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FROM HIGH CAMP TO HIGH REALISM: Whereas the enjoyably kitschy 1950s film had opted for a melodramatic approach with garish special effects, David Cronenberg’s The Fly updated the premise with a low-key style. Here, Jeff Goldblum faces his moment of truth. Courtesy: 20th Century Fox.
CREDITS
Twentieth Century Fox/Brooksfilms; David Cronenberg, dir.; George Langelaan, short story; Cronenberg, Charles Edward Pogue, scr.; Marc Boyman, Stuart Cornfeld, Kip Ohman, pro.; Howard Shore, mus.; Mark Irwin, cin.; Ronald Sanders, ed.; Carol Spier, prod. design; Rolf Harvey, art dir.; Louis Craig, Ted Ross, Chris Walas, Clark Johnson, F/X; Michael Bigelow, Dennis Dorney, special visual effects; Katherine Kean, Mitchell Rothzeid, special animation effects; 96 min.; Color; 1.85:1.
CAST
Jeff Goldblum (Seth Brundle); Geena Davis (Veronica Quaife); John Getz (Stathis Borans); Joy Boushel (Tawny); Leslie Carlson (Dr. Brent Cheevers); George Chuvalo (Marky); Michael Copeman (2nd Man in Bar); Carol Lazare (Nurse).
I’m working on something that will change the world and human life as we know it.
SETH TO VERONICA ON FIRST MEETING
BACKGROUND
Playboy, which had premiered in 1953, won a reputation for publishing high-level science fiction along with their then-radical approach to a mainstream presentation of nudity. British journalist George Langelaan (1908–1972) submitted a horror item, which became a huge hit in the June 1957 issue. Fox picked up the film rights and hired James Clavell, later famous for his 1962 novel King Rat, to expand the story. The program picture, which came in at a little less than $700,000 ($200,000 more than a typical B movie, owing to color photography) earned a hefty $3 million at the box office, establishing that there was a market for intelligent science fiction.
With the success of John Carpenter’s The Thing remake in 1982, Fox executives wondered if a remake of The Fly might achieve the same success. Edward Pogue’s script remained true to the Grand Guignol quality of the original, the lead actually becoming a giant fly. When David Cronenberg (1943–) came on board, he had a different vision and rewrote extensively before production began.
THE PLOT
At a party thrown by Bartok Science Industries to introduce their wide variety of experimental products, Veronica, a reporter for Particle magazine, meets klutzy but charming Seth and heads over to his place to check out his landmark invention. Veronica is amazed at a teleportation device, which instantaneously moves any piece of inanimate matter from one pod to another. She becomes intimately involved with Seth. He continues his work, now attempting to move animate matter, though experiments with baboons prove disastrous. Believing he has the problem solved, Seth enters the pod alone. Or so he thinks; a common housefly has joined him.
THE FILM
The Canadian filmmaker retained two key ideas from Pogue’s script: a gradual, rather than immediate, metamorphosis from human to monster, and the female lead realizing that she is pregnant. Cronenberg had already, in the low-budget Rabid (1977), revitalized vampire films. His beautiful blonde bloodsucker (Marilyn Chambers) is not a spectral figure like the vampires from Hammer Studios horror films, but rather an everyday young woman who, following a highway accident, undergoes a blood transfusion with unexpected results. Cronenberg approaches the ongoing premises of horror, fantasy, and sci-fi, always rethinking them as variations on his most characteristic idea: our unconscious fear of our bodily functions and the unspeakable things that go on just beneath the surface of the skin, which, if any of us happens to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, can transform us into “things.” Cronenberg’s characters appear to be contemporary, everyday people when we first meet them, speaking in the current vernacular, wearing clothing like everyone else on the street, and living in immediately recognizable homes. When the horror begins, it is effective because the audience associates with the relatively realistic characters they have come to know and recognize as similar to their friends . . . and themselves.
THEME
Debuting only a few years after the AIDS epidemic began, The Fly was considered by many critics to be an allegory for that disease. The Oscar-winning makeup by Chris Walas did produce the look of AIDS victims. Others argue against that interpretation inasmuch as sexual relations have nothing to do with the hero’s sad fate.
The fear of computers—in particular, the horror that such artificial intelligences might make decisions when programming by humans proves insufficient—is as prevalent here as it is in an entirely different context in 2001: A Space Odyssey. This anxiety would continue to develop as a theme in the years ahead.
On the one hand, Veronica’s insistence on ending the pregnancy after she realizes that the embryo may be a monster prompted many feminists to hail the film as a pro-choice statement. On the other hand, those who have read Cronenberg’s script, including sequences that were either left unfilmed or shot and discarded, come away with a different impression: Veronica chooses to have the baby, whatever the outcome.
TRIVIA
Cronenberg appears in a cameo, playing the gynecologist visited by Victoria after she discovers her pregnancy.
Following The Thing, this film continued to prove that gross-out effects, with blood and flesh splattering, that previously had been associated with drive-in cult films were now part of mainstream moviemaking.
Unlikely as it may seem, this sci-fi horror/thriller was produced by Mel Brooks’s company, Brooksfilms, which mostly turned out broad comedies.
A horrific sequence in which Seth puts a baboon and a kitten into the pod at the same time, resulting in a weird “monkey-cat” creation, was cut from the release print, not so much because of its terrifying impact but because preview viewers felt it diminished any sympathy for the struggling hero.