The Fly opens with a close-up of Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum), who boasts of an invention that's going to change "human life as we know it." The Fly closes with a wide shot of his invention broken, his apartment smoldering, his life in ruin. The film takes place almost entirely in that apartment: a water-stained loft stuffed with wires and tubes and one of those endearing, enormous '80s computers designed to say the few things the film requires it to say, like "Fusion Complete." The film's story deals almost exclusively with the three people glimpsed in that final wide shot. And in that image, The Fly, maybe the best horror film of the '80s, shows the end-result of its sole conceit: that its hero, Seth Brundle, discovers a way to teleport matter by ripping it apart - molecule by molecule - and rebuilding it elsewhere.
The twist of the film, of course, is that a fly zips into Goldblum's "telepod" during an ill-considered experiment on himself, and his computer merges man and fly at the genetic level. This twist offers a darker take on the original 1950s potboiler, a hokey but endearing film in which the hero merely swapped his head and arm with a fly.
In the 1986 version, the transformation is quieter, a feature-length escalation instead of a single event. His decay comes off like some kind of disease. But which one?
In a way, Brundle's "disease" is every disease. His skin sweats. Rashes form. Strange growths poke from his back. He loses his teeth and fingernails. People eager to dub the '80s the AIDS decade could call Brundle's skin lesions a nod to the then-new virus, but his symptoms indicate everything from everyday eczema to the after-effects of chemotherapy. It can't be a coincidence that writer/director David Cronenberg's father battled cancer during filming, but the depiction of Brundle's deterioration goes beyond even that broadest of sicknesses. His affliction becomes all afflictions. Brundle is on the way out.
The film's gruesome study of Brundle's biology won makeup supervisor Chris Walas an Oscar (his name is the first one you see when the end-credits roll). As Brundle evolves into Brundlefly, makeup and prosthetics transform Jeff Golblum without a single seam. So long as Brundle can talk in the film, Jeff Goldblum plays him, covered in layers of latex applied over countless hours. The illusion always convinces. Even during the climax, when the "Brundlefly" sloughs off its human chrysalis and emerges as a spindly Bosch-ian impossibility (an animatronic puppet effect). There's a tactility to the creation that would be lost with modern-day computer graphics. It doesn't look "real," but the monster clearly exists in the same space as the heroes.
One of the many sharp details given during his deterioration is how Brundle adapts by adopting gallows humor. After he explains that his computer essentially "mated" him with the fly via gene-splicing, he adds, "We hadn't even been properly introduced." Saving body parts like teeth and ears in a medicine cabinet for God knows what reason (nostalgia?), Brundle dubs the cabinet "the Brundle Museum of Natural History." He mumbles about "insect politics" and displays his new way of eating food with genuine enthusiasm. He names himself "Brundlefly" and grins.
Despite retaining his intellect and good-humor, the fly's brain grows in power. His already-jittery demeanor grows agitated. His sex drive increases, leading to a fling with a trashy barfly. Late in the film, it's hard to tell if him vomiting green glop onto an antagonist is an act of human aggression or animal instinct (and maybe a little hunger). Worst of all, his desire to live outstrips his compassion for Ronnie. He decides that, if he merges with her through the teleportation process, he can be more human.
Or maybe he can be with her forever that way. He chuckles and suggests they could become "the ultimate family," and, stepping back, you realize what spurred him to test the telepods wasn't a classic mad scientist moment of hubris. "Fools, I'll show them all!" Instead, he misreads Ronnie's meeting with an old flame. Spurred by sexual jealousy, he walks in one telepod and out the other. The drama of the film emerges from a single moment of conflicted love. And even as Brundle regresses, he retains enough of that love to ward her away at a crucial moment, offering the heartbreaking line, "I'm saying... I'm afraid I'll hurt you if you stay."
It's through this relationship that the film, whether intended or not, might operate on another basic level, depicting how men (and nerds in particular) seek the purity of women as a means of diminishing their own imperfections. By seeking validation and self-respect through the women they love, men vaunt women, unfairly, to the status of goddess. Brundle may love Ronnie, but he finally sees her as a creature of organic perfection first and foremost. He wants them to be together forever... but for his own benefit. Her autonomy becomes secondary. Which is the great problem of venerating the opposite sex. Put someone on a pedestal, and they become a statue, an object. Not an equal.
