Characters / The Fly 1986: Seth Brundle

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Dr. Seth Brundle/"Brundlefly"

"Computers are dumb, they only know what you tell them. I must not know enough about the flesh myself. I'm gonna have to learn."

^{Click here to see Brundlefly} 

Played By: Jeff Goldblum

"The disease has just revealed its purpose. We don't have to worry about contagion anymore. I know what the disease wants. 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. Whaddaya think? A fly? Am I becoming a hundred-and-eighty-five-pound fly? No, I'm becoming something that never existed before. I'm becoming... Brundlefly. Don't you think that's worth a Nobel Prize or two?"

A brilliant, fast-talking thirty-something quantum physicist, Seth has spent at least six solitary years working on teleportation technology. Out of loneliness and lust, he impulsively, awkwardly offers to show beautiful magazine reporter Veronica Quaife his project — and she is impressed enough that, after a false start, she agrees to follow his work for a book. When their professional relationship turns deeply personal, it gives him the "Eureka!" Moment he needs to perfect the telepods. Unfortunately, a misunderstanding involving Veronica's editor/ex-lover results in Seth thinking he's being cuckolded, and one too many glasses of champagne later he decides to go ahead with the finale of his project — teleporting himself as the device's first human subject. But he doesn't notice that a housefly is in the telepod with him when the fateful moment comes. The computer that controls the pods fuses the two beings on the molecular-genetic level, and in the days that follow Seth begins to transform into something else from the inside out...

Seth's Slow Transformation unfolds over distinct physical stages numbered by the filmmakers and referenced below.

• Stage 0: Pre-teleportation, when he is fully human.
• Stage 1: The days that follow, marked by odd hairs growing from scratches on his back and, later, facial lesions.
• Stage 2: After the night with Tawny the lesions are worse and his fingernails begin to peel away.
• Stage 3: Four weeks later; skin is completely disfigured and Primal Stance is beginning to develop.
• Stage 4: At most a few days later; Primal Stance is complete, hair is thinner, and teeth are corroded. Certain small appendages begin to molt^note to become the collection of "The Brundle Museum of Natural History" in his medicine cabinet.
• Stage 4B: The "monkey-cat" deleted reel (see certain non-Vanilla Edition releases); body is noticeably lumpier.
• Stage 5: Final humanoid form, resembling a mass of cancerous growths and/or a chrysalis.
• Stage 6: Brundlefly proper, completely insectoid and literally emerging from Stage 5.
• Stage 7: "Brundlebooth" a.k.a. "Brundlepod" — the result of accidental merger with broken pieces of a telepod.

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• '80s Hair: As Carly Lane wrote in a Syfy Wire article, Seth's brown hair is "not yet a mullet, not yet an '80s rocker 'do. But it looks soft. So very soft." (According to cinematographer Mark Irwin, David Cronenberg thought Jeff Goldblum had a "too narrow" face, so a hairpiece known as a fall was added to his natural locks to enhance it. The upshot is that Seth has a similar profile to Veronica and his Ominous Hair Loss from Stage 4 on is more dramatic.
• Adaptation Name Change: His counterpart in the 1958 film and the short story it was adapted from was named Andre Delambre.
• Adaptational Villainy: The original short story and 1958 film has No Antagonist; the titular Doomed Protagonist Tragic Monster is also a Non-Malicious Monster who manages to put himself out of his misery before his Split-Personality Takeover. In this version, Seth does undergo a Split-Personality Takeover and becomes a Villain Protagonist in the third act.
• Alas, Poor Villain: The completely transformed Seth ends up in a much more pitiful state after being painfully spliced with the remains of the telepod thanks to his Villainous Breakdown.
• All There in the Manual: That he has a doctorate is mentioned in a deleted scene in which Veronica videotapes an interview with him the morning after his fateful teleportation (and, oddly, in one of the television ads for the film).
• And I Must Scream: The "Brundlepod" form is in indescribable agony just from existing. It has just enough intellect left to nonverbally beg for death.
• Bad Liar: When Tawny asks him who Veronica is upon the latter's just-in-time arrival at the loft, he is so surprised, flustered, and embarrassed that he all he can think of to say is "Oh, I forgot to tell you — I live with my mother too. Mom, meet Tawny." Tawny doesn't buy it and takes the opportunity to leave.
• Became Their Own Antithesis: Author William Beard's commentary track on the 2019 Blu-Ray discusses Seth as a case of this: He starts out introverted, controlled, and gentle, but post-teleportation becomes extremely extroverted, indulgent, and cruelly selfish as his animalistic, primitive "true" self is awakened and takes control of him.
• Big "NO!": Twice, after a fashion.
  • Short and intense version when Veronica suggests they could consult other doctors or scientists for help.
  • Although Brundlefly is The Speechless, when the teleportation sequence activates before he is fully out of the pod there's no doubting his anguished howl "translates" as this.
