You're living inside a 1983 horror movie

Added: 2026-05-10

[00:00:00]Ah, the 80s. The smoking on TV shows, the patting employees on the butt as a friendly hello. You know, inserting a VCR into your chest cavity. The 80s had everything. But what can a very weird, very controversial, very peaks film by David Croninberg, a film so strange it was a flop on release and then somehow became a cult classic and then somehow became a prophecy? What can a movie like that tell us about the algorithmic hellscape that we're all currently living in today? Let's find out.

[00:00:31]Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait. For those of you in the audience who weren't alive in the 80s and have no idea what a VCR or a VCR cassette is, well, a VCR is, you know what? It doesn't matter. We'll find out together soon enough.

[00:00:52]So, Video Drrome, if you've seen it, you probably remember it for the freaky stuff. You know, the breathing television, the slit in James Wood's stomach, the flesh gun, everything with Debbie Harry in it. And if you haven't seen it, well, I envy you a little bit, to be honest, because you're about to have a great time. And we're going to walk through it together in a minute.

[00:01:11]But here's the thing. 43 years on, this film looks a lot less like science fiction than it did in 1983. People love to say that Croninberg kind of predicted social media in this film, and he sort of did, but that framing for me undersells what's going on in this movie cuz he didn't predict our specific technology or circumstances. He just noticed something older and much weirder. something about us, about what we want, and about how we get hooked on things, and about what happens when somebody actually figures out how to hijack our desires for their own purposes. And he embodied all of it in this film. He made it flesh. the pattern he described, it keeps fitting decade after decade after decade regardless of which technology happens to be on the menu because we keep forming these addictive relationships with a few new twists each time. So, forget all the intellectual stuff just for a minute, just for a second, because I want to tell you that Video Drone is a blast of a film. Before any philosophy, let's just enjoy that about the film for a bit and let's run through all of the weird crap that happens in this film because we are in Toronto and it's very much the early8s. A guy called Max Ren played by James Woods, you know, before he went crazy in real life and he runs a low rent cable TV channel called Civic TV.

[00:02:35]>> Civic TV, the one you take to bed with you.

[00:02:39]Max programs basically, and this was a strategy back in the day, the cheapest, the most provocative content that he can find. Stuff like, you know, softcore porn, exploitation, anything gonzo or offthe-wall. And he's kind of like, even as he's portrayed in the film, he's sort of just a low-level dealer rather than a villain. Someone who knows what his audience wants, which is sleas, and then finds it and gives it to them. The trouble really is though that when you deal in outrage and sex and sleas every day, it eventually gets boring. So Max is always on the lookout for something tougher. He says, >> "I don't know.

[00:03:17]It's soft. Something too soft about it.

[00:03:25]I'm looking for something that'll break through, you know, something tough."

[00:03:30]and he's been pulling this pirate broadcast out of the air, a thing that used to happen. Move on. And one night he picks up something really strange. He picks up a signal with no station ID, no production credits, no story, nothing.

[00:03:43]Just a claywalled room and a lot of disturbing violence. And then the broadcast ends.

[00:03:51]>> That's it. That's it.

[00:03:54]>> And for the first time in a long time seeing it, Max can't look away. He's excited. He gets obsessed. He starts trying to figure out who's making it because he wants it and where it's coming from. And he drags in his colleagues and his contacts and eventually meets a media figure on a debate panel that he immediately tries to seduce.

[00:04:13]>> Listen, I'd really like to take you out to dinner tonight.

[00:04:15]>> And Max's only lead on where video drone is coming from is another panel member who didn't quite appear on that panel. A strange media philosopher called Brian Oblivion. Oblivion only appears on a TV monitor. He refuses to appear on television, he says, except on a television, which you know, yeah, very cute. And the character is openly modeled on Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian media theorist and philosopher.

[00:04:39]And he gives us the film's most quoted line.

[00:04:42]>> The television screen >> has become the retina of the mind's eye, >> which has aged extremely well in the way that only certain prophecies do. Nikki, meanwhile, is getting obsessed with video drone 2. She wants to go to Pixsburg where she thinks it's being made. She tells Max, >> "I'm going to audition.

[00:05:03]>> I was made for that show.

[00:05:04]>> Nobody on earth was made for that show."

[00:05:06]>> And he tries to talk her out of it. He's starting to realize the danger of all of this, the thing that made it exciting and has now made it quite threatening.

[00:05:15]But she goes anyway, and she does not come back. She disappears. This is where the film starts to kind of slip its moorings and where Croninberg really earns his reputation for weird as well as his outstanding production crew because Max starts hallucinating or we think he's hallucinating because the point is we're not really sure what's real in the film and what's in just Max's imagination. The TV starts behaving strangely. It starts breathing, pulsating, developing lips. Nikki appears inside the screen calling to Max from behind the glass and we get one of cinema's strangest love scenes in which Max essentially makes love to a television set and then his body starts changing and this is where the classic Croninburgg body horror lives. It's an opening in his chest that wants to be fed. That even swallows a gun when he probes an opening in his chest with a gun that that even takes a VCR cassette. Yes, one of these into it. Max is now a desiring machine with an input slot. These are the images that I think people remember the film for. They're iconic. They're also why I think people misremember it a bit as just a body horror film because they're so vivid and they crowd out everything else. They seem to like hijack our own fears and our own late night impulses. But while all of this is happening, there's actual plot that's moving on in the background, which is very interesting. Max is being pulled in two directions at once by two different factions. Both of them trying to use him. And on one side, we have Spectacular Optical.

