Videodrome

When you look at David Cronenberg’s nearly 30-year-old Videodrome (can it really be that long ago?), it’s incredible to realize how comparatively quaint the technology in the film is. It’s also hard not to realize that the points — warnings really — Cronenberg was making about technology overtaking our lives have only become more and more relevant with the passage of time. Ideas such as a society that has to be patched back into the world through soup-kitchen-like missions offering doses of TV seem disturbingly real when you encounter news stories of homeless people putting a higher priority on an internet connection than on a place to sleep. The concept of an inanimate object becoming a permanent body fixture doesn’t appear anywhere near as ludicrous in a world where people can’t be parted — even briefly — from their cellphones or their Twitter accounts. How far away are we really from Cronenberg’s prophecy of “the new flesh?” This review by Ken Hanke was originally published on July 17, 2012.