The Cronenberg Series Part 8: The Flesh Makes Them Crazy

During a second experiment yesterday a fly which I did not see must have got into the disintegrator.  My only hope is to find that fly and go through again with it.  Please search for it carefully since, if it is not found, I shall have to find a way of putting an end to all this.

- from "The Fly" by George Langelaan

"...Guess I shook you up a little bit, didn't I?  They handed you all that crap about love and rebirth, and now you find out it's just a butcher shop, like everything else, so you don't want to hear about it..."

- from Seconds by David Ely

In 1957, George Langelaan, a British writer born in France wrote a short story called "The Fly," about a French scientist named Andre Delambre who had invented a teleportation machine (called a "disintegrator" in the story).  The story is structured as a mystery, as early on Andre is found dead, his head and arm crushed under a steam press, with his wife Helene apparently his murderer.  However, Andre's brother and a police detective must know why this happened, and information from Helene and Andre's son about a strange white-headed fly eventually lead to the truth:  when transporting himself one night, to test his invention's ability teleport humans, a fly got into the machine, with the result that Andre and the fly somehow fused together, while also splitting.  A fly with the head and arm of Andre accounts for the strange fly, and Andre with the head and leg of the fly accounts for his method of murder, or suicide.  The year after its publication, this story was adapted into a film by screenwriter James Clavell and director Kurt Neumann.  The action of that film is moved to Quebec for some reason, but otherwise it's a pretty faithful interpretation.  In 1986, on the other hand, David Cronenberg (with co-screenwriter Charles Edward Pogue, whose script he rewrote) remade the film, or once again adapted the story, though this amounts to the same thing, and so therefore to an equal degree Cronenberg adapted neither.

Six years after Langelaan's story appeared in Playboy, writer David Ely published his second novel, called Seconds.  It's the story of a man we initially know as Wilson, though it's clear this isn't his real name, and eventually as Antiochus Wilson, also clearly not his real name ("But it's a preposterous name," he says).  He's a successful middle-aged banker who, when we meet him, is following a set of cryptic directions to an office which contains a business that promises something along the lines of a new life.  What this will entail is, taking the macro view, not at all unlike entering the Witness Protection Program.  He will be given a new name and a new job, and all ties with his previous life will be thoroughly severed.  There's more, though -- his new life will also be funded by the company, his appearance will be drastically altered by plastic surgery, and the ties with his old life will be cut by producing a corpse which will be made to physically match Wilson.  Wilson is told that there are many types of death packages to choose from, but Wilson being well off he chooses -- or really, is almost made to choose -- the most expensive option, and so in a New York hotel room, a man dies of cerebral hemorrhage, and Antiochus Wilson is off to California.  This story fascinated director John Frankenheimer, who was coming off a hot streak of films, two of the most recent being The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May.  When Frankenheimer, working from a script by Lewis John Carlino, turned Seconds into a film in 1966, these three films would later be said to comprise the director's "paranoia trilogy."

Even though there are key similarities between George Langelaan's original story and David Cronenberg's adaptation, Cronenberg does something that Langelaan did not, and that Neumann did not.  It's the same thing that pretty much every screen adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has done to that story, which, like Langelaan's story, is structured as a mystery, with the truth about Mr. Hyde's identity only being revealed at the end.  What I'm getting at is, Cronenberg removes the mystery element, and forces his scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) to live with his horror.  Dr. Jekyll on-screen is almost always seen taking that first catastrophic dose, so the mystery is only for the characters around him, but not for the audience, and certainly -- and this goes without saying but is nevertheless key -- for him.  In his depiction of the tragedy of Seth Brundle, Cronenberg also removes the mystery, so that the audience knows what's up every step of the way, and his small cast of characters, of which there are really only three, the other two being science journalist and Brundle's lover Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis) and her editor and ex-boyfriend, the unforgettably named Stathis Borans (John Getz), all catch up with us at about the same time.  So that what we're left with is Seth Brundle's old life ending and his new life of insectile disintegration beginning, and ending.

