In June of 1986, my sister was born.
In July, I turned two.
In August, David Cronenberg released his version of The Fly.
I don’t remember my birthday or my sister’s birth. They’re anecdotal. The Fly, on the other hand…I think I have blood-memory of The Fly. Considering how long it takes to gestate a feature film, we were probably conceived around the same time.
In July, I turned two.
In August, David Cronenberg released his version of The Fly.
I don’t remember my birthday or my sister’s birth. They’re anecdotal. The Fly, on the other hand…I think I have blood-memory of The Fly. Considering how long it takes to gestate a feature film, we were probably conceived around the same time.
So The Fly and I grew up together, and I made its tagline—“Be afraid…Be very afraid”—my motto all throughout childhood. I was very afraid of things like the “Brundlefly,” the uncanny and sticky-looking hybrid of man and insect Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) becomes in The Fly.
In one of my earliest non-anecdotal memories, my father and I are sitting in our Plymouth Horizon, listening to Michael W. Smith sing about the throne of God and rainbows and angels. Sitting in the backseat surrounded by maroon velvet upholstery, I am filled with a growing unease to the sounds coming out of the stereo speakers. After Smith finishes singing his part, a choir of children comes in chanting “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come.” Maybe it was an effect of the synthesizers, or maybe it was the shallow sound of chanting children, but I hear warbling, pitch-shifted voices coming out of the speakers, and they terrify me.
In one of my earliest non-anecdotal memories, my father and I are sitting in our Plymouth Horizon, listening to Michael W. Smith sing about the throne of God and rainbows and angels. Sitting in the backseat surrounded by maroon velvet upholstery, I am filled with a growing unease to the sounds coming out of the stereo speakers. After Smith finishes singing his part, a choir of children comes in chanting “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come.” Maybe it was an effect of the synthesizers, or maybe it was the shallow sound of chanting children, but I hear warbling, pitch-shifted voices coming out of the speakers, and they terrify me.
| This terror strikes me as perfectly justified in light of the cherubim I’d learned support the throne of God on their wings. These man/animal hybrids are frequently confused with putti, a race of insidious flying babies who have somehow managed, despite their stubby little fingers and their pudgy little arms, to steal the name of fearsome beings. Real cherubs are as un-putti as is angelically possible. With human bodies, calves’ feet, and a veritable bestiary of faces, they’re downright unwholesome. But worse still for my tender psyche was this: these “angels” have four wings, each covered in eyes. | The Fly and I grew up together, and I made its tagline—“Be afraid…Be very afraid”—my motto all throughout childhood. |
Twenty years after the release of The Fly, I made a short film called George and Eye. I made it in a few days with some friends, working with a script I wrote in a college class and a budget of about $20. My friend and protagonist, Jon, drove us around Minneapolis to pick up the few props we needed.
As our last stop loomed on the left, I made Jon drive past without stopping. Mrs. B’s was supposed to be a doll shop where we could buy realistic eyeballs, but from the outside it looked more like an eyeball harvesting location. The house had been torn asunder at one point and crudely plugged up with cinder blocks, and there was a screened-in porch on the front. Parked out front was a conversion van. The van had those little curtains drawn in the windows, curtains that look like they are made of the worn-out upholstery from ancient basement couches of unspeakable horror. It was the van of a pedophile or a serial killer.
Eyes were vital to the movie, so after hyperventilating a bit, we flipped a u-turn and pulled into the parking lot. The porch was full of spidery plants and broken furniture. Inside, the walls were lined with the tiny naked bodies of dolls of every conceivable height, girth, and color. There were dolls standing around looking at each other, at Jon and me, at the walls. There were dolls with closed eyes and long lashes in baby carriages in the middle of what might have been an aisle. The store looked like a personal collection that had gotten out of hand.
We heard the sound of someone moving around, but everyone in sight was made of either porcelain or plastic. Jon and I exchanged an uneasy glance. A woman emerged from a room in the back, a room full of little arms, legs, and heads. She was talking, but not to us. Another woman followed her out of the back room, and they continued their conversation about a doll the customer had owned in her childhood but had lost along the way to middle-age, referring to the doll as they would a small child who had gone missing.
When the shopkeeper turned her attention to us, we asked to see some human-sized eyes, blue, if she had them. The customer looked us over and asked, “Oh, do you like dolls, too?”
I told her the eyes were for a movie we were making. What I didn’t tell her was that the eyes needed to be blue because that is the color of newborn eyes, or that we were going to make sores for the newly-erupted eyes to see out of and bathe them in blood.
As our last stop loomed on the left, I made Jon drive past without stopping. Mrs. B’s was supposed to be a doll shop where we could buy realistic eyeballs, but from the outside it looked more like an eyeball harvesting location. The house had been torn asunder at one point and crudely plugged up with cinder blocks, and there was a screened-in porch on the front. Parked out front was a conversion van. The van had those little curtains drawn in the windows, curtains that look like they are made of the worn-out upholstery from ancient basement couches of unspeakable horror. It was the van of a pedophile or a serial killer.
Eyes were vital to the movie, so after hyperventilating a bit, we flipped a u-turn and pulled into the parking lot. The porch was full of spidery plants and broken furniture. Inside, the walls were lined with the tiny naked bodies of dolls of every conceivable height, girth, and color. There were dolls standing around looking at each other, at Jon and me, at the walls. There were dolls with closed eyes and long lashes in baby carriages in the middle of what might have been an aisle. The store looked like a personal collection that had gotten out of hand.
We heard the sound of someone moving around, but everyone in sight was made of either porcelain or plastic. Jon and I exchanged an uneasy glance. A woman emerged from a room in the back, a room full of little arms, legs, and heads. She was talking, but not to us. Another woman followed her out of the back room, and they continued their conversation about a doll the customer had owned in her childhood but had lost along the way to middle-age, referring to the doll as they would a small child who had gone missing.
When the shopkeeper turned her attention to us, we asked to see some human-sized eyes, blue, if she had them. The customer looked us over and asked, “Oh, do you like dolls, too?”
I told her the eyes were for a movie we were making. What I didn’t tell her was that the eyes needed to be blue because that is the color of newborn eyes, or that we were going to make sores for the newly-erupted eyes to see out of and bathe them in blood.
© Wold Creative Company
George and Eye was inspired by the scene in The Fly where the scientist Seth Brundle, undergoing his transformation into an insect (after a botched experiment with teleportation), inadvertently pulls his fingernail off. After a moment of surprise and squirting pus, he looks into the mirror at his new face and asks, “Am I dying?”
In his lecture, “The Metamorphosis,” Vladimir Nabokov dismisses a Freudian analysis of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, preferring to “concentrate, instead, upon the artistic moment.” He then proceeds to tell the story of The Metamorphosis all over again. The dismissed Freud would call this the repetition compulsion. He’s right probably right, but I think I know what Nabokov was trying to do with Kafka; it’s what I was doing with Cronenberg in George and Eye. The next best thing to experiencing a work of art for the first time is being instrumental in someone else’s experience of it. As they scan the page or view the screen, you can look for the telltale signs of enjoyment or revulsion in their eyes.
In his lecture, “The Metamorphosis,” Vladimir Nabokov dismisses a Freudian analysis of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, preferring to “concentrate, instead, upon the artistic moment.” He then proceeds to tell the story of The Metamorphosis all over again. The dismissed Freud would call this the repetition compulsion. He’s right probably right, but I think I know what Nabokov was trying to do with Kafka; it’s what I was doing with Cronenberg in George and Eye. The next best thing to experiencing a work of art for the first time is being instrumental in someone else’s experience of it. As they scan the page or view the screen, you can look for the telltale signs of enjoyment or revulsion in their eyes.
Cronenberg is a filmmaker who quite naturally works Nabokov into almost every interview with the press, so it is surprising that he is often referred to as the “Baron of Blood” rather than by another, more intellectual alliterative appellation. But then there are two David Cronenbergs. While the Baron of Blood exploded a prop head filled with livers for Scanners in 1981, the Cronenberg known by his more intellectual moniker (The Lord of Literature? The Duke of Drama? The Inquisitor of Intellect?) exploded his own brains onto celluloid as the decade progressed, and the Baron took a backseat.
The Fly, made almost 30 years ago, was Cronenberg’s last straight horror film. Since then he’s been making films that explore the psychological realities of their respective characters. Their particular horrors are, for the most part, psychological rather than physical. But even when he was in full body-horror mode, Cronenberg had characters like Brian O’Blivion (Videodrome, 1983) saying, “I believe that the growth in my head… I think that it is not really a tumor. Not an uncontrolled, undirected little bubbling pot of flesh, but that it is in fact a new organ, a new part of the brain.” He’s always been interested in how the body and brain interact. And from the brain, it is not too far a leap to the mind.
The Fly, made almost 30 years ago, was Cronenberg’s last straight horror film. Since then he’s been making films that explore the psychological realities of their respective characters. Their particular horrors are, for the most part, psychological rather than physical. But even when he was in full body-horror mode, Cronenberg had characters like Brian O’Blivion (Videodrome, 1983) saying, “I believe that the growth in my head… I think that it is not really a tumor. Not an uncontrolled, undirected little bubbling pot of flesh, but that it is in fact a new organ, a new part of the brain.” He’s always been interested in how the body and brain interact. And from the brain, it is not too far a leap to the mind.
| Indeed, several of his films have focused directly on the life of the mind. His first short film, Transfer (1966), is about the relationship between an analyst and his patient. The Brood (1979) takes psychoanalysis into the realm of body-horror-fantasy with “psychoplasmics.” A Dangerous Method (2011) returns to reality with the story of the relationship between two analysts: Freud and Jung. In a 2012 interview with Iconic Interview, Cronenberg points out that his “affinity” for Freud may have to do with the fact that Freud is “body conscious.” For Cronenberg, every film is in a “body” genre. Body-horror made way body-dramas. Of which, The Fly was the first. | [Cronenberg has] always been interested in how the body and brain interact. And from the brain, it is not too far a leap to the mind. |
Of course, there can be no clear demarcation between Cronenbergs: like the Brundlefly, he evolved over time. The genesis of The Fly itself is an evolutionary one. It first appeared as a short story in the June 1957 issue of Playboy and was penned by George Langelaan, a British spy who knew little (a very little) about what science could do to a body. His visage was transformed through plastic surgery during WWII, allowing him to better blend with the indigenous population into whose midst he was parachuted. (Apparently his ears were pinned so he’d look more French.)
“The Fly” captured attention right away and was almost immediately shaped into Vincent Price vehicle. (David Hedison was actually top-billed, but Vincent Price’s name always comes up first.) In 1958, the first filmed Fly was about science and hubris and consequences. In 1986, The Fly seems to be about those same things, but since it communicates through, pus, hubris, and decaying flesh, it winds up being about disease, hubris, and death. In other words, it’s universal.
For the most part, when a movie is remade, the original is remembered as better, even if the remake is more popular. But in the case of The Fly, the 1958 version is only a shadow of the remake. I believe the reason why Cronenberg’s version of The Fly is so much better than the first version is largely due to that self-interrogation in the bathroom: “Am I dying?”
“The Fly” captured attention right away and was almost immediately shaped into Vincent Price vehicle. (David Hedison was actually top-billed, but Vincent Price’s name always comes up first.) In 1958, the first filmed Fly was about science and hubris and consequences. In 1986, The Fly seems to be about those same things, but since it communicates through, pus, hubris, and decaying flesh, it winds up being about disease, hubris, and death. In other words, it’s universal.
For the most part, when a movie is remade, the original is remembered as better, even if the remake is more popular. But in the case of The Fly, the 1958 version is only a shadow of the remake. I believe the reason why Cronenberg’s version of The Fly is so much better than the first version is largely due to that self-interrogation in the bathroom: “Am I dying?”
Reviewers and critics at the time of the movie’s release fixated on the disease-like symptoms of the fusing of man and fly and saw parallels between The Fly and the AIDS epidemic. Cronenberg took the longer view. He claimed that the movie was a metaphor for the disease all humans share, “the disease of being finite.”
Here is a partial list of my childhood fears in no particular order:
| Expiration dates, Unexplained secretions, Tree forts, Deer ticks, Entrapped digits, Life preservers, Baseballs, Nails, Tumors, Necrotic flesh, Strangers, Mustaches, Candy, Kidnappers, Conversion vans with curtains (I guess the previous five are in order), Halloween candy, Razor blades, and Eyes. |
While by now you know why eyes carry the same sense of impending doom for me as necrotic flesh, it may not be immediately clear why life preservers made the list. Well, I was also petrified of things that could fail on me.
| So in addition to tree forts (which one could fall out of), I guess I should add arms, which are usually necessary for gaining access to said forts. My arms weren’t very hardy at the age of six, and even now every time I find the need to hoist myself up somewhere, I still remember the stinging shame of being unable to clamber up after my cousin as he showed me his new creation nestled among the tall trees of his backyard. | Tetanus was my first introduction to a Cronenbergian ailment (not that I ever had it). I looked it up in Encarta 95. |
By the time I was of an age that building tree forts was both desirable and possible, I was climbing all over the trees in my backyard with nails in my mouth and a hammer in my hand, thinking about falling and swallowing nails and puncturing holes in my stomach. Once my fort was up for a season or two, I was thinking about tetanus every time the peeling birch trees swayed in the wind and I heard them groan against the weeping nail wounds I had given them.
Tetanus was my first introduction to a Cronenbergian ailment (not that I ever had it). As soon as I found out about tetanus, I looked it up in Encarta 95. The prognosis went something like this:
Tetanus was my first introduction to a Cronenbergian ailment (not that I ever had it). As soon as I found out about tetanus, I looked it up in Encarta 95. The prognosis went something like this:
| You puncture yourself on a nail, but don’t notice it until a few days later. Then, because you are a hypochondriac and know this about yourself, you decide it is probably not a nail-caused puncture wound, but some other kind. So you wash the wound with hydrogen peroxide even though that does no good because it is a puncture wound and it says not to treat them with hydrogen peroxide right on the back of the bottle. Then you run around for a while, wondering when you will get lockjaw and die, until you get lockjaw and die. |
Cronenberg understands this kind of fear, the fear of impending doom from within. In an interview around the release of The Fly he said, “[T]he idea that you carry the seeds of your own destruction around with you, always, and that they can erupt at any time, is…scary. Because there is no defense against it; there is no escape from it.”
As a boy, Cronenberg watched his father be gradually overtaken over by his own seeds of destruction: cancer cells. Milton Cronenberg was a writer who spurred young David to write stories of his own. It is not hard to see a montage cutting from an earnest boy, pencil in hand; to a teenager, all pimples and angles, “writing pastiches of Nabokov;” to a confident young man, wearing glasses he stole from George Romero, directing his first film. But we have forgotten to splice into this montage scenes of bodily decay, scenes which can lead just as naturally to a career in science. But the lab coat didn’t fit as well as our protagonist thought it would, and he eventually wound up back in his element, studying literature in college.
