The final scene of Videodrome could seem self-evidently nihilistic—the marker of postmodernity. The confused and deranged protagonist, Max, who is beckoned again by Nicki, reincarnated on the screen and telling him that “death is not the end” to join the “next phase”. He shoots himself after seeing himself shoot himself on TV. Max has eventually “maxed out” his desire for sensation. 

 

  This suicide concludes the that the film dramatizes, first, the dissolution of borders between simulacra and the real and between spectacle and the body.  Max, by transforming himself to become “the new flesh” – a state of pure simulation, is without control of mobilizing his own body. As soon as the television burns and explodes, the body organs (the old flesh) come out from the screen, signifying that the goal of videodrome is never to augment the body, but to reprogram and direct it. “Natural” is never a real option. Max is consistent with Haraway’s theory of the cyborg: the gun has been incorporated into Max’s body. 

 

  Video spectatorship does more than just carries Max’s body into technology; it binds him to representational images in a postmodern fashion. “TV shows reality, but reality is less than TV,” O’Blivion says, which can apply to be Max’s destiny when his images are shown on the screen. Jean Baudrillard is concerned with the postmodern culture that, our society has become so reliant on models and maps that we will lose all contact with the real world that precedes the map. To him, it is a question of “substituting the signs of the real for the real” –the image appears as a clear counterfeit of the real, and becomes more real than the real. The spectators are confronted with a precession of simulacra; that is, the representation precedes and determines the real. There is no longer any distinction between reality and its representation; there is only the simulacrum. As a result, the suicide of Max is an indicator of a new reborn as a simulacrum, as a television image and as such a fate to circulation and proliferation of copies in postmodern age. 

 

  In Videodrome, the spectators are gazing, not at people, but at a conspiracy made into a whole world, in a landscape of technology and media objects that are endowed with a delirious life and autonomy of their own that foregrounds simulation, repetition, hallucination.