• Break the Cutie: He is shy and awkward around Veronica, but his enthusiasm for his work and desire to share it helps him connect with her, and their blossoming love indirectly helps him figure out how to program the telepods to transport animate objects. But his insecurity over the nature of her relationship with Stathis (which she doesn't go into much detail on because she'd rather not get him involved in that drama) leads him to misunderstand why she leaves on the night of his triumph, resulting in him getting drunk and teleporting himself. He becomes Drunk with Power for a while, but when he realizes what's actually happening to him — that he is mutating and effectively dying — he is brought back to his senses. He tries to see the bright side of his situation ("Don't you think [becoming Brundlefly] is worth a Nobel Prize or two?"), but as he comes to understand that he will not die as himself but an insectoid monstrosity who would harm the woman he loves — the only person he has in the world — he is thoroughly broken, and learning that she is pregnant but doesn't intend to keep the child pushes what remains of his sanity and morals off of a cliff.
• Bungling Inventor: A dark version, in that Seth's telepods accidentally double as a gene splicer when more than one living being is sent through at a time.
• Character Tics: He bites his fingernails when he's nervous, most prominently during the successful baboon teleportation, and this eventually helps him realize that something went wrong when he teleported when one of them comes off in his mouth. Post-teleportation, he develops a lot of tics foreshadowing his final form:
  • Stage 1: The first noticeable change — just before the audience sees the strange hairs growing from the cuts on his back — is that his kisses are lustier than in Stage 0. From there, whenever he's in heat his breathing and voice tend to be lower and raspier. The rasp becomes permanent come Stage 3. Come Stage 5 it's clearly difficult and even painful for him to talk and breathe in a human manner and his computer no longer recognizes his voice.
  • Stage 2: He begins clutching the left side of his abdomen. Come Stage 4 he reveals to Veronica that there's a growth there, but he doesn't know what it is. Stage 4B had a payoff in which an insect leg emerged from it, whereupon he bit it off; in the finished film its right-side counterpart emerges during his One-Winged Angel transformation. Back to Stage 2, when he broaches the idea of Tawny being teleported, he's also rubbing his forehead (just above his left eyebrow); this turns out to be a sign of the transforming body beneath his skull. He also is more physically sensitive — he brushed off the circuit board getting stuck to his back and pulled out by Veronica in Stage 0, but a few drops of alcohol rubbed into his skin hurts him enough to knock a glass out of Tawny's hand (alcohol is deadly to flies). Also, when Veronica talks to him he takes a bite out of a candy bar and makes a face as if it tastes bad, indicating that his taste buds and digestive tract are starting to change as well.
  • Stage 4: He has fully developed a fly-like twitch^note hinted at in Stage 1 during the arm wrestling match.
  • Also, it's subtle but in Stage 0 his hands tend to stroke or fidget with his tie when he's anxious or thoughtful. The latter is the case when he's lying on his bed after the disastrous baboon teleportation. As Veronica joins him there and tells him he's cute, she gently takes his tie in her hand...
• Clipped-Wing Angel: Thanks to a Villainous Breakdown he ends up getting fused with part of a telepod, left helpless and in terrible, dying pain — although it's clear that he was already physically and mentally unstable.
• Conditioned to Accept Horror: Downplayed. During the month Seth spends alone he is fearful and repulsed by what he's becoming, but adjusts to it because he has no choice. This results in embarrassment when Veronica returns and he doesn't think to warn her about how he now eats before helping himself to a doughnut. In Stage 5 his reaction to several teeth tumbling out of his mouth and onto the keyboard is not horror, as he displayed when his fingernails started coming off, but mild annoyance and resignation.
• Conspicuous Gloves: After his fingernails start coming loose, Seth puts on a pair of gardening gloves so he can use the computer's keyboard without leaving sticky pus on the keys. He is still wearing them in Stage 3 (when he's using canes to walk), and discards them come Stage 4, having figured out that the changes to his hands allow him to Wall Crawl.
• Cursed with Awesome: Even though the transformation makes Seth a diseased mutant, he gains wall-crawling skills, corrosive vomit, and superhuman strength and stamina as well. In fact, because the strength and stamina begin to manifest before the Power-Upgrading Deformation needed for the other abilities does, he initially doesn't realize he's cursed. It's unclear what the absolute end result of Seth's changes would be; the state he ultimately reaches (where he wordlessly begs for death by placing the muzzle of a shotgun to his own head) has at least as much to do with being caught partially outside the telepod when it activates as with having genetic problems.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation: His short story/1958 counterpart decides to kill himself before he can hurt anyone, via being crushed by a metal press, requiring the aid of his wife to do so. Seth — in part because his insect side is determined to live at any cost — doesn't become suicidal until he is rendered a helpless Clipped-Wing Angel, whereupon he silently asks Veronica to slay him with Stathis's shotgun; she obliges by blowing his head off.
• Dying as Yourself: Tragically, Seth realizes that he cannot do this; by the time he dies as Brundlefly there will be nothing left of his original mind and morals. Or so he thinks. The broken Brundlefly managing to silently request that Veronica end his life with the shotgun means Seth Brundle died more man than fly.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Although he briefly falls out of love with Veronica in Stages 1 and 2 as his Split-Personality Takeover and Drunk with Power feelings blind him to her concerns over all the changes he's exhibiting, his learning what's actually happening to him brings him back to his better self and the only reason he doesn't reconcile with her right away is because he's scared that, among other things, he might be contagious. His love for her is such that he decides to send her away in Stage 5 for fear he'll eventually hurt her without meaning to. Although his mind completely snaps with the realization that she's pregnant and doesn't want to keep the child and he subsequently decides they will be the "pure" human beings who will unwillingly help him with his Evil Plan to save himself, even in this deranged state the only reason he doesn't kill Stathis with vomit drop is because she begs him not to, and he clearly sees the prospect of Romantic Fusion as a wonderful culmination of their relationship as well as his last hope of retaining humanity.
