‘I’m Becoming Brundlefly…’: Body Horror, Gender Dysphoria, and David Cronenberg’s 1986 sci-fi/horror The Fly
Please be warned, spoilers for The Fly (1986), Rabid (1977), and Videodrome (1983) lay within (and if you’re one of these people who thinks that there’s some kind of time limit on spoilers, well… that doesn’t make sense. People can only watch a movie when they watch a movie, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a day old or 100 years old, if they’ve not seen it, then they’ve not seen it, end of).
NOTE TO THE READER; The purpose behind this piece was entirely personal. This isn’t meant as some definitive reading of the text or to try to claim that anyone else’s reading is wrong. This is simply one possible reading, and it is one that I have spent a lot of time thinking about, ever since I first saw Cronenberg’s movie.
The idea here was solely to get my own thoughts down and to try to contextualize some of the things I have felt about The Fly and to maybe help myself understand just what it is about the film that impacts me and speaks to me so much. When I was young and I first saw it, there was something about it that frightened me. Of course, it’s a horror movie, so there’s no grand revelation there. But, it didn’t just frighten me, it terrified me in a way that I couldn’t quite wrap my head around. I wanted to understand that more.
Having finished the piece and let it sit here for a little while now, I think I finally do sort of have an idea of what it was about Cronenberg’s movie that really got under my skin. Of course, at the time I had absolutely no way of knowing this — I wasn’t able to come out when I was younger, and such was the atmosphere around me that I doubt I even knew what Gender Dysphoria was, even though I was undeniably experiencing it.
Additionally, I also want to say, this is the first time that I’ve attempted to apply ‘transgender theory’ to a film that isn’t overtly about gender or gender identity in some way or form. I think it’s pretty obvious that there are trans elements hidden away within the flick — I mean, Brundle quite literally goes through a transformation — but that’s really not the focus, nor is it the filmmaker’s intent. So, I just wanted you all to know that before going in.
Thank you! I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.
“It wants to turn me into something else. That’s not too terrible, is it? Most people would give anything to be turned into something else!”
Gender dysphoria as a topic of discussion and understanding can be extremely difficult for many people to wrap their heads around. As Sean R. Atkinson explains, “Gender dysphoria is the distress or discomfort that may occur when a person’s biological sex and gender identity do not align” (Atkinson, S. R. 2015). That’s the simple definition, but it doesn’t fully convey the struggle, the trauma, and the sheer horror that can come with it. And, at least as far as I can tell, that is the bit people tend to struggle with. I think, personally, that this comes simply from the fact that if you haven’t experienced it, then it is extremely hard to comprehend. After all, while almost all of us at some point or another find flaws in our appearance or ourselves, these flaws don’t tend to consume us, draw us into a depression, or destroy our entire sense of self. Ultimately, for most of us, our bodies are simply a part of us; another piece of the puzzle that all fits together nicely to create the unique and wonderful you. They may have certain features we dislike or wish were different, but overall when you look in the mirror you still see yourself, and if you don’t, a haircut, a change of clothes, or any other number of simple changes can help. Indeed, as Aoife Rajyaluxmi Singh puts it in their article, Understanding and Treating Body Dysmorphic Disorder, “concerns about one’s appearance are recognized and accepted in most cultures as an aspect of normal human behavior” (Singh, A. R. 2019). For those of us with Gender Dysphoria, however, it doesn’t always work like that.
