The views of the loser do not typically fill prominent chapters in the history books. We know what Julius Caesar thought of the barbarous tribes in Gaul and Britannia, but almost nothing about what they thought of him. His descriptions of savage resistance to his military campaigns suggest just how much the latter wanted to be civilized at the point of the imperial spear. But the word of a Caesar -- and our own guesses -- are no match for a conquered people's own written or visual accounts.

The silence or amnesia of the vanquished isn't always the result of suppression. They can also be caused by trauma -- the inability to acknowledge, much less boast about, defeat. How many New York Yankees are writing confessional books about last season?

The writer-director David Cronenberg is often decades ahead of his peers in dramatizing the psychic perils of contemporary life, and never more so than in Videodrome, his wicked 1983 satire of McLuhanesque techno-bliss.

The plot concerns a sleazy cable-television executive named Max Renn (played all too convincingly by James Woods), who is constantly in search of exotic programming for his easily jaded audience. Late one night at the station, grousing that his soft-porn shows have lost their edge, Renn is turned on to a new channel by his technical assistant. With a signal that is rumored to originate “somewhere in the Third World,” the channel broadcasts images unlike any Renn has ever seen: shadowy scenarios of torture from inside a prison.