Editors Note…hopefully you’ve seen this masterpiece by now. If not, there are spoilers ahead. And seriously, if you haven’t seen it…it’s been 40 years, what are you waiting for? Go watch it and come back and read the article afterwords.
Remembering David Cronenberg’s THE FLY on the 40th Anniversary of it’s release
August 15th. Friday night – 8pm. 1986. My ten year old brain cracked like an egg left scrambling on the icky aisle floor of the Lowes Twin theater on Main Street in New Rochelle (New York). Little did I know the lasting effects it would have on me. I want to tell you why in as simplest terms as possible...
Let me backtrack. Two weeks earlier I had accompanied my mother at a Psychiatric convention in Boston. One night with her doctor friends they decided to let off some steam by catching a nearly sold out 7pm show of Aliens. Goes without saying it was an amazing theatrical experience, you’ve probably read hundreds of nostalgia essays on how that movie changed lives, but to be honest my thoughts lingered on a trailer that preceded the screening.
It was called THE FLY.
Lucky for me it didn’t take that much effort to convince my mom to take me to the opening two weeks later back in NY, she was intrigued by the trailer as I was. I even convinced my friend Jeffery to tag along and he was a pussy cat when it came to horror, I lied to him saying that it was like Star Wars but with insects. He bought it, what does a nine year old know anyway?
Fast forward: August 15th. A balmy Friday night. The Lowes Twin. A beautiful double screen theater that housed maybe 300-400 seats each. And the screens were big and wide. Just a magical place to see a blockbuster or even a low rent B-movie.
Around 7:30pm there’s a small line that gradually grows bigger as the clock ticks towards 8. The hype is building. People are genuinely excited. The 6pm showing crowd begins to filter out. I see a phalanx of ashen faces. Shell shocked. Thousand yard stares of trauma. Then the last one to saunter out of the auditorium…a ginger haired white woman wearing a yellow polka dot sun dress…she collapses against the concession stand and she lets out a blood curdling scream that I can still hear the echoes filtered into my mind. Not the kind of generic scream one just belts out of reflexive shock, this was the kind of scream that rattles the bones and tears at the fabric of one’s soul. This woman was in deep guttural pain. She had to let it out. Ushers had attended to the woman and the Paramedics came soon after and hauled her off into an ambulance feeding her an oxygen tube. I remember turning to my mother and saying “this is gonna be good.”
The movie starts with a blaring score by Howard Shore that instantly awakens the senses, quieting the audience into rapt attention. Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum(a real life couple at the time)meet cute at a science convention. He takes her back to his lab and shows off his invention, a teleportation machine that oddly, and I think quite on purpose, resembles a bees nest. After conducting a test with a live baboon, the machine inverts its insides, dying instantly. Things progress as the scientist and the journalist begin to form an attraction, making love after the teleportation setback which ultimately leads to another breakthrough as Seth Brundle, getting the idea as Veronica describes a sex kink, which leads him to reconfigure the program into the computer about the complexities of the flesh. Soon enough they teleport another baboon…and what do you know…it’s a success!
Veronica gets a message from her former lover on how he plans to expose Seth’s invention and she hastily rushes out telling Seth to slow down on the relationship. Jealous, dejected, and drunk Seth conducts an impromptu test on himself accidentally merging his DNA with a housefly as he undergoes a grotesque physical and psychological transformation into a hideous human-insect hybrid.
And boy what a transformation! Goldblum’s performance cannot be lauded enough. It is quite simply the greatest acting performance within the horror-sci-fi genre I have ever seen. It is shocking to me this man wasn’t even nominated for an Oscar. When Seth crashes out on Veronica because she refuses to go through the telepod I remember everyone just collectively gasping when he explodes with the line “YOU’RE A FUCKING DRAG YOU KNOW THAT!”
