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The Fly
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(1986)
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The first time I heard about this film was when I was 9 or 10 years old. It was a Monday morning on the Catholic grade school playground and my best friend Dominick told me his brother had taken him to the movies that past weekend. He then told me he saw something called
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The Fly
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, where “a guy turns into a fly and he keeps all his body parts in the medicine cabinet.” He then added that upon seeing one of the jarred specimens his brother exclaimed, “Look, that’s his cock!” That was the day I learned what “cock” meant. Anyway, a year or two later, I saw it on home video. I couldn’t shake it. I wasn’t sure exactly why at the time…I mean. it was just
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Jeff Goldblum
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progressively becoming an insect humanoid thing…but I just couldn’t shake it. There was something indefinably disturbing about the picture. Nevertheless, it instantly became one of my favorite movies. Fast-forward to present day. I was watching or reading an interview with
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David Cronenberg
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wherein he said something, and I’m paraphrasing here, along the lines of: “When I remade the fly, it was during the initial AIDS outbreak. Disease was on our minds. I thought it’d be much more frightening to depict a man falling apart in front of himself, from something cancer-like, than just suddenly turning into a monster like in the original.” Well Cronenberg, you were right. Thanks for making an outlandish story feel so terrifyingly real. And if you, the reader, have never seen this flick, and everything I’ve said hasn’t weirded you out enough: Jeff Goldblum plays the title role. –
Joe DeRosa
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