Dialogue: A Cronenbergian Conversation Part 2 — David Goes to Hollywood: 'The Fly' and 'Dead Ringers'

As our Canadian hero ventured south to Tinseltown, he didn't abandon his obsessions or his uncompromising style.

For a while it looked like David Cronenberg might be done making movies. Some of the long filmmaking silence  that followed 2014’s Maps to the Stars was  understandable. It’s much harder to finance films than the days of his low-budget first features, which were partially backed by funds from the Canadian government. In 2017 he lost his wife, Carolyn Croneenberg, and in 2020 his sister and longtime collaborator Denise Cronenberg. He still seemed interested in working, but mostly as an actor on TV series like Slasher and Star Trek: Discovery. Maybe he was drifting gently into retirement.

Then came word of Crimes of the Future, a new film that shares its name with a little-seen 1970 Cronenberg short feature and concerns a near future filled with body modification, boundary-pushing performance artists and other classically Cronenbergian elements.. Cronenberg admirers and sickos (not mutually exclusive groups, of course) pricked up their ears at rumors that it’s a shocking endurance test. As members of at least one of those camps, we decided to embark on a conversation series covering select Cronenberg films. Our conversation continues with two of Cronenberg’s Hollywood features, 1986’s The Fly and 1988’s Dead Ringers. 

Scott: Cronenberg’s time in Hollywood is quite brief. He reportedly turned down the opportunity to direct Return of the Jedi, because he said that he wasn’t used to doing other people’s material. (In a chat with EW’s Clark Collis a few years ago, he explained his disinterest in directing franchise movies with an answer that articulates exactly why I find so many of them unstimulating.) He kicked things off with perhaps his most commercial film, a rock-solid (if not terribly Cronenberg-y) adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dead Zone, followed it up with The Fly (an adaptation of Kurt Neumann’s 1958 film) and Dead Ringers (based on Bari Wood’s 1971 novel), and then entered the ‘90s with more adaptations, none of them commercial: 1991’s Naked Lunch, 1993’s M. Butterfly, and 1996’s Crash. 

The Fly was a hit, but it’s startling to me how far Cronenberg pushes what a mainstream audience can take. The film is disturbing and almost breathtakingly gross, from the “inside-out” baboon that twitches inside the telepod to the physical deterioration of Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) as the insect that entered the telepod with him starts to take over his body. The gradual chipping away at his skin, with its tears and pustules and molting pieces, mirrors a psychological breakdown that’s equally unsettling. Once the horror fully consumes the sci-fi in the third act, it starts to feel like Cronenberg is getting away with something. 

---

The Reveal is a reader-supported newsletter dedicated to bringing you great essays, reviews and conversation about movies (and a little TV). While both free and paid subscriptions are available, please consider a paid subscription to support our long-term sustainability. 

---

Watching The Fly again for this conversation, I found myself zeroing in on its most famous line, which doubled as its tagline: “Be afraid. Be very afraid.” The line is spoken by Geena Davis, who co-stars as Ronnie, a science journalist whose interest in Seth’s game-changing teleportation project evolves into a romantic interest, too. When Ronnie says that, the increased strength and potency that Seth has enjoyed since going through the telepod has tipped into extreme aggression. She discovers Seth with another woman he picked up in a bar and he’s trying to coerce her into going through the telepod, too. (He believes that it “purifies” you.) The woman says she’s afraid, Seth offers reassurances, and then Ronnie steps in with the line. 

Cronenberg connects us with Ronnie’s fear long before that. I love how The Fly wastes no time establishing the relationship between Seth and Ronnie, opening  at a media shindig thrown by Bartok Science Industries—the company bankrolling Seth’s work, with no oversight—and the two flirting over drinks. He’s busy on a major project, and offers to take her back to his warehouse lab, which puts Ronnie in the difficult position of wondering how professional this excursion is going to be. Is a scoop worth the threat of an awkward proposition—or, worse, a sexual assault? The run-down, unpopulated, middle-of-nowhere location doesn’t look promising to say the least. 

The good news is that Seth really does have something amazing to show her, and the better news is that she genuinely connects with him and seizes the opportunity to turn the development of his teleportation project into a book. But she isn’t done getting threatened. Her ex-boyfriend Stathis (John Getz), also her editor at Particle magazine, is pathologically jealous and inserts himself back into her life at every opportunity. And then once Seth puts himself through the telepod—which he does, pointedly, in his own drunken fit of jealousy—he becomes a terror through a sharp escalation of his masculine traits. The strength and potency, yes, but also a sociopathic narcissism, a lack of restraint and empathy, and an unhinged temper. 

