The Fly · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Brundle stands at the bathroom mirror and works a fingernail loose from his finger. It lifts away with a little pus, and he does not scream. He looks at it the way you'd look at a slide. Later he will keep it — with the teeth, with the strange dried curls of himself — in the medicine cabinet he calls the Brundle Museum of Natural History. A man, curating his own remains.

That clinical calm in front of horror is the key to what kind of film this is, and Deleuze gives us the exact name for it. Between the close-up that only feels and the action that changes a situation, he locates a stranger, lower image: the impulse-image. It is Secondness gone degenerate — not a hero meeting a milieu, but an appetite seizing a fragment of the world and dragging it down a slope. Its native country is naturalism, the Zola of bodies driven by hungers older than character. And its first move is to reveal that the ordinary setting was never only a setting. Brundle's loft looks like a workplace — lab, bedroom, eventually cell. Deleuze would call that the derived-milieu, the social surface. But the telepods open a door under it. What comes through is the originary-world: a savage, pre-human zone of pure drive where a man and a housefly are, to the computer's innocent eye, the same kind of meat. The film's whole premise is that this lower world was always inside the upper one, waiting.

Watch what the impulse does once it's loose. It doesn't plot. It wants. Brundle wants sugar by the spoonful, wants sex until Ronnie is frightened, wants to vault gymnastically off the pipes, then wants raw sweetness, then wants flesh. Each craving is a symptom — Deleuze's word for an act you read backward to a drive the character can't see. Brundle, the scientist, is the perfect host for this, because he keeps trying to read himself: "I'm becoming something that never existed before. I'm becoming Brundlefly." He narrates his own pathology into a tape recorder, which is the impulse-image's grim joke — the intelligence survives just long enough to take dictation from the hunger that's eating it.

And the parts pile up. The fingernails, the ear, the teeth in the cabinet. This is the impulse-image's fetish in its plainest form: the part-object, broken off the body and charged, hoarded, fixed upon. Most films would use the museum for a scare. Cronenberg uses it for grief. These are relics. He is mourning himself in advance, organ by organ.

Over all of it runs the thing Deleuze called the line of slope — the pente, the irreversible downhill of the originary world toward exhaustion and death. The Fly is almost nothing but this line, drawn cleanly. Ronald Sanders cuts the film as one accelerating curve; Mark Irwin keeps the camera composed and observational, lighting the pods cold against the warm clutter so the horror has nowhere to hide except the body. The restraint is doctrine. Nothing stylistically agitated is allowed to compete with the slope. You are made to watch entropy at the speed of a disease, which in 1986 audiences understood, and understand now, as more than metaphor.

The miracle is that the slope keeps producing a face. Goldblum's performance is a textbook of what Deleuze calls the potisign — the icon of power, micro-movements crossing a face at a threshold, intensity building where it can't yet discharge. Deep into the prosthetics, through coarsened skin and lost teeth, something recognizably him keeps surfacing: a flicker of the old charm, a joke, then terror at the joke. "I'm an insect who dreamed he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is over, and the insect is awake." That is the impulse-image reaching, impossibly, for tragedy — a body reduced to drive that can still report on its own loss.

This is Cronenberg's specific invention, and you can see him assembling it. From the 1958 Fly he takes the splice and inverts its shock ending into a long arc; from Bride of Frankenstein he takes the monster-as-pathos; from his own Shivers and The Brood and Videodrome he takes "venereal horror," disease that rewrites the flesh, the body as symptom made literal. What's new in The Fly is the welding of that lurid material to operatic romance — Howard Shore scoring not the monster but the grief, writing the slope as if it were Tristan. Body horror had externalized inner states before. No one had made the externalization break your heart.

What it did to the genre is simple and large: it proved the impulse-image could carry love. The monster movie runs on the action-image — threat, confrontation, resolution. The Fly throws that out. There is no villain, no act that reverses anything, only biology and the people inside it, and at the end the fused creature wordlessly guides Ronnie's hand to the shotgun. That is the last gesture available on the line of slope: not victory, mercy. Everything Cronenberg seeded in the body-horror that followed comes from this discovery — that the surest way to terrify us with the flesh is to make us love the person losing it.

Watch it again for the cabinet. He keeps everything. He knew exactly what was happening to him, and he loved it, and the dream was over.