“The Fly”: This is not your body and you have no choice in it

“My body, my choice” is a popular phrase in pro-choice rhetoric, and while its success as a piece of political jargon is without doubt, watching The Fly I started to wonder just how achievable it really is.

Every day, our body starts to break down without our ever registering it. Our hair is falling out, our skin is slowly sagging, our teeth are rotting. There is no choice in this – the line between a sick body and a healthy one is very thin.

All it takes is one bad decision.

The Fly hinges on one such moment: Seth – drunk, alone, and upset, gets into his telepod, not knowing he shares it with a fly. It is this, something so preventable, that you can’t help but think about as the film ends and his body begins to break down.

We live so much of our lives in our heads that it’s easy to forget the world outside even exists

Humans are complicated – we have dreams, hopes, prejudices, and an ego as self-obsessed as it is self-aware. Often, the same person can be cruel as easily as kind, and can hold multiple, often contradictory, ideas simultaneously. We live so much of our lives in our heads that it’s easy to forget the world outside even exists, and we hardly even notice our body works until it fails. This is certainly the impression given by the first 30 minutes of The Fly which consists of an almost melodramatic love triangle between Seth, Veronica, and Veronica’s editor, Stathis, who intrudes unpleasantly on the previous two’s budding relationship.

This is until Seth’s drunken mistake of getting into the telepod with the fly.

Then, the film starts to focus on the outward at the expense of the inward – the physical reality of his body at the expense of his previously focused on emotional life. Seth’s skin becomes pockmarked and his fingers exude milky pus – his body is literally falling apart.

(If you hit the brakes too soon, you may spend the rest of your life as a bundle of flesh on a hospital bed, not even noticing as your family cries around you.)

The symptoms at first resemble signs of puberty – pocks that look like acne, hair that starts growing in new places, and an increased sex drive. However, it isn’t long until the symptoms become more serious. Seth isn’t just changing, he’s transforming into something new, something monstrous.

The Fly isn’t the first horror film to reference puberty: Teen Wolf (1985), Ginger Snaps (2000), Carrie (1976) – they all do it. Puberty, specifically female puberty, fits perfectly within the horror genre. It’s bloody, it’s disgusting, it’s even taboo! One’s initially desired body becomes feared and not seen as one’s own. It is in fact only acknowledged in relation to other’s (men’s) feelings towards it. You become something new, yes, but you also become the other.

Both Veronica’s creation of a new being and Seth’s destruction of the being he once was leads to the loss of their respective autonomies and identities

There is as much focus in the film on Veronica’s body as there is on Seth’s. The camera fixes itself on her bare back and naked legs. Inside the narrative, Stathis remarks that when she dies he wants to keep her dead body. Her pregnancy is treated with as much gravity and horror as Seth’s decaying. It makes sense the two would be connected even if, at first, they appear complete opposites. The teleporter’s ability to fuse two entirely different beings and create something entirely new recalls the act of human production – something made explicit when Seth remarks that his plan to fuse him, Veronica and the baby will cement them as a family. Both Veronica’s creation of a new being and Seth’s destruction of the being he once was leads to the loss of their respective autonomies and identities.

Seth becomes Brundlefly and changes from a he to an it. He loses his humanity and his body becomes something else.

Veronica, pregnant, transforms from person to a mother. Her body is no longer hers both in her dream and in real life. Even her abortion is controlled by men. Stathis arranges it for her, and a male doctor is selected to perform it, until Seth prevents it. When he kidnaps her and takes her up to the roof, he doesn’t mention her body, or their child, he speaks of himself. If Veronica goes through with the abortion, she kills the only human part of himself left. Her body has become an extension of another – it is no longer hers.

Not that Seth’s body is still his either. His teeth fall out, his fingers no longer look like fingers, his skin splits apart to reveal a monster. Laura Mulvey argues that women in film are often reduced to body parts compartmentalised and separate from the whole but the same is true for Seth too. His bathroom cupboard becomes a space to collect the appendages that fall from the whole.

Meanwhile, we forget how delicate we are – we too are subject to age and illness

The film keeps returning to this idea of the flesh – its most famous moment comes when Veronica remarks that “the flesh makes us crazy”. While this may sound like a line too abstract to relate to our real lives it definitely does. We’re crazy to view a body as a series of sexual organs that never function but always perform, to reduce bodies to parts, to watch body horror where arms snap and skin peels off. Meanwhile, we forget how delicate we are – we too are subject to age and illness.

None of the characters in The Fly have control over their own bodies – even Stathis loses limbs. They are subject to a world outside of themselves: their bodies aren’t theirs, and they have no choice in the matter. At the end, when Seth guides the gun to what was once his head and trusts Veronica to perform an act he now can’t, she is forced to shoot a man she loves: neither are making the choices they want.

In a sad way, this is where The Fly most mirrors humanity. In real life, maybe teleporters don’t exist, and maybe a man never can become fused with a fly, but it doesn’t matter. We all have, or will, experience our body as a hostile environment, something we can’t control that others are left in charge of. It is unfair but it is true. At a certain point we all must accept that this isn’t our body and we’ve got no choice in the matter.