ABSTRACT

Videodrome arrived in North American cinemas in 1983, four years before the Mulroney administration agreed its free trade deal with the United States, and at a moment when the relationship between Canadian and American media cultures was rapidly changing. Since the 1950s, Canadian culture had become increasingly industrialised – or as some preferred to argue, Americanised – through the privatisation of the airwaves, the development of cable and satellite communication, and boosted private sector arts funding, to give just a few examples. This article argues that such changes, aspects of Videodrome’s socio-economic context, are equally objects of its self-reflection, as the film’s primal scene (where Max Renn appears to pick up foreign satellite signals), the debates it stages over censorship, and its portrayal of Toronto as a transnational space recall us to the shifting structure of Canadian culture in the mid- to late twentieth century. Videodrome also registers the fears of Americanisation that accompanied such changes, though it avoids criticising the latter from that standpoint. Instead, this article concludes, it treats the recent evolutions in Canadian media culture as an effect of a much broader and deeper process, namely commodification.

摘要

Videodrome 于 1983 年进入北美电影院，比马尔罗尼政府与美国达成自由贸易协定早四年，当时加拿大和美国媒体文化之间的关系正在迅速变化。自 1950 年代以来，加拿大文化通过电波私有化、有线和卫星通信的发展，以及增加私营部门的艺术资助，变得越来越工业化——或者像一些人更喜欢说的那样，美国化——仅举几个例子。本文认为，这些变化，Videodrome的各个方面的社会经济背景，同样是其自我反思的对象，作为电影的原始场景（马克斯·雷恩似乎在接收外国卫星信号），关于审查制度的辩论，以及将多伦多描绘成一个跨国空间让我们想起二十世纪中后期加拿大文化结构的转变。Videodrome也记录了伴随这些变化而来的对美国化的恐惧，尽管它避免从这个角度批评后者。相反，本文的结论是，它将加拿大媒体文化的最新演变视为更广泛和更深入的过程的影响，即商品化。