Episode 157: Long Live the New Flesh: On David Cronenberg's 'Videodrome'

"Death to Videodrome! Long live the New Flesh!"

It was perhaps inevitable that the modern Weird, driven as it is to swallow all things, would sooner or later veer into the realm of political sloganeering without losing any of its unknowable essence. David Cronenberg's 1983 film Videodrome is more than a masterwork of body horror: it is a study in technopolitics, a meditation on the complex weave of imagination and perception, and a prophecy of the now on-going coalescence of flesh and technology into a strange new alloy. In this episode, recorded live after a screening of the film at Indiana University Cinema in Bloomington, JF and Phil set out to interpret Cronenberg's vision... and come to dig the New Flesh.

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REFERENCES

David Cronenberg, Videodrome

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb

Weird Studies, Episode 75 on “2001: A Space Odyssey”

Richard Porton and David Cronenberg, "The Film Director as Philosopher: An Interview with David Cronenberg"

George Hickenlooper and David Cronenberg, "The Primal Energies of the Horror Film: An Interview with David Cronenberg"

Weird Studies, Episode 144 with Connor Habib

William Friedkin (dir.), The Exorcist

Plato, Timaeus

William Gibson, Idoru

CBC, Yorkville: Hippie Haven

Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess”