To fuse and refuse: The Fly at 25

Seth Brundle, the tragic genius at the core of The Fly (1986), is motivated to crack the secrets of teleportation not only because such innovation will challenge established concepts of time and space, but also because he suffers from motion sickness—teleportation means never having to set foot in a propelled vehicle again. This bit of character eccentricity is one of the many ingenious details that have allowed The Fly to endure these last 25 years, not only as what may be the defining synthesis of every major theme in David Cronenberg’s filmography, but as the modern big-budget genre film that synthesized an intelligent query into the most vital and troubling issues faced by contemporary philosophers, scientists and policy-makers with an absolutely primal and inspired display of body horror theatrics. There is no other movie at once so smart and so disgusting. Indeed, The Fly features what remains the most astonishing vomit scene—wait, make that scenes—in cinema history. (A word of warning to the uninitiated: do not watch this movie while eating yogurt.)

Rooted in the 1957 short story by George Langelaan and, of course, the Vincent Price film of the same title (1958), The Fly is several things: a chamber love triangle between Brundle, a journalist (Geena Davis) trying to file and article for a magazine named Particle, and her editor (John Getz); a science fiction about a man who accidentally gets into a machine with an insect and pays the abysmal consequences; and a shock-meditation on aging, death, and what it means to be human. “Am I dying?” Brundle wonders after his successful self-teleportation with insect co-pilot begins to exact its gooey toll on his flesh. (“His” flesh? Or something else? Teleportation obliterates form in order to recreate it elsewhere.) This being a Cronenberg film, whatever existential terror or grief Brundle feels en route to becoming Brundle-fly is eclipsed by unquenchable fascination. Other versions of Langelaan’s ‘Fly’ had its protagonist lose his ability to speak relatively early in the story; Cronenberg insisted that his Brundle keep his tongue nimble as long as possible—he wanted Brundle to articulate what was happening to him until the very end, at which point a single, unbearably sad gesture is all that’s needed for the experiment to reach its dire conclusion.

Much credit has to be given to Goldblum, whose toothy, lanky charisma, dry humour and quiet showmanship rendered him one of Cronenberg’s perfect alter egos: a smart man of action; a geek with sex appeal; a guy who can endow the word "cheeseburger" with seductive magic. And Davis, Goldblum’s girlfriend at the time, is every bit his match, both intrigued and repulsed, in-love and loving and fiercely self-protective: her alarmed response to the possibility that she’s pregnant with Son of Brundle-fly is deeply affecting. Its fantastic narrative being awkwardly yet necessarily compressed, The Fly is not without its little flaws—a bit of boilerplate dialogue here, some garish lighting there; way too much showy pathos from Getz’s emasculated ex—but the immense power of its unnerving ideas, the complex dynamics of its tautly told story, and the nuanced performances of its two leads earn its status as some very peculiar sort of masterpiece.

Flesh for fantasy vs. naked lunch: Food Inc.

Movies make us hungry. They can also make us disgusted. They can bypass rational thinking and make us desperate to eat things we normally wouldn’t stomach. They can take the consumption of food and render it either into gastronomical pornography or body horror. Primo and Secondo whip up a spectacularly succulent feast in Big Night; the man in the white suit cracks eggs over his mistress’ naked flesh in Tampopo; Divine eats shit in Pink Flamingos; Harrison Ford works a glazed donut and sunglasses into hot sex with Lena Olin in Hollywood Homicide; Bob and Doug McKenzie drown in beer in Strange Brew; the little zombie girl feasts on her own mom in Night of the Living Dead. Make your own list, the point is that moving images of eating prompt responses in us that other media can’t, and that’s the primary reason why, despite lame graphics and excess compression, I feel compelled to recommend the straight-ahead activist Food Inc. so highly. There are other, more thorough methods of gaining this information, but few possess the promise of inciting such immediate action from such a potentially large audience.

Helmed by TV history doc veteran Robert Kenner, Food Inc. comes out swinging, with every well-calculated punch directed at the corporate takeover of American food—and, by extension, our food—and what all evidence points to as a rigorously enforced policy of closed doors and diversion tactics that usually manifest in a veneer of pastoral serenity. Images of sunrises, freshly painted barns and happy, healthy cows grazing across a lush expanse of grass are a beard for, among other things, Frankenstein factory farming, shamefully lax disease control measures, seed patents and, obviously, appalling cruelty to animals, not to mention humans, since labour exploitation—there are allegations of big food in cahoots with US Immigration—is key to industry mechanics. The fact that so much in Food Inc. seem shocking to audiences is slightly baffling to me, given that little of this is breaking news. (I actually heard someone in the theatre tell their friend, “I can’t finish this,” referring to what, if my nose was correct, must have been nachos and some substance dubiously advertised as cheese.) But Kenner and company do such a sturdy, if too concise, job or laying out and updating the essential arguments, an approach surprisingly low on scare-tactics and big on plainspoken testimony from those inside the industry and out, that I can only hope the shocked will feel empowered to make needed changes in their diets, votes, and consumer habits.

