Cronenberg’s Videodrome and the Post-Modern Condition :: Cronenberg Videodrome Essays

Cronenbergs Videodrome and the Post-Modern Condition In past years, when an artist or philosopher critiqued the populace of the arena, it was incessantly presumed that there was a reality to be criticized. However, post-modernity has presented those people with a horrifying new challenge -- a world that has literally been so crucify by its technology that the important issues of pieces existence no longer comprise of finding answers to questions like Why are we born to suffer and faint? but merely trying to distinguish between the real and the unreal, which to post-modern man is not esoteric philosophical speculation, but a practical day to day issue. The post-modern trajectory is one that leaves mercifuls fighting not to suffer political supremacy or to break the shackles of injustice, but simply to keep abreast their identities as real beings in the face of technologys blurring of the lines between man and mechanics, benevolence and machinery, reality and image. This s truggle seems to be a losing battle for mankind, as apiece day the inventions that were meant to bring us pleasure and increase our leisure time, sort of dehumanize us by taking a piece of our selfhood for their hold with every(prenominal) passing moment. The post-modern social theorist Jean Baudrillard posits that the world of right away is a never-ending virtual apocalypse of reality yielding to the hyperreal--reality delineate not as what, in fact is. but rather that which stool be simulated, reproduced, or Xeroxed. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and never has this been more true than in the world of the post-modern, where the only viable scheme left is to take technologys weapons and turn them to our advantage, in one final crusade to preserve our humanity by somehow finding meaning in the hallucinatory, cybernetic, hyperreal spectacle that is the post-modern condition. Of all the possible means of gaining the insight into our nature and the nature of the world that is necessary to survive technologys siege on reality, few media are as powerful as cinema (after all, film provides a uniquely fond and intense vehicle for ideas), and few film-makers are as adept at dissecting the concept of post-modernity as the Canadian author David Cronenberg. In an age where every passing moment constitutes a further obscuring of the boundary between reality and image, this prophetic director clarifies, cuts through, and captures the very essence of post-modernity, through masterfully through pieces of cinematography that bring technology, obsession, and carnality together and pit them against each new(prenominal) in the horrific battlefield of the mind, each fighting for control of the human psyche.