The Fly (1986)

Filed Under BBT Magazine, Science Fiction, Soylent Screen, Jef Taylor, horror, Cronenberg, The Fly, Jeff Goldblum, Insects, Notice I didn't say Kafkaesque?, Mad Scientists, Transformation

BBT’s film critic Jef Taylor’s column has spoilers this time around! Fortunately, you’ve probably already seen the movie.

 

If you work with animals, or food made of animals, or trash made from food made from animals, now is the time of the year to start dealing with flies.  At my job I’m charged with purchasing and providing many different fly control products to different animal caretakers.  I’ve even been making an effort to identify the different fly species that are found in my region.  I’ve gone a little fly crazy, which is why I’ve finally decided to watch David Cronenberg’s The Fly.

Jeff Goldblum plays the darkest version of his signature characer, a nervous and socially awkward yet brilliant and oddly attractive scientist.  Geena Davis does a nice job in a role that could have been a simple love interest/damsel in distress.  Instead she is a strong woman with a successful career; the character is written with a surprising amount of respect, despite the scene where she gives birth to a ten pound maggot.  John Getz  provides the third corner of the love triangle, as a character so insecure and sleazy that he only seems like an acceptable choice once the other guy starts pulling out his own fingernails and vomiting on his donuts. 

I presume that I’m the last horror and sci-fi fan/naturalist to have seen the movie, so you undoubtedly know the premise.  A scientist named Brundle and a housefly get mixed up together when an experiment goes awry.  Instead of the instant giant fly head seen in the earlier versions of the story, we get a slow transformation from man to insect.  For some reason, I expected the movie to have more exploration of the natural history of the diptera, and the housefly in particular.  There is the explanation of the feeding method of flies–at least the most disgusting aspect of it–but little else.

The fact of the matter is that Cronenberg isn’t especially interested in insects.  The fly that ends up in the teleporter is noteworthy for the very fact that it was overlooked.  It was too insignificant for the jealous and impulsive scientist to notice–his passion is his undoing.  His flesh is corrupted by his own actions, the fly is just the mechanism by which his corruption is played out.  The Flesh, The Flesh!  Cronenberg, despite hilariously disingenuous denials in interviews, is obsessed with The Flesh; how we inhabit it and how it drives us.

The computer Brundle uses doesn’t understand the flesh, he tells us.  That’s why it makes steaks taste bad and mutilates baboons.  (As a side note, who the hell is supplying this lunatic with Hamadryas Baboons?  Those things aren’t cheap, and they aren’t exactly easy animals to keep around.  Note to Brundlecronenberg: there are good reasons why most scientists use mice for lab animals.)  So he teaches the computer be passionate for flesh–how, we don’t know, since we are mercifully spared a montage of intense data entry scenes.

Where do you go next once you’ve scrambled up a baboon?  Why, you throw yourself into the thing, naked, drunk, and angry.  With the fly in him, Brundle becomes more of a man.  If there’s anything we’ve learned from Jeckyll and Hyde, various werewolf movies, and Spider-Man 3, merging with the Animal gives a man confidence and sex appeal, and a few unwanted hairs.  It can’t last, however; nobody wants to see a movie where a guy gets animal molecules mixed up in his dna and then lives sexily ever after. 

All flesh goes to ruin, especially the flesh of mad scientists who experiment on themselves.  The corruption takes over, and the sex appeal diminishes sharply as chunks of human drop away into sticky puddles.  In the inevitably violent climax, the vestiges of man slough off revealing the monster inside.  I’ve seen this scene happen in what seems like dozens of movies made after The Fly (most recently in Slither).  In the dilapidated ruins of the home and hideout , the latex and glycerin monster reaches for his former lover, revealing a poignant glimmer of humanity before the squib explodes the puppet head.

 

Jef Taylor is a film critic, zookeeper, naturalist, and licensed pest control technician.  Really.

 

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Comments

3 Responses to “The Fly (1986)”

  1. Gregory Adams on April 29th, 2008 4:26 pm

    Great review! I can lend you the two Vincent Price versions. The first is surprisingly effective, while the second is howlingly funny.

    No squibs were harmed in the making of either.

    –G

  2. Natalie L. Sin on April 30th, 2008 9:40 am

    And then they made the follow-up movie. Seriously, just skip it. What was beautiful, intense, and tragic in this version becomes sterile, useless, and dull in the second. It’s only use is to make us grateful for better movies, up to and including flight safety videos.

  3. D.S. Knight on May 3rd, 2008 5:45 pm

    And I used to hate Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, but I’ve come to realize that shows like this might never have come to be if it weren’t for him. ;) :P

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