David Cronenberg's "Videodrome": Media Theories and Cultural Clichés

This essay approaches David Cronenberg’s celebrated movie Videodrome (1983) not as a Sci-Fi film exploring the future but instead as a movie which helps to better understand complex media theories of the time (1980s). Probing ideas coming from the School of Toronto, and especially from Marshall McLuhan, Videodrome frames the side effects of an environment where television is still the dominant medium. Consistently, in that movie Cronenberg assesses the technological extension of the human body, as well as the psychological effects on human beings living in a hyper-consumerist landscape, in turn leading to blur inner and outer self and to subvert traditional sexual and moral biases. However, while opening up the doors of perception to the complexity of the technological environment soon to be superseded by the digital revolution, that movie nevertheless casts a mask on McLuhan, which limited our appreciation of both the man and his message and, at the same time, of the School of Toronto legacy.