Videodrome, Transhumanism, and the New Flesh

A warning: This video is seriously disturbing and contains violence and body horror. Thank you for your time.

David Cronenberg's film Videodrome is, on its own, a bizarre and disturbing trip into the world of extreme sensationalism in entertainment and its mind-warping power. However, it does introduce a very interesting modern philosophical concept: transhumanism. Transhumanism is the philosophical notion that the human species can continue to advance and evolve by augmenting the human body with biological and non-biological enhancements – that the future of humanity lies in techonologically augmented humans.

One of the factions in Videodrome is the Cathode Ray Mission, established by the late Professor Brian O'Blivion and run by his daughter, Bianca. The mission is a bizarre sort of transhumanist sect with a pre-computer bent: they feel that humanity's future is in video, that there is life in recorded video – that an individual is their image and that a mind can be captured on VHS tapes. In a rather bizarre twist, the mission actually provides evidence for their case, in a bit of a roundabout way: Professor O'Blivion is some years dead when the film begins, yet the world has no clue of this; he makes appearances on television talk shows regularly via his tapes.

More generally, the film supports this notion with the twisted journey that the main character, Max Renn, finds himself taking. Renn is the president for a UHF television network in Toronto; he specializes in gratuitous violence and softcore pornography. In the course of seeking new programming, Renn stumbles upon Videodrome, a “reality” show which consists of protracted torture and ends in murder – staged snuff films, exactly what Renn thinks will be the next big thing. Videodrome is actually produced by a NATO-funded terrorist group; the show is a weapon designed to grow hallucination-inducing, reality-warping tumors in the brains of viewers – lowlifes, in the opinion of the terrorist group, who should be purged from the North American continent.

Renn, throughout the film, has been subjected to a slightly-modified version of Videodrome which has effectively replaced his mind with a fleshy VHS player, and the program his body is playing is the terrorists' – they are using him as a distributor for their video weapon and as an assassin. Bianca O'Blivion, when targeted by Renn, puts in a new tape and uses him to kill the head of the terrorist cell. After his target is eliminated, he is ordered to destroy his “old flesh” and fight Videodrome in the video realm.

Videodrome is heavily invested in bundle theory, in terms of identity. Professor O'Blivion is alive, preserved in his VHS tape library. Max Renn is reprogrammed twice over the course of the film, first into a NATO assassin, then into a transhumanist assassin. His identity is swapped out as easily as one might swap out a VHS tape. The horrifying mutations he undergoes are partially a result of the tumor in his head and partially a result of the changed nature of his mind; his body, as it were, shifts to suit the needs of his new mind and new identity, from the highly-Freudian cassette slot that appears in his stomach to the cancer-inducing weapon that replaces his right hand.

Soul theory is herein invalidated, as the "real" Max Renn, the soul, would have put up some resistance to the drastic alteration of personality and identity. In some way, however, the film could be said to have some soul-like influences on its mind mechanics. If the O'Blivions' words are to be believed, the mind can be preserved in video, although most minds are destroyed. While, unlike the soul, the mind is not indestructible, it can be given an indefinite lifespan. Again, the mind can be, and with the exception of Professor Brian O'Blivion's and Max Renn's minds, is destroyed in death, so it is not a soul or soul-like construct, but it is more enduring than the mind in other works.

This video is a series of clips from Videodrome. The first occurs right after Bianca O'Blivion has inserted her VHS tape into Max Renn. The rest are the results of that first action, condensed.