As a boy, Cronenberg watched his father be gradually overtaken over by his own seeds of destruction: cancer cells. Milton Cronenberg was a writer who spurred young David to write stories of his own. It is not hard to see a montage cutting from an earnest boy, pencil in hand; to a teenager, all pimples and angles, “writing pastiches of Nabokov;” to a confident young man, wearing glasses he stole from George Romero, directing his first film. But we have forgotten to splice into this montage scenes of bodily decay, scenes which can lead just as naturally to a career in science. But the lab coat didn’t fit as well as our protagonist thought it would, and he eventually wound up back in his element, studying literature in college.
| When Cronenberg started making movies after graduation with funding from the Canadian Film Development Corporation, it was apparent that though he didn’t want to study the science of dying, he did want to study its philosophical and practical applications. He made movies about parasites, diseases, and cancers, which exhibited an admixture of scientific detachment and irresponsible glee (such that the horrified press coverage of Shivers got him kicked out of his apartment). A character in Shivers goes so far as to say, “Disease is the love of two alien kinds of creatures for each other.” | Freud says that the uncanny is linked to the fear of losing one’s eyes. But what about eyes where there shouldn’t be eyes? |
Though he may have some of the detachment of a man of science, Cronenberg is acutely aware of the outrage of disease and death. In the documentary, David Cronenberg: Long Live the New Flesh, Cronenberg discusses one of the paradoxes of the classical Cartesian split between mind and body:
| One of the bases of horror, in general, and difficult[ies] in life, in particular [is] how we can die. Why should we die, why should a healthy mind die, just because a body is not healthy? How do you have a man dying, a complete physical wreck and his mind is absolutely sharp and clear? There seems to be something wrong with that. |
In the sickroom, the mind of the loved one is as sharp as ever, but disease has taken up residence in their body, transmogrifying it into a hybrid of disease and human. As their flesh takes on new dimensions, textures, and smells, the initial cognitive dissonance of the experience fades, and the bereaved is left face-to-face with the hybrid loved one who is not entirely the person they once were.
The first screening of George and Eye was cancelled by my university. They said it was because of a lack of other films to show at the film festival. I don’t blame them, really. I think there was one other entry, a slap-dash documentary about a summer mission trip. As films in completely different categories, they shouldn’t have to compete with each other. But I’m not so sure it would have been a bad idea to let them be shown together, to let their binary oppositions—fear and faith, despair and hope, life and death—inform and expand each other.
George and Eye ends with George telling his roommate that his sores are all better. These are the sores that last the audience knew were birthing eyes that rolled greasily in their bloody tumor-sockets. “They’re all better,” says George, brightly, as he holds up a bloody knife. (Though the blood was real fake blood, it looked a lot like raspberry jam on that steak knife.)
In his essay on the uncanny (which he calls unheimlich—literally translated as “unhomelike”), Freud says that the uncanny is linked to the fear of losing one’s eyes. But what about eyes where there shouldn’t be eyes? The crawling feeling of the unheimlich is also found in the opposite of loss: surplus. The uncanny is related to the fear of the hybrid. It’s insect hairs growing out of one’s back and human legs that end in hooves and sighted wings. Sometimes the uncanny makes you want to gouge your eyes out.
George and Eye ends with George telling his roommate that his sores are all better. These are the sores that last the audience knew were birthing eyes that rolled greasily in their bloody tumor-sockets. “They’re all better,” says George, brightly, as he holds up a bloody knife. (Though the blood was real fake blood, it looked a lot like raspberry jam on that steak knife.)
In his essay on the uncanny (which he calls unheimlich—literally translated as “unhomelike”), Freud says that the uncanny is linked to the fear of losing one’s eyes. But what about eyes where there shouldn’t be eyes? The crawling feeling of the unheimlich is also found in the opposite of loss: surplus. The uncanny is related to the fear of the hybrid. It’s insect hairs growing out of one’s back and human legs that end in hooves and sighted wings. Sometimes the uncanny makes you want to gouge your eyes out.
In Western thought (and much of the Eastern, too), the existence of ugliness and disease reflects the presence of evil in the world. These symptoms of the fallen nature of humanity are to be vanquished with all possible haste through prayer and whatever other means comes readily to hand. Surgical strikes work for tumors and terrorists alike. But at the same time, the angels who hold up the very throne of God are dreadful hybrids. If this is so, maybe the uncanny is not something to be escaped.
I’d hoped making a horror film out of my fears would be cathartic, but by the end of the film the uncanny takes center stage. In the last shot of the movie, an extreme close-up of a jar filled with eyes and other gore fills the frame.
