Where Goes Your Head?

Is the goal of any political faction ultimately to make its opponents' heads explode? 1981's Scanners makes a convincing argument that this might just be the case. It's one of the most famous, and financially successful, early works of David Cronenberg, a director I've long admired. Yet Scanners is among his films I've watched only infrequently. I don't think I'd seen it in more than fifteen years before I watched it last night.

Mainly I think it's because, any time the mood might strike me to watch Scanners, I inevitably think, "Yeah, but I could watch Videodrome instead." Videodrome takes the underlying ideas of Scanners so much further. It has the commentary on the subliminal influences integral to political movements and ties it effectively to visual media. It removes distance between the viewer and the protagonist by making us party to his hallucinations, and we join him in being unable to distinguish between reality and fantasy--as well as being unable to distinguish between fantasies meant to titillate him and those meant to manipulate him.

Sex is present in Scanners but on a much, much more subdued level. Early in the film, we only see male Scanners, people with the ability to psychically join their nervous systems with another human. And the film's hero, Vale (Stephen Lack), is first seen wielding these powers as a weapon against an unsuspecting woman, albeit involuntarily.

He can hear her making disparaging comments about him, prompting him to reflexively "think about her". It's an elegant and sinister illustration of how a meme can work, even without any intentions from its creator and/or deployer. But where intention ends and accident begins isn't exactly clear, is it?

Cronenberg has said that he doesn't believe in spirits or the soul, he believes that the body is entirely physical. This makes sense of the fact that Vale is able to hack into a computer with his mind. But it's not quite the effective fusion of technology and biology we'll see later in his films.

While it may be no Videodrome, at least I haven't watched it ten billion times, so I was able to have something slightly closer to a fresh experience watching it last night. Ah, to be young and new to the filmmography of David Cronenberg again.

Scanners is available on The Criterion Channel.