[00:07:00]It's a corporation that on the surface makes glasses and on the underside is actually a defense subcontractor. Their CEO is Barry Convex, which again, fantastic name. fantastic character and he is softspoken. He's professional.

[00:07:13]>> An enthusiastic global corporate citizen.

[00:07:17]We make inexpensive glasses for the third world and missile guidance systems for NATO.

[00:07:21]>> He's the kind of guy who commissions war crimes during the week and is a pillar of the local church on Sundays. Convex is using the video drrome signal as a weapon. He wants to, as he says, cleanse North America, which he thinks has gotten soft and there are hard times ahead. He talks about it as if it's a public service he's performing and a holy mission. You know, one of those guys. And quick aside, because this really has nothing to do with the plot, but Croninberg includes the most brilliant parody in this subplot of a corporate product launch that I think has ever been filmed.

[00:08:32]Just great. 10 out of 10. Show of the year beats Apple Presentations hands down. On the other side of this battle, we have the Oblivion family. It turns out that Brian Oblivion has actually been dead the whole film. He was killed by video drrome or some kind of sinister forces related to them years ago, which is why he only ever just appears on tape. You know, just like this. Like, hype, and subscribe. And his daughter Bianca runs a kind of shelter called the Cathode Ray Mission. And just a second here, but cathode rays were how the '8s television works. And yes, they did literally fire electrons at your face onto a screen. It it was a different time. The mission gives homeless people access to television, which is a hilarious concept in and of itself, but it's treated as like therapy or communion rather than entertainment so that they too can be transformed like everybody else is in their homes at night. Bianca agrees with convex that the signal transforms people. She just think it should be used for liberation or what she considers liberation rather than control. Same signal, different politics, and Max is caught between the two. Now, the film escalates from here in a way that I won't fully spoil because part of it is the joy of watching it all unfold. There's a flesh gum. There's a hand that becomes a weapon. A magnificent moment where someone has a tumor removed by another tumor. The conspiracy gets weirder and weirder and weirder. And the graphic effects are frankly hilarious. And by the end of it, Max is alone in a derelict room with a single television.

[00:09:58]And the television is showing him what he's about to do. And then he does it because by this point, there's no daylight left between what's on the screen and what's in his head. He whispers a phrase that's been circulating in different mouths throughout the whole film. And the movie ends on it with the classic iconic, >> I'm with the new flash.

[00:10:18]>> And that, for our freaky late night viewing pleasure, is Video Drrome.

[00:10:22]Ladies and gentlemen, the film gives us a hard time for seeking out and watching it in the first place, watching this kind of weird, warped material and really enjoying it. But then it is enough of a gentleman to make it really fun and smart and give it to us anyway.

[00:10:37]So now you're asking me what does all of this mean and why watch it now and what does it say about 2026? Cuz I think it actually has a fair bit to say. I think Video Drrome is really a film about wanting. About the strange, restless, never quite satisfied wanting that we're all walking around with most of the time. About what happens when something gets in between us and that wanting and starts interfering with it, starts adjusting it. So, we're going to walk through that kind of argument in four parts. In part one, let's talk all about desire. Max's something that will break through. you know, Lan and the Gap, Nikki Brand, and what I'm going to call my Amazon problem, which is genuinely a problem, and I'm not joking. In part two, we'll talk about the body, what the signal actually does to Max once he's been watching long enough. Why Croninberg makes that change look the way it does, and what it means that Max experiences the change as becoming more himself rather than less. And in part three, we'll talk about the control side of it all, which I think you might have suspected was coming. You know, the spectacular optical part, the fuko and delurs part, the Bianca oblivion case for the signalers liberation, and the question of whether this kind of dial and interference should exist in the first place. And in part four, we'll talk all about the politics very briefly about what happens when this whole machinery starts working on whole populations at once and why so much of what we now call political feeling or political argument or political ideas or disagreements or whatever it is has actually stopped being political in any meaningful sense that would have made sense 50 years ago. So that's kind of my argument in the process. It's a film about us, but it's also a hell of a film. So, let's start where the film starts with Max Ren looking for something that will break through.

[00:12:39]So, look, before we get to Max though, I want to tell you about my Amazon problem, cuz I do have an Amazon problem. I'm sorry. I'm not proud of it.

[00:12:46]We all have crosses to bear, and this one, frankly, is mine. So, here's what happens. It's usually late, and I've had maybe a glass or two of something, okay?

