Friday, March 4, 2016

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #33 The Fly

The science of The Fly makes as little sense as the original 1950s version. Apparently, the transportation machine can reassemble any substance perfectly, except for DNA. I imagine that realistically, Dr. Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) should have faced instant death rather than a gradual transformation into a fly-monster when his DNA was accidentally spliced with a fly as part of a teleportation experiment. Still, the movie makes the imagery gritty enough and ‘Brundlefly’ disturbing enough that we can suspend our disbelief.



By the standards of most horror films, this movie is unbelievably subtle. We get extended sequences without dialogue in which emotions other than abject terror are communicated to the audience. The most notable of these is one in which Dr. Brundle is able to put on an acrobatic display in his lab to impress his love interest, reporter Ronnie Quaife (Geena Davis). He’s able to spin around a bar until he touches the ceiling with his feet. We can see that Seth believes this to be a great achievement, and believes that his teleporter has somehow improved him. However, seeing this sequence, the tension builds as we and Ronnie know that there is something wrong with him.



When I see this film, I fundamentally see a deconstruction of traditional masculinity. Seth meets Ronnie by showing her his teleporter, which she suggestively allows him to demonstrate with her stocking. He explains that the machine works on non-living things, but will kill anything living in gruesome ways (he demonstrates this point with a baboon). It’s clear that it’s his intelligence that makes him attractive to her. Furthermore, it’s sex with her that inspires him to finally reprogram the machine so that it’s able to safely transport a second baboon.



What destroys him, however, are his macho urges. Before the baboon can be properly tested, Seth gets drunk and decides to test the machine on himself out of some misguided attempt to prove his courage. He fails to see a fly that lands on the inside of the pod door. The fly comes to represent his most primitive urges. They feel good, but they’re destructive and unhealthy. Seth tries to force Ronnie into the teleporter, still unaware of the fly and believing the teleporter to have “purified” him. When she refuses, he goes out, challenges a redneck in a bar to an arm-wrestling contest, maims the man with his super-strength and uses the event to pick up a woman named Tawny (Joy Boushel).



While Tawny’s scenes are brief, they make the subtext extremely overt in regards to Seth’s behavior. He impresses her with his strength and then shows her his teleportation machine. Unlike with Ronnie, he doesn’t even bother to explain what it is, simply allowing her to believe that it’s some sort of magic trick. When Tawny refuses to go through the teleporter herself, he grabs her and says “you’re going to like it!” This gives us the obvious metaphor of Seth as a rapist, playing with other people’s bodies the way he played with his own, and only Ronnie’s intervention stops him from forcing Tawny into the pod.



Seth’s actual deformities develop gradually. He first grows a few unusually tough hairs from his back, then begins to develop a rash. Eventually, his skin becomes a pile of boils, his hands become distorted, and his teeth fall out. He becomes unable to eat solid food, instead dissolving his food with acid. His hair falls out and his ears fall off. The final act of the movie begins with him discovering the fly through his computer records. And from that point forward, the movie consists of us watching him decay, both physically and mentally.



Towards the end of the movie, Seth feels himself losing empathy as he becomes increasingly insect-like in his thinking. He gives a speech in which he said he’d like to be the first “insect politician,” meaning the first insect capable of compassion and compromise. However, he fails at this. When he finds out Ronnie is pregnant and seeking an abortion, he breaks into the clinic and kidnaps her, viewing her as a possession. He attempts to force her into the transporter pod, believing that he can merge with her and the baby to become a being that’s at least closer to human than his current form. When he tells Ronnie this, his skin begins to fall off and we see him fully transformed into a fly-creature, the humanity ripped away with the last traces of his empathy.



The cavalry comes in the form of Stathis Borans (John Getz), Ronnie’s ex-boyfriend and editor. He’s a character I haven’t mentioned up until now, mainly because his interactions were primarily with Ronnie. I’m a bit uncertain how much we’re supposed to feel about him. During her initial meetings with Seth, Stathis tells her that he’s a fraud and acts jealous, despite Ronnie having broken up with Stathis before the movie even starts. I believe director David Cronenberg intended to set us up with an expectation of a traditional happy ending, with Stathis attempting to call the military who wrongfully view Seth as a threat in retaliation for Seth “stealing” Ronnie, Seth finding a way to cure himself and Stathis receiving his comeuppance.



Instead, Stathis arguably undergoes the exact opposite of Seth’s journey as he becomes more empathetic to Ronnie over the course of the film. He fully supports Ronnie in her decision to get an abortion, entirely for sympathetic reasons. When Seth takes her, he comes to Seth’s lab with a shotgun, and despite being mutilated by Seth, Stathis is able to disable Ronnie’s telepod, causing Seth to be merged with the machine itself.



There were originally several different endings filmed, all of which were hated by both test audiences and the filmmakers themselves. They gave us variations of Ronnie is pregnant, Ronnie is not pregnant, Ronnie is ambiguously pregnant, Ronnie is back with Stathis and Ronnie is single. I think it’s not hard to see why these endings didn’t work: all of them attempted to give you closure on a movie that was about a situation that could not be easily resolved. Literally, any true “ending” to the story would seem false.



So instead, the movie closes with Ronnie fatally shooting Seth, now in agony from his fusion with the telepod and crying over his death. There is no final answer. There is no silver lining. Instead, there is only tragedy and despair.



One thing I want to draw attention to in this movie is the lack of overt phallic imagery. Given the obvious masculine nature of the fly, I suspect that not giving the final form of Brundlefly a more prominent proboscis was a conscious decision. The film seems to see the male body as completely unconnected to the reckless and aggressive actions that destroyed Seth Brundle.



If the movie has a failing, it’s that it’s too short. It’s only about an hour and a half, and only the final third deals with a visibly mutating Seth. I think another half-hour of watching him fall apart little by little would have greatly increased the impact of the movie.



As it is, however, this movie is a fine example of horror filmmaking that scares you with both horrifying visuals and creepy ideas while questioning societal expectations. Gene Siskel outright accused the Academy of snubbing Goldblum for a Best Actor nomination due to their prejudice against the Horror genre. This is Cronenberg’s best-known film for a good reason!

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