‘I’ll hurt you if you stay.’ The Fly scene-by-scene: Act Two

Abstract

This chapter describes the scenes of Act Two of David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986). In Act Two, Seth Brundle makes the transition from amiable and reclusive scientist to predatory and misogynistic Brundlefly — a seamless character transition that creeps up on the audience through Cronenberg's screenplay and direction, and Jeff Goldblum's subtle yet defined performance. As the Brundlefly persona comes to the fore, the audience still sympathises with the overtly animalistic, egregious person he has become. They know this is not the real Seth; it is the corruption of Seth at a cellular level. Cronenberg's patented brand of body horror is coming into its own right here with Seth finally admitting to himself that something is wrong. He questions whether he is dying, and if this is what dying is like, which directly references Cronenberg's own explanation of the film: that it is an allegory for our mortality as human beings and the natural processes that lead to old age and death. It is by way of the computer that he discovers his DNA has fused with a fly — the vital ‘reveal’ — in a cinematic moment common to many great science-fiction films where pivotal information of emotional resonance is not communicated between human beings but between human and machine.