Cronenberg’s Videodrome and the Post-Modern Condition :: Cronenberg Videodrome Essays

Cronenberg’s Videodrome and the Post-Modern Condition      Ã‚  Ã‚   In past years, when an artist or philosopher critiqued the reality of the world, it was always presumed that there was a reality to be criticized. However, post-modernity has presented those people with a horrifying new challenge -- a world that has literally been so overcome by its technology that the important issues of man's existence no longer consist of finding answers to questions like "Why are we born to suffer and die?" but merely trying to distinguish between the real and the unreal, which to post-modern man is not esoteric philosophical speculation, but a practical day to day issue. The post-modern trajectory is one that leaves humans fighting not to maintain political supremacy or to break the shackles of injustice, but simply to maintain their identities as real beings in the face of technology's blurring of the lines between man and mechanics, humanity and machinery, reality and image. This struggle seems to be a losing battle for mankind, as each day the in ventions that were meant to bring us pleasure and increase our leisure time, instead dehumanize us by taking a piece of our selfhood for their own with every passing moment. The post-modern social theorist Jean Baudrillard posits that the world of today is a never-ending "virtual apocalypse" of reality yielding to the hyperreal--reality defined not as what, in fact is. but rather that which can be simulated, reproduced, or Xeroxed. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and never has this been more true than in the world of the post-modern, where the only viable strategy left is to take technology's weapons and turn them to our advantage, in one final attempt to preserve our humanity by somehow finding meaning in the hallucinatory, cybernetic, hyperreal spectacle that is the post-modern condition. Of all the possible means of gaining the insight into our nature and the nature of the world that is necessary to survive technology's siege on reality, few media are as powerful as cinema (after all, film provides a uniquely accessible and intense vehicle for ideas), and few film-makers are as adept at dissecting the concept of post-modernity as the Canadian author David Cronenberg. In an age where every passing moment constitutes a further obscuring of the boundary between reality and image, this prophetic director clarifies, cuts through, and captures the very essence of post-modernity, through masterfully done pieces of cinematography that bring technology, obsession, and carnality together and pit them against each other in the horrific battlefield of the mind, each fighting for control of the human psyche.