Videodrome: Days of O'Blivion (5 page)

“Yes, but this is
boring,” Fluorite added. “Hitler had charisma. The Nazi’s had
stylish uniforms; but this is a twenty minute interview of McNamara
talking about battlefield statistics. Anyone who can keep their
eyes open long enough should want to punch the son-of-a-bitch.”

Fifty people came onto
the test floor. They received their instructions and scoring papers
and donned their headphones.

The programme began.
Robert Strange McNamara, architect of the Vietnam War began droning
about the mathematics of death. He talked about how he evaluated
the height to accuracy ratio of B-29’s firebombing Japan in World
War II. Every two minutes a message flashed over the bottom of the
screen saying, ‘How Much Do You Like This Man? 1-10’. On the test
floor, the subjects would pick up their pencils and score
McNamara’s likeability.

The television
interview broke at ten minutes for a short commercial break. A
woman was putting on nylon stockings. She ran her hand along her
leg. Nice. Sensual.

The interview resumed.
“Mr McNamara, how could you apply statistics to Vietnam and not see
that things were headed in the wrong direction?” the interviewer
asked. “You were measuring targets hit, enemies captured, weapons
seized and the body count. Surely those statistics showed you were
losing the war?”

‘How Much Do You Like
This Man? 1-10’

The interviewer stated,
“Mr McNamara, Vietnam cost fifty eight thousand American lives and
it was pointless.”

‘How Much Do You Like
This Man? 1-10’

The interviewer
increased the moral hurt, “When you factor in the civilian deaths,
the enemy deaths and the deaths of our own troops and our allies,
you’re looking at a figure close to one million, three hundred
thousand human lives lost.”

‘How Much Do You Like
This Man? 1-10’

The film ended.

“That was brutal,”
Brian said.

Fluorite collected the
test papers as the people were leaving and spotted the anomaly
instantly. “Brian, look at this. Those with Veraceo are scoring
McNamara six and seven for the start of the film, then straight
tens half way through.”

Brian shuffled the test
papers, flicking through them. “It’s on every one of them. Starting
from question five, that’s ten minutes into the film they jumped to
a ten. They did it across the board. Everybody scored him a ten
from question five onwards. Why?”

“I want to watch it.”
Fluorite rewound the cassette and patched the Veraceo generator
into their workshop feed. Normally they avoided watching the
Veraceo signal as they felt it would cloud their judgement. “I want
to watch it and see what happens. Do you want to try it?”

Brian pulled up a
chair.

The film began.

McNamara droned on
about maths and statistics.

The programme went to
commercial break. Nylon stockings.

“That’s it,” Fluorite
said. “I feel it. I see some pretty girl stroking her own legs and
suddenly I’ll forgive McNamara all of his sins. I don’t care how
many dead kids there are in Vietnam.”

“I feel it too,” Brian
added. “But why the hell should we be feeling this?” He wound the
tape back and watched the commercial again feeling the eroticism.
He watched it three times sensing the impact lessen with each
viewing. He stopped the tape and paced the floor. Excited by the
discovery. “I think it could be sex and violence in combination,”
he said. “The human brain is attuned to those things.”

“Well, that’s where
we’ll test next,” Fluorite said. “We can test it with sex, with
violence and with sex and violence in combination.”

----- X -----

By the time Brian made
it home that evening he could sense something strange happening to
him. As he looked at his hands on the steering wheel he sensed
movement under the skin. When car headlights turned towards him the
beams arrived at his eyes by some twisting or spiralling motion.
His vision felt sharper, his flesh felt attuned to the
surroundings, his hearing fidelity improved. Good God, something
was happening. Something good. Something pleasant and
enjoyable.

He entered the home and
began shedding clothes. He wanted to shower to feel the pressure of
the water droplets hitting his skin. He kicked away his shoes and
stepped out of his trousers then spent a moment alone and nude in
his apartment. His arms stretched wide, his head filled with
colours. It felt as though the texture of the carpet was moving
and… Good God… was he hallucinating? It wasn’t a truly discernible
hallucination, rather he felt on the precipice of an experience
that had yet to manifest itself. Is this how Albert Hofmann had
felt on his infamous bicycle ride when he discovered LSD?