• Evilutionary Biologist: In Stages 1-2, Seth believes that his enhanced strength, stamina, etc. are the direct result of teleporting himself so he starts pressuring Veronica to "go through" — "And I won't be able to wear you out; we'll be the perfect couple! The Dynamic Duo!" When she objects he declares her a coward and sets out to find "someone who'll keep up with me", leading to his tryst with Tawny. Only Veronica's timely arrival stops him from forcibly teleporting her; shortly after this he realizes what's actually happening to him, which smashes this trope to pieces.
• Evil Plan: He plans to genetically splice himself with a healthy human being, since that would make him more human than fly again. Not evil enough? Well, the human subject he chooses is Veronica — and it's implied it's partially because she doesn't want to keep his child, but he does.
• Face–Heel Turn: By the end, his desperation to retain his humanity combining with his mind becoming more selfish and instinctual like that of a fly leads him to forcefully trying to merge Veronica and their unborn child with him. He is fully aware that this is in effect, and urges Veronica to leave him before he hurts her, but that's before he learns she's pregnant.
• Fatal Flaw: Lust. He must follow things that fascinate and matter to him — his work and his relationship with Veronica, who understands and is attracted to his passion for that work — to their ultimate conclusions. His fateful teleportation arises from his response to Veronica leaving to confront Stathis just as they were celebrating his successfully teleporting a baboon. The careful, patient scientist gets drunk — loosening his self-control, whereupon he throws caution to the wind for his ultimate professional goal ("What are we waiting for? Let's do it!") and ends up fused with a creature that operates purely on instinctual urges. He's initially euphoric and desperate to teleport Veronica or any other woman because he needs "someone who'll keep up with me" — that is to say, is capable of sating his lust — and only realizing what's actually happening to him breaks the spell. Faced with the prospect of a painful, awful metamorphosis and death, he still takes comfort in becoming something that never existed before — and that he accidentally invented a "very good" gene splicer. He's fascinated and even delighted by the process (as when he shows off his Wall Crawl skills to Veronica), but still seeks a way to retain his humanity. In the climax, with his mind almost completely ruled by insect instinct, he decides using the pods to fuse himself with her and their unborn child — creating "the ultimate family" and making her part of him forever by way of his work — will do that. Instead, he ends up only wanting death and accepts it, having seen an incredible experience through to a logical end, a triumph of sorts as Cronenberg points out in his DVD commentary for the film.

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• Genius Cripple: Played with. When he allows Veronica to see him again (Stage 3), he is using two canes to slowly walk because he's now hunched over and cannot maintain his balance otherwise. At this point he believes he is dying. By her next visit (Stage 4), he has not only adjusted to the Primal Stance but is downright jumpy and spry — having discovered an ability to Wall Crawl and realized that he isn't dying but becoming something else.
• Gentleman and a Scholar: He's a "socially-awkward but nice and polite" example of the trope prior to his transformation; his losing his gentlemanly nature is an early sign of it.
• Gibbering Genius: The Trope Codifier, bar none, as Jeff Goldblum's subsequent career bears out. Seth is a cheerful chatterbox from the start, admitting early on that after years of working alone he feels a need to talk to someone about what he's doing. Post-teleportation, he becomes even more talkative because his metabolism is working a lot faster and the resultant exponentially surging energy is affecting his brain. In Stage 5 his speech is slower and halting, likely because his vocal cords are decaying, but he still clearly wants to speak as long as he's able to.
• Greater-Scope Paragon: He, or at least the good in him prior his Split-Personality Takeover Face–Heel Turn, becomes this in the sequel. His son Martin ends up carrying on and redeeming his legacy by not only figuring out how to make the telepods work again, but also finding a cure for the mutation he inherited from his father.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Upon realizing that the smug, confident Stathis is an ex-lover of Veronica's as well as her editor, Seth jumps to the conclusion that she's cuckolding him and bitterly drowns his sorrows even though she's promised to return to the loft in a few hours (which she does). The resultant loosening of his self-control is what sets him on the path to becoming a literal monster. When Stathis comes to rescue her from his clutches in the climax, Seth cruelly maims him before attempting to Murder the Hypotenuse, only stopped by Veronica's desperate pleas.
• The Grotesque: Once his Drunk with Power "high" has ended and he realizes what's actually happening to him, his sweet self re-emerges in Stage 3 but is now laced with Gallows Humor, fear, and shame as he continues to deteriorate. Upon re-establishing contact with Veronica, he initially tries to avoid physical contact with her (concerned he might be Patient Zero), sadly saying in passing "You look so pretty..." at one point. When he finally reaches out to her for an embrace — after he has vomited upon a doughnut and his right ear has tumbled off — she returns it without hesitation. Even though it's upsetting and exhausting for her to be witness to his unfolding tragedy, she loves him too much to abandon him altogether. Ultimately he decides to send her away upon realizing that, due to his mind and morals fading away, he will hurt her if he doesn't.
