset of “meta-horror,” or horror films that consciously expose the inner workings of horror films in general. [6]

As Cronenberg’s comments suggest, the human capacity for mental disability can be just as important a source of anxiety about corporeal embodiment as the “threat” of physical disability, for the mind (which of course includes the physical structure of the brain) is responsible for our subjective sense of reality. “Our own perception of reality is the only one we’ll accept,” he explains. “Even if you’re going mad, it’s still your reality. But the same thing, seen from an outside perspective, is a person going insane” (Cronenberg, 1993, p. 94). Unreliable narratives like Videodrome expressly play with this solipsistic quality of perceived reality in their realization of diegetic reality lensed through a character’s extreme subjectivity. But it is precisely this sort of blurring of fantasy and reality that causes conservative outcry to be leveled at fantastic films in general (e.g., horror/cult films) for their purported ability to influence the minds of viewers (especially cultishly devoted repeat viewers). Perhaps what is so threatening to conservatives about the “dangerous” images in fantastic films (especially horror and other body genres) is the subversive potential represented by the unruly and grotesque carnival body (whether it belongs to the “insane” killer or the mutilated victim), reminding us all of the fleshy frailties of corporeal embodiment. The fantastic and horrific film is thus a temporary carnivalesque space that conservatives, fear mongers, and arbiters of social taste refuse to officially sanction, instead labeling as potentially “dangerous.”

As film theorists like Clover (1992) and Shaviro (1993) have argued, horror films involve a masochistic submission to images that highlight the fragility of the human body and mind. As both a body horror film and a fantastic unreliable narrative, Videodrome is like an index of cinema’s masochistic unpleasures. I have written elsewhere (see Church, 2006) about the especially masochistic effects in both form and content produced by unreliable narratives, and those main points are worth briefly repeating here. Following from Studlar’s (1988) theories of film spectatorship as a masochistic act, unreliable narratives feature protagonists with shattered identities and unstable formulations of reality, leaving the spectator with no point of identification but the subjective fantasies of a tormented mind that is powerless to control or make sense of the diegetic world. This subjectivity directly informs the formal qualities of these narratives as the spectator’s hypotheses about the sequence of plot events are repeatedly shattered and revealed as false, delaying indefinitely the satisfaction associated with classical cause/effect motivation and complete narrative closure. This leads to an overall sense of submission to the deceptive narrative, both for the spectator and the protagonist. This sense of disempowerment (especially in cases when madness or insanity is the focalizing device for the unreliable narrative) places the nondisabled viewer in the sort of disempowered, feminized position culturally relegated to persons with disabilities in a patriarchal, ableist society. However, while such an intense identification with a mentally disabled (or broadly, “insane”) character might seem potentially positive, the exploitative use of such identification for the provoking of masochistic unpleasures in the nondisabled spectator leaves much to be desired. A nondisabled spectator is free to experience a temporary sense of disempowerment because, as in the temporary inversions of carnival, he/she still retains hegemonic power in an ableist society once the film ends. The nondisabled spectator’s pleasurable act of actively reconstructing the fragmented narrative after the film ends allows for a sense of normative reality/sanity to be aggressively reconstituted, thus reasserting and further naturalizing the sense of a “sane” normative realism in which nondisabled people can still exert power over persons with disabilities.

Stepping back now from unreliable narratives, it would seem that fantastic films in general might produce masochistic unpleasures through their use of fantasy to destabilize normative realism and plunge the spectator into unfamiliar imaginative worlds that speak to collective cultural fantasies yet often remain a disorienting individual authorial vision. By representing the intersection of the liminal and the subliminal in the realization of dreamlike images from the cultural subconscious, grotesque disabled bodies often people these strange, Otherly, and carnivalesque worlds. As Brottman (2005) says, the grotesque carnival figure suggests a loss of bodily control and a “fearful desire to dissolve the contours of the self,” violating ego boundaries in its close relation to “fantasies about merging and fusion” (p. 46, 49)—all of which, I might add, are unpleasures closely associated with masochism. Because the disabled body is culturally figured as a signifier of death (or the potential for death), the common representations of physical and mental disability in fantastic films may be linked to the masochistic desire for death as an unattainable and complete dissolution of ego, psychoanalytically associated with a final reunion with the pre-oedipal mother; this desired reunion can only take place “in madness, death, or fantasy,” says Studlar (1988, p. 188). Cronenberg’s original ending for Videodrome would have emphasized this nicely, for Max shoots himself, only to be reborn as the transformed “new flesh,” united with his female counterparts within the technology-mediated world of Videodrome (Cronenberg, 1993, p. 97).