Stuart Gordon once commented that his infamous cunnilingus scene in Re-Animator was a simple extrapolation of that classic horror image of the monster carrying a woman away to his (always his) lair. Gordon claimed he simply went the next step and showed what the monster wanted, which Gordon decided was sex. That's certainly what his lustful professor in Re-Animator wanted, but I suspect the classic Universal monsters (and many after them) wanted something simpler and more emotional than sex. If a man can find someone to love him, then he is not as monstrous as he might fear.
Goldblum and Davis, who dated at the time of production, bring conviction to this dynamic. Like Christopher Walken in Cronenberg's The Dead Zone, Goldblum here creates a full-blooded tragic hero, one augmented by a veteran actor's eccentricities instead of overwhelmed by them. Goldblum's familiar style of talking - fidgety, abrupt, interrupted with the "ums" and "ahhs" of a mouth struggling to keep up with a buzzing mind - fits perfectly to his role of overager scientist. Geena Davis's Ronnie risks being a foil, especially in the back half of the film, as she can only observe Brundle's slow transformation, but she regains agency after learning she's pregnant with Brundle's baby. In the closing moments, she makes the biggest, most difficult choice of all.
The only other character is the skeevy Stathis Borans (John Getz), whose presence as both Geena Davis's boss and her former lover evokes that elegant Pixar guideline to combine characters whenever possible. Although his role could be split in two, the fusion allows for both personal and professional jealousy to intermingle, and the story gives him the courtesy of meaningful development. For most of the film, Getz is among the great self-absorbed pricks of the 1980s, cousin to William Atherton and Paul Gleason. But he breaks down when he confronts Davis in a clothing store, rebuilds his ego, and he manages a fumbling redemption in his effort to kill the Brundlefly in the finale.
Huge symphony strings and brass ebb and flow through the film under the stewardship of Cronenberg's regular composer, Howard Shore. Since The Fly, Shore contributed music to equally disturbing films like The Silence of the Lambs and Seven. In those subsequent films, you hear the same interest in lush, full orchestra to set the tone, opposite to contemporary percussion-heavy intensity-rampers like Hans Zimmer and Tom Holkenborg. With this kind of operatic score, there's a chance the film could overplay its emotions and fall into camp, but no, somehow the music elevates The Fly, especially during the heart-crushing final ten minutes, a climax so reliant on faces and action it could play as silent film.
The Fly stands tall as the peak of a string of excellent '80s horror remakes. John Carpenter's The Thing, Chuck Russell's The Blob, and Paul Schrader's Cat People honor their inspirations (Goldblum also played a supporting role in the effective 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers). Products of a new Hollywood style, these films push more naturalistic acting and dialogue, more explicit gore and makeup effects. More importantly, they all escape their origins by retaining one core idea and rebuilding the narrative into something fresh. New characters, new contexts, new versions of the monsters based on contemporary anxieties.
Where The Fly succeeds over its brethren is in its creation of a laser-focused, character-centric story, where a plausible, enviable romance leads to rash decisions and impossible choices. Thanks to its storytelling economy, The Fly leaves room to build its emotions to dizzying heights. This allows the story to be the best possible version of itself, simultaneously the zenith and the most fundamental Platonic idea of what a monster movie is. Within that simplicity, The Fly contains multitudes.
Huge symphony strings and brass ebb and flow through the film under the stewardship of Cronenberg's regular composer, Howard Shore. Since The Fly, Shore contributed music to equally disturbing films like The Silence of the Lambs and Seven. In those subsequent films, you hear the same interest in lush, full orchestra to set the tone, opposite to contemporary percussion-heavy intensity-rampers like Hans Zimmer and Tom Holkenborg. With this kind of operatic score, there's a chance the film could overplay its emotions and fall into camp, but no, somehow the music elevates The Fly, especially during the heart-crushing final ten minutes, a climax so reliant on faces and action it could play as silent film.
