Lecture: The Fly: Globalism

NTUT Undergraduate

The Fly (1986)
Director: David Cronenberg


Jeff Goldblum

... Seth Brundle


Geena Davis

... Veronica Quaife


John Getz

... Stathis Borans


Joy Boushel

... Tawny
Leslie Carlson

... Dr. Brent Cheevers (as Les Carlson)

George Chuvalo

... Marky
Michael Copeman

... 2nd Man in Bar
David Cronenberg

... Gynecologist

The Fly — The Opera

On 2 July 2008 the opera The Fly by Howard Shore to a libretto by David Henry Hwang premiered at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris with Cronenberg as director and Plácido Domingo conducting. The US premiere was 7 September 2008 at the Los Angeles Opera. The opera uses essentially the same characters and storyline from Cronenberg's film.

Upon its release, The Fly was critically acclaimed, as was Goldblum's tour de force performance. The film was a huge commercial success, the biggest of Cronenberg's career, and was the top-grossing film in the United States for two weeks, earning a total domestic gross of $40,456,565. Film critic Gene Siskel named The Fly as the tenth best film of 1986. In 1989, Premiere and American Film magazines both conducted independent polls of American film critics, directors, and other such groups to determine the best films of the 1980s, and The Fly appeared on both lists. The film was also widely thought to be an allegory of the AIDS epidemic, although Cronenberg denies this and states that the subtext/metaphor of the film is the natural process of aging and death. The "Brundlefly" makeup effects won a 1986 Academy Award, the film's sole nomination. In 2005, Time magazine film critics Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel included The Fly in their list of the All-TIME 100 Greatest Movies, Time later named it one of the 25 best horror films. In 2006, the Chicago Film Critics Association named The Fly the 32nd scariest film ever made.



Plot

Seth Brundle: “What am I working on? Uhh... I'm working on something that will change the world, and human life as we know it.”



At a meet-the-press party held by Bartok Science Industries, Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum), a brilliant but eccentric scientist, meets Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis), a journalist for Particle magazine. Bartok Science Industries provides the funding for Brundle's work, and he tells Veronica that he's working on a project that will change the world. Intrigued, Veronica accompanies Brundle back to his warehouse laboratory/home so he can show her his invention: a set of "Telepods" that allows instantaneous teleportation of an object from one pod to another. Veronica is impressed and eventually agrees to document Seth's work. Although the telepods can transport inanimate objects perfectly, they do not work correctly on living things. Seth unintentionally demonstrates this horrific fact when he attempts to teleport a baboon, which is killed when it is reintegrated inside-out. Shortly thereafter, Seth and Veronica begin a romantic relationship, and their first sexual encounter provides inspiration for Seth. He realizes that the machine is not perfectly reassembling living objects, but is rather "reinterpreting" them, and sets about reprogramming the telepod computer to cope with living flesh.

Seth then succeeds in teleporting a second baboon with no apparent harm. Flush with this success, he wants to spend a romantic evening with Veronica, but she leaves before they can celebrate. Brundle's judgment soon becomes impaired by alcohol and his paranoid fear that Veronica is secretly rekindling her relationship with her editor and former lover, Stathis Borans (John Getz). In reality, Veronica has left to confront Stathis about his continuing interference in her life, and his threat to reveal the existence of the telepods to the world prematurely. Unaware of all this, a drunk and jealous Brundle decides to teleport himself, both as a way of getting back at Veronica for her imagined infidelity, and also to provide the teleportation system with its first human subject. Just before the telepod door automatically closes, a common housefly slips into the pod, unseen by the distracted Brundle. The teleportation successful, Brundle emerges from the receiving pod, seemingly normal.

Shortly after his teleportation, Seth reconciles with Veronica, and soon begins to exhibit a sense of intoxicating euphoria, as well as heightened strength, endurance, and sexual potency. However, he also gradually becomes arrogant and violent, and when Veronica sees that something has gone wrong and refuses to allow herself to be teleported, Brundle abandons her, claiming that she cannot "keep up" with him sexually. Brundle then meets a voluptuous and sleazy woman named Tawny at a bar, and arm wrestles with a burly man named Marky, with Tawny as the prize. After using his superhuman strength to give Marky's arm a compound fracture, Brundle takes Tawny home for the night.

The next morning, Veronica arrives at the warehouse in time to prevent Brundle from forcibly teleporting Tawny. After Tawny runs away, Veronica tries to warn Brundle that something is happening to him, but, still in denial, he throws her out of his warehouse and tells her never to return. After she leaves, however, Brundle is horrified to discover that his fingernails are beginning to fall off. Realizing that something really did go wrong during his first teleportation, Brundle checks his computer's records, and discovers that the telepod computer, confused by the presence of two separate life-forms in the sending pod, merged him with the fly at the molecular-genetic level.