[00:12:54]and I'm tired, but I'm not really ready for bed yet. And I'm doing that thing where you're not really watching what's on TV or you're not really reading whatever is in front of me. I'm just sort of hovering. And in this state, I open Amazon, not for anything in particular. I'm I'm not looking for a specific item. I'm I'm looking for the answer. That thing that if I could just find it and order it, it would finally fix whatever's wrong with my life right now. And of course, the problem appears to me. must get this thing to fix this problem because this is really what's standing in between me and success in my life making meaning and sense which is right nothing technically but also everything. So I scroll and I add things to my cart and eventually I find the magical object that will finally sort out everything and I order it and I close my laptop and I go to bed feeling like I have done something. I have accomplished something like the problem has been solved. And the next day, or usually three days later to be honest, a battered package shows up on my doorstep and I open it and inside is, and I'm not making this up, this happened. Inside is a diehard themed advent calendar with a tiny figurine of Hans Gruber that you make fall from the top of Nakattoi Plaza day by day as you get closer to Christmas. And I look at it and I think, it's the middle of the year. and I go, "What the hell is this?" And the next evening or the evening after that, the cycle repeats. Sometimes, to be fair, I do remember ordering the thing.

[00:14:23]Definitely not the Hans Gruber advent calendar, though. The package arrives and I go, "Oh, great. I wanted this."

[00:14:28]And then I put it on the shelf and I forget completely about it. By next Saturday night, I'm back on Amazon. I'm looking again because somewhere in between then and now, the gap has reopened again. And there's a new object that this time will definitely sort my entire life out. But there never is. The object that will solve things does not exist. But I keep searching for it anyway. And that's kind of what's wrong with Max Ren at the start of Video Dome because Max isn't a monster. He's not depraved. He's not even by the standards of Toronto cable television in 1983 particularly bad. Max is just numb. He's spent years programming his channel with the most provocative content he can find, and he's watched all of it repeatedly, professionally, until one day, none of it really connects with him anymore. He's just the daily parade of taboo material that keeps civic TV profitable and has become background noise to him really. So, when he tells his colleagues he's looking for something that will break through, he's describing a threshold problem. the same threshold problem that you and I are running into late at night perhaps when I open up Amazon at 11 p.m. or whichever app it happens to be for you and you start scrolling. Whatever was supposed to satisfy us, it no longer does. We need something that will cut through finally and make the thing that we want feel like the thing that we have. And that's the gap. Not the store, but the feeling or the lack of feeling perhaps.

[00:15:56]The French psychoanalyst and philosopher Jacqu Lan made a distinction about 60 years ago that's basically the entire engine of this film and the engine of our phones too. I have to say there are two kinds of wanting lean said you have the first kind. It's it's straightforward. You're hungry. You eat a sandwich. You're satisfied. Want fulfillment. Done. Out. Lovely. Most of us experience this most of the time.

[00:16:21]We're doing this kind of wanting. We're fine. There's a second kind of wanting and this one is sneakier. It's the kind where getting the thing doesn't help because the want was never about the thing. The want was about the gap, the reaching out itself. The sense that something crucial is just out of frame, just beyond the next click or swipe. And if you could only get to it, then you'd feel what? Real, awake, whole. The crucial thing about that second kind of wanting is that the object you're chasing or I'm chasing there, the thing on the other side of that gap, it does not exist. Not because we haven't found it yet. Not because Amazon hasn't surfaced it for us yet, but because it is structurally impossible from the start. Nothing could ever do that job, although occasionally some things do come tantalizingly close briefly. And Croninberg, I think, shows us this in two ways. He shows us these different kinds of wanting and the second one is kind of the one that most people miss in video drone because the first one is obvious. Max chases the video drone signal not because the content is good.

[00:17:28]I mean the content is barely content.

[00:17:30]It's just a claywalled room and some violence but because it promises access to something that he can't reach. Direct contact with the real sensation without mediation the feeling of feeling. But he also needs that signal in the second way. He needs it to be almost satisfying perpetually so that the chase keeps going so he can keep running after it.

[00:17:51]And it does. He watches it once. He watches it again. He keeps watching. The second way too that Croninberg shows us the gap opening is through Nikki Brand and through a way that's a little bit sharper because when Max meets Nikki on the panel show, she's on television. Max is on television, too. There's a charge.

[00:18:10]They go home together and they're in his apartment and they're together and the film kind of loses interest in them a bit. Their relationship in person in real time with a real Ruben, it's flat.

[00:18:22]It's not as fun. Croninberg doesn't really dwell on this part. He just kind of lets it happen. And then Nikki disappears. She vanishes into the video drrome audition or wherever she goes.

[00:18:32]She gets reabsorbed into the screen. And suddenly Max is desperately in love with her again and lusting after her. The TV starts showing her. She calls to him from inside the glass. The screen swells and breathes in that iconic scene. It becomes a service he can press his face into and she's there. She's beckoning.