To put it simply; for most, your bodies do not work against you. According to Louise Bailey, in their article, Suicide Risk in the UK Trans Population and the Role of Gender Transition in Decreasing Suicidal Ideation and Suicide Attempt, people with Gender Dysphoria display “high rates of suicidal ideation (84 percent lifetime prevalence) and attempted suicide (48 percent lifetime prevalence)” (Bailey, L. 2014). Sure, you may age, you may get ill, and you may suffer ailments like a weak knee or migraines, but those things aren’t fighting against your mind, against you as the person you are. You aren’t becoming something you are not, being forced entirely without your consent into a socially assigned role that simply doesn’t correspond to your very understanding of self. Your body isn’t an enemy in and of itself, metamorphizing into something that — whether you want to feel it or not — you just don’t recognize. In their essay Some-ness in No-When: Queer Temporalities in the Horror Genre, Melody Hope Cooper writes “Horror films […] often focuses on the human body. Horror uses monstrous forms and mutilation to elicit a response of panic from the viewer” (Cooper, M. H. 2018). This is especially true of the body horror subgenre, and given the experiences of Gender Dysphoria outlined above, it isn’t hard to see why it resonates with a lot of transgender folk! As I have already said, many of us suffer from ailments, but our bodies are not shaping us into different people altogether. Most of us aren’t Seth Brundle…
Perhaps the most iconic and well-known of David Cronenberg’s cinematic offerings, 1986’s The Fly — very loosely based on George Langelaan’s 1957 short story of the same name, which also spawned the incredibly boring 1958 film, starring Vincent Price (sorry, I love a bit of classic horror prestige, but 1958’s The Fly is a bloated, lazy mess of a movie, more famous for the parody version featured in The Simpsons than it is for anything the film itself actually does) — is a film that had been read and re-read countless times, and under many different lenses. Telling the story of scientist Seth Brundle — played by the ever-watchable and utterly incredible Jeff Goldblum in what is, in my opinion at least, by and far his best performance to date! — The Fly details the horrific and nightmarish transformation that befalls Brundle after he tests his new invention — a teleportation device — on himself and inadvertently merges his DNA with that of a common housefly.
From an AIDS metaphor to, as Cronenberg himself puts it, “the general idea of aging, disease, and the inevitability of deteriorating” (Kirk, J. 2011), there are many different meanings one could apply to the movie. Such is the nature of cinema, I suppose, that with a little creative thinking an individual can and will bring their own personal reading to a film — and look, before we start with the inevitable ‘iTs JuSt EnTeRtAiNmEnT, sToP rEaDiNg InTo EvErYtHiNg’ bs, they are right to by the way. This is how art works, folks! I’m sorry if ya don’t like it, but that’s all there is to it — and The Fly has most certainly encouraged many readings. Indeed, as well as getting the critics on-side (at the time of writing, the movie boasts an impressive 93% on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes), the film even struck a chord with the general movie-going audience, and remains Cronenberg’s most financially successful movie to date. Whether this is because movie-goers were merely captivated by the film’s, as The Guardian put it, “96 minutes of grotesque, vomit-soaked bedlam” (Fleed, A. 2022), or whether it was something deeper is hard to say, but the fact remains that something in the film hit upon a universal fear, and when it comes to universal experiences — like having a body, for example — then we can easily find ourselves drawing upon our own experiences to relate to the horrors on screen.
Of course, Cronenberg knows this. Hell, basically the entire front half of his career was built out of this idea!
Body horror as a subgenre, at least in the sense that we understand and view it today, was arguably created and defined by the Canadian auteur. In their chapter on the subgenre for the collection Studying Horror Cinema, Bryan Turnock notes that the writer/director “spearheaded” the subgenre throughout the 1970s and the 1980s (Turnock, B. 2019), and he was developing ideas that are present in The Fly as early as Shivers (also known as The Parasite Murders and They Came from Within) in 1975. Cronenberg may not have been the originator of the idea — many regard Mary Shelly’s seminal 1818 sci-fi/horror Frankenstein as one of the earliest examples of the subgenre — but he is undeniably instrumental in its evolution and development in terms of horror on film. It’s not really hyperbole to say that Cronenberg is body horror; his early filmography is basically a list of the subgenre's best cinematic offerings (excluding John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), Brian Yuzna’s Society (1989), and — assuming you actually count it within the bracket (it’s debatable) — Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979)), boasting such gloopy, grotesque, and thought-provoking cult classics as Videodrome (1983), The Brood (1979), Scanners (1981), and Naked Lunch (1991).
(Side note; I’d be remiss not to also throw a mention in for one of my personal Cronenberg favs, the mind-bending 1999 alt-reality thriller, eXistenZ — which stars, in one of the weirdest cast lists ever, I reckon; Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jude Law, Willem Dafoe, Ian Holm, and Christopher fucking Eccleston — and is essentially a creepier, weirder, more cerebral version of The Matrix (also 1999). Like if you took The Matrix, removed the glossy and stylish exterior, and fed it through a filter of sex, bodily fluids, and that distinctly Cronenbergian sleaziness).
