Videodrome is a Cronenberg film from ’83. It’s a kind of teevee-video junkie body horror flick mixed with a nightmarish version of McLuhan’s media theories. One of the characters is actually a media theorist who, spoiler alert, died years ago after recording tapes of his lectures. In response to any question his people just play a tape, assuming (correctly) that his philosophical mumbo-jumbo is high-handed enough that no one will take his image to task for dodging the issue, for fear of looking dumb.

Q: [Professor], do you think erotic TV shows and violent TV shows lead to desensitization, to dehumanization?

A: The television screen has become the retina of the mind’s eye.

Other than that the film plays off fears of the ’80s — that violent, sexual content on television will corrupt people and, in the extreme case, give them tumours.

One of my film school field trips is to a Cronenberg Q&A at TIFF 2010 so I’m running a festival of his films. He’s the biggest deal in Canadian cinema, so I’d like to have an intelligent question (or two) about either his body of work or my gestating own.

Jill and I are lying in bed doing our social media. If Videodrome was updated for the oh-ten it would be about Facebook forcing you to kill people… while mutating your brain.