The Fly stands tall as the peak of a string of excellent '80s horror remakes. John Carpenter's The Thing, Chuck Russell's The Blob, and Paul Schrader's Cat People honor their inspirations (Goldblum also played a supporting role in the effective 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers). Products of a new Hollywood style, these films push more naturalistic acting and dialogue, more explicit gore and makeup effects. More importantly, they all escape their origins by retaining one core idea and rebuilding the narrative into something fresh. New characters, new contexts, new versions of the monsters based on contemporary anxieties.
Where The Fly succeeds over its brethren is in its creation of a laser-focused, character-centric story, where a plausible, enviable romance leads to rash decisions and impossible choices. Thanks to its storytelling economy, The Fly leaves room to build its emotions to dizzying heights. This allows the story to be the best possible version of itself, simultaneously the zenith and the most fundamental Platonic idea of what a monster movie is. Within that simplicity, The Fly contains multitudes.
"The Canon" is a series of essays aimed at exploring classic horror films from a fresh context.
What a good analysis, it’s given me a lot to think about. You are right about character over machines in this SF story. The horror is more personal here than in previous Fly film. Along with fear of sickness, this film also touches on fear of madness, “what if I became a monster”, in a direct Kafkaesque style. In the background, this film also explores an old primal fear of miscegenation, but this subtext is quite subtle, if we take the broad meaning of the word. For that matter The Fly works well with the Evil Twin (doppelganger or The Other) concept; like some ancient god spontaneously generating or budding off a child. With those underlying themes, the film becomes more than a science experiment gone awry, but touches on some of humanity’s basic fears, rational or not.
ReplyDeleteBTW, I liked you bringing up the quest for purity in others as a means of mitigating imperfection. Is this an echo of the miscegenation theme? Horror films reflect our own fears personally and as a culture. Just as in Oedipus Rex, written some 2,500 years ago (but probably based on older works), the fear of an unwanted baby left out to die should survive (oh the horror) and unknowingly have sex with it’s mother (the ultimate horror)– who said horror was a new concept? On that I leave you with the end of a nightmare poem written nearly 100 years ago by W.B. Yeats:
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
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ReplyDelete'The Fly' achieves a rather elusive goal: asking for sympathy for the involuntarily self-made villain. Other sympathetic men-turned-monsters, such as The Incredible Melting Man, are nearly as effective, but the melting man's horrid dilemma was the result of an external force. The fact that 'Brundle fly' was the result of the victim/villain's own oversight made the matter wholly disturbing and well worth investigating.
ReplyDeleteLike the remake of the 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers', 'The Fly', both prime examples of successful remakes, re-energized the goal of the original version: the inability of man to cope with the devastating consequences of an exponentially increasing high-tech world. 'Body Snatchers'' original goal was as a tool of anti-Communism; the new version involved humans desparately attempting to cling to a shrinking island of reality in the face of a nearly-completed alien invasion, thus expanding upon the principle of benevolent social reconstruction. 'The Fly' is just as persuasive with its premise, providing a deeper look into the psychology of the perpetrator. Rather than tinker with a legend, as most modern producers are likely to do, the film kept alive the circumstances which drew viewers to the original. Still, I cannot help but envision another remake -- but in the hands of revision-happy hacks -- degenerating into a fusion of misplaced computer graphics and a toned-down script. Hollywood has a very special gift for turning classic products into slush; e.g., 'The Haunting', 'Woman in Black', the Star Wars franchise.
Like 'Alien', which spawned countless, forgettable sequels, 'The Fly' continues to stand on its own favorably bizarre merit. When thinking of abundant, raw scientific jargon with little directive and purpose in movies, one only have to turn to 'Phase IV' and 'Altered States'. Other than special effects, both movies failed to achieve a balance, and will likely be forgotten. Neither offered any characters we really cared about or liked (which is the reason we've forgotten the countless 80s slasher movies which rivaled 'The Fly' on the big screen). 'The Fly' reaches from the screen to issue an inkling of reality to its audience with the question: could Brundle fly, that is, be the sum total of blindly- driven technology-base human be you one day?