For years, The Fly (1986) has been famous for its gross-out gore. Even by his own standards, director David Cronenberg – who had already racked up a slew of body horror classics, from Shivers and Rabid to The Brood, Scanners and Videodrome – exceeded his gruesome reputation. But there was something different this time: a relationship drama cocooned in viscera.
Developed as a loose remake of Kurt Neumann’s 1958 B-movie classic, screenwriter Chuck Pogue kept the same basic premise – a scientist accidentally fuses his body with a housefly when it hitches a ride in his teleporter – but recalibrated the ideas, shifting from an instantaneous change to a gradual metamorphosis. So when comedy legend Mel Brooks, of all people, sent the script to Cronenberg, it immediately piqued his interest. And, after rewriting Pogue’s script (in part to make the characters “more interesting”), what emerged was a transmogrified beast.
“Of course The Fly is very horrific,” Cronenberg reflected years later. “It is definitely a horror film and a sci-fi film, but people do think of it as a love story.” It was this romance, as much as the groundbreaking effects from Chris Walas, which would cement the film as a classic of horror cinema.
“Is this a romance we’re having?”
The first thing you’ll likely notice about Cronenberg’s The Fly, though, isn’t the love story, or the effects, or the science-fiction. It’s the music.
Composer Howard Shore had worked with Cronenberg on The Brood, Scanners, and Videodrome – and would go on to work with him over four decades, including on the director’s most recent film, The Shrouds. However, in addition to their frequent collaborations, Shore amassed credits on some of the most sweeping epics ever committed to screen, not least Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films years later.
Looking back on The Fly, this grandeur is there from the beginning. We may not be in Middle-Earth, but from the opening moments, Shore’s music swells with a cathedral-filling grandeur, hinting at a depth and profundity not always seen within the gooey parameters of genre film.
This glorious music introduces us to journalist Ronnie (Geena Davis) and physicist Seth (Jeff Goldblum) as they meet during a science symposium. She’s sniffing out a story for her magazine; he’s cute and socially awkward, inviting her back to his lab for coffee. When she capitulates, he shows her what he’s been working on: teleportation. She is left reeling (“It will change the world as we know it”) and the pair begin a passionate affair, mixing work with pleasure as she charts his research.
There’s a beautiful efficiency to the writing here: Cronenberg reportedly cut the first 17 pages of Pogues’ script, and the plot flows with a deftness that never feels forced or as if it comes at the expense of character.
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It soon emerges that there is a snag in Seth’s experiments: the telepods can only transmit inorganic matter (as demonstrated by the film’s first gore set-piece, where an ill-fated baboon is turned inside out), leading him to hypothesize that the computer doesn’t understand ‘the flesh’, and that he himself must learn about this.
As well as serving as a response to the prophetic mantra from Videodrome (“Long live the new flesh!”), this motif of ‘fleshliness’ acts as both a statement of intent (Seth’s journey will be characterized by fleshly ecstasy and degradation) and a metaphor for our collective humanity. Locked away in his lab, Seth is sheltered (“I don’t have a life”), but his relationship with Ronnie begins to teach him what it means to be human. She awakens his heart.
If this sounds twee, it’s absolutely sold by Davis and Goldblum’s phenomenal performances. There is a gentle sweetness to their interactions that goes beyond sexual chemistry, speaking instead to the fragility of two lonely people who find each other.
But the ‘flesh’ here also hints at something risky, wild, animalistic. As Ronnie puts it, the flesh makes one “crazy”, and though she might be talking about intense sexual desire, it also suggests a kind of dangerous abandon.
It’s this paradox which seems to encapsulate their relationship and foreshadow Seth’s downfall: fleshly passion might wake him up to a life of love and passion, but when he (wrongly) suspects Ronnie of sleeping with her boss and ex-boyfriend Stathis (John Getz), he rashly decides to send himself through the telepod, unaware that a fly has joined him for the ride.
“I know an old lady who swallowed a fly”
At first Seth seems fine, better even. Possessed with increased strength and sexual vigor, he waxes lyrical about the almost spiritual qualities of his teleportation experience. However, soon the cracks begin to appear in his character, body, and mind. Where once he was gentle (tenderly fastening a necklace around Ronnie’s throat, whispering sweetly in her ear), he soon becomes violent, lashing out, punching walls, demanding. His messianic language slips into outright ravings (“Drink deep or taste not the plasma spring!”) and – after a night where he snaps a guy’s arm and cheats on Ronnie – the couple break up.
Suddenly alone and confronted with his behavior, Seth looks at himself in the mirror, noticing, as if for the first time, the thick pockmarks on his cheeks. He bites nervously at his nails… until one peels off. And as he sits there, fingers oozing (“What’s happening to me? Am I dying?”), he’s confronted with the reality of Ronnie’s challenge: he is changing, in every conceivable way.
Cronenberg has spoken about how The Fly is a story where – SPOILERS! – “two people fall in love, one gets a horrible disease and dies in front of his lover who then helps him to die”, and that whilst a traditional dramatic version of this story would be hard to finance, by making it a genre picture “suddenly all of that was ok”. And this perhaps gets to the heart of why The Fly has such enduring power: it’s not just a gore film, but one steeped in universal human experiences of losing someone, be it to addiction, illness, or themselves.
“Please help me”
Seth’s “bizarre form of cancer” progresses, reducing him to vomiting on his food as his ears (and other extremities) rot away. At the same time, Ronnie discovers she’s pregnant and begins having lucid dreams of giving birth to a maggot (with Cronenberg cameo-ing as the gynecologist, of course).
She visits Seth again, trying to talk to the man he once was, but is instead greeted by perhaps the most beautiful and tragic line of the whole film: “I’m an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is over, and the insect is awake.”
With nowhere left to turn, Ronnie begs Stathis to arrange an abortion, but before the doctor can begin the procedure, Seth kidnaps Ronnie and returns to his lab (read: lair). Stathis – himself on a redemption arc from sleazy ex to something more noble – arrives with a shotgun, but is ambushed by Seth, who pukes corrosive vomit on him, dissolving his hand and ankle. What’s more, Seth reveals to Ronnie he plans to use the telepods to fuse him with her and the baby: three people in one body, the ultimate nuclear family.
As the seconds tick down, Stathis recovers from his injuries just enough to shoot the connecting cables, and in the chaos Ronnie is spared, whilst Seth is teleported one last time, now fused with the telepod itself. As he emerges from the smoke – a wheezing, crawling insectoid mass of flesh and metal, no longer a man but truly ‘Brundlefly’ – he places one claw against the shotgun barrel and begs Ronnie to end his suffering. Through streaming tears, she complies.
It is perhaps this final moment that best captures what makes The Fly so unique: like Seth, it is a fusion of horror, romance, grief, love, loss, and longing. From Shore’s soaring score to the incredible effects work from Walas and the indelible, humanistic fingerprints of Cronenberg, it is a magnificent, heartbreaking epic about a man who became a monster and what it means to be human.
