Steve Reads

I’m nearing the end of Monaco’s book How To Read A Film — and thank god, really, because the guy is wandering all around topics that don’t really relate to film, like the economics of sitcoms — and I’m reminded of a calculation related to digital videos: if you want to record 30 frames per second of true-color video, and make it large enough to fill up a standard computer screen, a two-hour-long film would take about 8.5 gigabytes of storage. As far as I know, DVDs don’t yet have that much space; they use lossy compression to save space while losing some detail from films. In other words, DVDs still aren’t the ideal way of reproducing film. Fortunately, storage gets cheaper by the year, so there will surely come a time when we have nearly perfect fidelity to film on a digital medium.

Speaking of DVDs, I’ve bought an unholy number of DVDs recently: the Brazil three-DVD set, Orson Welles’s The Third Man and Citizen Kane, Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Woody Allen’s Manhattan, Godard’s Breathless, and Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.

I just finished watching David Cronenberg’s film Videodrome, about a future/present world where people watch incredibly depraved, sadistic snuff television. James Woods plays an executive at a porn company who’s interested in selling the snuff TV (whose brandname is Videodrome).

It’s pretty interesting stuff, largely in spite of what Cronenberg creates. First, Cronenberg seems to have no problem describing himself as a horror-film director; in the (flimsy) supporting materials for the DVD, he mentions that horror films force people to confront something that’s buried inside of them. His horror-film roots lead to lots of gratutitous gore, none of which could serve to address the viewer’s psychology in any conceivable worldview. Then there are the random characters thrown in with strange clichéd Hollywood types (e.g., the mysterious woman with the German accent), none of which really do anything. Maybe Cronenberg is ironically subverting the Hollywood stereotypes, but at some point irony becomes indistinguishable from a waste of time.

Finally, there’s the sadistic-sex-combined-with-nudity element, which arises a few minutes into the film. We get there via a television talk show in which James Woods gets to answer two or three questions, flirts with one of the other guests (played by Deborah Harry) on the show, and eventually beds her. All so that we can learn she’s masochistic, which leads her to try out for Videodrome. She’s a stand-in for a larger cultural problem that Cronenberg is diagnosing, but she’s never more than an empty shell of a character.

In short, the film had a point to make, but Cronenberg smeared it with so much cinematic plaster that he almost lost that point.