Frankenheimer and Carlino's version of Seconds in plot terms is not remarkably different from David Ely's novel.  The most important aspect of Seconds as a film is Frankenheimer's ability to translate to screen what so many people ignorantly regard as one of the "unadaptable" elements of prose fiction, which is to say, the state of mind of the characters.  Therefore, when Ely's prose is quite straightforward, Wilson is constantly doubtful, nervous, uneasy.  With the unnamed company whose services he kind of sings on for, Wilson is dealing with a building filled with apparently normal people doing something extraordinary, and extraordinarily bizarre, with always -- always -- the hint of something sinister.  So in Seconds, everyday rooms are shot to look enormous, wider and taller than they are, sometimes cavernous -- Wilson is surrounded by emptiness, but an emptiness that is nevertheless walled in.  They're emptiness, captured.  Similarly, Jerry Goldsmith's magnificent score is both eerie and, eventually, mournful, sometimes both of these at once, as the truth, or the lie, of what Arthur Hamilton, the name, for practical reasons, given to the pre-Wilson protagonist (played before the company's services by John Randolph, and after the necessary plastic surgery, and now called Wilson, by Rock Hudson) has purchased isn't revealed to him, exactly, but rather dawns on him.

Seth Brundle begins his new life by experiencing, and enjoying, an enormous increase in physical strength and agility.  Added to this is a powerful boost to his sex drive and general energy, to the point that Veronica can't keep up with him -- he's become superhuman.  When she can't, he becomes angry, both in her weakness and her unwillingness to begin her life anew with him by going through the teleporter.  He's convinced that his new power is a result simply of his body being reduced to molecules, scattered, and rejoined fifteen feet away.  We know differently, but in any case, he's reborn, and life as he knew it, as it's experienced by others, is boring, slow -- it's shit.  His temper is short, and his disdain for ordinary life makes it easy to betray Veronica and take up a very driven and purposeful form of hedonism.  This angers Veronica less than it frightens her.  She knows something is wrong and she soon knows what it is.  Brundle doesn't care, because his life is better now.

In David Ely's novel, Wilson sort of just drifts into his new life as a successful California painter (new paintings are supplied to him by the company), never comfortable with any of it, except when he's had a couple of drinks and starts to enjoy his big house and his potential freedom.  But that freedom is always only a potential thing, and he never truly lives it up.  Many chances to have sex with young women are poorly acted upon, or not acted upon, because Wilson is still the man he was.  Unhappily married, but married, and never a guy to chase a skirt.  The "new freedoms," as A Serious Man's Mrs. Samsky would call them, of the 1960s, even the early stages of that decade, are a new thing, and they're off-putting, nerve-wracking, and alien.  No matter what he's been told, Wilson is not a new man.  Frankenheimer's version is somewhat different here, as his Wilson, as played by Hudson, is initially hesitant around this apparently free-wheeling beach community he finds himself living in, but the guidance of an ocean-loving woman named Nora (Salome Jens) allows him to almost literally fall into what is essentially a non-Roman Roman orgy, complete with stomped grapes and wine.  It's an old custom made new again, but, like Wilson, it's old.  It's not new.  Nothing that already exists or has existed can now be called new.  Rock Hudson as Wilson can whoop it up all he wants, but he's still Arthur Hamilton.  This is something he will come to understand. 

Brundle's life is not better for very long.  His body twists and cracks and his flesh softens and his fingernails fall away and his teeth drop out and he can no longer eat solid food.  He must vomit on his meals to liquify them.  His rebirth is speeding him along to his death.  Even after the arrogance he drew from his new power oozes out of him like pus, Brundle's shattered mind can't grasp that what is so awful about his new life is the fact that he is still Seth Brundle.  None of this would be nearly so sad if he wasn't still Seth Brundle, but he only occasionally comprehends that.  At one point he says to Veronica "I'm an insect who dreamed he was a man and loved it.  But now the dream is over...and the insect is awake."

Antiochus Wilson always knows where he came from and who he was, and that's the lie.  John Frankenheimer was drawn to Ely's novel because he knew that the popular 1960s philosophy that a person could cast off that which made them unhappy and begin life all over was bullshit.  Who you are at a given moment is a culmination of who you were and what you experienced and who you knew over every second of your life up to that point*.  If you believe otherwise, you are acting.  Wilson, when he rolls around in a barrel of grapes with dozens of naked people, he's performing.  He doesn't know that, but pretty soon, at another party he gets drunk and he starts spilling details of his old life.  According to the company, This Is Not Done.  But it's who he is.  It can't stay inside.  What he's meant to be and do is unnatural, and would be unnatural for anybody.  Both Ely's novel and Frankenheimer's film eventually become, or have always been but the exclamation point is eventually added, a science fiction/horror film.  In the novel and the film, Wilson makes doomed attempts to reclaim his past with a new name and face, but while Ely's approach is sad to the point of being depressing, Frankenheimer's, interestingly, is sad to the point of being angry.  In the novel, Wilson is a man at sea in the modern world -- elevators still kind of fascinate him.  Once reborn, his Wilson can never anchor himself, and he's pulled back to a life in which he found no happiness but which at least was his.  Frankenheimer is pissed off, however, not with any perceived increase in individual freedom or liberty or the shedding of certain inhibitions -- he's pissed off at the notion that in embracing these you can or should or are even able to obliterate that which could stall that embrace, and he's pissed off at those who promise rebirth free of any umbilical cord.  In his Seconds, stupid people are being preyed on, and he's pissed off at the stupid people and he's pissed off at the predators.  Wilson was never Wilson.  He was always Arthur Hamilton, introducing himself as Antiochus Wilson.

