SHOCKTOBER: The Fly (1986)
Putting a David Cronenberg masterpiece back under the microscope. Turns out, it’s really about sex (among other things). Plus: Bride of Frankenstein (1935).
It’s spooky season. Every year, my wife and I spend October exploring the cinematic eerie, macabre, and downright frightening in an annual tradition we call SHOCKTOBER. I’ll be posting weekly write-ups for this year’s selections here at Discontent Dispatch.
The Fly (1986)
David Cronenberg’s The Fly begins with a conversation between scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) and journalist Ronnie Quaife (Geena Davis) at a meet-the-press function. He’s working on something, he tells her, that will “change the world, and human life as we know it.” Though she presses him, he refuses to say more. If she really wants to know, she’ll have to come back to his place.
Brundle’s pitch sounds like a put-on or a bad pick-up line. At first, Ronnie laughs it off as a prank; her editor Stathis Boras (John Getz), after hearing her relay the story the next day, also thinks it’s a con. Of course, by then, Ronnie knows that Brundle was not putting her on, that his teleporter is the real deal. But that initial conflation of scientific advancement with sex persists through the rest of the film. Both, intertwined, undergird The Fly’s gruesome body horror, adding disturbingly intimate dimension to its vision of human bodies first enhanced, then distorted, then finally destroyed by technology – and the attempt to connect with someone besides oneself. In this film, the true horror is our separation from other people.
Seth Brundle, it must be said, isn’t much of a ladies’ man. Initially, whatever chemistry exists between him and Ronnie is undercut by an equal and opposite feeling of intense isolation. It’s clear he’s trying to impress her, but it’s just as clear that he has no life beyond his project, even before he says so outright. Granted, having no life has served him well. It has enabled him to focus on his work; he owes everything he’s achieved to his isolation. But it hasn’t been enough, and he’s getting restless.
For one, there’s a problem with the teleporter. It’s unfinished, only able to transport non-living matter: the stocking, but not the flesh underneath. When Brundle learns Ronnie plans to publish a story on his work, he panics. The attention, he says, would destroy him. It would be too much to let the world in all at once. Initially, she scoffs. She can’t just sit on a story this big – and, after all, he knew she was a reporter when he invited her back to his lab.
But, if Brundle isn’t yet ready for the world, he at least acknowledges that it’s time to let someone in. He frames his counteroffer to Ronnie – exclusive access to his work for the duration of the project – as an invitation to share in his project’s completion. He professes a “strong urge to talk” about his work.1 This urge, a desire to connect extending far beyond the needs of his project, proves to be his undoing. Despite early successes, the introduction of this social component into his work scrambles Brundle’s perspective and derails everything he’s worked for.
Ronnie, of course, accepts Brundle’s offer, and his work on the teleporter resumes. The problem persists, now viscerally on display; when Brundle attempts to transport a baboon, the machine turns it inside out. But, in response to this disaster, Brundle finally makes The Fly’s core obsession explicit. As he puts it:
It [the teleporter] can't cope with the flesh…. Computers are dumb. They only know what you tell them... I must not know enough about the flesh myself. I'm gonna have to learn.
This insight leads Brundle to his breakthrough. To reproduce organic matter – be it the baboon, an uncooked steak, or a human being – the teleporter will need to grasp its “poetry.” The computer – and Brundle – need an education in the ways of the flesh. The teleporter’s success depends on its ability to be “made crazy” by living matter.
For Brundle, it helps that this education in “the flesh” soon extends to his relationship with Ronnie. Ronnie falls for him; he, in turn, falls for her. The undercurrents of sensuality between them, bubbling beneath the surface all along, are finally brought to the surface. But there’s an interesting twist: Brundle and Ronnie’s love scenes are boring. Vanilla. I’d say they verge on the passionless – whatever spark might have existed between them is more or less extinguished once it gets down to actual consummation. Their relationship feels rote, and that’s no accident. It feels rote by design. When you’ve just invented a technology that will change the world forever, how can another person possibly compare?
Fittingly, that passion, or fire, or whatever you want to call it, returns only after Brundle passes through the teleporter himself (in a fit of jealous rage, no less). But it does so at a cost. This is the part everyone knows: unbeknownst to Brundle, a fly was in the teleporter with him, and their DNA has been scrambled. The superhuman quality of Brundle’s fiery new energies is a byproduct of this mutation – which, for the time being, remains hidden. Only Ronnie notices something’s wrong, and one of the first tells is the change in their sex life. Suddenly, Seth is too much for her.
Other signs soon emerge, as well. After being teleported, Brundle grows more energetic, more athletic, punctuating his feats of physical agility with long monologues about the “inherently purging” nature of teleportation and his corresponding enlightenment, characterized as a “deep, penetrating dive into the plasma pool.” He also grows more irritable and demanding, to the point of finally driving Ronnie away. She still loves him, but she can’t take his abuse anymore.
But here’s another curious thing. Despite his nastiness, The Fly can’t help but be on Brundle’s side. This is partly because he’s so charismatic – Goldblum gives a virtuoso performance here, always perfectly balancing the competing subtleties in Cronenberg and co-writer Charles Edward Pogue’s script – and partly because no coherent alternative is articulated (not in words, at least). But the film, in its middle section, appears to actually believe Brundle when he insists on the significance of his transformation. It, too, gets behind the idea that he’s becoming something new, something greater than himself. Brundle is exhilarated and rejuvenated by his dive into the “plasma pool,” and we, the audience, are transformed right along with him. We, like him, are “made crazy by the flesh.”
