I recently talked with a friend about how we’re burnt out on scholarship that links horror film to abjection, a state of being cast off or degraded, as there are piles of writings on the subject from my field and its related disciplines. Then said friend and I talked about what horror movies we would be willing to screen for our courses and which ones we could not. We both agreed on The Shining. I would use the movie as an excuse to play Kate Bush’s “Get Out of My House,” an anti-rape anthem sung from Wendy Torrance’s perspective.
I might pick David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, a novel yet chillingly prophetic film about how television and various technologies literally mutate and consume viewers and users. Any class discussion I lead would allow time to evaluate the film’s racial politics in creating a fake snuff program like Samurai Dreams, the political implications of a character like feminist soft-core pornographer Masha (Lynne Gorman), and Debbie Harry’s involvement in the project.
I’m sure Caitlin at Dark Room would vehemently disagree with my stance against scholarly assertions around abjection and I’m willing to hear her defense. Frankly, such conversations seem inevitable when talking about pop stars’ cultural meanings and functions, regardless of whether they’re cast in a Cronenberg film. As Annie at Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style astutely pointed out in her piece on Jessica Simpson, certain pop stars lend themselves well to discourses around the abject, particularly when they’re calculating “dumb blondes” who talk about farting and are photographed wearing unflattering pants.
Actually, I might even argue that all female pop stars can be discussed in terms of abjection, since women, particularly famous women, make themselves vulnerable to degradation and exist in between concepts of the object and subject. As much as I don’t want to impose or project such terms onto female pop stars, casting Harry as Nicki Brand, a psychoanalyst and radio personality who learns about a snuff television program from CIVIC-TV president Max Renn (James Woods) after they hook up and decides to audition for the show despite obvious consequences, was deliberate.
Image of Harry as Brand for an NME article of the period; image courtesy of nme.com
Videodrome came out in 1983. By then, Harry firmly established herself as a pop star and cannily utilized the relatively new medium of music video to articulate a fragmentary, ironic, self-reflexive feminine persona, a blonde bombshell in quotes. Marilyn Monroe is often mentioned when discussing Madonna’s star formation, but Harry’s detached cool and esoteric approach to fashioning herself into a sex symbol clearly was a point of reference. Harry was no doubt aware of the erotic menace a close-up shot of her glossy pink lips could cause, even if they weren’t devouring James Woods’ face through a television screen.
Given Harry’s recent reflections on aging, professional longevity, the pressure to stay relevant in an ever-shifting pop landscape, and the myriad of ways she’s open to sexist pathology, it is important to think about what point in Harry’s career Videodrome was released and how we could make meaning out of it. In 1981, Harry released her first solo album, Koo Koo. Blondie put out The Hunter soon after to relative commercial indifference and went on hiatus for nearly twenty years. Eight years into Blondie’s career, Parallel Lines and “Heart of the Glass” were part of the lexicon and Harry was looking to move on and diversify. Videodrome may have reflected those interests.
I’m somewhat troubled by the results. I recognize Brand’s agency in electing to be part of a violent political experiment she probably knew would kill her and her decision to live on as a televisual image. Yet I’m concerned that she’s ultimately just a savior for Renn’s character, thus making her subordinate to his subjectivity and reducing her to a symbol. Maybe Videodrome suggests that all of humanity is vulnerable to this process, regardless of identity. This could explain the vaginal VCR that grows from Renn’s abdomen. Yet I’m unconvinced that the film’s disturbing assertions about how bodies relate to technologies don’t have misogynistic implications. But I am still interested as to why Cronenberg called upon a female pop star to help realize his vision. Clearly selecting someone who once sang ”In dusty frames that still arrive, die in 1955″ for this project was no accident and thus opens up new opportunities for interpretation.
