Weird Studies - Episodes Tagged with “Media Theory”

Episode 157: Long Live the New Flesh: On David Cronenberg's 'Videodrome'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0500

"Death to Videodrome! Long live the New Flesh!"

It was perhaps inevitable that the modern Weird, driven as it is to swallow all things, would sooner or later veer into the realm of political sloganeering without losing any of its unknowable essence. David Cronenberg's 1983 film Videodrome is more than a masterwork of body horror: it is a study in technopolitics, a meditation on the complex weave of imagination and perception, and a prophecy of the now on-going coalescence of flesh and technology into a strange new alloy. In this episode, recorded live after a screening of the film at Indiana University Cinema in Bloomington, JF and Phil set out to interpret Cronenberg's vision... and come to dig the New Flesh.

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REFERENCES
David Cronenberg, Videodrome
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible
Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb
Weird Studies, Episode 75 on “2001: A Space Odyssey”
Richard Porton and David Cronenberg, "The Film Director as Philosopher: An Interview with David Cronenberg"
George Hickenlooper and David Cronenberg, "The Primal Energies of the Horror Film: An Interview with David Cronenberg"
Weird Studies, Episode 144 with Connor Habib
William Friedkin (dir.), The Exorcist
Plato, Timaeus
William Gibson, Idoru
CBC, Yorkville: Hippie Haven
Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess”

Episode 71: The Medium is the Message

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 13:00:00 -0400

On the surface, the phrase "the medium is the message," prophetic as it may have been when Marshall McLuhan coined it, points a now-obvious fact of our wired world, namely that the content of any medium is less important than its form. The advent of email, for instance, has brought about changes in society and culture that are more far-reaching than the content of any particular email. On the other hand, this aphorism of McLuhan's has the ring of an utterance of the Delphic Oracle. As Phil proposes in this episode of Weird Studies, it is an example of what Zen practitioners call a koan, a statement that occludes and illumines in equal measures, a jewel whose shining surface is an invitation to descend into dark depths. Join JF and Phil as they discuss the mystical and cosmic implications of McLuhan's oracular vision.

REFERENCES

McLuhan, Understanding Media
The Playboy interview
McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects
Graham Harman, American philosopher
Clement Greenberg, American critic
Dale Pendell, Pharmako/Poeia: Plant Powers, Poisons, and Herbcraft
Brian Eno, British composer
Marshall and Eric McLuhan, The Laws of Media: The New Science _
Jonathan Sterne, _The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction
Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone (editors), The Essential McLuhan
Charles A. Reich, The Greening of America
David Fincher (director), The Social Network _
Gilles Deleuze, _Cinema I _and _Cinema II
Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin
Eric Havelock,_ Preface to Plato_
Walter J. Ong, American theorist
Plato, [Republic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic(Plato))_