Cronenberg isn't angry.  His film is also, and always was, a science fiction/horror film, but it's one where the only person who dies is also the villain, and also the greatest victim (though Stathis Borans could make a pretty good case for himself if he felt like it).  Seth Brundle's tragedy begins with a freak accident, and is exacerbated, so that The Fly finally becomes Cronenberg's most emotionally wrenching film to date, by a return of his self-awareness.  Cronenberg's flair for insanely and complexly grotesque endings is in full force here -- Brundle, by the end, is more monstrous, more inhumanly twisted, than he ever was, and now, finally, he knows it, fully.  He always knew it, but he could deny it.  He could believe his new life as a fly was just beginning.  He might have learned to mourn what he was losing, but it isn't until his final seconds that he realizes it was never a new life to begin with.  It was always his death.  There was nothing next.  What he was going through wasn't the birth of Brundlefly, as he insists, because there is no Brundlefly.  All he was experiencing was the death of Seth Brundle.

John Frankenheimer's filmmaking career was a long one.  He died in 2002, with dozens of films behind him, the last of which was an HBO film that aired the same year he died.  He's primarily remembered for his first ten or so films, but he always did great work, and there's a handful in there that are genuine American masterpieces.  The Fly turned out to be, and may still be, David Cronenberg's biggest commercial success.  This is curious considering that it's still very much a David Cronenberg film, but that core idea is pretty irresistible.  The Fly is also one of his very best movies.  After this, he would enter a new phase.  In the subsequent 27 years, there would still be a scattering of films like eXistenZ that hearken back to his wild, twisted, viscera-splattered early days, but if before he made science fiction horror, he would soon begin making what might be called horror dramas.  And then he would change again, but we'll get to that.  David Ely is still alive.  He doesn't seem to write or publish anymore, and there's not much information about him out there, at least that I can find, other than that between 1963 and 1992, he published seven novels and two collections of short stories.

George Langelaan died in 1972.  He wrote several short stories, a handful of novels, and a couple of memoirs.  During World War II, he was a spy for the Allies.  In his memoir The Masks of War, he describes needing to alter certain physical features so that he might more easily drop undercover.  He achieved this through plastic surgery.

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*The Criterion Collection is releasing Seconds on DVD and Blu-ray on Tuesday, August 13th.  John Frankenheimer's motives for adapting Ely's novel are described by his widow, Evans Frankenheimer, in a special feature on that disc called "A Second Look."  I have paraphrased her words for this post.

The Collection Project: A Deep Penetrating Dive into the Plasma Pool

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An overview of the career of David Cronenberg would have to mark his 1986 remake of Kurt Neumann's The Fly as something of a watershed. In the view of many people, including myself, Cronenberg's The Fly is easily one of his best films, but it also works as a transitional film, coming after his semi-big Hollywood turn as the director of the Stephen King adaptation The Dead Zone. That film feels particularly un-Cronenbergian, and in this sense the ultra-Cronenbergian The Fly could almost stand as his Blue Velvet, following his own Dune, The Dead Zone. That analogy can only really work if anybody thought The Dead Zone was any kind of disaster, but nobody does, because it's terrific and popular, so the analogy turns out to be a big whiff. In any case, the fact that The Fly is a remake is almost incidental, as the material -- especially the way the science of the story was refigured from the 1958 film, credit for which Cronenberg gives to the writer of the original draft, Charles Edward Pogue -- is so in line with what Cronenberg was all about in the early-to-mid-stages of his career that the whole project, and finished film, seems like an absolute natural for him, in the same way that J. G. Ballard's Crash would a decade later.