Ronnie is the surrogate for the audience, because even in his most charming moments, Seth is a Jeff Goldblum character, odd and aloof, and it’s tough to find your footing with him. Davis’ vulnerability figures into why The Fly is such a scary movie, and I think Ronnie’s experience navigating this perilous world of men is a major theme of the film. What does she do about an ex who disregards every personal and professional boundary she’s established? How does she reconcile her love for Seth with the dangerous man he’s become? Can she help him and still protect herself? These are awful questions. And they’re the kind that too many women have to ask themselves, whether the guy they like is turning into a fly or not. 

What do you think, Keith? Did Ronnie’s experience affect you in a similar way? And what do you make of The Fly as a piece of commercial moviemaking? 

Keith: It really is Ronnie’s story as much as Seth’s, isn’t it? And it’s a scary journey for all the reasons you mention. It’s telling that Stathis, who’s established as a smug, boundary-ignoring creep, becomes her best hope to get out of a dangerous situation without ever becoming any less of a creep. Turning to him for protection and to help secure an abortion is a true any-port-in-a-storm solution. (Stathis’ fundamental ickiness also makes it hard to feel too bad when he gets to experience Brundlefly’s digestive system firsthand in the climax, a clever touch.)

As to your second question, The Dead Zone (which I like a lot) is probably the most commercial film Cronenberg ever made, but The Fly plays like a true genetic splicing of one of his Canadian films and what 1986 expected of a commercial horror film. It shares his past work’s concern with mutation—both physical and metaphorical—but it also delivers the horror goods. It’s a 20th Century Fox release that draws a lot from the tradition of Universal Horror and its sympathetic monsters. Brundle even gets a Creature from the Black Lagoon-like monster-carries-the-terrified-heroine-in-his-arms shot. And, like the Gill Man, the Wolf Man, and Frankenstein’s Monster before him, it’s impossible not to feel for poor Brundle. He may be awkward and aloof as the film begins and disgusting as it ends, and his arrogance and personality flaws might be his downfall, but he’s also a brilliant, gentle soul–and Ronnie loves him. If The Fly didn’t work as a love story—and though it’s a short film it spends a lot of time setting up their romance and establishing the couple—it wouldn’t work at all.

But boy does it work. It’s filled with quintessential Cronenbergian themes, particularly the relationship between our bodies and our inner selves, and how it might be a mistake to make a distinction between the two. Seth changes on a biological level and his personality responds in kind, but is it fair to say the creature he becomes isn’t still Seth Brundle? Or, maybe it’s the idea that there’s any kind of fundamental self that’s not prey to the whims of biology and chemistry that’s the illusion. But I also think The Fly extends beyond territory Cronenberg has covered before. Seth and Ronnie’s situation mirrors what it’s like to watch a loved one succumb to disease, or to be the loved one succumbing. Cronenberg has said the film isn’t specifically a metaphor for AIDS, but those parallels are certainly there. But it’s also about aging and the way the body changes and falters. Seth jokes that he sees getting hairier as one of the compensations of old age, but the idea of your body breaking down without your permission is as terrifying as it is universal. The Fly is gross and shocking—that maggot dream sequence!—but it’s also haunting in a way that’s hard to shake. A couple of years ago I bit down on a crouton and, in the process, somehow broke two teeth. After the initial shock, I found myself thinking about how The Fly played like a warning of things to come. Things fall apart, even these things we call ourselves.

We haven’t even mentioned how good both Goldblum and Davis are here. Cronenberg’s early films tended to focus on fairly bland protagonists, which served them well. Those movies benefitted from having indistinct everymen at their centers. Woods in Videodrome, Walken in The Dead Zone, and Goldblum here all move away from that. Seth is a complex and tragic figure, and Davis’s Ronnie matches him well, trying her best to keep the situation from unraveling and only truly becoming afraid when she realizes she can’t. It defies any attempt to pigeonhole Cronenberg as just a cold, clinical filmmaker (as good as he is at the cold and the clinical.)