Indeed, so undeniably integral to the entire body horror subgenre is Cronenberg that even Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland’s irreverent and incredibly popular Adult Swin cartoon series, Rick and Morty (2013-present), felt compelled to pay homage to the master; dubbing the monstrously mutated townsfolk who appear in episode six of season one ‘Cronenbergs’. To quote Douglas Kellner in his essay, David Cronenberg: Panic Horror and the Postmodern Body, “while his style and use of genre is somewhat conventional, [Cronenberg] can be read in retrospect as a pioneering cinematic auteur” (Kellner, D. 1989). So, though the filmmaker himself may claim “there is no such thing as the body horror arena” (Collis, C. 2022), it’s safe to say, in my opinion at least, that without David Cronenberg the landscape of not just the body horror subgenre, but of horror cinema in general, would look substantially different. But what actually is body horror, anyway?
Well, according to Ronald Allan Lopez Cruz in his essay, Mutations and Metamorphosis: Body Horror is Biological Horror, “this popular horror trope is characterized by the manipulation and warping of the normal state of bodily form and function” (Lopez Cruz, R. A. 2012), and what makes it such an effective form of horror is that we can all relate. Personally, I kinda take issue with the notion of a ‘normal state’ when it comes to individuals because, ultimately, normalcy doesn’t really exist and everyone’s experiences are unique and their own. But, for the sake of ease (and also because this is generally how the movies — and Hollywood in particular — code things) ‘normal’ in this case exists within a sort of heteronormative, cis state; basically, Western ideals of the straight, white male and the straight, white female.
This is why, for example, people can, without a hint of irony, look at a movie like 1989’s The Little Mermaid (itself a tale that is arguably ripe for the body horror treatment) and think ‘hey, this literal child giving up her entire life and body and culture for a man she has never actually met is totally normal and fine’, while simultaneously losing their shit over the notion of school-aged children seeing something like two men kiss. The supposed ‘fear’ and rhetoric espoused by the likes of so-called ‘gender critical’ feminists, who “have criticised social developments such as LGBTIQ-inclusive school education and positive media representations of trans people” (Pearce, R. 2020), are born almost entirely from heteronormative notions of gender and sex that are widely treated by such groups as the supposed ‘norm’, and as a baseline from which any deviation is inevitably judged against. As R. Indhumanti writes in their essay, The Influence of Sex Role Perception on Career Aspirations and Self-Esteem in Children with a Preference for Disney Movies, Disney’s movies reinforce “biased ideas about gender, social behaviour and societal norms” (Indhumanti, R. 2019). But, it’s not just Disney that we’re talking about here, and this idea extends to movies reaching far beyond ‘the House of Mouse’! In cinema — especially Hollywood cinema — it is the heterosexual, cis, white experience that is the de facto ‘jumping-off’ point, and it is within any deviation from that experience that we find the deviation from the ‘normal state’ referred to in Lopez Cruz’s definition of the body horror subgenre.
This is essentially the reason why any form of an outlier from the heteronormative ‘normal state’ is ‘othered’ within horror cinema. As we’ve already established in other essays, the ‘other’ is almost always coded as ‘bad’, ‘evil’, or ‘monstrous’. Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) is the ‘other’ in part because of his gender-bending qualities. We see the same thing crop up again in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and — as anyone who has read my previous essays will know — the ever-problematic De Palma movie, Dressed to Kill (1980); and if you wanna know more, check out my essay on this very topic, here! But, this isn’t exclusively a sex or gender issue; as far back as Tod Browning’s 1931 classic, Dracula, we can also see this trope of the ‘other’ in play, but this time in a deviation from traditional Western values, rather than anything relating to sex or gender. As Sarah Looney puts it in her essay, The Evolution of Dracula, “the film presents Dracula as a foreign threat, highlighting his opposition to the American way of life” (Looney, S. 2017), and the film is not alone. The ‘other’ is intrinsic to the very foundation of horror, and while it can, on occasion, display sympathy and even sometimes empathy to the minority groups who inevitably fall into this category, there is little point denying that the genre is also troublesomely problematic within this context. Though, while there are many examples of this trope in use throughout the history of the horror genre, coding characters as ‘queer’ is undeniably one of the most popular.
