On David Cronenberg's The Fly

1. Bartok Science Industries and Bitonality

The Fly begins at a meet-and-greet hosted by Bartok Science Industries, the company funding Seth Brundle’s research. The name Bartok wasn’t chosen at random. Béla Bartók was a Hungarian composer of modern, symphonic music. He was a proponent of bitonality, a compositional method involving the simultaneous development of melodies and harmonies in two different keys. Dissonance results when two or more tonalities clash within a single composition. Think of Brundlefly as a bitonal composition in the medium of the flesh and the allusion to Bartók makes total sense. Two simultaneous melodies in different keys are analogous to two genomes, insect and human, clashing in a single organism. (I do have an unresolved question regarding names though. Stathis Borans and Seth Brundle both have the initials S.B., which is a reversal of Bartok Science. Why?)

2. Motion Sickness and Disembodied Consciousness

Seth Brundle suffers from motion sickness. Riding in Veronica Quaife’s car from the Bartok party to his laboratory, He admits that he hates vehicles. There’s something funny about a grown man with such a characteristically childish affliction. We’re meant to see Brundle as ridiculous but charming. His weakness makes him sympathetic. Motion sickness, after all, is not that big of a deal. But as with the name Bartok, there’s something going on beneath the surface here. The body ill at ease with the vehicle is similar to the mind ill at ease with the body. Seen in this light, does Brundle’s research on teleportation express a yearning for disembodied consciousness? The struggle between mind and body comes to the fore as Brundle’s physical transformation progresses. His thought patterns and the corresponding nervous impulses of the fly are at odds. He struggles in vain to resist the hybridization of his mind. It’s the ultimate case of cognitive dissonance.

3. Fusion and Cold War context

When things start going wrong Brundle asks the computer if the fly was assimilated during transport. The computer says, “no”. He then asks what did happen. The computer says, “fusion”. This is an evocative term given the cold war context of The Fly. The original film was made in 1958, the height of the atomic age. Thermonuclear bombs were exploded regularly over the Pacific throughout the ‘50s. These fusion bombs were far more destructive than the fission bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. They were enormous fireballs, sometimes miles across, made of superheated gas in an ionized state, or plasma. (The sun is a naturally occurring plasma created by an ongoing fusion reaction.) Brundle uses the word plasma several times while raving about his experience of teleportation, which also, and more importantly, was one of fusion with the fly. Plasma and fusion—it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Cronenberg has nuclear technology on his mind. His film The Dead Zone, made just before The Fly, deals explicitly with the threat of thermonuclear war between the USSR and the USA. But what exactly is he saying about all this in The Fly? Maybe we can think of Brundle’s plight—at odds with himself, gradually losing his humanity, plagued by his experience of fusion—as somehow representative of the Cold War world. I don’t mean to say that the fly stands for Communism and Brundle for Capitalism or vice versa. Just that someone thinking about the world in the grips of the Cold War might see an apt metaphor in Brundlefly, an organism with two genetic directives struggling to dictate the course of its development.