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.

The Rite: Study hard, eat well, exorcize regularly

Diagnosed with a dearth of faith, aspiring priest Michael Kovak (Colin O’Donoghue), who only joined the seminary to wriggle out of working at his old man’s funeral home anyway, gets sent to exorcist school at the Vatican, where he meets a kooky old Welshman (Anthony Hopkins) who teaches him the ropes. Their first client’s a pregnant teen who becomes a contortionist and barfs up bloody spikes whenever the Devil’s steering the bus. But what really rattles Michael’s sturdy skepticism is the way Satan seems to know his secrets, and speaks them out loud through the mouths of the possessed, in front of everybody, and in English, no less. Because The Rite is fundamentally about the acquisition of faith, as a weapon against diabolical forces attempting to control the flesh, as a way of focusing your mind and settling on a career. This is the story of a young fellow finding his vocation, and thus doubles as a recruitment video for the Catholic Church. Come, we’re told, and fetching Italian journalists will dig you, even if you can’t make out with them. More importantly, you’ll get to put demons in the sleeper-hold on a regular basis.

I certainly appreciate how The Rite, helmed by 1408 director Mikael Håfström, “inspired by” true events and “suggested by” a book by Matt Braglio, honours its own convictions enough to hold off on dopey spectacle and manifest its evil in relatively subtler forms—if Satan made everybody levitate and do the head-spin there wouldn’t be any reason to doubt his existence. Perhaps the central problem with the film is that its conflicts are so abstract and internal that the final showdown feels artificially protracted and actually pretty dull, with not especially riveting newcomer O’Donoghue driving the devil out of Hopkins, who in going from mentor to victim gets to transition from affecting an amusingly businesslike air to supplying a torrent of Hannibal Lecter-like taunts. At least he’s having fun.

There’s also something about the way The Rite appeals to the ostensible latent Catholic in all of us that feels annoyingly simplistic, that feeds into a childish desire for sweeping solutions to life’s most complex problems and absolutions from responsibility for our inner demons. Michael does indeed initially question church dogma and defer to psychology in his attempts to explain away freaky phenomena, but once he rises to the occasion and casts Satan out of a poor soul the implication is that he’s learned a glorious truth, one tantamount to a free lunch: by simply speaking some magic words, The Rite assures us, and doing so like you really mean it, we can each of us be cured of what agonizes us.

Piranha 3-D: Beach blanket bloodbath, barf-bags may be required

Alexandre Aja’s third horror remake kicks off with Richard Dreyfuss getting sucked into an astonishingly lame-looking computer-generated whirlpool before being gobbled by two-million year-old killer guppies. Dreyfuss’ cameo is meant to remind the amnesiacs in the audience of Jaws, though wouldn’t it have been more in keeping with the monumental crassness of Aja’s Piranha to somehow digitally resurrect Roy Scheider and shove him into this innovative new product for inducing vomit? That’s not hyperbole, incidentally—there are at least two acts of vomiting in the movie itself, and only one is performed by a piranha.

Wasn’t the first third of Saving Private Ryan supposed to be a comedy? Apparently that’s the sort of “high-concept” that gets green-lit these days, resulting in this brazenly cynical, simultaneously tedious and upsetting beach blanket bloodbath, quite possibly the only summer fare that includes both Academy Award-winning actors and porn stars in its cast, not to mention the chubby kid from Stand By Me. Funny thing is, I’m not sure which camp gives the worst performances. At least valiant Elizabeth Shue looks like she’s trying, and Christopher Lloyd is nearly amusing in the Sam Jaffe expository scientist bit, though he doesn’t have to work as hard as Sperm Overload 3’s Gianna Michaels, playing a topless parasailing appetizer.

Scripted by Josh Stolberg and Peter Goldfinger, the story’s at once risibly sentimental and utterly heartless, winkily aware of its own irritatingly idiocy yet idiotic nonetheless. It concerns Sheriff Shue trying to evacuate an Arizona resort upon discovering swarms of hungry cannibal piranhas released from captivity while some mannequin who’s supposed to be her teenage son absconds from babysitting duties to hang on a boat with Jerry O’Connell’s insufferable moron with a movie camera, who’s supposedly making pornography. Of course Shue can’t get those pesky spring breakers to exit the water, and soon enough all those dozens of young women Aja worked so hard to get out of their bikinis are ripped to shreds, not only by piranha teeth but also the outboard motor of some scumbag foolishly trying to escape the massacre. After seeing Piranha you may want to undertake hypnosis to get its images out of your head.