• Half-Human Hybrid: Brundlefly is this, and in his final "natural" form he does not bear an obvious physical resemblance to either a human or a fly as a result.
• Hell-Bent for Leather: He's not seen wearing the brown leather jacket Veronica purchases for him until after his trip through the telepods, and then it's specific to his Drunk with Power stretch — especially his setting out to find another partner after she refuses to be teleported. For bonus points, that she bought him a leather jacket ties into Seth's growing understanding of and fascination with flesh.^note For even more points Seth buys her a golden necklace with a heart-shaped pendant later, which she wears for almost all of her subsequent scenes. His world, after all, is that of the machine/metal.
• Hidden Depths: Gibbering Genius though he may be, he's eloquent when it comes to explaining his work. He's socially awkward but he's also capable of deep love and devotion, though this is tragically perverted by his transformation. He retains his eloquence even as the rest of his humanity fades away, and losing his ability to speak (when Veronica accidentally rips his decayed human jaw off) is tellingly the moment he moves from Stage 5 to 6. These depths are foreshadowed by his sole hobby — playing piano.
• Hollywood Homely: He's quite muscular for a scientist who doesn't get out much. (Not that any of the female viewers are complaining, or anything!) The shooting script did have him as out-of-shape prior to the teleportation, a detail that may have been dropped because the film was made in a compressed timeframe (shooting began in December 1985 for a locked-in August '86 release date). William Beard's commentary on the 2019 Blu-Ray points out, however, that the audience doesn't notice how shapely Seth is until he teleports himself because his concealing Limited Wardrobe, expressive face, and awkward-but-sweet personality are holding their attention.
• Howl of Sorrow: To say nothing of pain — having been merged with broken telepod parts, his Stage 7 self howls in agony as he tumbles out of the prototype pod.
• Humble Hero: While the plot gets rolling by way of his wanting to impress Veronica with his marvelous telepods, after his demonstration he freely admits that he didn't create them from scratch, saying "I'm really a systems management man" in that their individual components (lasers, molecular analyzers, etc.) were commissioned from people "much more brilliant than I am [...] and I just stick them together." Moreover, Veronica apparently only learns of his noteworthy past (he was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in physics at the age of 20) from Stathis. Seth loses this humility in the Drunk with Power stage of his metamorphosis, becoming a braggart in the wake of his belief that his invention has made him a superman.
• I Am a Monster: He basically warns Veronica of this in his "insect politics" speech.
• I Cannot Self-Terminate: In the end, seeing the pathetic creature that was once Seth Brundle crawl out of the third telepod, fused with pieces of machinery and in horrifying agony, is probably sadder than watching the end of Old Yeller. This can obviously end only one way, and in one final display of humanity Brundlefly silently begs a shotgun-armed Veronica to end its life, and after some painful hesitation, she does.
• In-Series Nickname: He dubs himself "Brundlefly" upon realizing he's becoming a new lifeform.
• Intelligence Equals Isolation: Trying to convince Veronica to chronicle his work for a book, he notes "I don't have a life, so there's nothing for you to interfere with." Stathis learns that Seth's been working on the telepods for six years, which implies he's been alone at least that long, though earlier in his career he successfully worked with others. However long it's been, by Seth's own admission it's been "too long."
• Ironic Name: Crossing over with Shout-Out, his surname is that of a famous British racecar driver (Martin Brundle), which is completely unsuited to someone who has suffered from motion sickness his entire life. (The sequel carries on the reference by simply naming his son Martin.)
• Irony: A situational case: Seth's devoted his life to teleportation technology due to his chronic motion sickness and resultant hatred of vehicles. His Teleporter Accident results in him having to constantly vomit just to survive, as he cannot digest solid food and must use vomit drop to dissolve whatever he eats.
• Kubrick Stare: As Veronica adjusts her videocamera in preparation for interviewing him about what exactly happened to the first, ill-fated baboon, Seth — struggling to contain his anger, frustration, and guilt over the accident — glares in this manner.
• LEGO Genetics: Averted, as the change in DNA affects Seth slowly as his cells replicate, and his Stage 7 form isn't anything resembling a properly functioning body — though being fused with a telepod isn't exactly natural. Stage 6, his final "natural" form, is noticeably asymmetrical; his transformed human legs and arms don't remotely match each other. He also has a fifth, fly leg-like appendage on the right side of his body — the reason he doesn't have a corresponding one on the left is because that emerged back in the deleted Stage 4B sequence, and he desperately bit it off.
• Limited Wardrobe: Lampshaded! After Veronica mentions he apparently wears the same outfit every day — charcoal grey suit jacket, white dress shirt, red necktie, black trousers, and brown Oxford shoes — she learns that it's actually one of five identical sets of clothing. He explains to her that he got the idea from Einstein, who supposedly had five sets of clothes to avoid wasting mental energy on deciding what to wear. Of course, Einstein likely didn't have five jackets and five pairs of shoes!
• Little "No": After his fingernails start coming off, he tremulously whispers "Oh no...what's happening to me? Am I dying? Is this how it starts — am I dying?"
• Lovecraftian Superpower: Becoming a Body Horror via botched teleportation means Seth develops amazing strength and the abilities to Wall Crawl and vomit corrosive enzymes on food and enemies.