This is in part because of the ease with which a character (or creature) can be coded queer without much effort. To quote Melody Hope Cooper once more, “queer is not necessarily a specific sexuality or person; it is an umbrella term for anything non-normative […]. The characters who are shown as non-normative often do not fit into heteronormative society and therefore can be labeled queer” (Cooper, M. H. 2018). Despite this, of course, as outlined above, we all have experiences with our body doing things we don’t want it to; all of us have had a cold or an allergic reaction or twisted our ankles, and so on. The idea of our body turning against us, the horror coming quite literally from within, is universally frightening, regardless of your race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. It is a fear that every single person on the planet can share. But it is undeniable, I think, that there is definitely more to be found in the body horror subgenre when viewed from a transgender perspective.
The ever-excellent and interesting Robin Wood, in his extraordinarily influential essay An Introduction to the American Horror Film, took issue with Cronenberg’s movies — and by extension, I suppose, the very notion of body horror as a deviation from heteronormative gender roles — and claimed that the writer/director, throughout his filmography, consistently projects “horror and evil onto women and their sexuality” and that the “ultimate dread” is drawn from “women usurping the active, aggressive role that patriarchal ideology assigns to the male” (Wood, R. 1979). There’s an element of what is referred to in psychology circles as ‘womb envy’ here, I think, but we’ll come back to that later. Personally, I don’t fully agree with Wood’s analysis — in my opinion, Cronenberg isn’t interested in gender so much as he is in the act of sex, and in the sexual facets of the human body — but I do find there is a certain element of this reading that can be utilized and built upon. Firstly, Cronenberg’s films do tend to focus on the male experience. This makes sense, of course, as the director himself is male (as far as I’m aware…) and thus of course his specific viewpoint comes from a male experience. Secondly, there is merit in Wood’s arguments that Cronenberg’s films — specifically 1979's The Brood, though I think we can all agree that when Marilyn Chambers grows a literal penis thing in her armpit in Rabid (1977) can probably be counted here too — are “concerned with the oppression of women [and] the repression of the woman’s “masculinity”” (Wood, R. 1983).
Personally, I don’t necessarily subscribe to the idea that Cronenberg is quite as binary in his ‘attacks’ as Wood seems to think, however. It is my opinion that rather than being preoccupied entirely with the “repression of the woman’s “masculinity””, Cronenberg is rather more generally concerned with the repression of broader sexual and gender identity in a society that upholds and favors heteronormative sexual and gender stereotypes. Cronenberg’s films, despite supposedly villainizing women for deviating from their expected societal roles, are not doing so in an effort to uphold heteronormative ideals, but rather to explore the stresses and frustrations such heteronormative ideals inflict upon the people forced to abide by them. And, to a certain extent, this is a two-way street; for example, Marilyn Chambers growing a penis in 1977’s Rabid is then echoed in 1983’s Videodrome, when James Woods grows a vagina, and it is here, in the idea that the body has morphed into a gender the mind does not identify with, that we enter into the territory of a transgender reading.
There is an argument to be made that Videodrome could be read as a trans-allegory; Woods’ Max Renn is a somewhat toxic male character, and throughout the course of the film he grows the aforementioned vagina, a gun — which earlier in the film he pulls out from the vagina, giving it overt phallic implications beyond the obvious — is fused to his body against his will, and in the end, he winds up committing suicide so that he may become ‘the new flesh’. In terms of a trans reading, it isn’t hard to take these ideas to the next level, suggesting that the film is presenting a sort of metaphor for transitioning; he dreams of having a vagina, he is repulsed by the phallic symbol fused to his body against his will, and he finally gives up the body and the life of Max Renn to begin a new life as whatever the hell ‘the new flesh’ actually is (I still don’t fully get the movie — it invites a lot of readings — which is in part why it’s so damned interesting!).
There are elements buried away inside Videodrome that connect with me, at least, on this level. It isn’t overt, and it most certainly isn’t intentional on Cronenberg’s part, but they are there nonetheless. Still, while we can pick out the individual elements that feed into this particular reading, perhaps the biggest impact on my personal connection to the film is the use of body horror in general. See, as I already outlined above, for me at least, Gender Dysphoria is body horror.
