1983 film Videodrome. Barry Convex the head of Spectacular Optical Corporation, which develops eyeglasses and NATO weapons technology, is giving a speech to unveil a new line of glasses, the Medici line. The theme of the event is the Renaissance, the backdrop consists of the Michelangelo fresco The Creation of Adam and in front of the fresco a giant pair of glasses with stain glass windows for the lenses. There are two quotes on each side.
Barry Convex tells the audience "we're here to celebrate our spring collection - the Medici line. And our theme for this year is based on two quotes from the famous Renaissance statesman and patron of the arts Lorenzo de Medici. 'Love comes in at the eye', and 'The eye is the window of the soul'."
The first quote according to website TV tropes isn't from Lorenzo de Medici but a William Butler Yeats poem A Drinking Song. The second quote is commonly attributed to Lorenzo, but a similar quote appears in the New Testament:
Jesus “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness.” Matthew 6:22&23
Convex' plan in Videodrome is to use televised transmission of snuff torture to induce tumors in the brains of those who watch. This will eliminate the undesirable reprobates of the population. Convex's organization plans to use the violence and sexuality of modern media to further right wing ends using new technology.
"North America is getting soft, patrón, and the rest of the world is getting tough. Very, very tough. We're entering savage new times and we're going to have to be pure and direct... and strong... if we're going to survive them. Now, you and this... cesspool you call a television station... and your people who wallow around in it and your viewers... who watch you do it... you're rotting us away from the inside. We intend to stop that rot. We're going to start with Channel 83. We'll use it for our first transmissions of Videodrome."
Though a petty capitalist Renn´s product, the softcore porn/hardcore violence channel 83, is in conflict with the bourgeois moral values which gave rise to capitalism, and therefore must be destroyed. The continuing competitive pressures and international scope of capitalism make this necessary. The ideology of Convex and company is the bourgeois morality of capitalism. Convex has an outwardly friendly and clean exterior even while he is a ruthless businessman with little sympathy for his potential viewers. That his company produces eyeglasses for the third world and weapon technology for NATO attests to this.
The way to save bourgeois society is to manipulate the new technology to destroy the body through the visual stimulation of television. The new flesh which Max Renn commits to is polymorphically perverse, making the entire body and its technological extensions an erogenous zone.
What struck me recently was that the Renaissance getup of Convex's trade show was intentional. Recently it dawned on me, the Renaissance was the beginning of capitalism. The Renaissance is the aesthetic of capitalism.
Much is made of the influence of Protestantism on the spirit of capitalism, but Protestantism was more ascetic than aesthetic in its attitude toward enjoyment in life. The work ethic Max Weber described was built on self-denial of the fruits of one's labor for the value of the labor itself. Nevertheless Protestantism is very worldly in its attitude towards the world, making wealth a sign of god's favor rather than the church hierarchy.
It was the Renaissance that first brought back an interest in the human body, in the world itself after the Middle Ages. But the interest way only in certain aspects of the body and he world. The printed word from the movable type led to the dominance of the individual's vision, reproduced on a mass scale to give individual authorship. Eyeglasses and weapons technology.
I know the connection between Convex and the Renaissance was intentional in Videodrome. David Cronenberg was influenced by media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who was his college professor at the University of Toronto.
McLuhan's is known for two phrases, "the medium is the message" and "the global village." McLuhan wrote about the telecommunications and the effect it would have on society before the Internet really existed. His big idea is that technology is an extension of the body. Certain technologies empower sense organs in different ways and this has a major effect on the kind of society we have.
"The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and of detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement. It is impossible to understand social and cultural changes without a knowledge of the workings of media."
The written word activates only the visual sense, in a linear fashion as one's eyes cross the page. The authorship is clear and the words are mass produced so everybody experiences the same reality. Television activates hearing as well as the visual sense, making the experience very different. This was exemplified in the Nixon Kennedy debate in 1960 which was the first to be televised. Those who listened on radio thought Nixon did better while those who watched television thought Kennedy did better, with his tan rested posture compared to Nixon sweating under his make up (though I'm not sure how visible this was on old black & white screens...).
Telecommunications like television, film, and later the Internet McLuhan predicted make linear narrative and individual authorship more complicated and difficult. We are not captive to the author's telling of events as our eyes move across the page. Television provides an uninterrupted stream broken up by commercials which can be very different than the program. With sound movies and television we can take in media through several senses which enter our thoughts even if we're not paying direct attention. Sound is harder to isolate a single space. Video games make the tactile sense active in our enjoyment of media.
Now with social media we interact with the content we consume. Also the new media invades our lives in new ways which can't be isolated from our personal lives.
"The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions— the patterns of mechanistic technologies—are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval, by the electrically computerized dossier bank—that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early "mistakes."
The mindset of Max Renn who runs the softcore porn/hardcore violence channel 83 is still within that of the old technology, the old flesh. Max defends his programming as being a harmless cathartic outlet for desire and aggression as opposed to real life sex violence. "Better on TV than in the streets." Max comes in conflict with this view as he searches for harder new material, which he finds in Videodrome. Supposedly from Malaysia, the signal changes the body of the viewer by inducing a brain tumor. Max's own perception of reality alters and objects like a gun and a videotape become part of his body. Max comes to accept his role as social revolutionary when he points his gun-hand to his head and following what played before him on the television proceeds to shoot himself in the temple.
¨Long live the new flesh.¨
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