Early on in David Cronenberg’s masterpiece Videodrome, TV station programmer Max Renn (James Woods) brings radio host Nicki Brand (Debbie Harry) back to his bachelor pad for the seduction that’s been coming since they exchanged some heated words about the decline of western culture on a roundtable talkshow. She declared the “gorging on [overstimulation]” promoted by his channel Civic-TV to be a bad thing, only to concede a few seconds later that she can’t help living “in a highly excited state”. So as they enter his cluttered apartment, where most couples might put on Al Green, they instead set the mood with a videotape containing raw, context-free footage of a nude woman being flogged with a cat-o’-nine-tails by a hooded man. “I can’t believe this,” she says, but she stops Max when he offers to turn it off, purring: “No, I can take it.”
The power dynamic between these kindred sickos seesaws back and forth as she startles him by asking him to cut her shoulder with a knife – in the exact same spot Saul Tensor would give an erotic incision to his lover Caprice decades later in Cronenberg’s recent Crimes of the Future – and he then gets in touch with his inner dom while piercing her ear. On their next date, she stuns him by gently pressing a lit cigarette to her breast. Max invoked Freud in their earlier televised tete-a-tete; imagine what the good doctor would have to say about this little phallic symbol, crushed on the bosom of womanhood with ease, and yet also with enough pain to leave a scar.
