Videodrome: Days of O'Blivion (6 page)

“Set design?”

Barry nodded. “Yeah.
The psychologist wants to try it with different coloured sets.
Apparently he thinks colour could be important in how Veraceo
impacts the brain.”

Brian shook his head.
“It’s not the colour that concerns me, it’s the content. What Peter
tells me is we’re going to start making sex movies. This is not an
avenue I’m comfortable with.”

“They’re actors.
They’re paid for what they do.”

“You don’t have a
daughter, Barry. I see this a little differently to you.”

Barry laughed. “Is
Bianca still reading those Germaine Greer books? I thought she’d
grown out of her teenaged idealism.”

“She hasn’t grown out
of anything. She’s matured into a thoughtful and sophisticated
woman. But that isn’t what I meant. I find it uncomfortable to be
associated with this. Sadomasochism on video? Soft porn with
violence? There is a psychology to pornography that if you capture
a woman on film, you own that image and by proxy you own the woman.
If you had a daughter of your own, you would feel the worry that I
feel now. I am going to commoditize someone’s daughter and I worry
that I’m on the road to becoming a pornographer.”

Barry laughed hard.
“You’re not making porn, you’re testing the science,” Barry laughed
until the joke faded to a chuckle. “Wow, you’re putting a lot of
philosophy into this. Look, some horny kids or a hooker are going
to get a sexy spanking on film. If you want to get involved then go
down to Pittsburgh and take a look at what they’re doing; or ignore
it and let it just happen. Do you think Consec are interested in
making porn? They just want to see what the technology can do.”

“I’m surprised Consec
are involving themselves at all.”

“It’s because of your
political results. I told Consec how agreeable you made McNamara
look and they got excited. They want this thing taken as far as it
can go… How far can it go?”

“I think I can push the
limits further,” Brian said. “I’ve been working on a way to make
the signal stronger and have upgraded the signal generator.
Veraceo-Two, if you will.”

“That’s great. Consec
are going to love that bit of progress.”

“But should we be
giving it to Consec? Ever since we got into bed with them I’ve had
doubts. Reservations. Like you said about their interest in
manipulating political broadcasts, that’s a monstrous thing. We are
giving the power to subvert democracy to a group who think the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is a good idea.”

“If you spend any time
thinking about the Soviets,” Barry said, “you’ll come to the same
conclusion as Consec... These communist overlords would love to
upend North America. Consec Leader is right when he says there are
communists whose sole purpose is to cause us irreparable harm.
Imagine if they had invented Veraceo first? They would use it to
swing elections here. The genie is out of the bottle, Brian. We
can't just un-invent this thing and you should keep that big
picture in your head. Go to Pittsburgh, take Veraceo-Two and push
this thing to the edge. Learn what it can do and learn how to
defend us against its misuse. Worrying about becoming an accidental
pornographer is a minor concern when the real focus is maintaining
global security.”

----- X -----

In Pittsburgh, Brian
was issued with a magnetic entry key by a security guard sitting on
the back door. The building looked derelict from the outside.
Broken windows had been hastily bricked up from within meaning the
broken glass was still visible ahead of the stonework. It was a big
place, with four floors and a basement. The guard told him only the
ground floor was used for filming, the first floor for
post-production and the higher floors for long term storage of sets
and props.

“Hello, are you Brian
Spectrometer?” A large lady crossed the floor with a cigarette
between her lips and her hand held out to shake. “I’m Susan
Anthony, Production Manager. Let me introduce you to the team.” She
walked him across the main studio floor. It was cold and Brian
could see his own breath. The studio had brick walls painted black
with high lighting bars suspended from the ceiling. Two
broadcast-quality cameras were on floating mounts ahead of a three
walled set made of plywood. It was just three walls painted white.
There were brackets on the walls and an ominous looking hook
hanging in the centre.

“Is this the set? I
thought it was going to be coloured?”

“It will be soon. We
have control of key light and set light, so they can change the
colour of the walls with lighting for now. At least until they
figure out which colour is best.”

Susan led them upstairs
to a long corridor with doors on either side. She opened one to a
room with three women sitting around a table covered in costume
sketches. “Ladies, this is Brian, he’s in charge of the Veraceo
signal.”