[00:18:50]She's always just out of reach. The traditional reading of this is that Max is in love with the idea of Nikki, that he can project onto an image of her what he can't project onto a real person. But I think the truer reading here is a bit more structural. I think it's like when Nikki is in front of Max, the gap is closed. The package has arrived. There's no reaching. The desire kind of flatlines, but when she's reabsorbed into the screen, the gap reopens, and the desire comes howling back. He can only want her when there's a screen in the way. The screen isn't getting in the way of his desire. It's what makes the desire possible at all. And that's a slightly horrifying thing to notice about a fictional character. But it's also a worst thing for us to notice about ourselves because I desperately want the stuff on Amazon when it's on Amazon when I'm putting it into the card and when I'm contemplating ordering it through a screen and imagining my life with that thing. That fictional projective almost play acting thing. But when it arrives, me, it's the potentiality, not the actuality, that momentarily fills that gap. What I think is new, what's new in video drrome and new in our lives too, is that something else has also inserted itself into the relationship between us and the gap which has always been there. But something new is in the middle, a layer or a medium, something that sits between you and your wanting and starts, let's say, just, you know, adjusting those dials and those settings. In the film, it's called the signal. But in our lives, we just call it the algorithm.

[00:20:28]And here's the kicker. And I know we all know this on some levels, but if the platforms made money by closing the gap, by actually delivering the friend, the answer, the satisfaction, the thing, then the entire economy would be built differently. They'd be optimized for fulfillment. You'd open the app, you'd get what you needed, you close the app, you'd live your life. We'd all be outside holding hands and dancing in a circle or something, whatever it is that people do outside. But that's not what the platforms are for. And we all know this, too. They're not for closing the gap. They're for keeping it open.

[00:21:00]Therefore, making sure that whatever you came looking for, you don't quite get.

[00:21:05]But you do get just enough of a hint of it to come back tomorrow or the next time and look again. And the loneliest economy by this measure isn't a side effect of all of this. It's the entire product. And Max in all of this pursuit and all of this lusting after video drum and Nikki, Max didn't notice. Max just got pulled into this cycle. And what happens to him next is what happens to you when you let the gap eat you.

[00:21:33]So up to this point, Max has been the one watching the signal. From around the midpoint of the film, the relationship kind of flips. It turns the other way.

[00:21:41]And let's talk about addiction for a second because the word can be used and abused. But addiction is older than the internet. Of course, it is. It's older than television. It's older than video drove and David Croninberg and older than almost everything. People have been getting hooked on substances, behaviors, and relationships for as long as there have been people. So, Croninberg is not really making a film about addiction as such. I think he's making something stranger and something a little more interesting. He's making a film about what happens when something changes you.

[00:22:12]When a signal, and I'm using that word deliberately here because it can mean a broadcast or an algorithm or just a steady input of stimulus, when it gets into your nervous system and starts rearranging the furniture in there. And then you, the rearranged version of you, want different things from the version of you that walked in. And that's clearly what's happening to Max. And Max's hallucinations don't start dramatically. They start in a way that's almost funny. the TV is on and the screen or the top just sort of bulges and it like it's breathing and Max squints at it and Croninberg doesn't understood it with too much heavy music.

[00:22:46]He just kind of lets it happen. He lets us the audience do the work of going, "Wait, what just happened here?" And then it happens again and Max snaps back. The screen and the top is breathing all the time. this TV is coming alive and then Max's apartment starts behaving strangely and then there's the slit in his stomach that appears and the videotape that goes into it and all of the crazy stuff that follows and then we're firmly in territory where we did not start. So Max is in the moment. It's happening to him.

[00:23:16]He's absorbed and absorbing. Max doesn't experience this as horror, but we do cuz we're watching from the outside. We can see the change. We're appropriately freaked out from inside Max though. The new flesh isn't an invasion. He actually in the movie seems to experience it as becoming more fully himself. He seems to be almost on board with a lot of the transformations. The slit feels like an opening. The cassette feels like an answer when he's programmed with it. The hallucinations. They feel like a kind of clarity. At least that's the way I read kind of Max's expressions and his reactions. By the time he whispers long live the new flesh at the end of the film, he's not surrendering something.

[00:23:57]He's arriving. And I think this is the thing that Croninberg really got right about all of this that nobody else who imitated him afterwards ever quite managed to do. The signal doesn't take Max over by force. It's not that kind of classic forceful horror. It convinces him that it's everything he's ever wanted. That it's doing to him what he wanted all along. The new flesh feels in this film like self-expression. And Croninberg has talked about this film in interviews over the years. And one of the things he said, and I'm paraphrasing a bit, is that a part of what he was doing with video drone was running an experiment on the sensors fears. The fear in the early 1980s was that exposing people to violent imagery would unleash their aggression. They go out and do violent things. It was the foundational anxiety of every panic about the media in the late 20th century. You know, from like that Dungeons and Dragons one to Marilyn Manson to violent video games and Grand Theft Auto, all of those panics, all of that stuff. the content gets in and then suddenly we turn into violent beasts who rage around the countryside.

[00:25:01]Croninburgg's answer to all of that panic in this film is colder than that and and and I think more on point because the signal doesn't make Max more dangerous. Although he still is very dangerous, but everybody is. It it kind of does the opposite actually. It makes him more pliable, more soft and suggestible. The video drone signal is the kind of weapon, but it's a weapon that isn't designed to create monsters.