What a picture, right? This strikes me as the best possible marriage between Cronenberg and Hollywood (with a special nod to Mel Brooks and Brooksfilms, which took chances on movies like this and, previously, David Lynch’s The Elephant Man). Is that how you see it as well? And does it surprise you that Cronenberg wouldn’t end up working in that system more? And that he’d cash the blank check this film allowed (to borrow a phrase from a favorite podcast) so quickly on a project as seemingly uncommercial as Dead Ringers?

Scott: I think you make an important point here about Cronenberg’s reputation as a cold clinician, which is well-earned but doesn’t tell the full story. The films that we’ve talked about so far—The Brood and Videodrome in the last conversation, and now The Fly and Dead Ringers—are also defined by their emotional intensity and the behavior of human beings under extreme emotional duress. The violent mutant-dwarves in The Brood are quite literally the product of a bad divorce, with Samantha Eggar’s character producing these creatures because her body cannot withstand the anger and stress simmering within it. James Woods in Videodrome seeks out new frontiers in down-the-dial cable content, but his relationship with Deborah Harry’s radio host changes him, making his body a malleable portal that suggests a vulnerability that belies his edgy persona. The Fly is so effective in part because Cronenberg and his actors are invested in the love story aspect of it. Seth doesn’t get drunk and enter the telepod if he’s not overcome with jealousy over Ronnie, and Ronnie doesn’t put herself in so much danger if she doesn’t care about him, too. These are all huge, defining performances for a lot of these actors—ditto Christopher Walken in The Dead Zone—and they don’t happen if Cronenberg is operating within a chilly, limited emotional spectrum. 

I agree that The Fly is the perfect Cronenberg movie for Hollywood, though the intensity of the final act suggests why this wasn’t a marriage built to last. It may be rooted in traditions like the Universal monster movies, but what studio horror movie from the time does it resemble? It exists outside of any trends that I can see, and it isn’t really easy to classify strictly as a horror film, since the science-fiction and romance elements of it are so prominent, too. You hear about these other flirtations Hollywood has had with Cronenberg—the Return of the Jedi thing was nothing more than a phone call, but Basic Instinct 2 seems much more involved—but he was far too iconoclastic to fit into an era where studios were exercising greater control over their productions. The Fly has a great mainstream hook and a big beating heart in its central  relationship, but it finds Cronenberg already pushing the limits of what’s possible in Tinseltown. 

He’d keep on pushing with Dead Ringers, a film of such brazen unpleasantness that it takes my breath away every time I see it. But again, it’s another intensely emotional film that presents itself as coldly as those twisted gynecological instruments that Beverly Mantle orders from a metallurgical artist. Along with Elliot, Beverly is one of the Mantle brothers, identical twin gynecologists (both played by Jeremy Irons) who are celebrated for their scientific advances and a practice that’s at the cutting edge of the field. Their uncanny synchronicity has a darker side—the two will deliberately switch roles and confuse their identities, with the more confident Elliot seducing women at their clinic before passing them along to his more sensitive brother. But when Beverly falls in love with Claire (Geneviève Bujold), an actress who introduces him to recreational prescription drug use, the brothers fall dramatically out of rhythm, with tragic results. Cronenberg follows them as they circle the drain together, codependent to the very last breath. 

The prologue is a dark joke that sets up the whole film. The twins are precocious adolescent schoolboys in Toronto, engaging in their own weird version of sex talk. One tells the other that the reason humans have sex is that we don’t live underwater. They then come upon a like-aged girl (“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” “Yeah, you ask her”), and proposition her into having sex in their bathtub—an offer she rejects, calling them “freaks.” This is the prelude we get to the Mantle boys becoming gynecologists, giving them access to women in their most vulnerable state. But it also sets the table for their stunted development as human beings. They are “freaks,” just as the girl said, but as their minds develop and they become sophisticated thinkers and physicians, they never develop as thoughtful, empathetic emotional beings. They’re forever those unsettling juveniles from next door. 

One scene stands out for me in this regard. Beverly is deep into his relationship with Claire, who unknowingly met and slept with his brother first, after he examined her and diagnosed her with a “trifurcated cervix.” (This later leads to the film’s most memorable line, when Beverly mistakes Claire’s gay assistant for her lover and asks him if he knows he’s “fucking a mutant.”) She’s late to realize that Beverly has an identical twin, and the deception obviously infuriates her. She demands that they meet Elliot for dinner, and when Elliot smugly addresses her accusations, Claire throws a drink on Beverly and storms out. The scene amuses Elliot until he looks over at his brother, who’s crying. Beverly has become attached to someone other than his brother. And their relationship, further ruptured by Beverly’s drug abuse, never gets on track again. 