He took to the
telephone. “Peter, it’s Brian. How are you feeling right now?”

“Euphoric,” Fluorite
said back. “What the hell did you put in that TV signal? I feel
like I can touch God.”

----- X -----

George, the newly
recruited videotape editor put the box of cassettes on the table.
“Okay, this is what you asked for. I’ve numbered them one to ten.
V-Test One is mostly violence with a little bit of sex. I spliced
in a bikini contest with some hardcore death clips.” He picked up
the end cassette. “Up here at V-Test Ten, we’ve got hardcore porn
mixed with cheesy TV violence. Some aggressive full-penetration
cock and pussy action intercut with Charles Bronson out for
revenge.”

Fluorite ran his finger
along them and stopped at V-Test Five. “What do you have
midrange?”

“In the middle I used
war reporting for the violence. Soldiers getting field dressings, a
bit of blood but not too ghastly. I cut this together with some
Baby Blues taken off the local networks. Sleazy stuff, but… you
know… what they can get away with. Tits covered in baby oil, that
sort of thing. ”

“I hate those
networks.” Fluorite said. “They’re rotting society away. What do
you think, Brian? Will TV be our ruin?”

Brian approached the
table. “I believe Pornography and violence are by-products of
societies in which private identity has been destroyed. A
destruction by sudden environmental change.”

Fluorite and George
both paused as they took in the meaning. “What environmental
change?” George asked.

“Television itself has
reshaped the environment. We used to live in a world shaped by
books, then by radio. These environments have been minimised by
television. That is what I mean by destruction of environment; we
have destroyed the environment shaped by books and replaced it with
game shows and whatever else comes through the cathode ray tube.”
Brian took V-Test Five and put it into the video deck. It was as
George described. Topless women in a sauna, a man lifting weights
with sweat across his muscled abdomen, a soldier holding a bloody
rag against his eye in a news bulletin, dead bodies beside a
burning tank, an attractive couple deep kissing surrounded by
candles, men chaining up another man in homoerotic bondage, a woman
in lingerie slowly opening her legs to the camera.

“Like I said,” George
added. “Middle of the road stuff. Down at number one it’s violent
as fuck whilst at number ten it’s wall to wall porn. This is what
you wanted, right? Pornography and violence scaled across the
spectrum?”

“It is,” Brian said.
“It’s perfect.”

----- X -----

The Consec psychologist
was an older man with a completely bald head and thick rimmed
glasses. He brought with him his analysis of the V-Test results and
passed copies to Brian and Peter Fluorite, then lit a pipe. “It is
quite remarkable what the V-Tests have shown.” He puffed tobacco
smoke into the air as he spoke. “But the one thing that really
startled me was the importance of removing context.”

Fluorite flicked
through a few pages of the report without really reading. “Why is
that important?”

“I would say it brings
emotion neutrality. Let me give an example. If you were to see a
film of a man shot and killed for no reason it would be terrible
violence. You would view that violence in and of itself and your
emotional response would be to the violence alone. There would be
no narrative, no explanation to cloud your feelings. But let us
suppose you preface the story by saying this man had shot up a
school playground, that many children had been murdered, then you
watched a film of this school gunman who, when cornered by police,
was shot and killed. This time, your reaction would not be to the
violence exclusively, but rather to the emotions brought forward by
the narrative. Your emotional response would be to the story as a
whole, not the violence in isolation. I have surmised that the
removal of context is an important factor in sharpening the impact
of Veraceo. Make sure, when you make your programme, that you keep
your material without context.”

“I’m sorry,” Brian
interrupted. “Did you just say, when you make your programme?”

Fluorite put his
analysis document down, sensing Brian’s confusion. “Did Barry not
tell you about this?”

Brian shook his head.
“Tell me about what?”

“We’re going to shoot
some test video. Make our own content.”

“I haven’t spoken with
Barry in a few weeks. What is the proposal? What are we planning on
doing?”