This cyborgian idea of a “new flesh” uniting human and technology remains intriguing because it seems to allow for a masochistic paradigm to exist within film spectatorship that would allow for positive identification with, and representation of, persons with disabilities. Just as Garland-Thomson (1997) sees the feminist post-gender potential of the cyborg figure as applicable to the culturally feminized disabled body, further explorations into the notion of all film spectatorship as a process of cyborgian interfacing may well yield a model for viewing films outside of the often stultifying political correctness of the disability studies field. Of course, I have fallen back repeatedly upon that same political correctness in this article—for the negotiating of positive and negative representations is indeed an important project for any liberation movement, but there is also a need for a more inclusive, less hypercritical paradigm of cinematic textual analysis. [7]

Because nearly all films are some kind of exploitative fictional fantasy, the fantastic film could be self-reflexively indicative of the potential for a new critical lens. As the site of intersection between mind and body, liminal and subliminal, internal and external, fantasy and reality, self and other, fantastic films could be taken as a more possibly cyborgian form of cinema, one that sheds new light on film spectatorship as a whole. In a sense, all films (both fantastic and social realist) are carnivalesque spaces that temporarily suspend everyday reality as the spectator indulges in a constructed diegetic world—and therefore all films also share the problematic resumption of “normalcy” and hegemonic power that marks the end of carnival. Like the “disability simulations” aimed at nondisabled people (and frequently derided by disability activists) [8], all films (being of a limited temporal duration) merely offer to the nondisabled spectator a temporary identification with a disabled character, before normative reality and ableist power relations are restored at the film’s end. Nevertheless, the imaginative framework of the fantastic film moves the grotesque disabled body from the margins of representation and into the spotlight, much like the freak show performer on stage: an exploitative spectacle for sure, but one which might inadvertently point back toward our own cyborgian mode of spectatorship, revealing us all as part of the “new flesh” so grotesquely intertwined with the disreputable pleasures of technology.

Endnotes

¹ Examples of social realist films widely remarked upon by disability studies discourses include My Left Foot (Jim Sheridan, 1989), Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994), The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946), Million Dollar Baby (Clint Eastwood, 2004), Born on the Fourth of July (Oliver Stone, 1989), Coming Home (Hal Ashby, 1978), Bad Day at Black Rock (John Sturges, 1955), and many others. In my discussion of social realist vs. fantastic films, I am not trying to set up a binary opposition between the two types, for indeed there are often overlapping realistic and fantastic qualities within the same film; for example, although David Lynch often uses disability for surrealistic and fantastic purposes, his film The Elephant Man (1982) is rooted primarily in social realism but still bears some “fantastic” stylistic traits. One difficult subgroup of disability film to define is the melodrama (including several of the films noted above): these show disabled characters (broadly characterized as tragic or supercrips in most cases) within a non-fantastic world of normative realism, but use manipulative appeals to excess, emotional spectacle, and victimization. These often resemble the “male weepies” described by Williams (1999) as part of her formulation of “body genres” (p. 276). Despite the unrealistic character types and melodramatic excesses of these films, I am not including them in my consideration of the “fantastic” due to their fixity within a normative realism.

² It should be emphasized that a disabled body does not necessarily connote “freakery,” for freakery entails what Chemers (2005) defines as “the intentional performance of constructed abnormality as entertainment.” Even if almost all cinema is historically predicated upon exploitation and voyeurism for entertainment, the social realist film supposedly treats the disabled body differently than fantastic films. Although damaging stereotypes like the supercrip and self-loathing cripple are more likely to appear in social realist films, and despite the same ableist prejudices against persons with disabilities being found in both broad types of film (which are therefore both highly exploitative in their depictions of disabled bodies), the traditional alignment of fantastic films with “escapism,” sensationalist “low” juvenilia, political unviability, and imaginative effects (meant to cause amusement, shock, and wonder) nevertheless throws the fantastic film toward more strongly paralleling the freak show. I would argue that the forces of medicalization and political correctness have merely displaced the intended effects of the freak show into different sorts of narratives featuring disabled characters: horror and shock can still be found in horror films; pity can be found in the melodramas depicting disabled characters as tragic; and wonder persists in the stories of triumphant “supercrips” conquering great obstacles.

³ It is notable in this sense that André Breton (1969) had considered the term “supernaturalism” instead of “surrealism” to more properly name the avant-garde movement that he helped found. He claims that “supernaturalism” would have been a more fitting descriptor for the sort of fantastic imaginative effects derived from dream states and memories (p. 24-25). The supernatural is indeed one of the most instrumental factors in formulating the fantastic, for it directly involves the violation of “normative realism” by unexplainable and unnatural occurrences such as typically only exist in the imagination.

⁴ Garland-Thomson (1997) observes that disability is such a fluid identity because it crosses more stable marginalized identities (e.g., femaleness, blackness). For nondisabled persons then, the constant “threat” of potential disablement makes the fluidity of disability all the more menacing (p. 14). Also it should be noted that the leveling, collectivizing effects of the grotesque carnival figure seem somehow linked to Davis’s (2002) concept of “dismodernism” as a challenge to the medical model of disability’s conceptualization of a “normative” body. The medical model of disability disables by paternalistically considering impairment to be a problematic deviation from the imagined concept of a normative body, thus treating impairment (a permanent state) as in need of a “cure.” Davis (2002) discusses dismodernism as a means of removing distinctions between “healthy/sick” and nondisabled/disabled bodies by way of locating all people on a fluid continuum of wellness that respects impairment and resists categorically assigning health-related values according to clinically diagnosed symptoms.