[00:25:28]It's designed to create instruments, which I think inverts the whole panic thing. The worst thing that the signal does on Croninberg's account isn't make us more extreme. It's to make us more compliant. The dangerous, radicalized outliers aren't the product. They're lab leaks or whatever they are. The product is the soft, suggestible, desiring body that eyes and that watches and that scrolls and that can be used to assassinate your enemies and be suggestible and that reliably comes back tomorrow. The signal it I think the film is trying to say doesn't need to coers us. It just changes what we want in the first place. And once it's done that, coercion becomes redundant. We're already going to do what it wants us to do because we want more. because it feels like we need more and we need to do it in the way that it's showing and we're becoming more ourselves through this thing and this mechanism we're building our profiles and engaging if you will and the film I think is showing us something specific with the breathing TV and with the slit and with the cassette and all of that it's the medium itself not the content not the show but the speed and the rhythm and the tempo of how the thing comes at you that is doing the reccalibration of our nervous system and is making us think that certain things are normal. And once that's happened, we suddenly don't have a baseline to go back to. We can't just turn the TV off because the off state isn't normal anymore. It's boring and weird. It feels like withdrawal. It feels like there's something wrong. And most people who spend serious time with a smartphone also know this feeling, even if they've never quite named it.

[00:27:01]You know, our hand twitches towards our pocket when we're reading cuz it's hard to concentrate these days or dinner with somebody we love, listening and present.

[00:27:08]But there's like this low hum underneath saying that the conversation could move faster. I sometimes have this too. You know when you play too many RPGs and you skip through the dialogue fast and then you find yourself, I don't know, talking with an IT person or something like that and you're like, I wish I could press spacebar and skip anyway. And like spending 10 minutes on a park bench with no phone makes the silence feel weirdly aggressive and odd. Three paragraphs into an article you're reading and you're already like scanning for an exit or a way to clip away or flip away to another tab. And it's weird because the world really hasn't changed or gotten worse. The book is the same, your partner is the same, the park bench is the same. We know that we've been recalibrated by how we've been using our phones and what we've been doing and all of that sort of stuff. The medium has trained our nervous systems to expect a different tempo of stimulation and anything slower now registers as insufficient. And that's Max with the world outside the signal. Once he gets sucked into all of this, once video drrome has rewired him, ordinary eye life looks thin and gray and insufficient. Life didn't get worse in that film. Max just got remade. And I think that's something that we all very much recognize. But this is not going to turn into one of those generic YouTube videos that tells you what you already know, which is screens are bad. Let's get away from that because I think the point of video drrome is that the thing we're not we're losing is not our time.

[00:28:28]The time is real and yes, we lose some.

[00:28:29]fine the but the thing that's actually getting eaten is a little harder to see and harder to mourn. We lose our ability to want well to want the right things to want what's healthy or better for us.

[00:28:43]What I mean by that is the ability to form desires that the actual world the one outside of the screen can actually fulfill. Wanting things at a normal human scale. Knowing the difference between a desire we formed ourselves slowly in conversation with our life and a desire that got installed by something else. Knowing what's worth chasing when you've got it and when you can stop. The signal in video drrome disables that our equipment for forming our own wants has been returned. We're wanting things that the world can't deliver. They don't exist because the gap that produced them has been industrially widened to keep us all reaching and reaching and reaching.

[00:29:23]And that artificially widened gap, that longing, that reaching, it starts to define who we are. Once we can see that the signal isn't just doing things to max, but changing what max is. Then the next question I think we should ask is pretty obvious. Who decided what the signal would do? Because somebody did.

[00:29:47]And this is the bit that I think we might miss if we just associate video drone with body horror because there's a whole paranoid conspiracy going underneath it too which is really interesting and really connected to those transformations. It you know the signal didn't drift in from outer space.

[00:30:03]It has a manufacturer. It probably has a board of directors even and a marking department and a plan. It has Barry convex at the very least. The corporation in this case is called Spectacular Optical and they make eyeglasses on the surface and defense contracts underneath. Their CEO is a man called Barry Convex. And Barry Convex is one of my favorite villains in a film to be honest because he's so mild. He's so softspoken and reasonable. He's smiley.

[00:30:29]He's fun to spend time with in a way. He has a great throwaway line about how he can't really stomach the freaky stuff he sells. whether that's defense contracts or torture broadcasts is something that the film leaves wonderfully ambiguous.

[00:30:41]He could be running a regional bank somewhere. Instead, he's running a campaign to reorganize the population's nervous systems. His plan, too, if you actually listen to it in the film, is almost offensively modern. Like, Convex isn't trying to brainwash everybody in North America. That would be expensive and inefficient and probably impossible.

[00:30:59]What he wants to do is for the signal to do the work on just enough people. The video drone broadcast isn't really entertainment and it isn't really propaganda. In fact, it actually, as we're told, doesn't need anything to work anyway. Doesn't have to have any content. It's a screening device. It's the medium as the message. It's um it identifies who's susceptible, who can't look away, who keeps coming back, whose body starts changing in response. And then it reprograms those people, the compulsive ones, the ones who fall in too far, who are already hooked. Their compulsion is the vector. And Convex doesn't need to get to everyone. He just needs to get to the ones the signal has already filtered for him, which is how he finds Max. Incidentally, the product, in other words, isn't the content. The product is the dependency. The content is the bait that keeps the mechanism going. And in a 1983 movie that required a defense contractor, a conspiracy, and a secret broadcast. Today, we just recognize it as a recommendation engine.

