0 Echo & the Bunnymen, "The Cutter" (1983)

(listen)

As with many of the non-charting songs I have picked to write about these last couple years (though it turned out a few actually had crossed the rubicon into the top 40, d'oh!), "The Cutter" is here mostly representing the album it comes from, in this case the third Echo & the Bunnymen album Porcupine, which is fine. In fact, all of their first four albums start at worthwhile and move toward essential. The general appeal is most often characterized as shades of neo-psychedelia in a postpunk frame. Wikipedia, for example, is quick to drag in the obligatory Sgt. Pepper-era Beatles on the matter of the thickly textured strings in this song. Fair enough, but I also want to call attention to Ian McCulloch's vocal, which had always displayed enough twitchy anxiety to get over on New Wave terms. For me, I had to hear the Bunnymen covers of Doors and Velvet Underground songs found on the box set to clarify just how good (and how ambitious) McCulloch always was. There is also the deceptively easy and unpretentious way the band has of packing in so much drama to so many of their songs. The stakes always feel high and so it is with "The Cutter." It thrums with a bottom vibrating at deepest levels even as the keyboard hooks elegantly stair-step across scales at the song's highest pitch, holding in place for its greatest effects. It's dread and atmosphere and yet light and frolicsome even, and always propulsive. It starts on a high note and builds to a glorious crescendo, like death and then heaven. I'm not even sure what it is exactly, let alone what it is about. And I don't know who or what "the cutter" is supposed to be but I don't think I want any part of it either.

Detail: Echo & the Bunnymen, "The Cutter" (1983)

0 Making History (1983)

Linton Kwesi Johnson's great moment—or at least the one I happen to know best—is out of print now and looks to have become a pricy collector's item, so I recommend the Independant Intavenshan anthology, which contains all of the tracks from Making History and 28 more besides. Absolutely worth it. Widely characterized as a "dub poet," which is close enough—the musical accompaniment is heavily atmospheric strains of Jamaica and Johnson is a highly regarded poet (published in the Penguin Modern Classics collection). This is another album, I have since figured out, that we all seemed to have found out about from the "A" Robert Christgau gave it, so credit due thatwise. It actually bears a fair amount of musical variety across its seven tracks—including one, "Reggae Fi Radni," that sounds plucked from parts of Nino Rota's soundtrack for the Godfather movies. The last track ("New Crass Massahkah") settles into unaccompanied vocal recitation, spacing out its simple musical statements. The first four songs, which are as good as it gets, work lively, satisfying strains on uptempo grooves. On all of them Johnson steps in reciting polemic in a thick, deep patois, which can be heard as musical itself, blending in nicely, but is difficult to understand. Certain fragments swim up unmistakably: "Di eagle an' di bear people livin' in fear of impending nuclear war fear," "From England to Poland / Every step across di ocean / The ruling class is dem is in a mess, oh yes / Di capitalist system are regress / But di Soviet system nah progress / So which one of dem yuh think is best," and "it was in april nineteen eighty wan / doun inna di ghetto of Brixtan" (the latter available in full at The Poetry Archive). Well, we already knew the drift from the song titles: "Di Eagle an di Bear," "Wat About di Workin' Class?," "Di Great Insohreckshan." And we knew the level of ambition from the title of the album. What was harder to guess was how musically it would be delivered. Until that last track, this thing moves with propulsive force. Perhaps some drag to the vocal, it can be rumbling and monotonous, but the charge of the words as they clarify counterbalances that well, for me at least, and there is an amazing force to the album sustained surprisingly well.

Detail: Making History (1983)

0 Videodrome (1983)

Canada, 87 minutes
Director/writer: David Cronenberg
Photography: Mark Irwin
Music: Howard Shore
Editor: Ronald Sanders
Cast: James Woods, Deborah Harry, Sonja Smits, Peter Dvorsky, Lynne Gorman, Jack Creley, Leslie Carlson, Sam Melkin

I'm pretty sure I've seen Videodrome in the theater, but the first time I saw it and the greatest impressions it has made on me have tended to come out of the semi-degraded VHS tape versions. Back in the day, a friend of mine always seemed to know how to put his hands on them early. Of course, seeing a DVD version now one quickly notes how the whole look and feel is slanted in exactly that direction. For much of the movie, in fact, we are either watching "television," or we are watching people watching televisions. One thing it gets surprisingly right still is the sense of intimate connection that develops between people and televisions—or monitors, I guess I had better say.

In many ways indeed Videodrome appears remarkably prescient now, certainly in terms of today's Internet culture, which is at least as bewitching and entrancing as anything on TV in Videodrome. It also correctly imagined the casual acceptance of pornography we see nowadays. "Got any porno?" says Nicki Brand (Deborah Harry), picking through the videotapes of Max Renn (James Woods), back at his place at the end of their first date. No embarrassment, no self-consciousness. But Videodrome is way more than a science fiction film that happened to get a few guesses right about the future—and quite a bit more ambitious than that too.