After a month-long period of self-imposed isolation, a desperate Seth again reconciles with Veronica, but he is continuing to deteriorate, becoming progressively less human in appearance. Brundle theorizes that he is slowly becoming a hybrid creature that is neither human nor insect (which the doomed Seth begins referring to as "Brundlefly"). He has started to exhibit fly-like characteristics, such as vomiting digestive enzymes onto his food in order to dissolve it, and the ability to cling to walls and ceilings. He also develops fly-like twitches and tics, and begins leaving his sloughed-off human body parts in his medicine cabinet, dubbing it "The Brundle Museum of Natural History". Brundle comes to realize that he is losing his human reason and compassion, and that he is now being driven by primitive impulses he cannot control. To her horror, Veronica learns that she is pregnant by Seth, and she cannot be sure if the child was conceived before or after his fateful teleportation. After having a nightmare in which she gives birth to a giant maggot, Veronica becomes determined to get an abortion.

Although Veronica visits Brundle to tell him about her pregnancy, she can't bring herself to do so. Outside Brundle's warehouse, Veronica begs Stathis to take her to a clinic, so she can get an abortion, but Brundle overhears their discussion while watching them from the rooftop. Brundle then abducts Veronica from the clinic, and begs her to carry the child to term, since it could potentially be the last remnant of his untainted humanity. Veronica refuses, afraid that the child will be a hideous mutant. Brundle takes her back to his warehouse.

Meanwhile, Stathis breaks into the lab with a shotgun and comes to Veronica's rescue, but is seriously injured and nearly killed by the almost fully-transformed Brundle, who dissolves Stathis' left hand and right foot with his corrosive vomit-drop enzyme. Stathis is spared from death only by the pleading of Veronica.

Brundle then reveals his desperate, last-ditch plan to Veronica: He will use the three telepods (the third pod being the original prototype) to fuse himself, Veronica, and their unborn child together into one entity, so they can be the "ultimate family", which the desperate Brundle believes will be "more human than I am alone". Veronica frantically resists Brundle's efforts to drag her into Telepod 1 and then accidentally tears off his jaw, triggering his final transformation. His body sheds its outer layer of decaying flesh, revealing a monstrous combination of man and insect. The now-mute "Brundlefly" creature traps Veronica inside Telepod 1, then steps into Telepod 2. As the computer's timer counts down to the activation of the fusion sequence, the wounded Stathis manages to shoot the power cables connected to Veronica's telepod with his shotgun, severing Telepod 1's connection to the computer and allowing Veronica to escape unharmed. Brundlefly attempts to break out of its own telepod just as the fusion sequence occurs, and is gruesomely fused with chunks of metal and other components from Telepod 2. As the mortally-wounded Brundlefly-telepod fusion creature crawls out of the receiving pod, it silently begs Veronica to end its suffering with Borans' shotgun. A devastated Veronica hesitates for a moment, and then pulls the trigger, ending the life of her hideously-transformed lover.



The Fly Lecture


David Cronenberg: Canadian (Toronto) filmmaker of, now, I think, 15 films, almost all in the SCI-FI/HORROR genre. The Fly was (is) one of his most commercially and artistically successful films. Other of his films include: Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, Videodrome, The Brood. (By the way: in the film, in the scene where Geena Davis is having the abortion and the fly larva appears, Cronenberg is playing the doctor.)



SCI-FI films are usually set in strange places like other planets, or under the sea or underground. They usually have one single premise: What if…? Cronenberg shows us all kinds of hideous things: a baboon turned inside out, and then Seth Brundle’s gruesome transformation. But, but, although it is difficult to watch, I will argue that the film is very sad. Although the film is visually gruesome, it is emotionally moving, like a great opera.



At the very beginning of the film and at the very end, we hear a piece of music from Western opera. We hear a little bit of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. Why? Two possible reasons:

1. To make us think of the opera in which a Japanese woman is called “butterfly” and is compared to a butterfly. She is delicate and beautiful like a butterfly, but in the end she is shamed by the American sailor and commits suicide. In the end of the film, Seth Brundle commits suicide. We should also be reminded of Cronenberg’s M Butterfly.

2. To remind us of the famous saying of the Chinese poet who dreamed very realistically that he was a butterfly; woke up and wondered: Am I a butterfly dreaming I am a man; or am I a man who dreamed I was a butterfly? In the film, Seth Brundle says: “Once I was a man, now I am a fly who dreamed he was a man and loved it.”



We are supposed to keep these comparisons in mind as we watch the film. I am going to concentrate on plot, character, and theme.





