The following notes on David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986) were written by Lance St. Laurent, the Cinematheque’s Project Assistant and PhD Candidate in the department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. A 35mm print of The Fly, courtesy of the Chicago Film Society, will be screened on Saturday, October 28, at 7 p.m., in the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave, as the final screening in our selection of 1980s fan favorites. Admission is Free!
By Lance St. Laurent
1986’s The Fly was not David Cronenberg’s first foray into Hollywood filmmaking, but it would prove to be his most significant. Three years prior, the Canadian auteur had teamed with infamous producer Dino De Laurentiis on the well-received and modestly successful adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dead Zone. However, that film was the rare Cronenberg project that he did not at least co-write, and it shows, with Cronenberg himself going so as far as to describe it as “certainly the least offensive film I’ve made”. It was instead Cronenberg’s follow-up, a remake of 1958’s The Fly, that would truly demonstrate the visceral horrors the filmmakers could conjure with a real Hollywood studio budget. The film saw Cronenberg taking his craft to disgusting new heights, but perhaps more surprising was the way in which the oft-cerebral filmmaker was able to adapt his distinct sensibilities to a form that was widely embraced by the moviegoing public, that of the tragic melodrama. For as much as the Oscar-winning makeup from Chris Walas may be what The Fly is best remembered for today, the doomed romance between scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) and his beloved Ronnie Quaife (Geena Davis) is what gives the film its exposed beating heart.
After completing The Dead Zone, David Cronenberg was suddenly in demand, reading scripts and fielding offers to direct a number of mainstream studio films, including Witness—“I could never be a fan of the Amish”—and even Top Gun. Eventually, Dead Zone producer Dino DeLaurentiis lured him back to develop an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale”. Cronenberg worked with DeLaurentiis for an entire year, producing twelve drafts of the script before departing the project due to creative differences. The eventual produced film, 1990’s Paul Verhoeven action spectacular Total Recall, would still contain contributions from Cronenberg’s time on the project, specifically the inclusion of disfigured mutant Martians and their conjoined telepathic leader Kuato.
With a year wasted and no new projects on the horizon, Cronenberg was approached by Brooksfilms, the production company owned by comedy filmmaker Mel Brooks, with a reimagining of The Fly scripted by Charles Edward Pogue. Much like he had done with David Lynch on The Elephant Man earlier in the decade, Brooks was looking for an up-and-coming filmmaker who could use support to bring their idiosyncratic visions to a wider audience. It was the rare script sent to Cronenberg that seemed tailor-made to his interests. “It was very body-oriented, very body-conscious,” according to Cronenberg, but there was one problem: “I thought the characters were awful, the dialogue trite, and the ending bad.” Cronenberg insisted on creative autonomy and would heavily rewrite Pogue’s screenplay, adhering to the reworking of the original Fly premise and many of the specific visceral details of his script, but rebuilding the characters from the ground up, reimagining the central couple as a newly blossoming romance rather than a stable marriage.
When writing Seth Brundle, Cronenberg describes his desire to create a character who was “eccentric enough to have a weird take on what’s happening to them.” For Cronenberg, it was Brundle’s ability to talk through his own deterioration that most fascinated him in the project. “[H]ow does this man deal with his disease: rationalize it, articulate it?” Mel Brooks suggested Pierce Brosnan for the role, a choice Cronenberg roundly dismissed. Contemporaneous reporting from Rolling Stone also indicates offers were made to both John Malkovich and Richard Dreyfuss, but the eccentric and loquacious Jeff Goldblum ultimately proved to be the ideal choice for the role as conceived by Cronenberg.
For the role of Veronica “Ronnie” Quaife, Cronenberg independently sought out Goldblum’s real-life girlfriend at the time, Geena Davis. Producer Stuart Cornfield was initially resistant to this idea, finding it to be too obvious and a potential source of on-set drama, but Cronenberg was persistent. “Jeff is a particular and eccentric screen presence. I wanted a woman who could match him for that. […] Geena is funny and sexy, and to me that is just the most diabolical combination.” It also didn’t hurt that the six-foot Davis could, quite literally, measure up to her co-star. “[I]t’s hard to line up the shots if one is much taller.”
The Fly may have been Cronenberg’s most expensive and ambitious project to date, but for the production itself, he kept things familiar and close to home. The film was shot entirely at Kleinburg Studio in Cronenberg’s native Toronto, and the crew was staffed with several frequent Cronenberg collaborators, including cinematographer Mark Irwin, production designer Carol Spier, editor Ron Sanders, and composer Howard Shore. For a personal touch, Cronenberg even based the design of Brundle’s teleportation pods on the engine cylinder of his own Ducati motorcycle.
Though the film was only the 23rd highest grosser of 1986, at $40 million domestic, it was (and to date remains) David Cronenberg’s most financially successful film. The film was also met with critical raves, including from The Chicago Tribune’s Dave Kehr, who described it as “a film that is at once a pure, personal expression and a superbly successful commercial enterprise.” Most importantly for Cronenberg, the success of The Fly gave him the clout to pursue (though not without pushback) a story that had been stuck in his mind since even before The Dead Zone, the lurid true story of the Marcus brothers, twin gynecologists who both died under mysterious circumstances. The resulting film, 1988’s Dead Ringers, would end up as one of the most acclaimed of Cronenberg’s career.
Upon release, many critics interpreted The Fly as a star-crossed romance for the AIDS generation, a tragedy of lovers torn apart by a voracious, unstoppable disease. For his part, Cronenberg mostly rejects such specific cultural resonances, instead claiming inspiration from something far more primal. “To me the film is a metaphor for aging, a compression of any love affair that goes to the end of one of the lover’s life. […] Every love story must end tragically. One of the lovers dies, or both of them die together. That’s tragic. It’s the end.” Maybe this is why The Fly has endured far beyond any specific context that critics in the 80s may have applied to the film. For at its core, despite its spectacular displays of gloopy grotesquerie, The Fly is less about the inevitable decay of our human bodies than the emotional and psychological wreckage of the loved ones helpless to stop it.