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The film is, in short, disgusting, one of the most disgusting films of Cronenberg's very disgusting career. In Neumann's film, a scientist, through a mishap with his newly invented transportation device, is fused at a genetic level with a housefly, which results in his own head, and one hand, being replaced, respectively, with a fly's head and, ah, hand, I guess. Pogue's idea, which Cronenberg ran with, was to have his scientist, Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) suffer a similar mishap, but, instead of an instant and partial transformation, he would transform in stages, and the transformation would present, to borrow medical terminology, as his body gradually disintegrating. That's what happens in Cronenberg's The Fly, and the breakdown -- which starts, cruelly, with Brundle enjoying increased strength and energy -- is by turns sad, grimly funny, and stomach-churning. Of course, this breakdown isn't just a breakdown, because while certain aspects of his new bodily existence, such as copious vomiting, naturally appear to be the symptoms of a man who is desperately ill, they're also part of a new, accidental evolutionary step, from Seth Brundle/housefly to, as Brundle himself terms it, Brundlefly.

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There is much going on in this film. First, there is Cronenberg's major early theme of body-horror, used to describe and depict in grotesque metaphor the way any of our body's might casually betray us with disease at any given moment. At one point, Brundle even says that his transformation is showing up as a sort of cancer. My problem with focusing too narrowly on this idea, in any of Cronenberg's films that employ it, is that it tends to miss the forest for the trees, which is how I feel pretty much any time someone tries to boil down the work of an artist I admire. Cronenberg himself is explicit enough when talking about his work that all that stuff is indeed on his mind (AIDS wasn't, though, when he made The Fly, despite any number of critics trying to cram that particular metaphor in there), but, as I hinted above, there's the strangely hopeless view of evolution running through The Fly, which is underlined with some vigor at the film's climax, when Brundle has been mangled up into some ungodly amalgam of man, insect and machine.

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Beyond all this metaphor, though, The Fly is an intense depiction of a single character, Seth Brundle. The film really only has three characters -- along with Brundle, there is Veronica (Geena Davis), Brundle's girlfriend, and the reporter covering the various stages, first, of his work on the transporter pods which he believes will change the course of history and mankind (an ambition that is itself almost evolutionary in its scope) and later of his disease; and Stathis Borans (John Getz), Veronica's editor and former lover -- but for obvious reasons everything else in the film revolves around Brundle. And the key thing about Cronenberg's The Fly, and about Goldblum's extraordinary performance in it, is that Brundle is not simply the vehicle through which Cronenberg can express his themes and ideas. Brundle is a complete person (hell, even Borans and Veronica aren't simply idea markers here), and his graphic tragedy makes The Fly the most emotionally devestating film of Cronenberg's career.

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There are certain things about The Fly which, watching it again today, struck me as newly interesting, but the emotional power wasn't one of them. I saw this film when I was about eleven, probably ten, and by the end I was a sobbing wreck. Okay, so I was a kid, but I felt almost as helpless and desolate today, as I watched Brundlefly finally give in to his despair and, his body now a complete disaster, lift the barrel of the shotgun that Veronica's holding, up to his forehead. What happens in this film is so terrible, so unfair and cosmically absurd, that you can never view Brundlefly as a monster, even at his most physically monstrous.

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Which is fitting, since The Fly is also a bit of a throwback. There's a great deal of Frankenstein in Cronenberg's film ("Are you a bodybuilder?" a woman asks Brundle after he breaks a man's wrist in an arm wrestling match. "Yes," he says, "I build bodies."), both in the mad science element, and in its mournful atmosphere. But you can throw it even further back than that, because The Fly is at heart a classical tragedy. Brundle's flaws are outsized ambition and impatience (and let's not forget all the tampering in God's domain he does), and he dies for them. And the film gets there with such precision -- Brundle's rise, if only in the eyes of Veronica, and fall are sketched out in just enough detail, as is the intense love affair between himself and Veronica, which, along with the great work done by Goldblum and Davis, carries the film's emotional weight despite the fact that not a hell of a lot of time is given over to it before things go haywire. Even Borans comes through, as an asshole who might only be an asshole out of desperation.

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The Fly is really pretty amazing. It's a metaphorical horror film structured as tragedy that doesn't let its themes overwhelm the people inside it. It's a gory horror film in which only one person dies (though it does make room for one of the most psychotically inventive cripplings of a character I've yet witnessed), a monster film in which the monster's lone rampage in a public area is motivated by the need to talk to his girlfriend in private. It is, in fact, the kind of film I dream about: a horror film about people and emotions, the kind of film that -- and you really must pardon me for what I'm about to do here -- fuses its genre trappings with a classic, character narrative. The maturity that Cronenberg really began to show in Videodrome and The Dead Zone was confirmed here, in spades. There was no looking back.

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This post has been part of the Cronenberg Blogathon, hosted by Tony Dayoub at Cinema Viewfinder. I promise nothing, but I hope this is only my first contribution to this particular blogathon.