The three women looked
up and said, “hello,” in unison.

"Carol is our art
director, Denise is in charge of costumes and Deborah is writing
the scenarios as she’s an expert on the philosophy of
sadomasochism.” There was a mannequin by the door dressed in a
black rubber suit with a gasmask and draped in a dirty,
cyan-coloured oilskin apron.

“Do you like it?”
Denise asked. “It’s the provisional costume for the Punishers,
although the psychologist is more inclined to use a hood rather
than a gasmask.”

“Why?”

“Depersonalisation.
They don’t want the Punishers to look like people. The feeling is
the gasmask makes it look like a man in a suit, whereas the hood
makes them shapeless as well as faceless. We’re going to shoot some
tests this afternoon and see which looks better.”

Susan brought him out
of the room and into an editing bay with two other women. “This is
Sonja, the director and Lynn the editor.”

“Is everybody involved
a woman?” Brian asked looking puzzled. “I didn’t expect that, given
the nature of what we’re doing.”

“In technical
production, yes,” Sonja said. “The psychologist was concerned that
a male production team would subconsciously veer towards
eroticising or over-sexualising the content. He felt women would be
naturally repulsed and therefore more clinical in the film
making.”

“He must think women
are sexless.”

Sonja smiled. “I
thought that myself for a while. I think he’s worried this would
end up as sleazy soft-porn. He spent a lot of time assessing our,
how can I say... feminist credentials. A lot of time went into
assessing our attitudes towards pornography.”

Brian took a seat.
“This is somehow refreshing. I was afraid of involving myself in
such a sleazy enterprise. Can I ask, what is your attitude to
pornography?”

“I think the liberal
consensus that has persisted over the last few years, the idea that
‘whatever turns you on is fine’ may be wrong headed. I think
pornography has nothing to do with freedom of expression as some
people say. It’s merely the advertising of prostitution. People see
it as entertainment whilst forgetting it’s primarily a business, a
ruthless and impersonal industry masked behind glamour and
eroticism.”

Brian nodded. “I worry
about its spread on television and home video. I’ve concerned
myself for some time with media and how it shapes the human brain.
We have no media theory for pornography yet, no deep exploration on
how it impacts the plasticity of the brain. Books, for example,
require effort. Reading, even the word itself, 'reading’, has
multiple meanings and the brain must decide instantly which meaning
to use. Therefore, the very act of reading, of consuming textual
media is shaping the mind of those who consume it. Those who listen
to radio as their primary media will have their brains shaped more
passively than readers and those who consume nothing but television
will question their reality least of all… but pornography takes us
to a new media of the flesh. I believe it could be an addictive
substitute for human relationships and we have no understanding
where that could lead.”

----- X -----

Brian connected the
Veraceo-Two signal generator to the patch bay of the editing booth.
“Have you seen anything with Veraceo?” he asked Deborah.

“No,” she shook her
head. “But I was fascinated when they went through all of the
non-disclosure agreements. For a while I was sure I was going to
work as a secret agent or something, the security and scrutiny was
intense. It's a lot of secrecy to make a dirty movie.”

“It’s not the movie
that’s a secret, it’s this.” He pointed to a box the size of a
regular VCR. Lights blinked on the front, toggle switches allowed
it to be configured, a rotary dial set the signal strength and an
output to an oscilloscope kept it calibrated.

Brian took the chair
beside Deborah and looked at the monitors. Everybody else was down
on the studio floor, but here Brian and Deborah sat ahead of the
two camera images as they filmed the set.

“When you were
introduced, Susan said you were an expert on sadomasochism… Are you
a… a dominatrix or something?”