This suggests that Brundle’s attempt at connection – with Ronnie, and, by proxy, with the world – has collapsed in on itself. But he understands the transformation as a sign things are moving as they should. His mania continues almost unabated, and, for the most part, he embraces it head-on. To Brundle, his becoming is an end in itself. He’s convinced that the final result will be a triumph of science – and a marker of his own personal glory:
Seth Brundle: The disease has just revealed its purpose. We don’t have to worry about contagion anymore… I know what the disease wants.
Ronnie: What does the disease want?
Seth Brundle: It wants to… turn me into something else. That’s not too terrible, is it? Most people would give anything to be turned into something else.
Ronnie: Turned into what?
Seth Brundle: Whaddaya think? A fly. Am I becoming a hundred-and-eighty-five-pound fly? No, I’m becoming something that never existed before. I’m becoming… Brundlefly. Don’t you think that’s worth a Nobel Prize or two?
This exchange marks a turning point, after which The Fly enters its final act. The tone is bifurcated, but consistent: visceral horror for Ronnie, intense pleasure for Seth. Ronnie discovers with horror that she’s pregnant with Brundle’s child; she begins to fear giving birth to another monstrosity. Her nightmare, in which she gives birth to a bloody, squirming grub instead of a human baby, is one of the film’s most horrifying scenes. This is a key moment – finally, the film’s sympathies lie wholly with Ronnie.
Brundle, on the other hand, relishes becoming Brundlefly right up until the point his human flesh melts away, revealing the 185-pound fly beneath. (The Fly’s special effects and makeup are consistently, horrifyingly insectine – Brundle’s transformation feels all too real til the end.) The sequence preceding this is a parade of horrors. He offers a cheerful demonstration of “how Brundlefly eats” that involves vomiting acid onto solid food before gulping down the resulting slurry. He collects his own body parts as they drop off, assembling them in a medicine cabinet display he cheekily nicknames “The Brundle Museum of Natural History.” Finally, he kidnaps Ronnie and tries to force her into the teleporter, with the aim of fusing her and the baby with himself. In the end, he grows distant from his humanity. He hardly even recognizes it anymore. Brundle was always a fantasy; Brundlefly is the reality. As he puts it: “I’m an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is over, and the insect is awake.”
Perhaps Seth Brundle never really understood the flesh at all. If nothing else, it made him crazy. He certainly never fully shakes his commitment to isolation – his obsessive focus on his own transformation blinds him to the real relationships he already has, severing the ties binding him to the outside world. But he may be best understood as a man who fatally underestimates the richness of human connection, which he sacrifices in pursuit of the tantalizing possibilities of the future and the flesh. The uneasy, ambiguous tension between flesh and mind, individuality and connection, never fully disappears. But it exists in a balance, up until the point when technological intervention makes that impossible.
Brundle is led astray by the belief that he can turn himself into something better than human. But there is no enhanced version of humanity – there are only humans, as they actually are. There are no superhumans, no “Brundleflies” heralding the next stage in human evolution. There are, however, humans who are in denial about their humanity, even as they become monsters.
I hear that David Cronenberg has mellowed. Crimes of the Future, his most recent foray into body horror, is more comfortable with the possibilities of bodily transformation. I hear it’s affirmative, even hopeful – far from the bleak vision laid out in The Fly and his other ‘70s and ‘80s classics.
To me, this feels like a loss. Our technologies make it easier than ever for us to exist in isolation. A disturbing number of us depend on them to connect with our fellow humans. And a few of us – a handful of billionaire charlatans, tech oligopolies, and their various acolytes and apologists – stand to profit mightily from the destruction of the world as we know it. Some of them may truly believe in their visions of progress and “creative destruction,” but the world they’ve wrought through their almost-unchecked power suggests otherwise. The road ahead is long and bleak, and we need filmmakers who can speak to that.
The threat looms, ever-present: that we might, in isolation with no friends but our devices, lose touch with our humanity and become monsters. It could happen to any of us; it is happening, right now, to all of us. We are all Seth Brundle now.
Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
What’s not to love in the Universal horror classics? Iconic monsters. Creepy Gothic castles. Mad scientists and graverobbers played by oddball character actors. Everything you could possibly want in a horror film is there for the taking.
The Universal Frankenstein famously bears no resemblance to Mary Shelley’s classic novel, but the creature’s dilemma remains the same: how to go on existing in a world that hates and scorns you. Like its predecessor, Bride of Frankenstein conveys this problem through Boris Karloff’s performance. Of course, he’s brilliant, bringing more pathos to a largely non-speaking role than lesser actors bring to reams of Shakespeare or Chekhov. They don’t make ‘em like Karloff anymore.
If you’ve never seen Bride of Frankenstein before (as I hadn’t), you’re in for a few surprises. The bride has a lot less screen time than you think, for one. Then there’s the weird framing device – the film begins not where its predecessor left off, but in the company of Mary Shelley, who introduces Bride of Frankenstein as the sequel to her original story to an audience of Percy Shelley and Lord Byron. Given the Universal Frankenstein’s radical differences from the source material, the sequel’s “word of God” treatment is a truly strange move. Some might even call it disrespectful. Me, I prefer to treat it as a fitting homage to the Godmother of horror.
Notably, this conversation, held over cheeseburgers in a fast food joint, feels strictly platonic – none of the romantic subtext of Brundle’s first invitation remains.