TIFF Cinematheque’s Toronto On Film series wraps up this Thursday evening at 9:15 pm with a screening of David Cronenberg’s essential culture-horror work, Videodrome. (I’ve written about the series in detail here.)
If you have to pick one Cronenberg film to include in a series about Toronto, Videodrome is the perfect choice. Though the vast majority of Cronenberg’s films were shot here, only Videodrome and Crash really use the city as a stage for their action.
But where Crash necessarily reduced Toronto to a series of asphalt highways and concrete overpasses, Videodrome engages with the city, capturing a snapshot of a Toronto on the precipice of social upheaval … thanks to a scurrilous UHF station that’s planning to introduce pornographic imagery to the airwaves.
It’s called CIVIC-TV in the film, but the narrative’s debt to the real-life furor over Moses Znaimer’s CITV-TV is left entirely undisguised it’s as though Cronenberg built a worst-case scenario out of the controversy that erupted over the station’s Baby Blue Movies in the late 1970s. Where in the real world, Torontonians were mildly scandalized by the softest of soft-core images, airing late at night, Videodrome envisions the movies as a carrier wave for a full-on assault on the city’s eyeballs – a terrorist act that gives birth to the New Flesh.
It’s my pleasure to introduce Thursday night’s screening on behalf of the Toronto Film Critics Association alongside my fellow TFCA member Adam Nayman it’s just been confirmed that Cronenberg himself will be in attendance, so I expect Adam and I will be introducing him rather than the movie.
In any case, if you want to see what Toronto looked like a quarter-century ago, and how our city figured in a seminal work of visionary horror, come on down to Jackman Hall. But be careful 26 years later, Videodrome can still bite.[rssbreak]
