When I was 3 or 4 I dreamed about a monster that lived in the TV and attacked the outside world with death rays. It took my family hostage and killed our dogs. Its shape appeared in the static and it had a shrill, hissing voice. This is perhaps the earliest dream I can remember.

“The battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena: the Videodrome. The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye. Therefore, the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, television is reality, and reality is less than television.” -Brian O’blivion,
Videodrome.

By the end of David Cronenberg’s 1983 film Videodrome we find that not only is television a literal part of the body, but that this brain part can spread contagious disease: the brain tumor inducing “Videodrome signal.” This metaphor carries into reality. Television does indeed transmit a particularly destructive disease. Symptoms include: lethargy, apathy, psychosis, and even death.

TV Carnage is an inoculation: the worst of television, cut-up, rearranged, and fed back into itself. Derrick Beckles takes television at its most dehumanizing and packs it into a feature length megadoses that will leave your psychic immune system ready for anything.

“You’ll turn against Videodrome. You’ll use the weapons they’ve given you to destroy them.” – Bianca Oblivion, Videodrome.

As the Socialist Patient’s collective said, “Out of Illness, Make a Weapon.”

I started doing this years and years ago in high school. Then I went to film school and worked for MGM for a good few years, so this has been my catharsis as well, because I was in the belly of the beast turning out shitty TV and laughing at it. I’ve always actually been attracted to exorcising my own demons with television. I was always watching it when I was a kid. When I was making compilations with friends I didn’t know other people were doing it. Then I discovered more and more – I came to appreciate other people’s work afterward. When I started doing it I was just really naïve. -Derrick Beckles, San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Videodrome is even more relevant now that YouTube is delivering what cable television promised to in the 80s: a world where everyone has their own television station. Although digital video tools began to democratize video creation, it’s taken the further proliferation of broadband Internet and the emergence of convenient platforms like YouTube and Google Video to democratize video distribution.

But thanks to threats to network neutrality, seriously broken copyright laws, and weak kneed service providers, there may soon be a monopoly on the television region of our brains again. Besides, even in a fully democratized video arena will the most intelligent, informative,insightful, or artistic content be the most viral? Or would it still be dominated by the lowest common denominator?

Don’t forget to take your medicine.