Headscratchers / The Fly (1986)

Headscratchers in The Fly (1986).

• When Seth/Brundlefly caught Stathis, why didn't he just throw him into the telepod? All Seth/Brundle needed was a regular human. Also when Veronica showed up, why didn't she suggest that he use Stathis instead? Stathis was being a stalky dick to her throughout the movie; it would've made for a happier ending if Brundlefly was merged with Stathis and made Seth more human than fly.
  • For the first part, it's because Brundlefly saw Stathis as a threat and wanted to eliminate him.
  • As much as Veronica disliked Stathis, she would not have wanted him dead.
  • Veronica was pregnant and he believed that would give him more human DNA.
  • Stathis might be a stalky dick (at least at first), but Brundle ends up losing whatever moral high ground he has (like how he cheated on Veronica with Tawny and had the gall to lie that Ronnie was his mother when his bar girl asked about her). Especially counting deleted scenes like the one where Brundle beats the baboon cat to death. One could call the movie's events a story of Seth Brundle's degeneration not just physically, but morally as well. So by the time of the trio's final encounter, Brundle completes his transformation into the beast he was becoming both on the outside and inside while Stathis redeems himself (especially when including the sequel's events).
  • The real answer to all of the above is: Brundlefly wasn't simply trying to add more random human DNA to his genome at that point, as he knew that couldn't turn him human again; he was aiming for the warped alternative of fusing himself entirely, with Veronica and their child specifically, into a single horrific being, out of the insane belief that this was the most 'humanity' he could now attain, and that it was the only way they could all be "together" again.
    • TL;DR: He was trying to become Brundle-Quaife-Fetus-fly, not Brundle-Borans-fly.
• For that matter, all he really needed was a single intact, living cell from her - at worst, some blood or a lot of cultured cells. The telepod could have fused their genetic material with his and that would have fixed it (or not) every bit as well as fusing her entire body with his. But he wasn't rational by then, and it would have made for a lot more boring a movie. (Hey! Let's watch the bioreactor grow cells for a couple of weeks until there's enough to feed into the telepod!)
  • It should also be considered that the genetic degradation he was experiencing at this point may have compromised Brundle's intellectual capacity to the point that he couldn't think in terms of genetic splicing- particularly since genetics on that level may not have been one of Brundle's areas of expertise- and may have become too fixated on his current idea to abandon it.
  • But saying that, is it really such a good idea to fuse human male and female cells, with or without the corruption of the fly DNA? I thought I read somewhere that because of sex differences, women and men are genetically "only" about 99% similar, rather than 100%?
  • Again, by this point Brundle's intellectual abilities may have been compromised by the physical and psychological stress of his condition, particularly when he's working on data in a field that we have no evidence he had any prior experience in.

• The first 20 minutes or so of the movie revolve about Seth not wanting to reveal his investigations to anyone because both his colleagues and financiers would "destroy him". However, any other scientist would have soon found out that transporting any kind of matter, inanimate or not, is still the accomplishment of the century since it would pretty much revolutionize the shipping industry altogether with things such as cargo trucks and boats being relegated to things of the past, singlehandedly getting rid of more than 50% of the carbon emissions in the world, and then some. The fact he is so stable and calculating at the start of the movie yet he never seems to be aware of this is quite mind blowing.
  • Given the implications of his discovery, perhaps it's the transportation industry he should have been afraid would come after him. How many billions would they have stood to lose?
  • There's also the question of why Seth used a baboon as the first biological subject, when testing the transporter. Couldn't he have tested a plant, or a cucumber or something, first? And when he did get to an animal, wouldn't one normally begin with something smaller, like an insect or a rodent?
    • He had tried it on a plant, before he worked out how to make the device operate on living tissue. The results weren't pretty.
  • I personally handwave that using the Stephen King story The Jaunt as a example. In that story, an equally quirky and introvert scientist discovers practical teleportation, and the moment it was known that he made such an earth-shattering discover, it was completely removed from his hands. Something like that would simply be too big. Plus, we know from the sequel that Brundle's financiers weren't exactly good people.
  • There is a scene early on where he admits that he has always been afflicted by car sickness. He most likely had the teleportation of people in mind from the start. Shipping would be a bonus.
  • He might have also been worried about the government taking his invention away from him and Bartok Industries—who stand to lose a lot of money since they can't use the technology—the moment it became public. There is actually law that covers this. The United States has the Invention Secrecy Act of 1951 allows for them to take possession of and suppress disclosure of any invention that poses a threat to National Security. Canada has a section in the Patent Act that allows the same thing. Brundle's telepods pose a clear threat to National Security. That said, either Government would happily compensate Brundle and Bartok Industries and even give them funding to further develop the technology in secret.