It strikes me that O’Connell’s would-be director is actually a pretty obvious stand-in for Aja. While he’s clearly no match for Aja in the sadistic misogyny department, all O’Connell wants for the first half of Piranha is to shoot naked tits, yet his most vivid expression of amazement occurs when he sees one of his honeys consumed by piranhas, who possess the showmanship to penetrate her from below and exit through her mouth. Soon after O’Connell’s back on his boat, half-mutilated, paraphrasing Eric Roberts in The Pope of Greenwich Village. “They took my penis,” he gasps, as though he wasn’t impotent to begin with. But he’s impotent in 3-D! Feeling entertained yet?

The Thing: Fear the familiar face!

When Hollywood endeavored to remake The Thing From Another World (1951), the late screenwriter Bill Lancaster wisely opted for a radical re-imagining, going back to the source material for inspiration, a novella by John W. Campbell Jr. entitled Who Goes There? Chief among the distinctions between The Thing From Another World and what would simply be called The Thing (82) was the decision, very much in keeping the Campbell’s narrative, to render the titular alien not as an angry salad bar in human form but rather an interplanetary chameleon, a parasite able to rapidly assume the form of whatever host organism it came into contact with after being thawed out by a Norwegian research team in Antarctica. They say mimicry is the highest compliment.

However, Lancaster’s script also differs from the earlier movie in that it features not a single woman. While the presence of women in the earlier movie could be written off as pandering to a broader audience with the arbitrary injection of a love interest, an argument of equal merit could be made that a great opportunity was lost in the resolve to make this an exclusively masculine story. A feminine perspective could have pleasingly complicated the deeply uneasy, paranoid group dynamics of The Thing, and you have to wonder if the absence of women didn’t emerge above all from squeamishness on the part of the filmmakers, all of them men, who may have felt uncomfortable with desecrating female bodies with the same infamously ferocious and nauseating zeal applied to those of men and canines throughout.

The Thing begins with a pretty corny looking flying saucer crashing into Earth, leaving no ambiguity as to what we’re dealing with from the get-go. There’s only a short, divertingly portentous half-hour or so between this cosmic establishing shot and the first manifestation of the alien presence in the encampment’s Husky cage, with flesh flying off of this poor pooch’s skull like a self-peeling banana, and blood-smeared spaghetti whipping around the room to ensnare the other dogs. The alien’s use of familiar flesh as a sort of Trojan Horse reveals a similar tactic to that of the aliens in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (56), which was also imaginatively updated and remade in a version directed by Philip Kaufman in ’78. But in The Thing, directed by John Carpenter, the process of transfiguration is itself the central concern of the movie. It veers away from the concerns of science fiction and into that of horror, emphasizing repeatedly the body as a site of grotesque violence and chilling anonymity.

The Thing, when not making you want to vomit, is pretty fun, another Carpenter siege drama where evil is evil and the good guys do what it takes. But I can’t help but imagine a David Cronenberg version, a movie far more curious, speculative and precise in its biological exegesis and bearing greater pathos. Undoubtedly Cronenberg, like the scientist in The Thing From Another World, would be more sympathetic to the alien than Kurt Russell, who rarely puts on a hat in the –40 tempests and eagerly torches everything in sight. But maybe we should be imagining a Werner Herzog version. Early in The Thing a characters named Windows tries to get in touch with his colleagues at McMurdo Station, the setting of Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World (07). Would those endearing misfits at McMurdo, spanning many countries of origin and encompassing both genders, have been able to fight off the alien? Or might they have embraced it as just another fellow outsider, far from home and in search of communion?

Corporeal punishment: Jennifer's Body

The body in question belongs to the resident narcissistic teen hottie of Devil’s Kettle, the generic rural American town where a suitably demonic series of events, dreamed up by a writer whose own first name is Spanish for Devil, unfolds. Along with a limpid rock band on tour, lifelong pals Jennifer (Megan Fox) and Needy (Amanda Seyfried) are the only survivors of a fire that inexplicably breaks out at the local watering hole, prompting what is surely the most poorly managed evacuation of a one-floor licensed truck stop in movie history, replete with extras running around, flaming, flailing, screaming. But only Needy will make it home that night. Jennifer will be abducted by said rockers in their boogie van—“agents of Satan with really awesome haircuts,” as she’ll come to describe them—and whisked away into the wilds of Devil’s Kettle to endure hardships only gradually revealed. When she returns from her ordeal she’s covered in blood, breaks in to Needy’s house, starts gobbling up mom’s roast chicken without even asking, and lets a massive black barf bomb erupt all over the kitchen floor. I guess it’s the barf that lets us know we’re watching a horror movie.

