Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2006 Videodrome, Trauma, and Terrorism: An Examination of Organzational and Emotional Dynamics David Arroyo Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES VIDEODROME, TRAUMA, AND TERRORISM: AN EXAMINATION OF ORGANZATIONAL AND EMOTIONAL DYNAMICS By David Arroyo A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Art Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2006 Copyright © 2006 David Arroyo All Rights Reserved The members of the Committee approve the thesis of David Arroyo defended on April 2, 2006. ______________________________ Kay Picart Professor Directing Thesis ______________________________ Barry Faulk Committee Member ______________________________ Virgil Suarez Committee Member Approved: _____________________________________________ Hunt Hawkins, Chair, Department of English The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract vi Introduction 1 Thesis 3 Defining Religious Terrorism 6 Corporate and Religious Institutions as Terrorist Cells 9 Trauma Theory and the Horror Film 23 When Victims Become Terrorists 26 Conclusion 35 Bibliography 36 Filmography 37 Biographical Sketch 38 iii ABSTRACT This thesis is an examination of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome. In the course of this thesis I compare a fictional account of terrorist activity to the behaviors and organizational machinery of genuine terrorist organizations such as the Army of God and Al-Qaeda. This is important in establishing the veracity of the film as an expression of terrorism, while allowing consideration for the emotional trauma of 9/11. Although the film was made in 1983 in the waning years of the cold war, Videodrome is surprisingly in tune with the traumas of the post 9/11 audience. iv INTRODUCTION It would be disingenuous to say this paper has nothing to do with 9/11. If 9/11 taught me anything it was that everything has something to do with 9/11. The first year following it was truly a monster. It followed us everywhere. Every article, every essay, every vapid counterfeit piece of soul searching began with “Ever since 9/11…” or “If 9/11 has taught....” 9/11 was ubiquitous. People didn’t just talk about it. They watched it over and over and over. We didn’t have televised coverage per say, we had a Mobius strip curling through the great white noise that is popular culture. And when that appeared to run its course people began making documentaries about it, a mere six months later. After that all dissenting voices were with the terrorists and it was time to go to war. No waiting period. No reflection. No pauses. For a solid year, every day was 9/11. Did we learn anything? Did we pause to consider what would drive a small band of men to treat the lives of over three thousand people (themselves included) as disposable? If we kept living 9/11 every day were we, as a society, really prepared to wage a war on terror? Did we even know what it meant to wage war on an idea, hurling ourselves at dictators and oppressive regimes rooted in nation-states that clearly weren’t Osama Bin Laden Inc.? Without sobriety, without any consideration for what we were about to inflict upon the world and ourselves we had taken the myth of the ugly American, given it steroids, a pair of electrodes in its neck, performed some black magic, and let it loose upon the world: a creature born of genuine trauma animated by callous political opportunism and an abnormal brain straight from a little man living on a ranch in Crawford, Texas. It’s made quite a mess for everyone, and it won’t be slowing down anytime soon. This is the perfect time to do what we didn’t do a few years earlier: breathe, pause, reflect. It’s time to consider what went wrong with both the terrorists and us. Of course, this is easier said than done. What do we look at and what can it show? There is a clear element of horror to 9/11 and our response to it. Media and machinery converge with the irrational. The Mobius structure of the media is reminiscent of the mesmerized victim. 9/11 froze American culture like the vampire freezes his victim with dead seductive eyes. Faced with the shape of horror we were made immobile. Contemporary horror, at least superficially, is about the defeat of reason: the invincible slasher, a monster that will not die. More importantly, it represents our failure to understand ideas: motives and emotional states. The common is rendered alien and the alien is rendered common. Clearly, the 9/11 terrorists had motives, they had reasons for what they did, but the monstrosity of it all presents a challenge to both logic and empathy. The act itself seems something that human beings wouldn’t do, even though the act itself is not unique in scope or strategy, but to the American experience, the hive mind of popular culture, it does appear to be exactly that, unique. The failure to come to terms with the event, to understand the motive, is significant in the shaping of the trauma itself. 1 The American public knows as little about terrorism after 9/11 as it did prior to it. The only difference now is we have a few names to go with the figures on the margins. Contemporary horror is also about the failure and/or betrayal of technology. In the 19th century technology was our friend. For pre-contemporary monsters, tools like the cross (a distinctly religious technology) protected man from vampires; the cross represented a harnessing of spiritual power. The Frankenstein myth though, provided an alternative narrative, the ability of science and technology to birth the monstrous. I’m not interested in arguing which narrative is dominant nor do I particularly care to ascribe a particular politics to them. It is in the case of 9/11, the largest terrorist disaster in American history, that the latter narrative clearly dominates. Terrorism and technology are significant factors in the shaping of an American tragedy. Bearing this in mind it should come as no surprise that the genre of horror can broaden our understanding of this event. Currently, horror is enjoying a quiet renaissance. The television show Lost, loaded with paranoia and a kind of island gothic atmosphere, is a commercial and critical success. Torture scandals have given rise to a rebirth of grindhouse filmmaking with movies such as Hostel (2005) and the Saw franchise. But the focus of this essay has less to do with the current trends in horror film and much more to do with a horror film made well over twenty years ago, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983). This is a horror film operating in the modes of science fiction and the conspiracy thriller. Following its initial release much was said about the gender politics of the film and its placement on the political spectrum. Like The Thing (1984), it was made in the twilight years of the cold war. A stifling paranoia pervades it, but the enemy isn’t a giant spider or an unseen enemy from another planet. No, the film was received as being more about mental boundaries. Although there is an unseen enemy, it is homegrown, birthed in the machinery of the North American media. As far as trauma and terrorism are concerned though, there is a legitimate reading of the film as a form of deferred action. Videodrome allows us to engage “experiences impossible for the subject to integrate in a meaningful way at the time of their occurrence” (Lowenstein, Land of the Dead 2). If 9/11 is the initial traumatic event then Videodrome provides a layer of metaphor, allowing us to speak about a trauma we have failed to articulate directly. 9/11 is a core trauma that may be triggered or experienced at a later point in time by a similar event; an investigation of Videodrome in this framework is an investigation of “two linked memories that only become fully comprehensible as traumatic through their deferred distribution across” two “different temporalities” (7). It is through the convergence of terrorism, technology, and terrorism in Videodrome, which is not recognized in the critical discourse surrounding the film, that one can, reflexively, engage the same topics that surround 9/111. 1 The critical discourse surrounding the film was preoccupied with political ideology. Was the film rightist or leftist in nature? Of all critics Robin Wood remains the one most openly hostile to Cronenberg’s work. There is a tinge of irony here as Wood is largely responsible for setting the tone and parameters of the Cronenberg conversation. In his essay “Cronenberg: A Dissenting 2 THESIS Videodrome is a multifaceted work. Despite the fact it was made in 1983, its construction of terrorist mechanisms, organizational models, leadership roles, military strategies, and goals is surprisingly accurate; this itself suggests the film can be viewed outside of its original cold war context because understanding terrorism from a structural standpoint, challenges the misconception that terrorism is rooted in the other and that it exists exclusively in the province of Middle Eastern renegades. Religious terrorism can be institutionalized within liberal democracies by co-opting institutional circuits of power, specifically, the television medium. This objective analysis provides the opportunity to discuss the emotional consequences of terrorism. For the purpose of this paper, terrorism adheres to Stern’s definition: a combat strategy that is both theatrical and focused on the noncombatant.