Fluorite shuffled on
his chair uncomfortably. “I’m sorry, I thought you knew. I was
talking with Barry yesterday and I assumed you knew all about this.
The idea is we need to test the limits of Veraceo, but the V-Test
videos George is cutting together are assembled from stock footage
and he’s struggling to find the right sort of material. Now that we
understand Veraceo works with sex and violence, we’re going to
produce something original, soft porn mixed with a little
aggression. With this we get to control the exact tone of the
programme.”

Brian turned to the
psychologist. “And this is what you’re working on?”

“Yes,” the psychologist
said. “Mister Convex asked for my input a little over a week ago.
That’s what I’m trying to help with. I’m trying to guide you on how
to produce your content. As I understand, Consec have already
released the funds and provided studio space.”

There was an
uncomfortable silence on behalf of Brian. He broke it himself when
he asked, “So our content must be without context. What else do we
need to know?”

The psychologist puffed
some more smoke then went back to his analysis. “I would also
remove swearing. Bad language is a form of linguistic violence. It
is aggression vocalised, but not only that, it’s analgesic;
swearing out loud works as a pain reliever. It’s important because
I believe Veraceo works on the deepest levels of the brain. The
basal part. The more primitive part of the human mind. If we want
to test the Veraceo signal we do not want to colour the results by
introducing bad language. Swearing is part of the primitive
mind.”

“How do you know that?”
Fluorite asked. “How could you know that swearing is based in the
primitive part of the human mind?”

“There is a link
between ailments like Tourette’s syndrome, dementia and stroke,
right back to our childhood development as babies. Young children
will scratch and bite and kick when they’re angry. They do this
until they learn a few swear words. Once they can swear there is a
way to externalise their rage and frustrations through language. If
you’ve ever seen a stroke patient when they lose language skills,
they often have no problem swearing. I once saw a man who had lost
almost all power of speech except for the words ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’.
His higher mind was destroyed, but those deep, basal and primitive
parts of the mind always function. This is the part of the brain
Veraceo seems to work on.”

----- X -----

Machines hummed and a
dozen workers in brown coveralls worked at a row of lens grinding
stations. Barry Convex watched them from his office. It was still
the old manufacturing base, but now they were investing heavily
into engineering R&D. Cheap spectacles for the Third World
meant an expensive investment. They had to combine all of these
machines into a single, reliable unit. If an optometrist got to a
village in Kenya, they would need to grind the lens at the same
time. In addition, the end product needed to be a fiftieth of the
cost here in Canada. It was tricky and he realised now that whether
he succeeded or failed didn’t matter to Consec. The money came from
the United Nations and they didn’t expect it back. All the same it
would be nice to succeed. It would be nice to have a legacy. He
would like to be remembered as Barry Convex, the man who brought
sight to the world. His ambition and ego liked that title.

He waved to Brian.
“How’s it going, Partner. Enjoying your lab?”

“The lab is wonderful,”
Brian said. “How are things here?”

“Spectacular Optical is
spectacular indeed. A lot of big things are happening.”

Brian nodded. “I’ve
just learned that we’re about to start making some kind of smutty
TV showcase for Veraceo. I’ve also just learned that you speak with
Peter Fluorite almost every day.”

“Yes, of course. Is
something wrong?”

“Why are you talking to
him and not me?”

“Oh… I’m sorry, Brian.
If you wanted me you only needed to pick up the phone. I didn’t
want to disturb you and thought it best to let you get on with
things, you know, bury yourself in research and enjoy discovering.
To be honest, I thought you would get annoyed if I called you every
day for an update. What do you need to know?”

“Tell me about this
video production. That would be a good start.”

“Sure. Well, when Peter
explained the V-Test results to me I relayed this back to Consec
who threw me a half million bucks as a budget and gave us a
specialised TV studio in Pittsburgh. I was planning on flying down
there this weekend. We can go together. There’s a Consec Partner
down there arranging everything. They’ve got a director and a set
designer; they’re working with the psychologist about set design
and costumes at the moment.”