• After they fight about Veronica's discontinuation of a sexual marathon, she snips hairs from Seth's back before he leaves to break a man's wrist and pick up a hooker. The next morning, Veronica is back with her "Be afraid. Be very afraid" line, having determined that the hairs from Seth's back are not human and probably insect with the help of, presumably, one of those 24/7 Instant DNA Labs that were all over back in the 80s.
  • Probably next door to the all night abortion clinic she later visits.
  • An experienced biologist with a microscope could probably provide that information and she is a science reporter.
  • As I recall, no genetic investigation takes place. She was just told that the hairs physically resemble insect hair more than mammal.

• Seth Brundle wanted to fuse himself with his girlfriend using the teleporter so that her human DNA would counteract the fly DNA. But wait. All his problems were started by him being fused with a tiny little fly. So why does he need to fuse himself with an entire human to solve them? If a tiny little fly was enough to cause all his problems then a small amount of human tissue should have been enough to do the job, shouldn't it? I'm sure he'd have had a much easier time convincing his girlfriend to give him some blood or at worst a piece of flesh or the end of a finger or toe than convincing her to become fused with him into some kind of freakish composite entity. For that matter even if for some reason he needed a whole person couldn't he have tried to get his hands on a fresh cadaver that had died of natural causes instead? It's worse in the second movie. At least Seth Brundle had limited resources, Martin had access to the resources of Bartok Industries (well, they probably wouldn't have actually been too eager to help him as they were planning on letting him transform into a Brundle-fly and then doing experiments on him, but he didn't know it at the time). He instantly dismisses the idea of reversing his condition at the expense of somebody else, even though even if for some reason he'd have to merge with a living human to reverse the transformation it shouldn't be impossible to find some brain-dead patient who was about to be taken off life support anyway whose family would permit them to be used as a gene donor before being euthanized.
  • I think Seth was a little, teensy weensy bit, COMPLETELY OUT OF HIS FUCKING MIND!!! He had a layer of dead flesh covering a warped, disfigured, horrendously cool looking fly body; he was in no state to be talking rationally. He didn't even want to become human again, he wanted to be one with his lover and his child, and together they would be "More human than I am alone" He was gone, Seth Brundle died long ago. What little else we saw was simply an example of Dying as Yourself.
  • Wait... no.. Ok, the problem was that no matter what, in The Fly Brundle was going have a percentage of fly DNA in him. He can't get rid of it. And in his insanity brought about by both desperation and his decaying human mind, he decided that he would fuse with his girlfriend (and baby) to at least reduce the percentage of fly DNA, even if it makes them a singular monstrous entity. And although he was on the right track with the cure, he didn't have enough time to simply swap out his fly genes for normal ones. In The Fly II, Brundle's son managed to perfect said cure which would eventually be used to save himself. As for getting a cadaver or a braindead patient... DUDE. Hospitals tend to keep track of that. Not to mention that they never had time to wait for such things anyway.
  • Couldn't he have just teleported again with a hair or fingernail clipping from before the accident? And if it had to be living DNA, maybe something like a rat or dog would at least have stabilized his body enough to give him time to solve his situation. But what bothers me the most is that no mention was ever made of the many species of bacteria living in the human digestive system and on the skin. I guess "The E. Coli" would not be nearly as frightening of a movie concept.
    • The bacteria dwelling in a human body could be considered part of the original "blueprint" of the body. Anything original within someone's body would just be incorporated within the new body, like someone building an exact replica of an original Charles Addams house, and copying every single bit of the myriad gingerbread details in the old one. The errant fly was never part of the first blueprint.
  • Seth sticks a dog/rat in the machine, flashy stuff happens, and he comes out looking like a disgusting, horrifying, twisted combination of man, dog/rat, and fly. Remember, he wants to get rid of the fly DNA, to restore his human DNA, so sticking a non-human in there would just give him more non-human DNA. And, as mentioned before, hospitals keep track of their patients, dead or alive, so he couldn't just yoink a corpse from them. Poor guy was boned from the very start.
  • And as far as asking the family for permission, he lives in isolation after his transformation, so if he contacts a family, what's he going to tell them? That he built a teleporter and fused himself with a fly so now he needs a fresh body? They would think that this was some sort of practical joke. If he got them to come to the warehouse for proof and they saw him, they would likely run away screaming hysterically at the sight of him and would probably get laughed off or committed if they told anyone about it.
• Where the hell did he get those monkeys?
  • Probably the same place he got all the parts for his teleporters—he ordered them through the company he works for without telling them what he was using them for.
  • Fine. But where was Brundlefly getting all of those doughnuts and sugary stuff? How would he get near a grocery store without anyone noticing a giant half fly roaming around? (Perhaps he stole them from a cop on the street or something?)
  • He probably ordered the food in bulk and had it delivered to his warehouse when he still looked pretty human.