[00:31:56]It's our everyday now. There's a French philosopher you've probably heard of called Michelle Fuko. Partly because I've gone on about him endlessly on this channel, but one of Fuko's big ideas is that power doesn't really work the way we usually think. We tend to think of power as something that stops you from doing something like the cop, the cell, the law, the boss, the saying no. Power is a prohibition. Fuko was kind of trying to say that that's only half of it. That's the loud half. The much more effective forms of power don't stop you from doing things. They kind of shape what you want to do in the first place.

[00:32:30]It makes some desires feel natural and others feel weird. Some behavior is healthy and others feel sick. It works through your body, through your habits, through what you find appealing or disgusting. Fuko called this bio power.

[00:32:44]It's a power that runs through bodies and through populations organizing what they want and what they're capable of wanting, which I think is exactly the situation that Max is slowly finding himself in in the film. Croninberg basically dramatized Fukco in 1983 in a movie about a guy with a VHS slot in his stomach. It's not even subtle. Convex doesn't argue with Max or threaten him.

[00:33:06]He just builds a machine that makes Max's body what Convex wants it to be.

[00:33:12]The whole apparatus of force becomes unnecessary because the desire is already pulling Max in the right direction. Philosophically, the person who picked up the thread of this was another French philosopher Gil Deers. In 1990, Delers wrote a very short essay, seven pages, you can read it on your lunch break, have fun, called Postcript on the Societies of Control. Delers's argument here is that we've already kind of moved past Fuko's world. Fuko's world had specific institutions. It had prisons and hospitals, schools, factories, asylum, you know, physical buildings where bodies were confined and observed and shaped. You knew that you were inside one. You could in principle push against the walls or at least see the doors being slammed closed and locked and see the power in operation.

[00:33:59]Durs said well those walls they've come down. We're now moving into something he called control societies. And the trick of a control society is that there are no walls. You never hit one. The corridor is infinite and it's full of doors that you've opened voluntarily and content that you chose and recommendations that you feel like were tailored just for you because they were.

[00:34:22]You don't get imprisoned in a control society. You get modulated. You get nudged or tuned or kept in motion or adjusted in real time based on how you respond. The corridor never ends. And the corridor is in some real sense designed around you almost personalized.

[00:34:40]It feels like freedom because nothing's stopping you. But nothing's stopping you because you're already going where it wants you to go, which is kind of what is happening to Max. If that sounds like also a description of every recommendation engine you've ever used or every foru page, every autoplay cue.

[00:34:58]Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Fukco would have recognized that kind of power, the structure of it, whereas I think Delers would have recognized the method. and Croninberg basically made a horror film about it before either philosopher had actually finished their writing on it.

[00:35:15]Now, I'd be doing this film a real disservice if I left it there because Video Drrome doesn't let you settle into the pure technism. It complicates itself. And the way it does that is with Bianca Oblivion. Bianca, you'll remember, runs the Cathade mission.

[00:35:30]Homeless people are given access to television, but as a kind of therapy or a communion, something closer to a sacrament than to entertainment. And Bianca believes that her father was right, that television is the next step in human evolution, that merging with the medium, isn't a death sentence, but an opportunity, and that the new flesh, the same phrase Convex uses, the same phrase Max ends the film on, could mean something liberating rather than terrifying. And here's the great great tension that Croninberg builds to and that kind of refuses to resolve. Bianca and Convex agree on the diagnosis. They both think that the signal transforms people. They both think that merging with the medium is inevitable in some way. They've given up resisting it really or never intended to resist it in the first place, but they just disagree about what to do with it. Convex wants to weaponize it for one purpose and Bianca wants to use it for liberation for another. So, is she wrong? And I want to take this seriously a bit because the easy version of this video would be no, the platforms always win.

[00:36:31]The signal is a weapon. End of story.

[00:36:33]And there is a version of that case that I find pretty persuasive. But I don't think it's the most honest case. And I don't think it's what the film is asking us to agree with all the time because the algorithms also do good things. The signal maybe could do good things as well. Algorithms connect us with communities that would never have found each other. They teach skills to people who can't afford formal education. They amplify voices that gatekeepers keep locked out. Political movements have been organized through them. They've been sustained and amplified through the same systems we've been describing as control. There is liberation potentially. The benefits are real. And pretending otherwise to make my critique work a bit better, that would be a little intellectually dishonest. art.