Of course, I can only speak for myself and my own readings, and not everyone who has suffered from Gender Dysphoria will feel the same way, but experiencing my first puberty as a young teen, my body transforming into that of a man’s despite my mind being entirely elsewhere, was a fairly traumatic experience. I didn’t fully understand it at the time, but when I look back on it, recontextualized through my ‘transness’, I see quite obviously that Gender Dysphoria was always present. And while I can only speak for myself, I’m not the only one who had such an experience; suicide attempts in young trans adults have been estimated to be as high as 40%, and, according to an article published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, this is generally thought to be a result of “two processes: gender minority stress and dysphoria related to one’s body developing in ways that are incongruent with one’s gender identity (i.e., a person’s psychological sense of their own gender)” (Turban, J. L. 2022).
Indeed, for many trans folk, puberty is a mental nightmare and, as is evident, this is even widely accepted in scientific and academic circles (thank you very much!). As such, measures have been implemented to ensure as little distress on those with Gender Dysphoria as possible, including “puberty suppression”, which “could allow adolescents with severe gender dysphoria the opportunity to safely explore their gender expression without the anticipatory burden of developing into a body that did not align with their identity” (Mahfouda, S. 2017). Understanding the mental and psychological torment going through puberty can be on a transgender person is important, not only in general terms — it helps us to understand their distress and dysphoria, as well as understand why and how medical procedures are in place — but also in terms of the reading I will be exploring in this piece. Indeed, my own experience of puberty was not a pleasant one, and I wish I had been offered some form of puberty suppression myself.
The notion that body horror can be read as a stand-in for some forms of Gender Dysphoria isn’t an especially new one. In Sophie Collins’ piece for MovieWeb.com, the author writes, “for transgender experiences and gender dysphoria, body horror is an essential kind of catharsis in changing the relationship that exists between our minds and bodies, as well as society and our bodies” (Collins, S. 2022), while writer and DJ Nadine Smith, in her piece How Body Horror Movies Helped Me Process Gender Dysphoria, notes that her experience “felt like body horror, the painful and intensely physical subgenre […] in movies like these, the horror comes not so much from an external threat — like a ghost or a home invader — but from within, as something uncontrollable and unknown transforms the very nature of what you are” (Smith, N. 2021).
But, while many films in the subgenre can be read in this way, for me none quite capture the horror and trauma as well as Cronenberg’s The Fly. Indeed, even as a young teen, I felt a strange sort of empathy for Jeff Goldblum’s doomed scientist, one that I was certain most of the people around me didn’t fully understand. Sure, I think it’s probably fair to assume that everyone empathizes with the doomed scientist on some level (as already outlined, we all fear out bodies turning against us to some degree), but for me it felt… I dunno… deeper. Perhaps some subconscious part of me recognized in The Fly my own internal struggles, as the narrative appears to work incredibly well as a metaphor for puberty, especially the puberty of those assigned males at birth. Brundle’s transformation from man to insect is almost so on the nose in this regard that it seems wild to think Cronenberg didn’t even consider it while making the film; early signs of the change for Brundle come in the form of thick hair growing on his back, he experiences an increase in both his strength and his stamina, his sex drive goes through the roof, and — perhaps most importantly — he develops mood swings, often violent and aggressive. Of course, we could take Cronenberg’s assertion that the film is a comment on aging as confirmation that he did consider this! And, while the film works remarkably well when read through this lens alone, the trans-aspect of such a reading becomes incredibly clear when we consider that the transformation Brundle goes through in the movie is one that is entirely unwanted.
For those of you who don’t know (and what are you doing? Go watch The Fly right now! I’ll wait!), 1986’s The Fly is “as much a romantic tragedy as a black-humored horror film” (Goldstein, P. 1986). Brundle’s death at the end of the film, coupled with its focus on the love story between the protagonist and Geena Davis’ awkward but likable journalist, Veronica, makes the film a genuinely moving experience. But, for me, beyond the obvious, there has always been a far deeper tragic aspect at the core of The Fly. Brundle doesn’t simply die, he gives up. The transformation is complete, and our lead cannot face life as this thing he doesn’t recognize. Moving beyond the grotesque — which may seem counter-productive, but stay with me — Brundle’s struggle is more than merely physical. It is psychological. Not only has he lost the body that aligns with his sense of self, in losing said body he is losing that very sense of self altogether. He is no longer Seth Brundle, he is ‘Brundlefly’, and so his plea for death, placing that shotgun against his head, is far from a monster paying for its crimes. Indeed, as Havi Carel puts it in their article, A Phenomenology of Tragedy: Illness and Body Betrayal in ‘The Fly’, “[Brundle] is much better understood as a tragic figure than a monster” (Carel, H. 2007). For Brundle — or, perhaps, ‘Brundlefly’ — death becomes an escape.
