A Film Canon

Like Videodrome, The Fly heralds the salvational potential of the "new flesh", the fusion of human and media consciousness - but, this time around, David Cronenberg suggests that the fusion has already occurred, or is at least prefigured, in animal ontology. To this end, he denudes animal consciousness for the sake of extolling animal sense-perception, presenting Seth Rundle's (Jeff Goldblum) accidental fusion of himself with a fly as a perceptual trajectory, a movement from simple to compound eye. For the majority of the film, this trajectory can only be registered indirectly - narratively, through Seth's gradual detachment from muse and lover Veronica (Geena Davis); tonally, through a superb queering of comedy that marks it as one of Cronenberg's wittiest efforts, and anticipates Naked Lunch. Insofar as Chris Walas' iconic prosthetic is terrifying, it's only by translating this perceptual trajectory into more concrete terms - especially Rundle's dispersed, incestuous, polymorphous sexual perception, which finds its logical conclusion in his suggestion that he, Veronica, and their unborn baby "fuse" in one of the teleportation 'telepods' responsible for 'Rundlefly' in the first place; a nauseating vision of the nuclear family as a single organism. Appropriately, the film's climactic spectacle comes with the fusion of 'Rundlefly' and the telepod itself, producing 'Rundleflytelepod', an unstable cyborg - and it's with this consummation that the invention fleetingly feels complete, just as it was only by becoming a fly that Rundle could solve the problem of organic teleporation, the telepod's inability to distinguish between flesh and meat requiring a diverticulated digestive tract to awaken it to the full "poetry of steak". It's a vision of bestiality as an iteration of man-machine romance, and a testament to Cronenberg's peculiar, Cartesian conception of the abject: less concerned, ultimately, with bodily viscera than with bodily systems, the mechanical regularity that signals some deeper, repressed affinity with the machine-world; a terror of "systems management", a designation Rundle finds more honest than "science".