• Mad Scientist: Initially subverted, later played straight. Prior to his teleportation, he is a driven scientist, and doesn't have great social skills, and is, well, working on teleportation, but he is a sane man working for the greater good with a clear ethical code. Even his choice to become Professor Guinea Pig as soon as possible is one he makes while he's drunk. Post-teleportation, the gradual Split-Personality Takeover (plus, at least before he learns what's happening to him, a Drunk with Power feeling) turns him into a straight version of the trope, albeit a sympathetic one with a Tragic Dream end goal. In an interview John Landis did with Cronenberg for the book Monsters in the Movies, they argue over whether Seth can be called this trope or not: Landis says yes, Cronenberg no.
• Milking the Giant Cow: He has lively hand/arm gestures in Stage 0, but in Stage 1, as he rants to the increasingly distressed Veronica about the wonders of diving "into the plasma pool" via teleportation, his gestures are extravagant — particularly when he points. This trope disappears post-Stage 2 due to his transformation affecting the speed and range of motion of his limbs.
• Monster Progenitor: Due to the events of the sequel. His son by Veronica, Martin, was conceived after Seth became a mutant and is an Uneven Hybrid of man and insect; unusually for this trope, he is stronger than his father was because he was born part-insect and is also able to retain his human intelligence and morals because he's 75% human. The villains' Evil Plan is to use Martin's monstrous form and Seth's telepods to create an entire race of monster soldiers, but Martin fights back and ends up becoming completely human while the Big Bad ends up a helpless mutant, ending the line.
• Motifs: Critic/filmmaker Steven Benedict points out in his podcast episode on this film that Seth Brundle is marked by evolution/transformation even before his Tragic Mistake.
  • He lives and works in a converted floor of an Abandoned Warehouse.
  • He has a Significant Wardrobe Shift in the wake of Veronica becoming his lover and expanding his wardrobe.
  • Once he starts mutating, slowly but surely his loft "decays" along with him, and he becomes associated with shadow rather than light (see Orange/Blue Contrast on the main page for more).
  • What is Seth? The answer to this question is brought up and changed by him and others to the point that I am / You are / Are you / He is verge on Arc Words:
    • Veronica notes "You're not a very accomplished drunk" during the drive to the loft. While he's actually nauseous due to motion sickness, her observation turns out to be true.
    • "I'm really a systems management man."
    • The skeptical Stathis dismisses him as "Your magician" to Veronica when Seth arrives at the Particle offices. Veronica notes to Seth "He thinks you're a con man." Later Stathis refers to him as "Your new playmate" and "The nightclub act" to her, but goes on to note that "He's actually quite brilliant."
    • The lines leading into Veronica and Seth's first night together are, respectively, "You're very cute. You know that?" "Am I?"
    • Tawny wonders in turn if Seth is a bodybuilder or magician of some kind. He responds that he is both times, specifying in the former case that "Yeah, I build bodies. I take them apart and put them back together again."
    • Veronica warns him shortly thereafter "You're changing, Seth".
    • Explaining what went wrong with his teleportation, he notes "Now I'm not Seth Brundle anymore. I'm the offspring of Brundle and housefly."
    • Later: "Am I becoming a 185-pound fly? No, I'm becoming something that never existed before. I'm becoming Brundlefly."
    • Seth Brundle and the film's final assessment, of course, is that he's "an insect who dreamt he was a man, and loved it."
• Mr. Exposition: In the first scene at the loft, he demonstrates and explains the telepods to Veronica and goes on to explain how he's realized them and why no one else, not even his financiers, knows about them as yet. Later on, after he's learned exactly what the nature of his transformation is and why it's happening from his computer, he explains it to Veronica in layman's terms. Not only is this justified because he's the only person who can explain these things and events to her, he admits that "I have a strong urge to talk about what I'm doing" to somebody after years of working alone.
• Must Have Caffeine: Implied if one knows from coffee culture. As Emma Westwood's book on the film notes, "no one had a cafe-style coffee machine in their home in the late 1980s", but Seth does. (He specifically identifies it as a Faema, which is espresso-specific; he also knows how to prepare cappuccino.) This trope also applies, albeit downplayed, on a meta level: Jeff Goldblum used coffee as an aid in playing Seth's post-fusion, hyper and unstable scenes.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Seth's eyes widening in horror as he learns from the computer that he was genetically fused with the fly is this trope expressed without words. (The fade to black that follows, helping to establish a four-week time jump between this and the next scene, is one of only two such fades in the film — the other being at the very end.)
• Nerds Are Sexy: He is presented as attractive, though he doesn't realize it. As socially awkward as he is, it's in a sweet way, but it's really his passion for his work that serves as the Commonality Connection between him and Veronica. After his initial teleportation, he at first becomes noticeably more alluring — but also dangerous.
• Nerds Are Virgins: It's not stated in-universe but according to David Cronenberg Seth is a virgin before he meets Veronica. Thus his relationship with her marks a crossing of a metaphorical threshold into maturity...and with that, the sorrows of aging, disease, and death when it inadvertently leads to his Teleporter Accident.