As a kid, this hit me very hard. As an adult, it literally stings. And I think just why I find it so impactful and emotive can be summed up almost perfectly in a quote from Brundle himself; “I’m an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now, the dream is over… and the insect is awake”. At this moment Brundle articulates, for me at least, the very core of the horror of my first puberty. Even though I couldn’t even begin to fully understand what it was I was feeling back then, here in the present, the idea rings impossibly true. Puberty is, for people like me, the shattering of a dream; the realization that our bodies are betraying us, and are moving in the opposite direction to who we truly are. Brundle is a man, but his body says otherwise. The film even hints toward a more biologically sex-minded take; Brundle keeps his penis in a jar in his medicine cabinet, collected together with all the other pieces of his body the transformation has robbed him of.
It is worth noting, too, I think, that the movie codes Brundle as increasingly more traditionally ‘masculine’ as the metamorphosis takes hold, which adds certain credence to the reading that he wishes to take on a more feminine presentation in his escape from it. While in the early scenes, pre-fly, Brundle is presented as a somewhat shy, awkward, eccentric but ultimately loveable goof, as the film progresses, “he careens across the spectrum of masculine toxicity” (Woods, T. 2014); he dons a leather jacket, he loses his temper in a tantrum when Veronica cannot keep up with him sexually, and in an effort to ‘win’ a woman at a bar he breaks a man’s arm during an arm-wrestle. At first, he attempts to embrace it — he even tries to convince Veronica that it’s “not too terrible is it?”, but no matter how hard he tries, in the end, he cannot deny the truth; the dream is over. Of course, that in the end Brundle also attempts to ‘solve’ the problem by forcibly fusing himself with Veronica says a lot, but we’ll come back to that.
There is another element present in The Fly that is worth noting, and that is the notion of ‘womb envy’. In psychology, womb envy is the term given to the envy that men may feel of traditionally feminine biological functions, such as pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding. In a sense, it is the reverse of Freud’s theorized ‘penis envy’, which describes young girl’s presumed anxiety upon realizing they don’t have a penis. When describing ‘womb envy’, noted German psychoanalyst Karen Horney (stop sniggering!), in her book Feminine Psychology, suggested that men’s “impulse to creative work in every field [is] precisely due to their feeling of playing a relatively small part in the creation of living beings, which constantly impels them to an overcompensation in achievement” (Horney, K. 1967), and I think it’s fair to say that in terms of striving for achievement, Brundle is definitely overcompensating. After all, as the man himself puts it, “What am I working on? I’m working on something that will change the world and human life as we know it”.
That’s a pretty hefty claim, but it’s one that’s not really hyperbole. Brundle’s teleportation device would indeed drastically alter the way humanity operates — being able to instantaneously travel anywhere in the world would be huge for countless reasons — but there’s little doubt that what’s driving him is his desire to be remembered, it is his legacy that matters. Indeed, the whole reason he initially agrees to allowing Veronica to continue to observe his progress is to capture — again, quoting Brundle himself here — “the complete record of the most earth-shattering invention ever”. So hyper aware is Brundle of his creation’s importance and potential impact on the world, and so desperate is he to be the one responsible and therefore remembered for it (legacy, folks! His name must live on!), that he winds up drunkenly stepping into the machine with that damned housefly to begin with.