⁵ Hollows (2003) observes how camp and cult are two categories of film that often overlap based upon similar reading and consumption strategies; for example, cult films are often consumed because of their campy qualities. She notes that cult is often based on “connoisseurship” in defiance of “mass taste,” stressing the selection of object choices, while camp is more about playfully and subversively reinterpreting any text, including mass culture texts, against the (dominant) grain (p. 38-9). As a mass culture text with both camp and cult potential, Scissorhands represents a blurred intersection between cult’s selection strategies and camp’s interpretation strategies. Camp is typically associated with a homosexual sensibility, and the almost formulaic outcast-teen romance in Scissorhands certainly conforms to this potential for a queer reading, in which the forbidden object of desire (Kim, the stereotypically pristine cheerleader beauty) slowly defies her possessive lover (Jim, the stereotypically aggressive heterosexual jock) as she falls for the sensitive social outcast. Scissorhands is also a case in which we might see realized Sontag’s (1999) observation that one origin of modern camp is the Gothic tradition (p. 56). Another point of possible discussion, given that mentally and physically disabled characters are so common in fantastic films and that fantastic films often elicit camp reading strategies, is the link between homosexuality and supposed mental “abnormality.” Just as apparent physical and/or mental abnormalities are typically used in representation to connote one another, older clinical definitions of homosexuality have similarly conflated mental and physical, mind and body; for example, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) listed homosexuality as a mental illness until 1973 (and in various other forms until 1994). Of course, the reprehensibly prejudiced belief that homosexuality is a learned symptom of mental abnormality still persists amongst conservative society today, somewhat paralleling the naively conservative belief that viewing certain types of fantastic films (which not only link mind and body, but also invite subversive readings like camp) can cause other “abnormal learned deviance” relating to sex and violence.

⁶ Other notable examples of meta-horror include Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960), Opera (Dario Argento, 1987), In a Glass Cage (Agustín Villaronga, 1986), Demons (Lamberto Bava, 1986), Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (John McNaughton, 1990), amongst others.

⁷ Just as the liberating potential of spectatorial masochism remained largely untheorized by feminists for many years due to its apparent ties to victimization, disability studies has also neglected this important area of (un)pleasure. Despite deploring the clinical gaze used by the medical model, disability theorists have yet to fully acknowledge their own employment of that same clinical gaze when analyzing disability in film. Studlar (1988) and Shaviro (1993) have both theorized masochism as a mode of spectatorship that eliminates the clinical gaze by removing the aesthetic distance between spectator and spectacle, going beyond the pleasures of the body genres described by Williams (1999). These theorists use Deleuzean theory to locate the visceral pleasures of all film spectatorship within the viewing body itself. This type of corporeal embodiment seems crucial to a new understanding of disability film, even if it proves controversial. By focusing on the social and medical models’ constructions of disability, disability studies scholars have moved away from corporeality, for fear of reinforcing an essentialist view of disability as located within the body itself. However, I believe that even in the absence of all social and cultural barriers, a corporeal dimension of disability would still (for many people, though not all) exist, whether in the form of chronic pain, limited mobility, etc. Furthermore, the policing of “positive” and “negative” representations denies some of the very real experiences of persons with disabilities. What needs to be formulated is an aggressive “queering” of disability representation that allows for all films, no matter how politically correct, to be read “queerly” by persons with disabilities, acknowledging the fluid and multiple identifications of all spectators. Deleuze’s conceptualizations of “becoming,” combined with considerations of disability’s constructedness and corporeality may well be the key to this new critical framework. For a useful example of scholarship linking corporeal feminism, Deleuzean theory, and queer theory, see Geller (2005/2006). Shildrick’s (2002) study of monstrous embodiment remains another key text that could importantly apply to film.

⁸ Disability simulations (e.g., public wheelchair trials) are common to college campuses and other highly traveled areas. Led by well-intentioned groups aiming to raise disability awareness by allowing nondisabled people to “see how it feels to be disabled,” participants are invited to try their hand at moving with a wheelchair (or other device for assisted mobility) or experiencing some sort of sensory limitation. Disability activists point out that while, for example, temporarily using a wheelchair may momentarily illustrate the challenges to mobility and access faced by persons with disabilities, a full appreciation of the disability experience cannot be reached so easily, for the social model of disability creates continual challenges and deeper prejudices that a nondisabled person will not experience.

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Author Bio: David Church graduated from Western Washington University in 2005 with a B.A. in English. He is currently pursuing graduate cinema studies at San Francisco State University. Aside from contributing to Offscreen, his work has also been published in Disability Studies Quarterly and Senses of Cinema.