Deborah laughed and
shook her head, swishing her hair. “No. Nothing so. It’s an
offshoot of gender studies. I came to it from literature. At one
end of the spectrum you have the Marquis de Sade whose writings
were inspired by ideas of atheism coming out of the French
philosophers. He reasoned that without God, there would be no
divine retribution for sins committed against another human being
and in his writing he took that to its logical conclusion. At the
other end of literature is Pauline Réage writing The Story of O.
Réage’s lover told her that women couldn’t write erotica so she set
out to prove him wrong. She wrote a story about a woman who gives
herself to every whim of her lover, allowing him to abase her even
to the point of degradation. Sadism is about taking control over
someone without their permission and Masochism is about giving
oneself to another with absolute permission… so, no,” she said with
a smile. “I’m not a dominatrix. I write essays and critical
analysis on sex in the media.”

Lynn, the editor, came
into the control room to start recording. “We’re about to start.”
She left the room.

“Shall we watch it with
Veraceo-Two?” Brian asked Deborah. “I’d like to see how it feels to
witness S&M with this.” He didn’t wait for her to respond.
Instead, he switched a few cables and checked the oscilloscope and
dialled the signal strength to sixty five percent of maximum. “The
camera feed on this screen has Veraceo included.”

“But it’s just the
camera feed.” Deborah said. “I don’t see any difference.”

“It’s invisible. Our
brains have two visual pathways. The eye sends information on one
pathway to the temporal lobe to process the image and understand
the world, whilst a second pathway to the parietal lobe manages
spatial awareness. Sometimes people with temporal lobe brain damage
go blind, yet they can still catch a ball because the spatial
vision system works. That’s the pathway Veraceo works on.”

On the studio floor
Sonja was giving directions to two men in the rubber suits. The men
held the gasmasks by their side and paid close attention to the
director. Brian and Deborah settled back to watch the performance
unfold.

It was showtime.

----- X -----

The Punishers brought
their helpless damsel in distress into a blackened room. The men
looked strong, both at least six feet tall against a thin looking
woman no more than five feet. The men wore black rubber suits,
rubber gloves, masks and aprons.

Their prisoner wore
only sackcloth.

The lights faded up
slowly to reveal deep purple walls as the punishers tied the wrists
of their prisoner but carefully left a loop of rope at the top. The
woman screamed and squirmed, fighting against the men, but
periodically stopped fighting, seemingly to allow her wrists to be
bound.

One Punisher held the
woman with his arms wrapped around her waist whilst the other
slapped her face with a melodramatic stage-slap.

“That looks fake,”
Deborah said.

Almost as though she
had been heard, the performers stopped and looked off-set as they
listened to instructions on the studio floor. The performance
restarted and the woman squirmed in the arms of the strong man. She
fought fiercely and was slapped again, harder, with purpose. She
cried out and rocked her head back, her long black hair thrown over
her shoulder.

Brian felt an almost
immediate sexual stirring in him. He crossed his legs so as not to
announce his arousal to the woman sitting beside him.

On set, the Punishers
looped their prisoner’s wrists over the hook and got to work tying
her ankles together then to a bracket on the floor. A handle was
cranked, the woman lifted until her feet were off the floor and
again, Brian felt a strong and powerful sexual thrill the likes of
which he’d not felt since his teenaged years. Was it the content or
was it Veraceo?

The Punishers began
spraying the woman with water whilst she screamed and twisted her
head to avoid the hosing. One of the men took a cat-o-nine-tails
and lightly whipped her lower legs.

The action on the floor
stopped again as the three players took direction, then one of the
men checked the woman’s bindings and spoke with her, checking that
she was comfortable. At this, Brian felt another whoosh of sexual
energy, but beside him, Deborah made a slight gasp and a moan.
Brian saw that she was caressing her neck but suddenly pulled her
hand away to cover her mouth.

It was the Veraceo. It
had to be.

Veraceo-Two with sexual
content was a ferocious aphrodisiac.

Back in the studio the
Punishers went back to work, lashing their victim’s legs whilst
spraying the water in her face. This time they got the angle of the
hose right and the water blew up her nostrils causing genuine
discomfort. The moment he recognised the woman as being in distress
the volume of the eroticism dialled back. It was a clue as to what
was happening. The sex was almost overpowering, the Veraceo-Two
signal amplifying the intensity; but when there was some genuine
pain felt on the studio floor the pain balanced the pleasure. This
was a balancing act. Brian surmised that if he were to watch only
torture without the sexualised content it would be horrendous,
almost physically painful.