Observations of Cronenberg's The Fly (1986):

It's no accident Seth Brundle and Stathis Borans share the same initials. In some ways they are mirrors of each other: man-children afraid of intimacy, afraid to grow w/in context of human connection--only interested in achievement.

Stathis Borans (John Getz), as Veronica's (Geena Davis) ex, has a name that sounds like stasis. Borans sounds boring, like a chemical element. A great character description: boring, static, unchanging. Emotionally unavailable. I could do a whole paper on this character alone.

Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) is a bundle of frenetic nerves, fraying as he slips deeper into the toxic melange of fly+human.

Seth also has an interesting Egyptian etymology, a deity who hacked up his brother Osiris up into pieces (like the telepod disassembles matter).

Seth only understands fusing physically w/another person, hence his insistence Veronica go into the pod so that he, she, & their baby will fuse into one being.

Stathis' inability to understand "the flesh" ultimately manifests in Brundlefly melting his hand and foot off. Emotionally & physically crippled.

Both Seth and Stathis have spent the entire movie calling Veronica "Ronnie" as a way of disempowering and defeminizing her.

Baboon watching Seth enter the telepod and emerge on the other side as a kind of reverse evolution. Ape watching man attempt to science his way forward & instead regressing into primordial awfulness. A kind of twisted punishment for having turned the baboon's brother inside out.

Telepods are wombs, representing Seth's fear of women, fear/awe of birth, & the collective fear/masculine insecurity scientific man's inability to create organic life, overcompensating for the lack by over-rationalizing, technologically attempting to replace woman w/machine.

To fix the flaw Seth must make the computer learn "the the flesh." Veronica is there to initiate sex, to teach him the ways. He isn't equipped to handle the raw power of human intimacy.

Their coupling is interrupted by a computer chip embedded in his back. Techno-fusion.

When Veronica confronts Stathis to "scrape the dirt of her old life off," Seth misreads as a sexual rejection of his self.

In his drunken state he teleports himself + the fly, fusing their genetic material, revealing the real Seth beneath, the "insect who dreamed he was a man."

Naked Seth emerges from the pod--the attempt to birth a new self. Playing God despite his lack of belief in god. We humans cannot help our own hubris and self-deceit. We still want to create.

Notable the teleportation process involves destruction then regeneration. Cycles.

Seth's whole reason for building telepods is ostensibly b/c he gets motion sickness. It's a hopelessly deluded attempt to master his own weakness.

That the *identity* of Seth Brundle is so easily subsumed in the process is proof of how truly fragile our mental self-image is.

Remember, it isn't that Seth Brundle absorbed the fly's DNA.

Rather, it was a genetic, molecular bonding of two primal forms--fly and Brundle.

Brundle's weakness was that he never had control of any part of his life.

For all his science, Brundle was only ever partially a man.

Meanwhile Veronica is the voice of sanity--emotionally resonant amid scientific justifications and elaborate ethical sidestepping. Fully human in touch w/herself, her feelings.

She's party to Seth's god-acting, but also separate from it--journalistically speaking she's in the flesh with Seth during his moment of triumph, yet absent during his moment of incarnation as the fused Brundlefly.

Her love, despite his transformation, never wavers.

When the malignant form of Seth describes insect politics to her, the inability for an insect to feel compassion, remorse, or fear (like an abusive partner), she stumbles out now firmly ready to abort the baby.

Notably, both Stathis and Seth attempt to deny her that autonomy.

In an astonishing display of visceral, literal toxic masculinity, Brundlefly first dissolves Stathis' hand and foot, then forces Veronica into the telepod in order to make her like unto himself, one with the plasma pool of pure id.

Finally Veronica blows Seth apart, revealing the sludge beneath the fly beneath the man, and the film fades out over her tears.

An astonishing fable of human dynamics of sexuality, technology, and identity. A masterclass of acting, production design, visual FX and directing.

The Fly is really one of the most solid sci-fi horror renderings of toxic masculinity I can think of, and one of David Cronenberg's most polished examinations of the human condition in his body of work.

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