[00:37:16]And this is the bit I think is worth really thinking through. Those benefits are still riding on an architecture that runs on desire and compulsion and the gap. The community building and the skill teaching, the political organizing are all happening inside a corridor that was built to maximize engagement. The liberational uses of the signal don't escape the signal's logic. They're powered by it. So we all may be listening to I don't know insert your selected source here Sam Seder or Pods save America the bull work Hassan Pike or whatever the new liberation theology is that you're getting through podcast or through YouTube or what depending whatever kind we prefer but we're doing it on the same platforms that are quietly working on us at the level that the film actually cares about. Changing our profile picture for example isn't a political act. It just feels like one because the platform is set up to make it feel like one and to make us identify with our programs and what we watch and consume to live our lives through them in a meaningful way. Meanwhile, the actual political work, which is the work that affects whether kids get health care or whether rent stays affordable or whether the climate stabilizes or that's all something that's happening somewhere else where the platforms can't monetize it. which is why the platforms have so successfully pulled most of our political feeling away from there and incentivized everybody else to do it too. So Biana's cathode ray mission and convex's spectacular optical are all running on the same broadcast. The signal doesn't really care which one is operating it. So the standard way to end this discussion in this section would be so the question is who controls the signals? Who gets to set the dials? But for me, the question isn't who controls the dial. The question really should be, and it's an old one, I know, whether this kind of dial should exist at all.

[00:39:03]Because once we build something like this, a system that can identify millions of nervous systems, sort them by susceptibility, and adjust what reaches them in real time, then the existence of that machine is a problem, regardless of whose hand is on it. Maybe today it's people you trust. Maybe tomorrow it isn't. Maybe today the algorithm is showing you community organizing and tomorrow it's showing your cousin something a whole lot worse.

[00:39:27]The dial doesn't care. It just does what it does. What's really interesting for me, and I think we all know all of this on some level, but Croninberg did see all of this in 1983. Spectacular Optical isn't just a standin for one bad company. It's a standin for the people and the corporations working the machine. the machine that lets a small number of people in a clean office with a calm voice and a pleasant tie decide what the whole society is going to want to do next. And once that machine exists at that kind of scale, once it isn't in one man in front of a screen, but a whole population whose nervous systems are being adjusted at once, the machine has stopped being a media company. It's doing the job that politics used to do, which is where the film and we are headed next.

[00:40:20]So politics has turned into media and media is turned into politics. The medium is the message as Marshall McLuhan famously said. But that also kind of means that you know that that we're being transformed into that very thing that everything's kind of merging together in this weird identity laden, desireladen, gapladen kind of way. This is really these merging of all of these structures is fundamentally what we are complaining about when we talk about polarization and outrage and basically all of this discourse now targeting and getting its fingers straight into everybody's central nervous system. Why do I keep saying central nervous system?

[00:40:56]Well, because it's the body horror of the video um and the film, but it's also like it's how we feel when we read and react to this stuff. Politics has moved on from proposals and amendments and attending body corporate meetings and doing all of that, you know, machinery stuff and it has become this kind of feeling outrage circulating stuff that really plugs into something within us. And so I think it's not a mistake that Croninberg makes spectacular optical a defense contractor in this film. He isn't being subtle about it for a reason. The signal isn't entertainment. It isn't advertising really. It isn't propaganda in the old sense in this film. It's just a governance tool. Comx isn't trying to sell us anything. He's just trying to decide what kind of person we're going to be. And once the signal is operating across a large population, well, that's kind of like political programming.

[00:41:49]Right now, politics, the real kind, the kind that decides a whole bunch of important questions, that politics is still happening somewhere. It's happening right now. It's in rooms and in legislatores and in courts and boardrooms and unions and zoning meetings, all that stuff. As Max Vber pointed out, it's slow and boring and it's mostly invisible and it shapes basically everything important about our lives. But the politics, stop and think about this for a second cuz I had to as well and it's a little confronting, but the politics that most of us spend most of our political feeling on isn't that kind of politics. Dayto-day, what we're doing is happening on a screen. We're consuming commentary. We're sharing posts. We're arguing in comments. We're getting hammered by content designed to make us feel like we're participating in politics and we're not. We just dose our bodies. Not really. Not in the sense that matters or makes a difference.

[00:42:39]We're just consuming a product packaging to feel like political action or change a profile picture or share a thread or get angry at the right people, get nostalgic about the right things.

[00:42:50]Politics has become content in a way that is not flattering. We feel like we're doing something and the feeling is genuine. I'm not mocking that feeling. I have it too. And then we close the app and the actual machinery of power just keeps grinding away untouched underneath us. This is the move that I really think we keep missing when we talk about social media and democracy and films like Video Drrome. The the platforms didn't poison politics. They did just something stranger and a little more depressing. They turned politics into a flavor, a brand affiliation, a lifestyle brand, something structurally indistinguishable from being a fan of a sports team. Really, you pick your team, you wear your merch, you hate the rival fans, you feel passionate, you feel involved, and none of it touches the actual game on the field, but you're spending 3 hours a day on it anyway. And this is an accusation leveled absolutely at myself, right? I'm not exempt from this at all. But I think that's what the signal kind of would do to political feeling. It's converted it. It's taken something that used to be at least sometimes at least it its best about getting together and changing the conditions of people's lives and it's turned it into a consumable identity.

[00:43:58]It's actually moved us further away from having our hands on the lever of power intentionally or not. Something the algorithm can show us more of, can sell ads ads against, and can use to keep us in that corridor, that endless corridor, which I think connects back to where we started. The thing the signal eats is our ability to form desires that the world can actually fulfill. And political desires are that kind of desire. It's also been reuned. What we end up with a population that wants intensely and constantly, but wants in shapes that the world outside the screen just can't deliver. Wants that can't be organized around. Wants that dissolve back into the noise the moment you put your phone down. wants that feel like passion in the moment and like nothing the next morning. Wants that can kind of go on forever.

