FLASHBACK REVIEW: THE FLY
I could, and almost did, summarize The Fly in three simple words: this fucking movie. David Cronenberg doesn’t play nice with his 1986 body horror film; it’s designed to repulse, to make you squeamish and upset, and thirty years later it has lost none of its horrific potency. Cronenberg is the undisputed master of body horror, and in films like Scanners, eXistenZ, and even in his finest work, 2005’s A History of Violence, he examines the horror that comes with the realization that there is something inside your body or mind of which you are unaware, something which someday might want to push its way to the surface, with or without your cooperation or consent. Cronenberg makes us afraid not of monsters, but of ourselves, and even if A History of Violence and Eastern Promises are technically better movies, The Fly is his greatest accomplishment as a visual storyteller.
The makeup effects for The Fly are rightly lauded, and we’ll get to that, but I feel like Howard Shore’s music doesn’t get the credit it deserves. It’s grandiose and bombastic, perfectly suited to a movie that hews closer to Greek tragedy than to traditional horror. It is, at times, operatic, making it perfectly suited to the opera adaptation staged a few years ago (I saw it; it was weird and quite good). Like all Greek tragedies, The Fly hinges on hubris and on brutal irony.
Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) has a right to be arrogant, though; he’s just invented a system of teleportation that will, in his own words, change the world. He shows it to journalist Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis), and soon the two are in love. If we’re being honest, the romance between Seth and Veronica moves way too quickly, but that’s a minor quibble. They’re fun to watch, because they’re both adults. There’s a minimum of cutesy banter, and their flirting quickly gives way to sex, and they’re refreshingly upfront about what they want out of the relationship.
One night, drunk and a little resentful of Veronica for not disclosing her previous relationship with her editor Stathis Borans (John Getz), Seth decides to go through the telepods by himself. Smoke billows out of the telepods when they’re opened, a B-movie touch that would be considered hokey today but here adds considerable atmosphere. Cronenberg uses close-ups of the fly, inconspicuous and unseen on the telepod’s wall, to imbue the scene with a sense of ghastly inevitability. I myself had the strong urge to yell at the screen.
The fly’s DNA merges with Seth’s, and thus begins one of the most unpleasant transformations in film history. The Oscar-winning makeup by Chris Walas is such an integral part of The Fly – part of its DNA, one might say – that his is the first name listed in the end credits. It’s a disgusting marvel to watch Goldblum pull off fingernails and extract teeth. It’s still the gold standard of creature effects, and for the sheer visceral reaction it provokes out of the viewer, it’s unlikely ever to be topped or even equaled. People who don’t remember The Fly remember famously gruesome scenes from it: Seth breaking a man’s bone through his skin during an arm wrestling match; Veronica, struggling in Seth’s grasp, wrenching his lower jaw off; Seth vomiting onto Stathis and melting his hand and foot.
Cronenberg holds off, until the climax, showing us Seth in true insect form. There’s no visual reference point. We can’t look at Brundlefly, as Seth begins calling himself, and see an insect. We see a humanoid monster, in the between-stage of forcible evolution. Goldblum’s manic energy is a good fit for his transformation into Brundlefly, as he speaks too quickly and his eyes dart around. The tragedy in his performance comes when the human Seth Brundle peeks through the monster Brundlefly, as if he’s aware of what’s happening but powerless to stop it. He sees something of himself in the fly, and something of the fly in himself. At the end of a heartbreaking monologue, he tells Veronica, “I’m saying I’m an insect who dreamt he was a man, and loved it. But now the dream is over and the insect is awake.”
Cronenberg makes the smart choice of not bogging the film down in scientific details. The more we know about the telepods, the closer The Fly gets to being a sci-fi movie, which is antithetical to its aims. The Fly is a deeply human story, one that ends on a surprisingly sad note (although, like a lot of ’80s horror films such as this month’s Cujo, it fades to black literally the second everything is over). Brundlefly, with his horribly human eyes, has been fused with a telepod, and he pathetically drags himself across the floor of his lab until Veronica shoots him. (Side note: it’s a nice course-correction to give Veronica more agency in the end, because for most of the climax she plays the role of damsel in distress, waiting for a maimed Stathis to let her out of the telepod.)
There is one loose end that Cronenberg leaves dangling, intentionally, and that’s Veronica’s pregnancy. (This would be expanded upon in The Fly II, which you can skip.) It’s Seth’s baby, and she quickly comes to the same conclusion as the audience: what is growing inside her? Is it human? “There could be anything in here,” she cries.
Seth Brundle wanted to change the world with his telepods, and he did, but not in the way he intended. He created a new species, of which Brundlefly was the first specimen. But who knows what’s growing inside of Veronica?
- T. Dawson