Our first glimpse of Debbie Harry as Nicki in Videodrome
Chris Forrester considers the role of Nicki Brand and the icon who plays her, Blondie frontwoman Debbie Harry, in David Cronenberg’s prescient examination of media.
“The television screen has become the retina of the mind’s eye.” So says the wonderfully named Professor Brian O’Blivion early in David Cronenberg’s seminal Videodrome, perhaps the most prescient and prophetic film about mass media and the information age. O’Blivion, an early expert in the power of televised images who opts only to “appear on television, on television,” speaks from a pre-recorded videotape played on a television as he muses on the screen’s newfound place as an external fixture of the human consciousness — and though he will be the film’s sole character to only appear onscreen on a screen, his presence as a specter of the picture tube illuminates an often unremarked-upon quality of Cronenberg’s masterpiece: it is perhaps the first ghost story of and about the information age, a haunting film in which the ghost is not a relic of now-ended human life, but rather a new and similarly immortal state of being made possible by the screen image.
For the uninitiated, Videodrome follows Max Renn, the president of a television station that specializes in sensationalist programming — at first softcore pornography, but later hyper-violent videos of human torture — who, upon the discovery of a mysterious source of snuff content (the titular Videodrome signal), begins a strange transformation that is at once mental and physical. Directed by the body-horror master David Cronenberg, who had at this point in his career forged a name for himself as a singular artist capable of articulating both political (Scanners, Rabid) and personal (The Brood) realities through grotesque transformations of the flesh, the film is a singular exploration of the mutability of the human mind and body at a decisive cultural moment.
One of Videodrome‘s many scenes of grotesque transformation
Among the many players Max meets on his journey into the cultural underbelly of illicit video (which offers a chilling anticipation of the rise of shock sites like rotten.com and LiveLeak) is Nicki Brand (Debbie Harry), a radio host with whom he becomes sexually involved after the pair appear on a television segment together. Like O’Blivion more prominently, Nicki often appears onscreen on screens — her only scenes in the film as a physically present character happen in quick succession as she and Max flirt on-air, meet after the recording of her show, and venture back to her apartment for a sadomasochistic sexual escapade in which she asks him to cut her and pierce her ears. It’s there that Max shows her recordings of Videodrome programming, which lure her from the real world into the spectral realm of (largely unseen) underground video-making. If Videodrome is in part a ghost story, then Nicki Brand becomes the phantom at its center, an elusive lure who brings Max ever deeper into a world he’s both excited by and rightly afraid of.
Fascinating here is Debbie Harry’s casting as Nicki; Harry was at this point an actress of considerable celebrity, beyond her limited acting portfolio, because of her band Blondie’s prominence. In the years directly prior to Videodrome, the band had put out its most popular and acclaimed albums yet, Parallel Lines (1978) and Eat to the Beat (1979), as well as its fourth number-one single, “Call Me” from Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo (1980). In spite of that success, the band broke up in 1982, and Videodrome became, for Harry, something of a transitory role — a breakout performance as an actress just as her music stardom was temporarily dwindling.
Max finds himself in the strange red room where Videodrome is filmed
All this is to say that in a film about screen images, the haunting climax of which hinges on a sort of immortal screen image-as-higher-state-of-being, Harry is very much legible as more than just any actress, but rather a figure whose celebrity was in part constructed by the very medium Cronenberg is so invested in interrogating. That celebrity enables a degree of complexity to a slippery character who might have, in the hands of another performer, been overwhelmed by the film around her. But Harry’s Nicki is animated by the right balance of low-key temperament and commanding presence, and thus becomes a sort of center about which the rest of the film revolves.
It’s Nicki whose fascination with the Videodrome signal and its programming that ultimately, and quite literally, sucks Max into the depths of the conspiracy that dominates the film’s back half. Here, Harry’s celebrity lends the film a dark edge, her character a lure to Max’s fatal curiosity, but also an image — and a screen image, at that — of real celebrity functioning as an attractive gateway to the television’s world of mind-and-body-altering torture and sexual violence.
There’s also a degree to which Harry’s casting, as well as the cool confidence of her performance, feels vital to the agency of a character who, on paper, functions quite deliberately as a fetish object for the male gaze (both on our screen and those within the film). When she’s introduced, Max makes a snide remark about the attractiveness of her outfit, and soon after, the pair become sexually involved. The film never offers Nicki much interiority, and yet Harry’s performance lends her a fierce, commanding sense of agency that’s fascinatingly at odds with the character’s innate flatness, a rich contrast that becomes as central to her personage as Nicki becomes to Max’s descent into mania.
The image of Nicki’s lips on Max’s television invites him into a new world
Again, Harry’s star power seems an obvious complication to the dynamics at play, both in the way that her screen presence animates Nicki with a larger-than-life sense of agency, but also in how the film leverages her star image for an incisive comment on the lure of sex onscreen. Much of Videodrome is as intensely – and subjectively – psychological as it is physically grotesque, and so the actual boundary between where Nicki’s character (if she exists at all) ends and Max’s fantasy of her begins is a constant source of tension. Harry, then, by virtue of stardom and recognizability, becomes an anchor for a character whose function is slippery and amorphous.
It’s fitting that a film that so envisions the screen image as an externalization of the human consciousness produces a handful of images that sear themselves immediately into the viewer’s mind: the red-walled Videodrome set, the orifice that grows in Max’s chest as the signal transforms him, the gun that embeds itself in his hand with writhing tendrils of steel. But the image that proves most indelible is that of Nicki’s lips in close-up inviting Max into the television; even if the film is about his descent into a strange new world, it’s she who opens the door.
IU Cinema will present a new 4K restoration of Videodrome on October 25, at 7pm, followed by a live taping of the Weird Studies podcast.