For me, Videodrome only gets better with time. It is very much a product of its era; saturated with images broadcast over UHF TVs or played on VHS tapes. But don't let the nostalgia fool you; Videodrome is just as relevant today as it was in 1983. Videodrome's eerie prediction of the future (mostly concerning technology's evolution and our changing relationship to it) allows the film to remain nostalgic in look, yet novel in feel.
Campiness aside, I cannot stress how intelligent this film is. It can be seen as a critique of reality TV (the main character, Max, cannot fathom the possibility of Videodrome's signal consisting of unscripted events), of televised personalities (see my notes on Brian O'Blivion below), and of representation through television as a whole (who needs the old flesh when we can exist on TV?).
Many of these stills are of, or feature, television screens (17 of the 58 stills contain turned-on sets; 19 if you count the latex screens depicting Nicki's lips). The aesthetic is impossible to ignore, but given that we are frequently surrounded by screens in our day-to-day lives (TVs, cell phones, computers, etc), the imagery is by no means unusual. In a world where digital images are becoming a part of our reality (see here, here and here), and where film actors are commonly shown manipulating screens with a flick of their wrist (see here and here), is Videodrome really that strange by comparison? Well, yes, it undoubtedly is. However, I feel that there are obvious parallels between how easily Max could be programmed by TV, and pervasive nature of television programs.