We meet Seth Brundle at an ordinary party, not a strange place like a space ship. And we meet the reporter who will become his girlfriend. He wants to talk and he tells her that he’s working on this invention that will change humankind as we know it. He ends up taking her back to his apartment/laboratory and shows her the invention and shows off how it works. He is a little lonely, he is a little boastful, he is a little proud, he is socially awkward and not used to talking to people. The reporter, Veronica, tells him she will print a story about the invention, and she goes to her publisher who makes fun of her and who is crude and who gets cruder as the film goes on. I think we are meant to compare the publisher, Stathis, with Seth Brundle: Of the two, whom do you dislike more?



Veronica agrees to be a reporter for Seth Brundle and record everything about his work. They set up the baboon experiment which ends disastrously. We learn later that the computer did not know what exactly to do; it did not understand “the flesh” and merely gave its “interpretation” of the flesh, maybe because Seth Brundle was so lonely that he himself had forgotten about the flesh. Does that make him a bad person, or just a limited person, an imperfect person? Anyways, he feels very bad about what happened and does not want to talk. He is angry with himself; he blames himself.



He and Veronica fall in love; Seth learns about the flesh. The second experiment with the baboon is successful, but the “old boyfriend” is jealous and spends the whole cold night outside Seth’s apartment; then he confronts Veronica in the clothing store and is very crude again. He is a bad boyfriend. Seth Brundle also gets jealous: the two men are “crazy” with jealousy but who is worse? Each is jealous; each is “crazy” about Veronica’s flesh since each thinks the other is sleeping with her. Seth decides to put himself through the machine. He experiments with himself as the first human—this is noble, honest. But of course, a fly gets into the machine and the two of them are “spliced” together at the molecular level. Seth’s amazing mutations begin the very next day.



This is where the movie takes a detour from the Chinese poet’s question. We know what a man is, what a butterfly is, what a fly is. The Chinese saying is a reassuring paradox: I might be a man; I might be a butterfly and it really doesn’t matter who is dreaming of whom since both are real and distinct. But the film is not a paradox, it is weird: There are no fly-men or man-flies. After he fuses with the fly he becomes something that has never existed. Why does he keep mutating? Because his newly spliced together genes do not know what he is or what he is supposed to be. There is no evolutionarily developed genetic information to map out things for his genes. His flesh has gone crazy. The computer calls him Brundlefly because there is no name for the kind of creature he is. His genes do not know what kind of creature he is supposed to be. If he were a butterfly dreaming he is a man, he could wake up and be a butterfly or vice versa…but Seth cannot wake up.



At first he is exhilarated. He’s very strong, very sexual, lots of energy. Then he becomes moody, a little aggressive, impatient. Then, little pieces of his body begin to fall off: fingernails, teeth, his ear, etc. He realizes something went wrong. He fears he may be dying. The question now is: how does he respond? He has various reactions: frightened, but also curious like a natural scientist, interested, fascinated. My point is: he does not lose his inner humanity. That is part of what makes the movie so emotional (fo me anyway.) He is protective of his humanity. He never loses language—up to the very end when he gestures to Veronica in a way that she can understand that he should be killed. These reactions are all very human in even a dignified way. He had been concerned that Veronica must not come to see him anymore because he may hurt her. He fears for her because he fears that the insect in him is brutal. He even wonders if he has a destiny: to become a fly politician. He thinks that he has a “disease” that has a “purpose”. He retains some kind of hope.



All of this is all the more emotional to watch because the audience can see very well that he is not becoming a fly. He is not becoming anything, not developing into anything, he is simply mutating and mutating and mutating—but with no goal, no final form to develop into. There is no Brundlefly species and so there is no final form to become. This means he is completely alone in the universe: there are no other beings like him, no fellow creatures. Eventually he panics and wants to merge with Veronica and their fetus: she is saved at the last minute by the old boyfriend, and that’s when Brundlefy realizes he is without hope and asks Veronica to kill him.



At this point we can understand the film at a different level. It is true that different creatures fall into species. No two humans are exactly alike, but they are more or less alike. Genetics produces both differences and likeness. But, but—what about life in general? What does genetics in general produce? Is life in general a “disease with a purpose”? Does life in general have a final form or purpose? Does the universe as a whole have a final form or purpose? Species keep evolving: does that mean they keep getting better, more perfect, or is it (life, the universe) in general formless, purposeless? I will leave that question for the evolutionary biologists.



In regard to cross cultural communication this film was by far the most cross cultural of them all. Insect culture, insect society is very different from either human or animal or plant. For this reason philosophers from Aristotle to Heidegger very often write about geology (the inanimate world), plants, animals and humans, but seldom about the closed and mysterious world of the insect. There are two extraordinary books by writers who were interested in insects which I can recommend: Fabre’s Book of Insects (with really beautiful illustrations by the author) and Maeterlinck’s The Life of the White Ant (which is a little bit disgusting in parts). But these are exceptions. Few but specialists study the world of the insect.



