The Fly

 In North American English, there are two words, a movie and a film. A movie is something that has been produced by a studio with the sole purpose of entertainment, any artistic merits it may have are purely coincidental. A film is something that is produced as an artistic enterprise, where to win an award or because the producers of the film believe in the project. I watch a lot of movies, and sometimes they rise to the level of film. It's been a while since I went out of my way to watch a film, but this is certainly a film. It can't be judged by the standards of a movie which is made purely for entertainment. Cronenberg, the director, said that this film is all about aging and losing your loved ones, but I think that is a surprisingly simplistic explanation. To me, the film is about sexual desire, and how our bodies will betray us. A lot of people at the time saw this film as a commentary on the AIDS crisis that was developing, and while that may not have been the director's intent, this interpretation certainly fits. Jeff Goldblum has remarkable charisma in this role, and he and Gina Davis have incredible chemistry. The reason it works as a metaphor for AIDS is that Goldblum's character is the one who undergoes the horrifying changes and Gina Davis's character escapes during the duration of the film but is left with a mortal horror that she has somehow contracted the same horrible disease from her now deceased partner. But the metaphor also works for situations where one member of the couple engages in dangerous activities that the other does not - the more responsible partner is left to wonder what damage they have been caused. It's also an exploration of the price of jealousy. There are two male characters who are both interested in a female character. One is an ex-boyfriend whose jealousy reduces him to making a pathetic display in public in front of his ex-girlfriend and strangers. It is a truism that men are afraid of being laughed at and women are afraid of being murdered. This film is a good explanation of this. The ex-boyfriend is played and shown in a horrific light. The current boyfriend thinking that some bad thing is happening between the ex-boyfriend and his love interest becomes jealous, get drunk, and engages in remarkably reckless behavior. He is then punished for this by having his body horribly transfigured. As a film, it works beautifully. As a movie though, I have a lot of questions. The plot of the story is that a single scientist has invented a teleporter. He meets a scientific journalist and wants to talk about his invention. When he actually convinces her to see his invention and does a demonstration of it, and she says that she wants to write about it for her magazine, he says no because the invention isn't ready yet, it cannot teleport organic life. This does not make any sense whatsoever. Even if that were true, the invention itself is revolutionary. You don't need to transport organic life for a teleporter to be a very useful thing. You could ship a product anywhere in the world in an instant. This device would simultaneously improve the world and throw it into chaos because millions of people would lose jobs and millions of people would gain jobs. So I don't understand why he thinks his invention is a failure. But okay, let's say you really want to transport organic life also. What kinds of animals or plants do you think you would start with? He starts with a baboon. Why wouldn't you start with a frog, even a fly, and work your way up to bigger organisms? While the city the scientist lives in is never mentioned, it appears to be New York. Where did one get two baboons in the middle of New York in the 1980s? Some of the special effects are amazing examples of practical effects, others are in my opinion over the top. One good aspect of this story that a lot of contemporary film lack is the fact that horrible things happen to this man not because he is morally evil, but because he succumbed to a quite normal human emotion, got drunk and did something reckless. The woman he loves while terrified by the changes he has undergone still loves him at the end and finds it very difficult to put him out of his misery. We lack sympathetic monsters. We have many anti-heroes that we can relate to, but we lack a monster that terrifies whose motivations we can understand. If you have never seen this film, I would definitely recommend it.