And don’t get me started on the insect politics monologue…there have been many memorable monologues throughout the history of cinema – I Believe in America (The Godfather) – Tears in Rain (Blade Runner) – USS Indianapolis speech – (Jaws) – You Can’t Handle the Truth – (A Few Good Men). But this one… delivered with such aching vulnerability… probably the single greatest monologue I’ve ever heard in my life. Even Gene Siskel placed the Fly as number 8 on his top ten that year.
Two hours later. The end credits roll. Howard Shore’s dramatic score kicks you in the teeth. And right on cue people literally jumped out of their seats and sped out of that auditorium like bats out of hell. Some just stayed in their seats, shell shocked by what they had just witnessed. My mom had to take a second before she could get up. My friend Jeffery didn’t want to sleep over, he just wanted to go home and curl up in his bed.
Why such reaction from an enthusiastic crowd? My theory is simple. Everyone thought they were going to get a Friday the 13th style slasher about a guy that turns into a fly and starts killing people in creatively gruesome ways. No one, myself included, thought we were going into a melodramatic tragic love story with deeply affecting performancesalso aided by practical makeup effects that were so nightmarish inducing you couldn’t walk straight. We were unprepared for the extreme physical decomposition. The scenes of the dissolution of the flesh, melting body parts with “fly” vomit caused mass hysteria, there weren’t any walkouts at my screening, but there was a lot of nervous murmuring, especially when Veronica goes back to visit Seth for the first time in his decomposed state. If the movie was tongue in cheek I think audiences would have digested it better, but Cronenberg wasn’t fucking around. He wasn’t going for cheap thrills. We got something serious.
THE FLY also introduced me to the intrinsic value of perspective. Me being a proud member of the male gender I never once identified with a female character up until that point. Ever! Women were just accessories to the plot and that suited me just fine. I was ten years old, what the hell did I know? It was a boys world as far as I knew. But Geena Davis’s performance got to me in ways completely unexpected. When she reveals she’s pregnant with a possible fly/human hybrid my jaw dropped along with everyone else in that theater. The level of chill inducing groaning from the audience when she reveals “I’m pregnant…I’m pregnant with Seth’s baby” was so palpable you could cut the tension with a machete. Even my mom turned ashen. People were beside themselves, the murmuring of shock filtered throughout the auditorium.No one saw that coming, which in turn raised the stakes of the plot to a deliriously high degree that it was impossible not to react.
At that moment I was Veronica, sitting on that toilet with the weight of the world on my shoulders, bursting into tears. I’m thinking “this is just not right…what would I do…do I kill the child out of mercy knowing its humanity could be compromised…or do I let fate decide?”
The subject of abortion wasn’t even a concept to me. It forced me to ask questions on bodily autonomy, the loss of control of one’s life, and the dilemma of facing an irrevocable choice. Another moment that scarred me is when Seth crashes the window into the Doctor’s office as Veronica is about to undergo an abortion and whisks her away into the night, taking her to a rooftop begging her to keep the baby. Again, Geena and Jeff, they are on fire in this two hander scene. The stakes keep rising. Everyone of us in that auditorium are now on pins and needles. How is this conflict going to be resolved? What has to be done? What needs to be done?
In an act of mercy…to end the suffering of his agonizing transformation…Veronica blows her lover’s head off with a shotgun. In any other horror movie at the time that moment would be considered a cathartic release, allowing the audience to breathe a sigh of relief. In the case of the THE FLY it’s an unbearable tragic love story.
Collective cinematic engagement. There’s nothing like it. Cinema takes you places you thought you could never go. Makes you consider other people’s, who don’t look like you, points of views. There is no other art form that can cause you to rearrange your thought patterns on how you see the world around you.
And I leave you with the immortal words of Seth Brundle…
“Drink deep or taste not from the plasma spring!”
Author Bio:
Alain was an 80's kid who grew up in the movie theater and watched everything from E.T. to Robocop to The Fly. No genre was off limits. His writing has earned a list of accolades for his various screenplays. Check out his other articles: HERE.
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