Zepke Stephen: Head in the Stars. Essays on Science Fiction

The great achievement of the film is therefore the way
it turns realism and abstraction into the same thing, a real
hallucination. In this the film’s motto ‘long live the new
flesh’ affirms a powerfully inhuman and sublime force that
obliterates its conditions in order to conjure an entirely
new future. The videodrome’s inhuman flesh convulsed by
libidinal forces is not ‘outside’ Max, it is Max, but a Max
that has been abstracted from his humanity. This is the
sense in which the outside is immanent for Foucault and
Deleuze, the outside is matter abstracted from its meaning
and form, liberated to become something else. As Deleuze
describes it in his book Foucault; ‘The outside is not a
fixed limit but a moving matter animated by peristaltic
movements, folds and foldings that together make up an
inside: they are not something other than the outside, but
precisely the inside of the outside.’ (1988 97) Videodrome
is, as Foucault put it (without mentioning the film) ‘a
fiction that cancels itself out in the void where it undoes
its forms and appears with no conclusion and no image,
with no truth and no theatre, with no proof, no mask, no
affirmation, free of any centre, unfettered to any native soil;
a discourse that constitutes its own space as the outside
toward which, and outside of which, it speaks.’ (1998 153)
conclusion
Although Videodrome has some elements that are
dystopian, I’d like to call it instead a ‘utopian hallucination’
in the sense Deleuze and Guattari gives these terms in
What Is Philosophy? There, the power that Nietzsche
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