Tweet

I’ve waited a few hours before writing this so I could calm down. It’s not easy to write articles when you’re holding a 1/5 of Beam’s Eight Star Whiskey (it really is the eighth star that makes it good) and an unloaded handgun (I’m just in it for the theatrics). I’m usually not so heated about remakes – I often mock the open hostility to the whole process, the cliche insta-outrage that anything ever is being remade. What does it matter? The original will always be there. If worse comes to worse, a few fans who would have never seen the original anyway fall in love with a false prophet while even more discover an old classic that they wouldn’t have found otherwise.

But something about Universal’s planned remake of Cronenberg’s Videodrome gets under my skin, bores into my chest, and leaves a gaping vagina-like hole there.

For the record, I love everything about Videodrome – its originality, its prescience, its vividness. Features of a true classic that could never really be duplicated or improved upon if redone.

So for the haters and the indifferent alike, I offer two comments:

1. Those who love Videodrome will hate a remake. A quick search for responses to the remake announcement backs this theory up. In fact, I’d like to see some cool, hip theater show the original during the opening weekend of the remake out of spite.
2. People who haven’t seen Videodrome or know nothing of chest vaginas won’t give a shit about a remake either. It’s a hard enough movie to wrap one’s mind around, the technological/philosophical questions it raises are out of date by over two decades (if they update it for the internet, it’s even still a bit late to the game), and dumbing it down will yield something pointless and myopic anyway.

Therefore, no one will see this movie. QED.

Regardless of my hostility or the ridiculousness of assuming a film will make zero dollars, I honestly can’t figure out the appeal of remaking something like this. Someone should help me out with an answer.

The original is beautiful and sickening. It forces a mirror onto its audience while creating a scornfully hated character that represents all of us. If there was any doubt that we all wanted to sexually please our television sets, this movie set us straight. If you haven’t seen it, rent it immediately.

What do you think? Is it possible for filmmakers to “rape” a Cronenberg film? Isn’t that sort of what his films want? Aren’t they just asking for it?