• Why did he use monkeys as his first biological subject? Why not a plant, or a vegetable? If it had to be something alive, would it have been so hard to attain something smaller, like an insect or a rodent?
  • He wanted a complex life-form comparable to a human being, so plants and insects are out. Might make for a neat experiment but it wouldn't get him any closer to his goal of teleporting a person. As for a rodent...you got me there.
  • Perhaps either Seth or one of his superiors at Bartok had a preference of "go big or go home". As most monkeys (including baboons) are not far off in size from a person, therefore to use something a lot smaller, like a rat, wouldn't be as illustrative. Imagine if the first baboon had actually seemingly teleported "fine". He'd still want to study it (and pass it back to the company's dedicated veterinarians for the same purpose) for any subsequent health problems, and that's easier to do on a large baboon than a small rat, especially given the higher morphological similarity to a human.

• Why were there only three people involved in this whole story (Seth, Ronnie and Stathis)? It's believable that an eccentric like Seth and a jerk like Stathis would not have any close friends. Maybe Ronnie doesn't have any either. But what about coworkers? Doesn't anyone work in that big office building besides Ronnie and Stathis? What about all of the other scientists that Seth works for? He keeps referring to "we" and "our work" at the beginning, as if there are many other scientists who know about his transporter experiments. Why did none of the other scientists get involved with this experiment, or come looking for Seth after he went into hiding in his apartment?
  • As Brundle reveals, he's basically working independently. He confidentially sends a set of system requirements and/or schematics to a variety of subcontracted engineers, and they ship back finished versions of the components he needs. Then Brundle does whatever tweaking is necessary to fit his vision, and assembles the components into Phlebotinium.

• Where did Seth Brundle get the money for all of the equipment and electricity he'd need to power his lab? And why didn't he have an assistant?
  • Brundle clearly states in the film that all of his work is funded by Bartok Industries, who provide him with everything he desires, and most likely also pay him a salary. Dialog:
  Seth Brundle: I farm bits and pieces out to the guys who are much more brilliant than I am. I say, "build me a laser", this. "Design me a molecular analyzer", that. They do, and I just stick 'em together. But, none of them know what the project really is. So...
  Veronica Quaife: Wow! And, uh, the money? Bartok Science Industries financed this?
  Seth Brundle: Hmm-mmm... But they leave me alone, 'cause I'm not expensive. And they know they'll end up owning it, whatever it is.
  • He didn't need an assistant. As stated in this exchange, he didn't even assemble the telepods from scratch. He probably just came up with how to make teleportation work, and put the pods together from "laser, this" and "molecular analyzer, that".

• Near the end of The Fly the guy sure has a lot of control of his muscles and facial expressions despite his body becoming a cocoon for the fly thing.
  • Yeah I've always thought that. His face and everything just drops off, yet moments earlier he was able to move his mouth and eyes etc like normal.
  • I always figured that his outer skin and basic functions (seeing, walking, talking) etc were basically running on fumes by the time he got to his final humanoid stage (Stage 5). His internal mutation was done and it was just a matter of waiting for his outer shell to just shut down so it could be shed and he could take his final form. When his jaw was removed it told his body that the outer shell was finally done and it was time to go into the final phase.
  • It's possible that what came out of his skin wasn't fully-formed. Seth's son in the sequel has an uninterrupted metamorphosis and looks more like a classic monster than the genetic mish-mash Seth turned into.