• Nightmare Fetishist: Justified: He becomes this as a way of coping come Stage 4, having realized that he's not dying (at least not in a conventional sense) but becoming a new lifeform. He is a scientist, after all; he needs to thoroughly understand and even embrace what he's becoming, no matter how disgusting it is by human standards. He insists that his eating habits be recorded for posterity in this stage, but the trope reaches its apex in Stage 5 with the reveal that he's preserving all of the human body parts he molts, which are "of historical interest only", in his medicine cabinet — aka "The Brundle Museum of Natural History".
• Non-Malicious Monster: Once he becomes The Grotesque with Stage 3, he also becomes this...for a while. Because he is also undergoing a Split-Personality Takeover, he cannot hold himself to this trope forever and come Stage 5 tells Veronica I Am a Monster in hopes of keeping her safe. It doesn't work since he learns about her pregnancy (and her intent to abort it) as he watches her leave with Stathis, and this pushes him over the edge. It's worth noting that in the shooting script he stopped being this trope sooner: A storyboarded but unfilmed scene had him vomiting on a homeless woman and preparing to eat her before he realized what he was doing.
• No Social Skills: Downplayed and justified. He's spent his entire adult life — and probably much of his adolescence, given he was shortlisted for a Nobel Prize at 20 — consumed by his work in physics, and has worked alone for at least six years as the film begins, so while he is polite, pleasant, and okay with social cues, he's initially at sea dealing with others on a personal level. He regrets this, and post-teleportation is excited that he can finally work on personal growth now that he's achieved his professional ambition. But that's before he realizes the real reason he feels so great...

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• Omnidisciplinary Scientist: Defied. He explicitly explains that most of the technical apparatus is stuff he himself doesn't understand, designed by colleagues he says are far more brilliant than himself and only assembled by him. He also explains his initial difficulty with transporting organic matter as being a result of his inexperience in biology. His own fields seem to be mathematics and programming.
• Ominous Hair Loss: As Seth's mutation progresses he begins shedding hair. By the time Veronica arrives at the lab to say goodbye, Seth's hair has been reduced to a few stray lengths of hair across his misshapen skull.
• Permafusion: What ends up setting up the movie's events is him accidentally merging with a housefly as a result of a transporter accident. Unfortunately, it doesn't stop there: as the movie progresses, so does Seth's transformation ito a horrific human-fly hybrid, until a second transporter mishap causes him to merge with shrapnel, forcing Veronica to kill him in order to end his misery.
• Phlegmings: By the time he reaches Stage 3, poor Seth can no longer digest solid food and must eat the way a fly does — via "a corrosive enzyme, playfully called 'vomit drop'" as he puts it, resulting in this trope whenever he has to consume anything. The vomit drop stains his face and clothes too, and is a key reason he ends up with Scary Teeth.
• Posthumous Character: In The Fly II, he casts a long shadow over the story. While Bartok Industries has no problem restoring the telepods, no one can figure out how to get them to teleport living matter properly, with Anton Bartok explaining to Seth's son Martin that it's one of the "secrets [that] died with him." Martin, who knows that his father was brilliant but not how he died (rather he is told that he succumbed to a Rapid Aging disorder that Martin has inherited), is convinced by Anton to try and finish his father's work. The tipping point for Martin's decision is watching (some of) the tapes Veronica made chronicling Seth's work, incorporating a deleted scene from the first film in which, the morning after his fateful teleportation, Seth describes how the experience felt.
• The Power of Love: The original HBO plot rundown of this film called him a man "transformed by love", and indeed he is in a myriad of ways. Love Hurts, indeed:
  • His succumbing to The Power of Lust and approaching Veronica at the Bartok press event starts the story.
  • In an inversion of Love Makes You Uncreative, the "Eureka!" Moment that points him towards solving the riddle of teleporting living matter via the telepods comes via Veronica's playful pillow talk.
  • His mistaken belief that Veronica is cheating on him with Stathis leads to him getting drunk out of jealousy. In his compromised mental state he decides to jump ahead to the climax of his experiments and teleport himself, which ends up being his Tragic Mistake.
  • Upon realizing he is succumbing to a Split-Personality Takeover that is eradicating his human morals and reason, he sends Veronica away — despite her being the only person he has — so he won't hurt her.
  • Immediately afterward, however, he learns that she is pregnant with his child and intends to have an abortion. His heart and mind break together, rendering him crazed and wicked: he kidnaps her and upon realizing he cannot convince her to bear the child decides he will create "the ultimate family" and retain what remains of his human self by forcing her to undergo Romantic Fusion with him.
  • On top of this, when Stathis arrives at the loft to rescue her Seth attempts to Murder the Hypotenuse — piece by piece, by using his vomit drop to dissolve first Stathis's hand, and then an ankle. He only stops short of dissolving his face because Veronica begs him not to.
  • When Laser-Guided Karma renders him a Clipped-Wing Angel, he uses this trope to end his suffering (and, perhaps, atone for his crimes) by silently communicating to Veronica that he wants to die by her hand.
• Power-Upgrading Deformation: Seth's strength and stamina only grow as his transformation into Brundlefly progresses, but at the cost of his beauty. His fingernails coming off reveals that the fingers themselves are now secreting a pus that is extremely sticky, which turns out to tie in to his ability to Wall Crawl (and while it's hard to see watching the film on a small screen, the palms of his hands and soles of his feet end up with little gripping "pads" for this). Losing the ability to digest solid food and having to use vomit drop upon it results in Scary Teeth.
