Cinema
The Fly (`18', selected cinemas)
Swallowing the fly
Peter Ackroyd
This looks as if it is going to become screen entertainment of the old-fashioned !on; it has all the makings of a good horror', and even the loud music is com- forting. Of course the plot itself is familiar to anyone who has even the remotest connection with the 20th century, although this modern adaptation might be expected to sport such ambiguous contemporary virtues as irony and self-conscious filmic sophistication'. The director, David Cronenberg, is not well known for these things, however. He specialises in the more gruesome aspects of the horror-repertoire, and is particularly attracted to those little physical details which so entertain audi- ences. Exploding heads are nothing to him; eyes pop, stomachs burst open, so what? His is the emetic school of film-making, in other words; but like his contemporary Brian de Palma he has managed to turn contemporary America into the perfect vehicle for some of the least pleasant fears and the oldest nightmares. In fact he is often just as interested in presenting mod- ern American life as he is in concocting the horror itself — with the implied assump- tion, no doubt, that there is little difference between the two.
In that sense The Fly might have been made especially for him since it manages to combine technology with nightmare, the brighter aspects of modernity with some of the more gruesome human anxieties. In the original version of this film, as far as I remember, the mingling of fly and man resulted in a little creature with Vincent Price's head attached to it. In this version, of course, Cronenberg has gone in quite the other direction and has decided that the human should change, slowly and in great detail, into a gigantic insect. The fact that he attains this fate by means of the latest computer technology does not dis-
guise the fact that the spectacle of man- into-fly is only a slightly more disconcert- ing advance from the classical man-into- horse or even man-into-stone. And so Cronenberg gets the best of both worlds.
Certainly this is a superior product superior not to the classical myths, of course, but to the original Fly. The script manages to hold the attention, after all, and in a film which manages to produce some of the most disagreeable special effects on record this in itself is something of an achievement. Even in pictures which depend to a large extent upon what might be described as non-literary phenomena, the script is still central. With the possible exception of certain products deriving from the age of the silent screen, no good film can exist without a good script.
The acting has its charms, too. Of course the girl is annoying. Girls in horror films always are, because they bring a human element into a medium which should really possess no human interest. That is why we dislike it when they scream, or faint, or refuse to shoot the various monsters on sight, or insist on giving the said creatures a second chance, and so on. The female can really play no part in horror, unless she is transmogrified into a vampire or perhaps a priestess, since this is an entirely primitive and generally male universe. That is why, in The Fly, as a man slowly turns into a living resemblance of something in a wax museum, no one ever dreams of calling the police or a doctor. There are no doctors or policemen in this world. Only our fears.
The actor in the central role, however, represented an inspired piece of casting with his slightly bulbous eyes and his quivering hands, he looks as if he has moved half-way to the insect state even before the experiments begin. He is an odd `Every cloud has a silver lining!' actor in many ways, with a studied manner that reminded one of the halcyon days of the Method, and there were times when one could not wait for him to change into the eponymous creature. But it has to be said that, as a fly, he did very well. It is a pity that he cannot make a career out of it.
But one such film is more than enough. The transition takes place only gradually at first, with unexplained tufts and clumps appearing on the actor's body; but then fingernails begin to drop off, teeth to fall from the mouth, and various inhuman juices to emerge from his gradually chang- ing form. David Cronenberg specialises in the horror of the body — he makes the flesh creep, in every sense, and those who are easily nauseated should not on any account see this film. There were times when your reviewer shielded his innocent eyes with his hands, and so he cannot report on the more ghastly effects; but he could hear the screams from the audience. Towards the end, however, the poor crea- ture (the fly, not the reviewer) looks really no worse than Charles Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (with just the right degree of pathos, as well) but then, at the very end, something ghastly happened. Since this reviewer now had his expensive leather briefcase up to his face, it is hard to know precisely what was going on. But it was something very nasty indeed.
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