[00:44:52]None of that is a side effect.

[00:44:53]Croninberg's convex saw it coming. He didn't need to convince anyone of anything. He just needed to reune what they wanted at the scale of a whole population. Let the rest take care of itself. Convicts needed a conspiracy to do this in 1983. And it gets pretty exotic. But whereas we don't. We've just got it. The structure of our algorithms and our lives and our platforms now do that kind of stuff for free. So where does this leave us? Well, let's think about the film's ending. Max is alone in a derelict room. The factions have canceled each other out. Convex is, sorry, spoiler alert, but dead. And Bianca's mission has run its course, and there's nothing left in the film except Max, a single television, and a question. The TV shows him what he's about to do, and then he does it.

[00:45:39]Because by that point, as I said, there's no daylight left between what's on the screen and what's in Max's head.

[00:45:45]The medium, the message, and the viewer, the audience and the participant, all of these things have merged. The signal and the self have merged. He whispers the line, "We've been hearing all film in different mouths, meaning different things.

[00:45:58]>> Unlike the new flesh, >> and then that's it. Roll credits. Film's over." They were apparently up against a Christmas shooting deadline and ran out of money. And you can sort of tell in the ending, right? Like the ending is sort of half profound philosophical statement about human machine fusion and half a director going, "Yeah, that'll do. We need to be in post by January."

[00:46:17]Both things are true at the same time to be honest, which is also part of why I love the film because it is a true late night horror movie with limitations and that's part of the experience. That's part of the fun. It's part of the genre.

[00:46:29]A lot of those rocket to a pretty quick and abrupt conclusion because that's the thing that gets lost about video drone when we treat it purely as prophecy. And I just want to remind us of it one more time. Yes, I've intellectualized it.

[00:46:43]I've talked about the message. I've done all of the philosophy stuff that we do on this channel. But this is just a fun film. It's a glorious, freaky, unembarrassed cult horror film of Debbie Harry doing weird stuff, a guy with a VHS slot in his stomach, and Barry Convex, the politest man in any movie ever made, casually announcing a plan to brainwash a continent. It's got that great Medici scene. It's got the breathing TV. It's got a flesh gun.

[00:47:06]Every 10 minutes or so, this film does something that no other film has ever done, mostly without breaking a sweat.

[00:47:12]So, yeah, Croninberg wanted to provoke us. He wanted to make us think about all these things. And I've overintellectualized a lot of them while still stating a very obvious things about the way we live now. But hey, that's me. But I'm also pretty sure that Croninberg wanted us to walk away from this film. To walk out at the end going, "Wow, what a ride. Gee, that was fun."

[00:47:31]And it is. It really, really is. So, what does the new flesh sound like 43 years on? Well, a lot of things, honestly. It It sounds a bit like every platform that promises to empower us while it profiles us. Like every promise of connection that delivers a kind of polished, friction-free loneliness, like a phone in the hand at 11 p.m. on a Saturday with an Amazon card open and three things in it that I'm definitely sure are going to fix my life. I think Croninberg just got the pattern right, social media or not. Desire turned into compulsion. Compulsion turned into control. And control when it operates at the scale of a whole society turning into something that does the job that politics used to do. Whatever the format that happens to be in in any given dec decade, whether it's, you know, television, cable, internet, algorithm, AI companions, whatever's after all of that, the shape underneath it's kind of just the same. One reason that it keeps fitting is that that gap is real. The gap is older than any of this. It's the basic feature of being a creature that wants. But what is new about it? What is new is what happens when somebody figures out how to monetize that gap, how to industrialize it, how to exploit it, how to widen it on purpose, sometimes on schedule or for profit, how to keep us reaching at the cost often of our ability to want well. So yeah, look, at the end of this video, I don't I don't have a clean prescription for us to fix it. Maybe we should all just go outside, hold hands, and do that circle dancing thing. But I still think there's value in seeing it. And I know we we see it every day and other commentators have highlighted in different ways, but this video makes us see it in a different way too, in a fun body horror way in a kind of at a slightly different angle. And that's good. Croninberg, he didn't give us a way out of video drone at the end, but he did give us a really great picture of it. He made the signal into flesh so that we could see it. And he made the new flesh feel like liberation, so we understand why it works and why it's often dangerous. And then he sent us home in the most quoted line in Canadian horror history and let us figure out the rest. So go watch the film. Pour yourself a glass of something nice. Watch the bit where convex says he can't ape with the freaky stuff. Watch Debbie Harry being more charismatic than the camera really knows what to do with.

[00:49:42]Watch the Medici scene and try not to laugh. Watch the whole magnificent unmbarrassed schllocky brilliant thing.

[00:49:48]It really deserves the rewatch. That's why I made this video. But that's it for Philosophical Film Club for now. So until next time, be wise and be kind and Oh, okay. Go on one last time just for me.

[00:50:06]You've pondered the void and paid the soul from being to nothing. You read the law. He's a jokeelling, soul probing feel so bad.