• Primal Stance: He starts developing this by Stage 3, and come Stage 4 has fully adjusted to it.
• Professor Guinea Pig: A rationalized version of this trope. Seth admits early on that he intends to teleport himself as the Grand Finale of his experiments, but shortly after the first time he successfully teleports any living organism he gets drunk and decides he doesn't need to wait on making sure the process doesn't have any aftereffects or anything like that. In fact, he's having a "conversation" with that baboon and tells it "I'm sorry I killed your brother...but he didn't die in vain, if that's of any comfort. And as the general said, 'There's nothing I'd ask you to do that I wouldn't do myself, boys.'"
• Protagonist Journey to Villain: His character arc, and his attempts to resist it only end up furthering it. He spends most of Act One as the sweetest of nerds...then comes the Teleporter Accident. Most of Act Two sees him as a would-be Übermensch who rages at the woman he loves, gruesomely maims a man in arm wrestling just to win an evening with another woman, and tries to put each woman through the teleporter in turn. The Internal Reveal deals a much-needed blow to his ego, but in Act Three he realizes his mind is still losing its human reason and compassion; the selfish ruthlessness that began to show in Act Two will eventually consume him. Come the climax, it does and he becomes a monster in every possible sense of the word.
• Puppy-Dog Eyes: Albeit the most grotesque version of this trope ever. Brundlefly proper doesn't have insectoid eyes, but gigantic opalescent ones that blink, stare, and twitch (Cronenberg and the effects team effectively caricaturing Jeff Goldblum's eyes). When Veronica objects to Brundlefly's silent request to Mercy Kill him, he sadly stares up at her in this manner and moans softly...and this last expression of humanity convinces her to pull the trigger.
• Real Award, Fictional Character: He was, according to Stathis, "an inch away from the Nobel Prize in Physics" when he was just 20. Later, Seth figures he might have a shot at the Nobel just for becoming Brundlefly.
• Revenge Before Reason: He has a Villainous Breakdown upon seeing Veronica's telepod severed from the other two and smashes the door of his open so he can finish Stathis off. With so little time left in the countdown and Stathis already maimed and near-helpless, the safe option would be to let himself be sent to the prototype pod alone and then come after him. Sadly justified in that at this point, instinct and rage have overpowered what remains of his human reason.
• Sanity Slippage: Brundle's gradual transformation and his futile attempts to reverse it eventually drive him insane, to the point where he decides that the best way to reclaim his humanity is to fuse himself, Veronica, and their unborn baby into "the ultimate family." He lampshades this earlier in his "insect politics" speech, describing himself as "an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is over... and the insect is awake."
• Saying Too Much: In the opening scenes, due to The Power of Lust clouding his mind he either misses or forgets the rather important fact that Veronica is a journalist when he offers to show her what he's working on in his lab. He doesn't realize his mistake until he realizes she's recording part of their conversation after his demonstration, and she correctly points out that everything he said was on the record and refuses to give him the resulting tape. After she leaves, he decides to make the best of it with a deal: If she'll hold off on writing an article on his work, she can be the sole chronicler of the creation, development, and refinement of the telepods, the stuff of an entire book.
• Scary Teeth: His teeth in Stages 4 and 5, the result of being corroded by vomit drop and sugar. Several of his front teeth gruesomely tumble out when he pulls a pencil he's been idly chewing on from his mouth.
• Second Love: As far as the audience knows he is this to Veronica, whose first love was Stathis. Seth is her true love as well, to the point that no one working on the film was satisfied with the two epilogues shot in which Veronica and Stathis ended up a couple again.
• Significant Wardrobe Shift: He initially has a nice but very Limited Wardrobe because he doesn't like expending mental energy on choosing what to wear; never mind he's a recluse and it wouldn't matter what he wore most of the time. Veronica decides to change that after learning this and buys him some new wardrobe pieces — a plaid shirt, a brown leather jacket, etc. The next time he's seen he's wearing said shirt and coordinating pants, suggesting he adopted the new look immediately; the suits are never seen again. It's a sign of how his relationship is transforming his entire life; in fact in the same scene he finally successfully transports a living being through his telepods, which he couldn't have done had his relationship with her not led to a "Eureka!" Moment. But later that night he teleports himself...and the early stages of the Slow Transformation that results have him become more virile, sensual, and aggressive. That's when the audience starts seeing him in that leather jacket — first with a shirt, but later without.
• Sinister Sweet Tooth: One of the earliest signs that Seth's teleportation experiment is turning him into a monstrous, amoral fly hybrid is his growing taste for sugar: at first, he's merely ladling the stuff into his coffee and calling loudly for a cannoli to go with it, seemingly uncaring of how weird it looks (or perhaps he thinks an alternative trope is in play); then, as he grows more violent and obsessive, he begins munching on chocolate bars while wandering the town in a rage, leading to a scene in which he gives a man a potentially lethal compound fracture without feeling a flicker of concern. By the time his degeneration becomes plainly obvious, his once-relatively tidy lab is littered with boxes of donuts and other sweet foods — a sign that his humanity is undergoing a very steep decline.
• The Sleepless: Post-fusion. Before he realizes what's actually happening to him he's happy about it: "I hardly need to sleep anymore, I feel wonderful!"