• Okay, first I can see, why would Seth want to perfect his invention before going public, but why didn't Veronica explain to him that a device that can teleport unliving matter already was enough to make people worship the ground he walks on and bring him money and resources to experiment on the living one in the clean lab, with assistants and proper safety measures instead of the basement-like place he works in? Especially after she saw the potential risks (monkey). Second, after his condition became apparent, why at no point of the story did anyone of them think about turning for help to other scientists? Yeah, Seth probably knows more about it than anyone, but the more people work to solve the problem the more chances it will be solved and it will be solved faster (Time is a big issue here.) Poor Communication Kills?
  • Brundle probably wanted to perfect the Living Matter issue himself before letting his device run amok in the world, because people would obviously immediately look into that application for it with results potentially even more disastrous than his own. Good point about the post-fly-fusion consulting of other scientists, though.
  • When Veronica sees him after his month-long isolation, she says they should go see someone. Seth bluntly refuses, comparing his condition to a bizarre form of cancer and says he refuses to "become another tumorous bore."
• They call it The Fly, but Brundle never even grows wings. Shouldn't it be The Walk?
  • Ba-dum pish!
  • Wah-wah-waaaaah.
  • Because the whole point wasn't that he was turning into a giant fly. He was morphing into a cross between a human and an insect. (The Brundlefly also doesn't have compound eyes, a segmented body, etc.) The fact he didn't grow wings was a choice Cronenberg made to illustrate that.
• (I only saw the 1986 version) Seth Brundle merges with a fly because one happened to be in the transport container with him. Guess what - the human body is CRAWLING with non-human critters. The bacteria in our intestines, the mites on our hair, the viruses and bacteria our bodies are currently fighting off... he should be LOTS of stuff in addition to fly! Cronenberg himself pointed out that there are billions of living things on the human body anyway (mites, bacteria, and so on).
  • It fused with him because it was a macroscopic outside source that wound up in the same pod with him. The stuff inside/outside him doesn't count. That's the point. The pod would teleport his entire body from one area to the next, and when the computer discovered that there was a fly in there, it got confused and merged the two together.
  • Maybe he did.
  • No, he didn't. He figured out how to separately scan, teleport and reform all of the miscellaneous lifeforms on, in and around the larger (baboon, cat, man etc) animal form. Indeed this would be necessary as some of the bacteria are vitally important to the main life form so they would need to be transported in exactly the right way. When you consider that he can scan every cell, nay, every atom of a life form and have it come out exactly right, of course he's capable of accounting for this (as is his invention). It may have been a problem he solved simultaneously with the "problem of the flesh" which the baboons were posing. The only problem he didn't account for was teleporting with another macroscopic life form. A fly is not part of the human's skin bacteria, the gut lining etc. It literally can fly around the telepod as a separate living thing to Brundle. So of course the computer would be confused by this little beast but not by any of the millions of minute lifeforms which inherently live on and make up Brundle.
• How does Brundle vomit stuff that is corrosive enough to melt Stathis's hand, but somehow doesn't melt through his own jaw?
  • Maybe he's immune to his own vomit.
  • Same can be ask about flies.
  • The fluid he expels is enzymatic, not acidic. The enzymes are probably inert until they mix with a catalyst, and these components don't mix until they're expelled.
  • On a related note, only a minute after Seth vomited on Stathis, Veronica's hand slipped into his mouth, leading to the infamous jaw rip, yet her hand is clearly unscathed since she can handle a shotgun.
• Right after Brundle's ear falls off, Veronica hugs him tightly... right on the place where his ear just fell off. Why wouldn't she hug the other side?
  • She is literally watching her boyfriend fall apart in front of her eyes. It's a given that she's not thinking clearly.
• Seth asks Veronica if she wants to do an "experiment". They put a piece of steak onto a plate and send it thru the telepod. After cooking it doesn't taste right, etc., etc. Brundle later states that there aren't supposed to be two separate codes in the telepod or it will get confused (causing his predicament). Why doesn't the telepod fuse the steak and the plate together? If it knows how to keep steak and plate separate it should recognize that fly and man are two separate entities and NOT fuse them together.....RIGHT?
  • Knowing that he was teleporting an organic steak on an inorganic plate, Seth probably programmed the computer to separate the two. However, he didn't foresee the possibility of two separate organic teleportation subjects. As for why, later, the teleporter fuses Brundlefly and the telepod itself, it could be that the computer interpreted his fusion program to include the pod when the door was forced open.
  • In the scene where he loses his teeth he is working on a cure (to reduce at minimum the percentage of fly in Brundlefly), even when he wants to fuse with Veronica he is thinking on a cure, but everything says fusion (perfect family of 3, etc) but Brundle didn't know that the result of that would be him cured and Veronica turn into a monster (look Bartok), it was intentional? Brundle really thought it would FUSE with Veronica and the baby or it was a mistake, result of his insect mind thinking only in the cure, surviving instinct even to lie to Veronica about the result? To me the movie is about Brundle turning into a fly and the inside battle to avoid it, in that way I would say maybe he doesnt know the results (only seen in the Fly II) of the use of another human being, he didnt calculate well what would happen or simply just dont care anymore because anything is better that in what he was turning. So many questions, so little time for just one movie