But that’s not where the ‘womb envy’ elements in Cronenberg’s film end. In fact, it seems to me, at least, that Cronenberg is very much aware of this reading, and he appears to have made a consious effort to ensure that aspects of the movie reflect this beyond the characters themselves. Sure, Brundle as a character is, initially at least, obsessed with his name being remembered within history, but there are also multiple visual elements that play into the notion of ‘womb envy’. Perhaps the most obvious of these are the teleportation pods themselves. In their article, ‘The Fly’, ‘RoboCop’ and the Masculine Body, writer Paul Anthony Jonez notes, “Brundle’s teleportation pods are overtly uterine in shape […], and become the metaphoric archaic mother, which both destroys and creates life” (Jonez, P. A. 2012). There is something to be said about the womb-like design of the pods in question. If the image of Brundle, stark naked and sweaty, emerging in a fetal position from the vaginal-like doors of his transportation pod, having been essentially reborn as ‘Brundlefly’, isn’t supposed to evoke certain suggestions around female anatomy and traditionally female biological capabilities, then I don’t know what is.
Of course, I’m not suggesting that Gender Dysphoria in trans woman is all about ‘womb envy’ (frankly, that feels a little TERFy, in my opinion, and I know that it’s not the case for me, anyway), but it is hard to deny that this particular element of the movie, coupled with Brundle’s subsequent transformation, mean that a transgender reading of the film isn’t too hard to come to. Brundle may not seek to create life, but he ultimately sorta does anyway, and in doing so the transformation he experiences then not only sees his own body turn against him, but in a sense it also turns against his own gender identity (his penis literally falls off). His ultimate solution to the problem is to go back through the teleportation pod, this time along with Veronica, so that the two of them — along with their unborn child — might be fused together in the same way as Brundle was with the titular fly to begin with. While in the film, Brundle claims this is so that they might become “the ultimate family”, when we’re looking at the movie through a transgender lens, it can’t really be ignored that Brundle’s response to his puberty-like transformation is to essentially attempt to take a cis woman’s body— hormones and all — and use it to ‘fix’ his own.
This is pretty problematic. If you’ve read any of my other essays, then you’ll have seen me talk about this before, but, for the sake of clarity, let’s briefly go over it again. There are those pesky ‘gender critical’ (lol) folks out there who view trans women (male to female trans people) as “violent male subjects infiltrating women’s spaces and appropriating women’s bodies” (Pearce, R. 2020). It is noteworthy in this sense that Brundle believes that in order to remain human (or become human again), he must ‘mask’ the transformation with a biologically female body. This can fairly easily be read as somewhat troublesome. Much like some aspects of Leatherface in Tobe Hooper’s 1986 sequel, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 — which I covered in great detail here, in my piece on the franchise as a whole — this element can be seen as feeding into the aforementioned ideas espoused by those self-proclaimed so-called ‘gender critical’ feminists. After all, Brundle quite literally wants to forcibly appropriate Veronica’s body to put an end to his own unwanted transformation, and is more than capable of using violence to achieve his goal.
In the end, of course, Brundle isn’t a trans character in the traditional sense. Sure, he may literally be transforming, but despite the subtext that can be read here, his story has very little to do with gender identity. That didn’t stop me viewing it that way as a younger person, however, and I suppose that has been the main point here. I wanted to analyze the film to better understand my own response to it, and in that regard writing this piece has actually been pretty damned helpful! There’s no denying Cronenberg’s movie is ripe for analysis, and even though I can’t honestly pretend like any of this was really part of the filmmaker’s intention, I think it speaks to the power of the movie, and the skill of Cronenberg himself, that even after all these years there are still more layers here ready for discovery.
This is perhaps what I love most about the film — along with all the gooey, grotesque practical effects and surprising effective and emotionally devastating love story — and what makes it such an undeniable classic of the genre. This is the first time I’ve really tried to apply a transgender reading to a film that is, for the most part at least, not overtly about gender or gender identity in some form or another. It’s been interesting, and — at the risk of repeating my sentiments in the ‘Note to the Reader’ at the front of this essay — I sincerely hope you’ve enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Ultimately, of course, this is very subjective and personal, and I feel like I have to highlight that here now. I know for a lot of you The Fly won’t speak to you in the way it does to me, and that’s great! Everyone has their own reading, and as I already said before, that’s kinda the point. However, for me, The Fly is most definitely, in part at least, a film about Gender Dysphoria, and I see a lot of my own personal experience with dysphoria within it. That, I think, is why the film really gets to me. As Veronica herself says, “be afraid. Be very afraid”.
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