It occurred to me watching Dead Ringers again that the Mantle brothers simply never grew up, despite their obvious intelligence and despite being played by Irons, whose air of sophistication is unrivaled. Beverly’s reaction to Claire at the restaurant is so raw that you know he’s never felt that way before, which is how all of us feel over that first adolescent breakup. You almost never feel that intensely about someone again. And when he gets the assistant on the phone and, in a jealous rage, says the most abusive thing he can conjure up, it’s like an explosion of internalized misogyny, along with his bruised feelings. The Mantles are such a frightening gynecological duo because they detest women, dating back to the girl who mocked them as teenagers and surely many others like them. These tools they develop to advance women’s health become implements of torture when their shortcomings as adult men are exposed. 

Is there a pattern to Cronenberg’s men here, Keith? What do you make of the bond between the Mantles, and Irons’ dual performance? It’s astounding to consider how difficult it must have been for Irons to track twins on such diverging trajectories. 

Keith: I’m not sure men who, to one degree or another, fundamentally don’t understand women have figured into every Cronenberg movie up to this point, but I think they’ve figured into them enough to count as a motif. (There’s more just over the horizon, too: Naked Lunch, which we’re covering soon, and the Irons reunion M. Butterfly, which we’re not). The Mantles understand aspects of how women work on a biological level better than just about anyone else on the planet, but that’s where their understanding stops. Beverly has better bedside manners (at least as the film opens) and Elliot can charm the public, but these distinctions feel less like parts of their personalities than adaptive traits they’ve picked up in order to survive. It’s reductive to say that, put together, they make one person. If true, it’s a pretty crappy person.

And yet, I can’t help but feel for the Mantles. Bev’s heartbreak is real, as is Elliot’s puzzlement over it and fear for his and his brother’s future. I find this movie incredibly moving, despite the Mantles’ fundamental loathsomeness. (That’s exemplified by the casualness with which they pose as one another in intimate situations as if this weren’t a horrible violation. Just because they don’t see themselves as individuals so much as a single functional unit—again, at least as the film opens—doesn’t mean others share that feelling.) Maybe it’s because of the intensity of the emotions in spite of the now literally clinical trappings. When Claire sighs “Doctor, I’m cured” after having sex while bound with medical equipment, it’s a melancholy scrap of pillow talk. She knows the doctor can’t cure her no matter how intimate they get. But she can pretend.

Irons' work is incredible here. Except in the final scenes, which intentionally blur the Mantles’ identities, it’s never a question of which Mantle is which. Bev holds his mouth differently. Elliot carries himself with more confidence. However dependent they are on one another, they’re not the same. Even Chang and Eng Bunker, the famed conjoined twins Beverly references with increasing frequency as he starts to fall apart, had their differences. 

Leaving aside perpetual outlier Fast Company—I really should catch up with that some day, I guess—this is Cronenberg’s first non-horror film, but I think it looks like less of a radical departure now than it did at the time. Tonally and thematically it’s very much of a piece with what’s come before and what will follow. It’s a film about bodies and identity and the ways disease, sex, and chemicals can contribute to the evolution and dissolution of both. (We also still get some twisted biology, courtesy of a dream sequence, and talk of mutations.) And now seems as good a place as any to talk about Howard Shore, whose music is so essential to setting and keeping the mood of Cronenberg’s films. His scores demand viewers understand what they’re seeing is important and deserving of our full thought and consideration without telling us how to feel. He writes moving, dramatic music for Cronenberg, but the emotions are hard to pin down. It’s an inspired partnership.

Does this feel like a point of departure for Cronenberg to you, Scott? And do you also find this movie touching in ways that are hard to explain? The Mantles are, unlike Seth Brundle, awful. But the film puts a close-up on their humanity, however incomplete it might be.

Scott: One reason it doesn’t feel like a point of departure to me is that while it’s technically not a horror film, it is certainly full of horrors. There’s surely no more vulnerable position for anyone to be in voluntarily than a woman in stirrups, preparing for a gynecological exam. For her physicians to be this emotionally stunted and contemptuous of women is dangerous even before drugs and alcohol play a role. The scene where Bev attempts to use the twins’ patented, solid-gold surgical retractor for an ordinary exam may not involve screeching violins and things that go bump in the night, but it draws a shock nonetheless. Even in the best of times, you get the feeling that the Mantles are not committed to health care so much as a mutual fascination with the body, particularly when it takes an unusual form. Treating patients is a means to an end for them. 

