Brundlefly & Me; Body Image and Body Horror in The Fly
June 28, 2020 ● Ed Murden
Before I had even watched a horror movie, the themes and images were already creeping into my little teenage conscious. I had no notion of what body horror was and definitively no idea how important it would be to me, but I do remember looking around my high school changing room at the other boys and then looking down at myself and being afraid.
The Fly follows Seth Brundle, a scientist researching teleportation, and a journalist named Veronica Quaife who becomes romantically engaged with him while researching Seth for a story. The tension in the story comes from Seth’s horrific transformation into Brundlefly after a mishap with his machinery which results in Seth’s DNA being spliced with that of a housefly and by the reoccurring presence of Staphis Borans, Veronica’s editor and her ex-boyfriend. When I watch David Cronenberg The Fly years after I had worked through all my own body issues, seeing the scientists obsession with flesh, his transformation, that beautifully absurd scene when Seth wakes in the night at the beginning of his transformation with the need to do several semi-naked pull-ups for no other reason than to prove he could, I couldn’t help but feel a strange affiliation with Brundlefly.
After the horrors of the changing room came PE lesson itself. Running up and down, over and over, not only becoming consciously aware of your own body through its pain and discomfort but also becoming aware of other bodies by their comparative ease. For me, body horror shoulders its way into the gap that we draw between mind and body. When your mind looks down at the body as if from a viewing gallery then all sorts of distortions and inaccuracy can come about. Like me in those changing rooms or a doctor looking down at a patient, not as a whole thing but as a lump of flesh is what makes our bodies an ‘other’, and so becomes something to fear. It is important that in this film, as well as across the genre as a whole, the protagonists are doctors or scientific professionals. The gaze of this profession, which lead to Foucault’s famous criticism of it in The Birth of The Clinic, is one that treats the body as only its failing parts. Rather than viewing the person as a whole, it sees them as a broken leg or a failing kidney, and because of the need to diagnose bodies, the medical profession has to define the perfect organ and so the perfect body. Like how we can look at our own bodies as something in need of improvement if it doesn’t meet our devised standard and so we take pills, work out or change our diet to try and achieve our goal.
When Seth begins to understand how he can recalibrate the machine to teleport biological matter he does his first test on a piece of steak. Cutting it in half he puts one part through teleportation and the other he leaves as it is. Cooking both he asks Veronica to taste them where she notices a difference between the two, the one that has been teleported seems ‘synthetic’. Seth jumps to testing the steaks after Veronica and him are lying in bed together naked as Veronica playfully pitches his skin. She says; ‘that’s why old ladies pitch babies cheeks, it’s the flesh, it makes you crazy’. What Seth decides is that the machine needs to learn the ‘poetry of the steak’, this thing that makes people want to feel others touch.
What I get from this film is that by teaching the analytic machine the poetry of the steak, and so moving the flesh into a place that can be understood and so controlled, Seth unleashes the fate that befalls him. Seth blames himself initially for the machine failing, he says ‘I must not know enough about the flesh myself’. For me this is important, the scientist who is supposed to understand this sort of thing admits a failing in his view of it. It is jealousy that Staphis might be sleeping with Veronica that first drives Seth to get into the teleportation pod where his DNA is spliced with the fly’s. He comments later that most people would give anything to be someone else, and unintentionally that is what he’s done in order to compete with Staphis and relieve his own feelings of inadequacy. When Seth steps into the pod himself, the computer now fully understanding the ‘flesh’ and the poetry that we bring to it, it doesn’t see the stark line that we draw between ourselves and the body, between the person and the fly.
Further into his transformation, Seth has to eat this food by first throwing up onto it so that it liquefies before sucking it back up. The act of eating is the major sign of his abjection, the thing that marks him away for his slimming humanity. Watching this for the first time, looking back at the insecurity and jealousy I had felt like my younger self, I found a message in all this ickiness that feels very far away from virtue. The flesh, our bodies that we so often split from ourselves with scorn is in a lot of ways totally tied up with who we are, not a thing you can beat into something else but something to be looked after because of its messy humanity. Seth accuses Veronica of only understanding ‘societies straight line of the flesh’ but her understanding of the body is one that allows it to be less than perfect. Seth’s joy at the start of his transformation is that he has reached the physical prowess that I think all of us are envious of if only for a moment.
We must stay away from the kind of gaze on our own bodies that Seth and his computer use, it allows for the predominant fears of our modern lives. More than war, terrorist threat, or government conspiracies I am scared that this mole or that pain may be cancer. I am worried that I don’t have the perfect body, or like in The Fly a foreign object may enter my body and disrupt it, this fear has never been so broadly felt now in the wake of a global pandemic.
Ed Murden ● Writer
Twitter: @spookyelvis_
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Manchester based writer/filmmaker, mainly writing for and about horror films but with an interest in anything strange and surreal.