“Hell is a teenage girl,” declares Needy at the top of her excessively explanatory voice-over, setting the tone of flamboyantly hormonal high school journal-keeping which will prove to dominate Jennifer’s Body, the follow-up to Academy Award-winner Diablo Cody’s screenwriting debut Juno. Like Juno, Jennifer’s Body has a sassy and irreverent sense of humour to help ease us into the angst, but it has none of its predecessor’s modest charms nor its feeling for the ordinary messiness of teenage existence. Jennifer’s Body wants to tap into the thick ambiguities of female bonds, using supernatural conventions, namely telepathy and some sort of Satanic shenanigans, to flush the internal drama out into something heightened, fantastic and immediate. But the film’s teenage monster is only vaguely conceived and engages in no particular mythology. Its central relationship is undeveloped, and its attempts to characterize Needy as the geeky one are laughably reduced to disguising her beauty behind a pair of glasses. Finally, its rendering of adolescent psychosexual trauma is crassly superficial. So it’s no Let the Right One In, no Carrie, no Ginger Snaps. It’s not even Trick or Treat. It feels like a mostly cynical cash-in on the latest teen exploitation trends and Cody’s emerging brand.


More disappointing however is where this film finds director Karyn Kusama, whose feature debut Girlfight was such a knockout nine years ago. Between Girlfight and Jennifer’s Body Kusama’s sole feature credit has been Aeon Flux. (I didn’t see it either.) But it seems like Kusama’s career has gone in roughly the same direction as Girlfight’s star Michelle Rodriguez, who went from coming out of nowhere with a genuinely tough, Oscar-worthy leading performance, to a string of supporting roles as the snarling, more one-dimensionally tough girl in films like The Fast and the Furious, Resident Evil, S.W.A.T. and Battle in Seattle. While it wouldn’t have redeemed her resume any, I kind of wish Rodriguez would have showed up in Kusama’s latest, just to cut to the chase beat the shit out of Jennifer, preferably in the first act.

Guy down in front next to the lady, he's our man in Panama: a comic chronicle of heartache, humiliation and pathology in Key West, circa 1978

I have never been to Key West, Florida. At least not, you know, in the conventional sense. But I have written about it, several times in fact, and what’s more I even wrote about Key West for the people of Key West. My pal Paul moved down there and got me a gig with a local magazine, interviewing Key Westers or, in any case, people somehow associated with the place, however incredibly tangentially. I’d talk to them and then write about our conversation in such a way that made it seem like I personally had something profound to say about Key West, even pretending it was a place I could in some way call home. The ruse was encouraged by my superiors. It was weirdly fun.

Most of what I do know about Key West I learned the same highly dubious way I learn most things: from reading fiction. Key West’s literary history is of course formidable, with its Hemingways and Tennessees and Elizabeth Bishops, though the period that really got me interested occured after their time, a period that previous to this gig I knew absolutely zilch about. Everyone I’ve ever talked to about Key West seemed to talk about what the place was like in the 70s, the time before colossal gentrification, the time of locally sanctioned madness, cheap real estate, too many guns, too many drugs, rampant corruption and literary outlaws. And I don’t know that any one figure seemed to sum up that time better than Thomas McGuane, a.k.a. Captain Berserko. Dude was so crazy he even married Margot Kidder. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t live there anymore.

The McGuane novel that everyone considers to be the his defining Key West work is Ninety-two in the Shade (1973), which he himself eventually made into an amiably off the wall movie with Peter Fonda, Warren Oates, Harry Dean Stanton and Kidder (enough said). But the one that strikes me as the genuine article, the one that comes closest to mapping out the particular pathology of that era/place/generation is in fact the novel McGuane took his biggest critical whipping for, largely on account of its disquieting degree of autobiographical content delivered in the treacherous wake of McGuane’s time spent courting Hollywood and seducing starlets. Literary types tend to find it distasteful when ostensibly serious writers overstep the boundaries of literary celebrity, and Panama (78), dragged McGuane’s private hysteria and public fumbles out into the open. You ask me, it’s a hell of a book, that much better—not to mention funnier—than its predecessor for laying its heart so crudely bare—though like Ninety-two, the mercurial comic prose is in high gear.

Panama’s protagonist is one Chester Pomeroy, returning to Key West to lick his wounds following some sort of debacle, or a perhaps series of them. The back cover blub explains that Chester’s a washed-up rock star, though you’d never glean that from anything described in the meat of the novel. He mentions being on tour, seems to like music, and at one point recalls having lunch with Jean-Luc Godard, but the way he conveys his past vocational adventures tends to be willfully oblique and/or surreally embellished: “I was making a tremendous living demonstrating, with the aplomb of a Fuller brush salesman, all the nightmares, all the loathsome, toppling states of mind, all the evil things that go on behind closed eyes. When I crawled out of the elephant’s ass, it was widely felt I’d gone too far; and when I puked on the mayor, that was it, I was through. I went home to Key West and voted for Carter.”