On the other hand, we can communicate with animals: We talk to our pets, for example. We think or like to think that there is some rapport that can be gained between humans and gorillas, humans and dolphins, humans and elephants. (But what about gorillas and dolphins? Elephants and cats? Elephants, cats, and bats? Will we ever see an international organization of primates? It seems unlikely. Humans will always have to mediate.) With regard to insects, however, we confront a closed society—a society that wants nothing to do with us at the level of communication. White ants will either leave me alone or eat me. Insects seem sublimely indifferent to humans as another kind of life form. And yet we share the planet with insects. The question is: How? I will leave that question for entomologists and ecologists.



From the point of view of our course it is possible to view the film as a metaphor for problems of globalism, the final term for the semester. What if all the cultures of the world “fuse” together at some level? What if the “plasma pool” Seth speaks of is global capitalism? “Drink deep, or taste not, the plasma spring!” he says to Veronica. Without genetics, there is no life; without capital there is no social organization possible that we know of since both fascism and communism have failed or been defeated. If your country is going to be successful in this world (or if any company or any individual is going to be successful in this world) you must not merely conform to but “drink deep of” the capitalist mode of production and social organization. In that way all the cultures of the world are being spliced together at a very, very basic level. Previously I remarked about how Japan has changed so much that Steven Spielberg had to film Memoires of a Geisha in Hollywood; I have heard so many times (even last week talking to my mother) that you cannot experience China in China—you have to go to Taiwan. Europe is no longer Europe, I have read, but instead is simply a “functioning museum” just like Seth Brundle’s “museum of natural history” of his useless body parts. In America there is great political anxiety about immigrants changing (mutating?) American culture and the American way of life. (The immigrants are following basic capitalist logic: they are looking for the best paying jobs. The Americans who hire them are also following basic capitalist logic: they are cheap labor.) Everywhere we see signs that globalism is becoming a single vast living entity…but does it have a purpose? It will be objected that the true “inner” Japanese culture still exists even if the architecture and industries look “international” in style; that the Chinese “people” will never lose their national character, that Europeans still love regional foods and their own languages, etc. That is, it will be objected that something “inner’ will be retained. That is precisely what happens to Brundlefly! Seth is still a human being “inside” who fears, loves, worries, hopes, retains curiosity and so on…but that is precisely part of what makes him a monster! IF he could transform ENTIRELY into a fly, then we go back to the reassuring paradox of the man/butterfly and all would be well. But he does not transform into a fly, nor the fly into a human. Their special characteristics are retained, but a monster—and not a superior being—is the result of the fusion. It is often remarked that capitalism itself mutates; that in China the world is seeing capitalism-with-a-Chinese-face. That’s fine because after WWII there was fear that every country/culture in the world would become “American”. (Alexandre Kojève introduced the notion of the “end of history” after which we are all happy “Americans” playing golf, going to the movies, grilling hamburgers, etc. etc.) Nowadays few worry about that. American culture has been absorbed into other cultures without the other cultures “becoming” “American”. I suggest that instead of worrying about becoming “American” we have to think about becoming cultural mutants. As time goes by bits and pieces of all of our cultures will “fall off”, because they will have become “relics” just like Seth’s ears and fingernails in the movie. No one culture or civilization will dominate. Some say that the 21st will be the “Chinese century” but I think that will only mean that more Chinese characteristics will enter into and be absorbed by the global culture. More people will speak Mandarin, eat Chinese food, adopt some Chinese customs. At the same time Mandarin, Chinese cuisine, and Chinese customs will themselves mutate. Global culture in general will continue to mutate, but into what? Into the “perfect nuclear family” (like Brundlefly-Veronica-Brundlefly fetus)? Global culture will not be mediated by anything except mutation itself. IF we could all become ENTIRELY Chinese, then there would be no mutation, but we are already on our way to becoming One Global Monster-Family; “We Are the World, We Are A Mutant” will become our global anthem. It will not a world completely dominated by any one culture (whether American or Chinese or some other); but instead world-mutation-domination! Historically the East has been dominated by China, India, and Persia; the West by Greece and Rome, the Church, Europe, Great Britain, and the USA. But now, because of global capitalism (which itself is always mutating, adjusting, changing—even the recent meltdown has not stopped it) the only thing that dominates is mutation itself which is not mediated by any one culture but by the mediating element of our having been capitalistically-genetically spliced with each other. There is no way back that I can see. Should we “be afraid, be very afraid”?



On the other hand, I could be completely wrong. I don’t know. I am only a humble professor. In any case, I will leave that issue to all of us to ponder since we all have to live here…