I’d hoped making a horror film out of my fears would be cathartic, but by the end of the film the uncanny takes center stage. In the last shot of the movie, an extreme close-up of a jar filled with eyes and other gore fills the frame.
Soon after that failed first screening of George and Eye, I buried my only DVD copy of the film in a shoebox among some out-of-date software discs and tried to forget about it. Obviously, I have been unable to repress my memory of it. I wish I could go back, edit the footage until my fears abate, and rerelease George and Eye to a larger audience, but the sole hard drive with the raw video on it does not belong to me. I seem to remember it was lost or stolen or crashed. Perhaps it is still out there somewhere, waiting to be uploaded to the cloud where it can live forever.
| In the beginning of his introduction to a new translation of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Cronenberg writes, “I woke up one morning recently to discover that I was a seventy-year-old man.” Like Gregor Samsa, he is surprised to have metamorphosed into a new form. But like Seth Brundle, he’s been able to look in the mirror and watch it happening over time. Seventy comes all at once, but you can see it sneaking up on you. | As I sat waiting for the doctor to come in, I thought about Cronenberg’s statement that, “most diseases would be shocked to be considered diseases at all. For them it’s very positive when they take over your body...It’s a triumph.” |
During a recent trip to the doctor’s office, I brought with me a list of ailments I believed I might have. I’d love to say that I’ve grown out of my fears, but I’m afraid that my fears have become more specialized. As I sat waiting for the doctor to come in, I thought about Cronenberg’s statement that, “most diseases would be shocked to be considered diseases at all. For them it’s very positive when they take over your body...It’s a triumph.” Maybe disease is part of what it means to be alive; after all, diseases need a living host to take up residence in. Perhaps in the future, we’ll find a way to live with disease. Or perhaps disease will find a way to live with us.
There is now some talk of Ebola mutating to become less lethal. If it learns how to let us live, it could infect people for longer periods of time, giving it a chance to jump to more hosts. It would be more survivable, but more people would become infected. A win-win for the disease and its host.
When Seth Brundle is first fused with a fly, he feels great, better than he has in years. Once he realizes that the mutations are killing him, he concocts a plan to teleport with more humans, upping his percentage of human DNA. In the film, he never gets a chance to try out his plan, but it seem like it could have worked. A hypothetical sequel could have him repeatedly tweaking his percentages, looking for the optimal mix of man and fly. A mix that would be the least uncanny to look upon: the perfect Brundlefly.
Now I’m waiting for the test results from that visit to the doctor’s. The words of Cronenberg echo in my head. A character in The Brood, after revealing a sarcoma on his neck that looks like a tree fungus, says, “I have a small revolution on my hands and I’m not putting it down very successfully.” His mistake may be in trying to quell the uprising. If my blood tests reveal any cellular unrest, I’ll try to live with the revolution.
There is now some talk of Ebola mutating to become less lethal. If it learns how to let us live, it could infect people for longer periods of time, giving it a chance to jump to more hosts. It would be more survivable, but more people would become infected. A win-win for the disease and its host.
When Seth Brundle is first fused with a fly, he feels great, better than he has in years. Once he realizes that the mutations are killing him, he concocts a plan to teleport with more humans, upping his percentage of human DNA. In the film, he never gets a chance to try out his plan, but it seem like it could have worked. A hypothetical sequel could have him repeatedly tweaking his percentages, looking for the optimal mix of man and fly. A mix that would be the least uncanny to look upon: the perfect Brundlefly.
Now I’m waiting for the test results from that visit to the doctor’s. The words of Cronenberg echo in my head. A character in The Brood, after revealing a sarcoma on his neck that looks like a tree fungus, says, “I have a small revolution on my hands and I’m not putting it down very successfully.” His mistake may be in trying to quell the uprising. If my blood tests reveal any cellular unrest, I’ll try to live with the revolution.
This essay was previously published in a somewhat different form in The Quarterly Conversation.
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