Chester’s two central concerns upon his return, the poles of some Oedipal wish-fulfillment, are: a reunion with Catherine, a woman he apparently married years ago in Panama, though neither can remember the ceremony, a woman he publicly insulted at some point in his blurry past but whom he still loves with an aching force, so much so that he stalks her in super markets and actually nails his left hand to her door while super-loaded on Bolivian cocaine; and to continue denying that his father is still alive, wealthy and boring, rather than a store detective who died of smoke inhalation in a Boston subway fire years ago. This is just one example of our hero’s selective or severely damaged recall skills. Chester’s memory issues are offered some degree of remedy when Catherine hires a private detective to follow him around so as to report back later on his actions. Yet in Chester’s first-person narration there’s never anything less than a rich sense of someone less than obsessed with coming to terms with his own identity. In an especially memorable moment, that sense of self-actualization is specifically concerned with how his relationship to place: “I didn’t know what I was, not a Southerner certainly. A Floridian. Drugs, alligators, macadam, the sea, sticky sex, laughter, and sudden death.”

In a certain sense Panama is a novel of redemption, though the shape or value of this redemption is hardly clearly defined or entirely resolved. It is a sort of staggering celebration of self-implosion and fiery bullshit, and a treatise on the limitations of willing oneself toward insanity. And it’s thick with a palpable, desperate heartache that refuses to surrender to the notion of a polite, quiet laying down of arms in romantic battle. What’s important too is that it speaks so specifically of a geography and a people as an entry point into persona and story. Whether or not the Key West of Panama really existed matters less than the fact that only Key West, that crazed, slightly suicidal Key West of the 70s, could have helped give birth to this heartfelt, daring, extraordinary goof of a novel.

Broken circle: Before the Rain endures not for its literal depection of interconnectedness but for the jarring disconnect of its spasms of violence

Milcho Manchevski’s feature debut Before the Rain (1994) operates around a tripartite structure, each strand offering a distinct narrative—one set in England, the other two in Macedonia—that connects in unexpected ways to a whole that comes full circle only in the closing scenes. Thanks to Criterion’s new DVD, I’ve just seen the film again for the first time since its release, and it seems to me now that what’s more important, and certainly more durable than the ways in which these threads literally connect are the ways in which each thread poses a variation on the same build-up toward an act of senseless violence, eviscerating whatever assemblage of order previously existed. Though made during the spike of international awareness of the chaos of the war-torn Balkan states, Before the Rain isn’t really a commentary on that particular political trauma or even on civil war in general. It’s about eruptions and the normally invisible geometry that links them.

An Orthodox Christian monk (the beatific, rather opaque Grégoire Colin) hides an Albanian teenage girl accused of killing a local shepherd. A London photo agent (the late, always wonderful Katrin Cartlidge) having an affair with a famed photojournalist discovers she’s pregnant. A Macedonian (a zesty, deeply watchable Rade Serbedzija) returns home after years abroad to discover a homeland where he’s considered an outsider each time he attempts to apply some moral logic to the madness of tribal disputes. Each of the major players make some sort of an appearance in each of the individual parts, a technique striking in its day that has since been exploited in some of the most awkward, overbearing and self-important films of the last several years, reaching its nadir with the likes of Babel (2006) and, worst of all, Paul Haggis’ Crash (04).

These later movies talk down their audience, straining to emphasize the theme of global interconnectedness by literally connecting their characters in risible feats of dramatic irony, as though we wouldn’t be able to sense the figurative connections without such guidance. If Manchevski’s spin on this feels less schematic, it may come down to simply having origins in an genuinely organic approach to dealing with a story that’s ultimately more about generating a specific feeling than hammering home an outsized message. More problematic are Manchevski’s use of rhymes or echoes throughout the film—a cryptic proverb, a turtle, vomit, the swatting of a fly—something meant to be subtle but actually has the opposite effect, drawing far too much attention to moments and gestures that start to feel awfully banal when trapped under the spotlight of Manchevski’s camera.

Still, it’s a privilege to criticize a movie for such details. While things might not quite mesh with the grace and quiet provocation intended, while certain events, such as the first killing, feel very forced, the poetry of Before the Rain is essentially of a fairly unimposing sort—I love the scenes of people dreaming of someone’s appearance right before the actually appear—while the performances are at times nothing less than sublime. I also feel more endeared toward Manchevski after hearing the audio commentary he does with scholar Annette Insdorf. While Insdorf keeps aligning Manchevski’s work to that of Kieslowski (a comparison that does Manchevski no favours), Manchevski unabashedly and unpretentiously points out the film’s obvious relationship to Pulp Fiction, which came out the same year, while pointing out little homages to Psycho (60) and The Wild Bunch (1969). In the essay included in the DVD package, Ian Christie takes this one step further, wisely seeing Before the Rain’s true lineage as being in late period westerns. With readings like this one, Before the Rain, unlike the movies it’s most obviously influenced, may actually just look better and better with age.