  • I believe the original software of the telepod did not have an issue with merging organisms. Originally he could have teleported two baboons, they would have both died but died individually. However after the steak he teaches the telepod to be creative and “the poetry of the flesh”, which resulted in the merging bug.
  • Think of the steak on its plate as simply a discrete quantity of material, which the telepod scans as one object to be transported, not as two objects in physical contact. The pod's system processes them as a single "unit", albeit with a portion of that unit being ceramic and another portion, meat. When the second pod receives the transmission, it simply puts meat where meat belongs and ceramic where ceramic belongs, same as it put the successfully-teleported baboon's skeleton on the inside and skin on the outside. If the steak had accidentally slipped off the dish and wound up sitting next to the plate, then the first pod would've registered them as two "units" and the second (expecting just one) would've no doubt produced a steak/plate hybrid.
• There may be room to theorise that Seth was a virgin before hooking up with Veronica, so that even a scientist with his brilliant mind may have reasonably forgotten to use condoms during sex (or rather, even have them to hand in the first place; he wasn't sure if he could seduce her at all, after all). But, wouldn't a confident and independent feminist like Veronica (who is also reasonably sexually experienced) want to take charge of her own reproductive future and carry them around herself? Doesn't really matter if she doesn't expect to hook up with just anyone at any random time, a savvy person should always be prepared. This would be especially in the public consciousness in the 1980s, as AIDS was in the forefront of their minds and the science had clearly shifted from thinking that only homosexual men could get it.
• Just a minor one but when Veronica suggest to Seth about his irreversible condition if there's someone they can go to perform tests on him which he vehemently refuses saying: "I won't be just another tumorous bore talking endlessly about his hair falling out and his lost lymph nodes" what did Seth mean by that?
  • It reflects on the idea of the film being a metaphor for a deadly illness such as HIV or cancer. Tumours, hair loss and lost lymph nodes are all side effects of cancer and/or the common treatments for it. Seth would much rather find a proactive solution using the technology he already has (despite going the wrong way about it due to his degenerating intelligence) than end up like a cancer survivor who will only decay faster as this is the first case of "teleportation-fusion of a man and another animal" and there really won't be any effective therapies they can find to stop or even slow his decline into a half-fly. At best, all they can do is do genetic analysis on him, which is one of the same functionalities that his scanner already gives.
• Why, exactly, does the metamorphosis of Brundlefly happen gradually and why Seth didn’t just come out looking like his final man/fly form immediately? Was it somehow his body adjusting to the mismatched human/fly chromosomes? And if that’s the case then why didn’t it work that way for the baboon/cat hybrid in the deleted scene or the Brundlefly/telepod creature at the very end? I get the filmmakers were trying to make a commentary about diseases and aging but in the universe of the film the inconsistencies don’t make sense.
  • Yeah, we kinda have to go with the idea that he gradually mutated into the final Brundlefly form, and also that his external human appearance essentially became a cocoon which gradually transformed and shed for the final form. On a crude layman's guess, the malformed code of his now-hybrid DNA provided well enough to express his former human phenotype (given his life history up to that point, any injuries e.g. scars, genetic conditions, etc) well enough that he initially looked identical and no worse for wear, but the parts which provided for proteins, enzymes etc began to react in unintended ways and slowly but surely expressed what would become his final form. As for the second question, one possible explanation is that in the case of the baboon/cat hybrid, it was after all a deleted scene and if the creators felt it didn't work for the logic of the film overall, they decided to cut it so we don't have to factor it into this issue. However, I prefer to think instead (because as you say there's also the fusion of the telepod and Brundlefly to consider, and Brundlefly in the scene is basically a missing link within the progression of his disease shown in the rest of the movie, so it works on that level too) that Brundle was just desperate, under inordinate pressure and trying to make any solution work by modifying the operation of the telepods so that two different organisms could "purify" as a hybrid, to solve (or at least minimise) the issue of fly DNA in his system. Computer programmers know that if you haphazardly change code to try and fix an error, you're more likely to introduce even more (and even worse) problems to the program, and that's assuming as a prerequisite that you still have solid mental capacity and it's not being corrupted by the influence of (by now) rapidly escalating insectoid thought patterns. Desperation and problem solving do not always go hand in hand and these circumstances were even more desperate than normal crises. Thus, by feverishly modifying the program code and whatever other tweaks he did to the teleporter hardware, he caused the fusion of the baboon and cat to be basically instantaneous and yet create horrific results where for example both creatures' heads were present in a freakish parody of a conjoined twin pair. And with similar results later when he unintentionally fused himself with the teleporter. Also, nevertheless his goal in doing this was to repurpose the teleporters from simple transportation devices into (if the operator so requires) molecular-genetic hybridisation devices, which likewise accounts for the discrepancy in outcomes which you picked up on.