Videodrome wants to get right down into the muck of identity, fracturing it every which way and reassembling again in the context of media saturation. In our hero Max Renn, a principal at the wonderfully named Civic TV, a sleazy fringe cable-TV channel in Toronto in near-future 1983, we see identity literally mediated, refracted into a hundred shards and fragments, before it is fused again and exploded to smithereens. Videodrome is the exploding head of Scanners done at the psychological level.

The basic science fiction conceit is that an electronic signal can be carried with video transmissions that will induce a brain tumor in viewers. The signal is most effective with brain states caused by passive viewing of violence. Once the tumor has grown it causes hallucinations, which in turn make its victims easy prey of others. All this is pieced together and put in motion when Renn's able assistant Harlan (Peter Dvorsky)—"Home of the buccaneers pirates of the high frequencies," a sign on the door of Harlan's office reads—shows Renn fragments of mysterious "Videodrome" broadcasts he has downloaded and unscrambled from satellite feeds. They are simple scenes ("incredibly realistic," Renn says of them) showing torture, beatings, and humiliations of victims in a room with stone walls.

Never mind that Videodrome devolves in the end down to a strange right-wing plot to purge society of immoralists. That's part of the humor of the movie, a rich vein that runs along all through. When Max Renn first shows a tape of the Videodrome show to Nicki, for example, she says, "I wonder how you get to be a contestant on this show." "I don't know," Max replies. "Nobody ever seems to come back next week." Renn's introduction by Nicki Brand to sadomasochism is equally rich with comic possibilities. There's a cigarette burn scene here I recall the movie being notorious for that puts me in mind now of the ear scene in Reservoir Dogs—just a bit too far on that one, perhaps.

The sharpest point of Videodrome to me is how it's so carefully predicated on the brain state caused by passively watching violence. Because we passively sit there watching it too. We should have brain tumors too. Renn is fascinated by the Videodrome show. He can't take his eyes off it, and we're not necessarily looking away either. It is an insidious element that churns away inside one. Cronenberg is positively ingenious about the way he sets up and stages and shoots scenes of the Videodrome show, which we see only for the briefest moments at a time, before Cronenberg cuts away again, or the show is otherwise cut off. It's just long enough to make it seem alluring and compelling, not long enough to entirely horrify and alienate. Thus we are comically enlisted in the depravity unfolding in front of us.

In many ways Videodrome operates much in the standard low-budget B-movie style, using character actors for texture and highlighting. Professor Brian O'Blivion (Jack Creley), the leader of a cult who appears only as a talking head on television sets, is a bald homunculus with a pencil mustache. "The television screen has become the retina of the mind's eye," he likes to say in sonorous tones. Masha (Lynne Gorman) is a flinty television producer and industry insider, a lusty old chickenhawk dame with a Russian accent. Barry Convex, the mastermind who uses an eyeglass manufacturing corporation as a front, is like nothing so much as the life insurance salesman who stayed too late.

Most of the budget evidently went to the special effects, which are always pretty good, and keep up even as the story begins to take on operatic excesses ("I am the video word made flesh," etc.). And what better excuse, after all, than hallucinations caused by a brain tumor caused by the mindset of passively watching violence on TV? The special effects are admirably utilitarian, never distracting from the ideas they represent, which is their real power. Even as it looks forward to the virtual reality helmet of the '90s (prescient again) Videodrome goes back even further, to iconographies suggested by our old friend Freud, for much of its most compelling imagery, such as the peculiar new orifice that may or may not appear on Max's abdomen, and the things people may or may not put into it.

Videodrome is not just the best picture of 1983, to me it's also David Cronenberg's best. It's harrowing, riveting, and droll, in no particular order, continually overtopping itself in a calibrated series of events that compromise anyone who watches simply by watching. I don't know how you can ask for any more than that in a movie.

Top 10 of 1983
I don't have much to say about 1983—it seems to me to be another lackluster year of the decade, one notably full of exactly same. Although I am more and more starting to feel my gaps in this year as well—there are a handful and more I could have mentioned beyond those listed. I am partial to the entertainments of Risky Business and A Christmas Story for social reasons at least as much as aesthetic. That might go for WarGames too. I really need to see The Right Stuff again. I suspect it could go higher but I haven't seen it in nearly 30 years.
1. Videodrome
2. Local Hero
3. Tender Mercies
4. Passionless Moments
5. Risky Business
6. A Christmas Story
7. The Dead Zone
8. WarGames
9. Koyaanisqatsi
10. The Right Stuff

Didn't like so much: Flashdance, Return of the Jedi, Scarface, Terms of Endearment, Yentl

Gaps: Ballad of Narayama, L'Argent, Nostalghia, Pauline at the Beach, The Terence Davies Trilogy

Detail: Videodrome (1983)