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

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 8 November 2023

⏱️ 74 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

"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. Support us on Patreon. Buy the Weird Studies sountrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page. Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia. Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop Find us on Discord Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau! 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” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Spectrevision Radio
0:02.0	Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.
0:20.0	For more episodes or to support the podcast,
0:23.4	go to weirdstudies.com. Hi, welcome to Weird Studies. This is Phil.
0:53.7	This week, J.F. and I are coming to you live from the Indiana University Cinema in my hometown of Bloomington, Indiana.
1:03.0	J.F. visited me for a few days the week before Halloween. During that week, we co-taught a seminar on Plato's Tameas and Speculative Music,
1:12.4	alongside our intrepid assistant Meredith Michael.
1:15.8	And a couple days after that, J.F. and I recorded an episode on the Tameas,
1:20.8	which we will be releasing in a couple of weeks.
1:24.1	But the main business that week was recording a live show at the IU Cinema to accompany a screening
1:30.3	of David Cronenberg's extremely weird 1983 horror film Videodrome. The IU cinema is one of the
1:38.7	jewels in IU's crown, and it was a special honor to do a show there. We would like to give a big thank you to
1:45.0	its director, Alicia Kosma, who scored a beautifully restored print of videodrome for the occasion,
1:51.2	and is an all-round cool person. And also, to Alicia's Jeeves-like staff. Since this was a live show,
1:59.7	we didn't bother recapping the plot of Videodrome, because we
2:02.9	all just watched the movie together and that would have been weird. So here's the story. James Woods
2:09.1	plays Max Wren, the president of a small TV station that airs edgy, trashy, exploitative affair.
2:16.9	But all anyone pitches him is period drama sprinkled with a
2:19.9	little softcore sex, and Max is bored. He's looking for more, something that'll really break through,
2:27.1	he says. Something tough. Max finds what he's looking for, a pirate broadcast called Videodrome, meaning something like
2:36.8	video circus or video arena, appropriately enough, as we are soon to meet a mad media prophet,
2:43.6	Brian Oblivion, who tells us, quote,
	...

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