Media, flesh, control, signal. A cable-television executive discovers a broadcast that rewrites the body. The Burroughs-via-cathode-ray lineage that Decoder also works, with Debbie Harry of Blondie in a lead role.
Why the Bureau files it. David Cronenberg builds the film on the same thesis the cut-up tradition took from William Burroughs: that signal is a virus, that media writes directly onto the body, that control travels through the broadcast. This is precisely the ground the canonical Film entry Decoder works, and the two films are best read as siblings on the Burroughs line, one from the West German cut-up scene, one from Canadian commercial horror.
The flesh-and-machine imagery, the television that breathes, the cassette pushed into a wound in the body, the hand fused to the gun, sits squarely in the tradition's machine-and-flesh preoccupation. Howard Shore's score is orchestral rather than industrial, so the link is thematic rather than sonic, but the idea is the tradition's own: the body remade by the apparatus it consumes.
The casting of Debbie Harry of Blondie gives a thin direct thread to the music world, though Cronenberg stands well outside the tradition's personnel. The Bureau files Videodrome as the mainstream-cinema statement of the Burroughs signal-and-control thesis, the same reservoir Decoder drinks from, reached by a different route.
This film is filed in the influenced field: cinema that shares the industrial, noise and avant-garde tradition's sensibility without being made by tradition figures. It is adjacent to the tradition, not of it. The canonical Film entries (Decoder, Halber Mensch, Pig) are tradition-internal works made by or with tradition artists; the influenced field collects the cinema that runs alongside the tradition and feeds the same imaginative reservoir.