Monday, March 20, 2006

Dissonant domestic scene #2: cradling a newborn girl-child on one's chest while watching Videodrome on TV. For some reason this film struck me as a lot more powerful this time round (the third? something like that). Can anyone enlighten here? Are there, like, two edits of the movie in circulation? (C.f. The Man Who Fell To Earth, where the original edit for the American market is an utter travesty, but still pops up on TV now and then). The Videodrome I saw the other night seemed to have lot more in the way of graphically abject and revolting effects in it, and be somewhat easier to follow narrative-wise. However it was absent something, strangely--the other Videodromes I remember don't end with James Wood about to blow his brains out, but a bizarre mural/cave painting daubed on the interior hull of the rusted boat--a craply-done-yet-eerily-grotesque image of the heads of all the main characters connected by (memory a bit hazy here) tendrils of pigment, like they've become some kind of rhizome being. Is this a false memory? I missed it, though; in some ways, the most befuddling, lingering moment of the movie for me, the previous times i've seen it at least.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comment away