In praise of The Fly – the body hor­ror that’s all in your head

Despite its ven­er­a­ble age, David Cronenberg’s The Fly remains the body hor­ror to beat. Viewed today, it’s the film’s puri­ty of pur­pose that stands out, the relent­less com­mit­ment to break­ing the human body down and putting it back togeth­er in all the ways it isn’t meant to be. It’s the pla­ton­ic ide­al of a body hor­ror movie, a per­fect 96 min­utes of acid vom­it and ooz­ing flesh. And oh, the flesh. ​“You only know society’s straight line about the flesh,” Jeff Gold­blum rants late on in the film. ​“You can’t pen­e­trate beyond society’s sick, gray, fear of the flesh. And I’m not just talk­ing about sex and pen­e­tra­tion. I’m talk­ing about pen­e­tra­tion beyond the veil of the flesh! A deep pen­e­trat­ing dive into the plas­ma pool!”

The Fly is a tour de force of dis­gust, Cro­nen­berg find­ing new and increas­ing­ly repul­sive ways to make us look down at our own fleshy forms with slow-dawn­ing con­cern. Every time an ear falls off or a mon­key is turned inside out is a fresh reminder not just of our mor­tal­i­ty, but how vis­cer­al­ly unpleas­ant most of us would find our own innards, how per­verse­ly alien our own bod­ies can seem. But as repug­nant as the film gets, as much as it twists the human body into unwel­come shapes, it only serves to hide the fact that the real hor­ror is all in the mind.

Much of the cred­it for that must go not to Cro­nen­berg him­self, but to Gold­blum. As sci­en­tist Seth Brun­dle, he brings his unique brand of charm to the film. Brun­dle is at once awk­ward and endear­ing, whether explain­ing why he wears the exact same out­fit every day (he got the idea from Ein­stein) or wax­ing lyri­cal about teach­ing his com­put­er: ​“to be made crazy by the flesh.” Like we said, there’s a lot of flesh going on here. Lat­er, after a tele­por­ta­tion hic­cup sees him gene-spliced with a house fly, Brun­dle goes through a dizzy­ing char­ac­ter devel­op­ment. At first he’s all ego, rel­ish­ing his new­found ath­leti­cism and pow­er. Because this is the ​’80s, he shows off through gym­nas­tics and arm wrestling. Then, as he slow­ly morphs into what he calls the ​‘Brundle­fly’, he spins through hor­ror, dis­gust, denial, attempts to cure him­self, and accep­tance, before he ulti­mate­ly takes a vio­lent turn for the film’s final act.

There are clear par­al­lels to the pop psy­cho­log­i­cal stages of grief, but Cro­nen­berg and screen­writer Charles Edward Pogue add anoth­er wrin­kle to the mix in the form of the encroach­ing influ­ence of the fly DNA. It’s one of the few ideas bor­rowed from the 1958 orig­i­nal (itself an adap­ta­tion of a 1957 short sto­ry by George Lan­ge­laan), but here made immea­sur­ably more inter­est­ing. In the ​’50s ver­sion, the fly mind makes itself known through con­trol­ling the scientist’s one entire­ly insec­tile arm, leav­ing poor actor David Hedi­son wrestling with him­self on set. Cro­nen­berg reimag­ines it as a sub­tler influ­ence, creep­ing into Brundle’s deci­sion-mak­ing, blur­ring the lines between com­pas­sion­ate human thought and the ruth­less insect mind. As the Brundle­fly becomes increas­ing­ly errat­ic dur­ing the film’s finale, it becomes hard­er and hard­er to tell where Brun­dle ends and the fly begins, which is exact­ly Cronenberg’s point. By the film’s end, there’s no point look­ing for Brun­dle – he’s long gone. So’s the fly, and all that’s left now is the Brundle­fly hybrid.

Then, of course, there’s Brundle’s rela­tion­ship with jour­nal­ist Veron­i­ca, brought to life with blus­ter­ing brava­do by Geena Davis. She has an instinc­tive sym­pa­thy for the crea­ture Brun­dle becomes, and is afford­ed one of the film’s most icon­ic moments, a night­mare vision of a preg­nan­cy brought to ter­ri­fy­ing con­clu­sion, a writhing, squirm­ing, two-foot mag­got eject­ed from her womb. The phys­i­cal hor­ror of the moment is imme­di­ate­ly appar­ent, but it serves a broad­er psy­cho­log­i­cal pur­pose, vivid­ly bring­ing to life her unshake­able fear that some­thing alien might be grow­ing inside her, that her own body might be turned against her. Far-fetched though The Fly undoubt­ed­ly is, the preg­nan­cy brings it crash­ing home, twist­ing a nat­ur­al, often wel­come, process into some­thing just as hor­ri­fy­ing as any shot of Jeff Gold­blum vom­it­ing acid.

The Fly is incon­testably revolt­ing, a creep­ing pro­gres­sion of some of the era’s finest pros­thet­ics, and a hor­ri­fy­ing look at the human body slow­ly col­laps­ing, quite lit­er­al­ly falling apart. But more than that it’s about a man los­ing his human­i­ty, his per­son­al­i­ty shift­ing just as fre­quent­ly – and vio­lent­ly – as his body parts. The great­est tragedy of The Fly isn’t that Brun­dle dies, or that he becomes a hideous crea­ture before­hand – it’s that he los­es so much of him­self that he tries to take Veron­i­ca with him.