Significant groundwork for Food Inc. was done in recent books like Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Both authors feature prominently in Food Inc., with Schlosser introduced while ordering a burger and fries—his confessed favourite meal—from a diner. To be sure, the primary concerns of these authors aren’t centered on making us feel bad about wanting sugar, fat and salt. In fact, they make it plain that we’re hard-wired to crave the stuff. The question is about how those cravings are monitored and fulfilled, and what our most accessible and seemingly affordable options are doing to our bodies, the results running the gamut from obesity to an epidemic of diabetes to sudden death. Such was the fate that befell a two-year-old whose mother is now a tireless food safety activist and who also appears in Food Inc. to outline the infuriating difficulty in getting health standards enforced.

As the opening voice-over informs us, food production has changed more in the 40 years than in the previous 10,000. Supermarkets no longer have seasons. Chickens are forced to grow so quickly that their bones are too weak for them to walk. There are only 13 abattoirs in all of the US, meaning that an untold number of animals might be contained in a single patty, animals eating corn-based byproducts they’d never ate until recently, animals wading in their own shit, which follows them all the way to your plate, inviting an ongoing stream of E. coli outbreaks. Cheapness makes the products alluring, yet a Latino family interviewed explains that they have to spend a huge portion of their income on their father’s diabetes medicine rather than on basic vegetables, and indeed, a head of lettuce costs more than a cheeseburger. So yeah, something feels a little wrong here, and you have to give credit to Kenner for not only avoiding hysteria but for closing the film with some digestible advice. He also features interviews with old school holdout farmers—some real characters begging for a movie of their own—who prove that there is indeed another way to do this, though to (re-)institute it requires massive change. Are we hungry enough?

Iron Man: welding unsubtle geo-politics to comic book logic feels pretty good

It starts with successive explosions of AC/DC and American-made firepower rocking an Afghan desert and features as its protagonist a wildly successful weapons manufacturer/war profiteer who recognizes his role in arming both first world imperialists and third world terrorists and, damnnit, develops a conscience. There’s something surprisingly comfortable in the imposition of an archipelago of overt—some might say opportunistic—political metaphor over an otherwise deeply conventional comic book super hero movie. Grafting our collective geo-political anxiety onto a story so rife with colour, intrigue and optimism goes down surprisingly easy, especially when lubricated with some rather ingenious casting.

Iron Man is utterly entertaining, and while it relies heavily on the less than plausible naiveté of its lead characters—“How did my weapons ever get in the hands of the bad guys?” our hero wonders—it’s still far more sophisticated than is strictly necessary, smartly incorporating the often cumbersome but apparently obligatory super hero origin story seamlessly into the film’s driving action. Half of the writing team was involved in Children of Men, and actor-turned-director Jon Favreau exhibits a winning playfulness and attention to nuance, but I have serious doubts if all this would have worked half as well without Robert Downey Jr. in the lead. Millionaire arms mogul Tony Stark is arrogant and appallingly oblivious to how the rest of the planet lives and dies, yet Downey imbues him with such charisma, nicely underplayed inner conflict—and, ultimately, moral conviction—that we’re more than ready to believe in his redemption.

Stark survives a near-death experience, is captured by your garden variety Middle Eastern insurgents, escapes by building the coolest suit of armour ever, then returns triumphantly to the US to eat cheeseburgers, get tender with his steady help-meet (Gwyneth Paltrow), and put his eponymous empire on hiatus, much to the displeasure of his cohort Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges, back-slapping, bald, bearded and somewhat Ben Kingsleyish), a suspiciously ingratiating guy clearly more concerned with the bottom line. The parallels with real-life figures are writ large: one character stands in for Dick Cheney, another for Colin Powell. Before you know it the entire military-industrial complex is under attack from its prodigal son (who is of course far too heroic to possess a like corollary). All in all, between the fun and fibre, the whole package fits together quite nicely. Even the self-consciously snappy finale—cue the Sabbath—would feel wrong if it weren’t for its pithy message: unlike your average politician, Tony Stark will not lie to the American public.