• The Speechless: Come Stage 6, he is this. As Cronenberg points out in the DVD commentary, Seth's final metamorphosis into Brundlefly only comes after Veronica accidentally rips his decaying human jaw off. Since he's no longer able to communicate with others, there's a tragic sense in the rest of his body giving itself up to the insect form.
• Stages of Monster Grief: He goes through all of them in his one-month-plus transformation.
  • Denial: Upon realizing that going through the teleporter somehow changed him, he never denies the actual changes, but rather that they're anything but good. He doesn't mind that his skin is developing lesions and his temper is shorter and more explosive. He even likes the prospect of gaining a Carpet of Virility! Once the fingernails start coming off, though...
  • Acceptance: He realizes the true nature of his condition, resigns himself to his eventual fate of disintegration and death, and comforts himself with Gallows Humor and by exploring what he's becoming in the meantime, seeing the upsides of it where no one else can. Veronica's love and presence helps here. However, he does long to be human again upon realizing he's also losing his mind and morals, resulting in...
  • Defiance: He starts formulating a plan "to reduce the percentage of fly in Brundlefly" at the very least. But it requires him to fuse himself with another human, and with his insect survival instincts starting to kick in he moves to...
  • Betrayal: With his sanity cracking upon learning Veronica is pregnant and intends to have an abortion, he decides to fuse her and the fetus with him. He also maims Stathis — who indirectly set Seth on the path to his Tragic Mistake — when he tries to rescue her, only for Stathis to get a second wind. The result is that Seth, now completely Brundlefly, gets merged with parts of a telepod. Now in horrible pain, he is...
  • Driven to Suicide: Except he's unable to kill himself, so he manages to convince Veronica to finish him off with Stathis's shotgun.
• Super-Strength: Merging with the fly gives him a mild form of this — enough to perform impressive gymnastic feats, rip open a strongman's arm in an arm-wrestling contest, and Bridal Carry objects of his affection/lust over long/steep distances. It's implied he's also capable of Roofhopping, and the script outright showed him doing so.

T-W

• Tall, Dark, and Handsome: Played with. Initially, his awkward nature downplays his attractiveness, as does the fact that Veronica is also tall. When she tells him he's cute, his response is "Am I?" In the first days after he's merged with the fly, the trope is played straight as he explores his new strength and virility and Veronica is more attracted to him than ever...only for his personality to become uglier as the transformation slowly works its dark magic on him. Once it kicks into high gear, Seth's beauty is decimated piece by piece — he succumbs to a Primal Stance, his dark hair gradually falls out, and his face becomes a ruin.
• Teen Genius: He's implied to have been one. Stathis tells Veronica that Seth was "An inch away from the Nobel Prize in Physics...he was only 20 at the time" he led a team of physicists.
• That Man Is Dead: When he explains his Teleporter Accident to Veronica he tells her "Now I'm not Seth Brundle anymore...I'm the offspring of Brundle and housefly." Later, having realized he's becoming a new lifeform rather than merely dying, he starts referring to himself as "Brundlefly".
• Tragic Monster: Alas, poor Seth! Probably one of the most profound examples of this trope ever.
• Tragic Villain: He becomes a Tragic Monster who desperately tries to regain his humanity — even if it means harming his love.
• Uncleanliness Is Next to Ungodliness: He's tidy in his appearance and the upkeep of his apartment/lab, going so far as to wear a clean set of clothes (one of five identical sets, down to the shoes) every day. As his mutation progresses apace and his mind declines as he tries to find some way to hold the inevitable back, he gives up on taking care of himself, the apartment becoming a wreck of discarded garbage (especially empty food and soda containers) — fitting in a sad way, flies being commonly associated with garbage and rot. He even turns his medicine cabinet into a museum for his falling-off appendages. As early as Stage 2 Veronica notes that he looks and smells bad compared to how he was before, but he brushes off her concerns with "I've never been much of a bather."
• Vampire Refugee: Seth becomes desperate to retain if not regain some of his humanity, but his plan to do so fails spectacularly, in part because it makes him a...
• Villain Protagonist: Becomes this upon deciding to forcibly merge himself with Veronica (and her unborn child) into a single entity, since that would be "More human than I am alone!" On top of that when Stathis comes to rescue her he maims him with vomit drop, clearly getting some enjoyment out of the process as he does so, and only Veronica's plea stops him from finishing him off.
• Villainous Breakdown: In the climax, Seth/Brundlefly's reaction to seeing Veronica's telepod disconnected from the other two is to smash the glass door of his open so he can at least have vengeance on Stathis. But just as he's partially outside it the countdown ends and the result is not pretty.
• Was Once a Man: His loss of humanity is such that he describes himself to Veronica as "an insect who dreamt he was a man" when he turns her away for the final time. He currently provides the trope's page quote. He's also an atypical example of the trope in that the audience fully gets to know him as a human before his Tragic Mistake transforms him.
• Workaholic: By his own admission, he has no life beyond his work on the telepods before he meets Veronica. In hindsight this points to his Fatal Flaw being desire. Whatever or whoever it is that matters to him, he must pursue it with all of his heart to the exclusion of all else — and what self-control he has ends up first compromised, then destroyed, over the course of the story.

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"We'll be the ultimate family. A family of three, joined together in one body. More human than I am alone."