But then, I don’t know that Cronenberg thinks about horror filmmaking in the same way a more typical genre stylist would. Beyond The Brood, which does offer a few conventionally rattling horror sequences, he produces images that make you recoil, and he does have a flair for the dramatic, like those wonderful shots of animals or humans emerging from the fog of the telepods in The Fly. But Dead Ringers feels entirely of a piece with Videodrome or Shivers. Cronenberg is exploring the extremes of human behavior and the tense relationship between the mind and the body–if that registers as horror, fine, but scaring audiences never seems to be the goal. 

I often tend to associate this Irons performance with his Oscar-winning turn as Claus Von Bulow in Reversal of Fortune, which would come out two years later. Both films take advantage of Irons’ high-toned arrogance, which often manifests itself in viciously droll one-liners. But there’s not a tragic component to Von Bulow, despite questions over whether he’s guilty of murdering his wife, because he’s an unsavory person regardless. The Mantles, by contrast, are an intensely lonely, alienated and codependent duo, and when they fall out of their symbiotic balance, you can sense how fragile that balance has been the whole time. Bev putting in that last phone call to Claire before retreating into his dead brother’s arms is so heartbreaking. He can’t even bring himself to say a word. 

What do you think of Cronenberg’s image-making here, Keith? I’ve always admired the silver-gray look of the film, which has a quality of surgical theater —sterile right up to the point when things fall apart. Meanwhile, the Mantles’ pristinely ordered spaces resemble Hunter S. Thompson’s hotel room in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The dramatic red gowns that Bev wears during his last operation, when he’s trying to use Anders Wolleck’s gynecological instruments and winds up huffing on the patient’s gas mask, suggests violence before anything even happens. Cronenberg isn’t a particularly flashy director, but he’s a master of mood. 

Keith: I vaguely remember Cronenberg saying he wanted the red gowns (designed by his sister Denise Cronenberg) to resemble a priest’s vestment, but in trying to chase down that quote I came across a description I really liked on the blog of a writer named Victoria Potenza, who writes that the costume “makes the brothers look like they are priests or cult leaders who control this world full of women because they have the ability to fix their bodies.” The reds certainly stand out, a reminder that the Mantles are in the business of bodies, which are anything but sterile and gray.

I also love the way he composes actors within the frame in this film. There are some obviously impressive shots of the Mantles walking together—accomplished with computer-controlled cameras in the pre-digital era of 1988—but also unforgettable images like Beverly hunched in the window seat of the clinic or Elliot’s twin sex workers (played by Jill Hennessy, in her debut, and her twin sister Jacqueline) gazing up as he instructs them on what to call him. The moment that always takes my breath away is the dance to The Five Satins’ “In the Still of the Night,” in which Elliot and his sometime lover Cary (Heidi von Palleske) lure Beverly out of his funk and into their arms. Cary’s the anti-Claire. She’s “with” Elliot, but she’s already freely offered herself to Beverly. As perverse as the arrangement might be, it looks for a moment like she might restore the balance between the two and, based on her reaction to being embraced by the twins, is more than happy with that arrangement. It doesn’t last. Beverly’s lost to them. Elliot will soon follow. Conjoined twins rarely have long lives, even if the connection isn’t visible.

Not to veer off subject too much), but I’m very intrigued by the forthcoming Amazon Prime series based on Dead Ringers starring Rachel Weisz. I like Weisz a lot, and showrunner Alice Birch wrote Lady Macbeth and has worked on Succession. But it’s also the remake that has to do something new with the material simply by virtue of making the protagonists women. This is a film about men who exert power over the world of women despite their alienation from it. A project with female Mantle twins can’t be that. But how readily does Cronenberg lend himself to remakes anyway? I’ve never seen the (twin) filmmaking duo Jen and Sylvia Soska’s 2019 remake of Rabid, but I have seen other proposed remakes get announced and fall apart, like Scanners (which did inspire some direct-to-video sequels), Shivers and Videodrome. Maybe some things are harder to double than others.

Next week: Experiments and Adaptations: Naked Lunch and Crash