What THE FLY Taught Me About Women's Right to Choose

David Cronenberg's 1986 remake of THE FLY is frequently cited as one of the best movie remakes ever.  The original is a good and cheesy '50s bug horror movie that ends on a surprisingly poignant note, but the Cronenberg cranks everything about that to a delightfully disgusting and seriously heart-wrenching 11.  Honestly, this movie has one of the most devastating endings ever, and it's bombastic in a way that is just on the brink of being unintentionally funny, but then is not.  It's just brutal.  People mostly remember it for its Academy Award-winning makeup utilized in creating the nauseatingly gruesome transformation of brilliant scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) into a giant mutant housefly.  Brundle is introduced as a socially inept but genius scientist-inventor who persuades a skeptical journalist named Veronica Quaife (Geena Daivs) to come back to his warehouse home/laboratory where he shows off his latest work: a pair of "telepods" that can instantaneously transfer physical matter from a pod on one side of the room to the other.  He offers her the exclusive scoop, but the telepods aren't yet ready, and still can't successfully transfer living tissue.  As their working relationship develops, he continuing to work on the machines and she recording the process for her story, Seth and Veronica begin an intimate relationship as well.  One night, while drunk, he decides to finally test the telepods with himself, but he doesn't notice the tiny housefly that has slipped into the pod with him.  While his atoms are broken down in the pod, so are the fly's, and both are reintegrated together on a molecular level when they come out the other side, but he doesn't recognize it at first.  He feels strong, healthy and powerful, and he is much stronger, with his stamina having increased exponentially.  All he wants to do is have sex and eat.  He believes the teleportation process has had a 'purifying' effect on his body, and he desperately wants Veronica to try it too, but she refuses.  Then, he starts getting himself into trouble, what with ruthlessly snapping a man's arm during an arm wrestling contest, and he develops lesions while fingernails, teeth and other body parts start to fall away.  He's losing his human empathy and reason, while the fly's primitive instincts take over, and eventually, he'll be unrecognizable as a human.
Meanwhile, Veronica is stuck with the situation of having had so much sex with the "Brundlefly" when she thought he was regular Brundle, and now she's pregnant.
In the most "Cronenbergian" scene of the movie, Veronica has a gruesome nightmare where she gives birth to a giant, human baby-sized maggot, and understandably, she makes a beeline to a doctor's office in the middle of the night to have an abortion.  Yeesh, abortion; is there a more polarizing topic than that?  Politicians and activists divide themselves up into "pro-life" and "pro-choice", because no reasonable but otherwise uninformed person is going to hear the words 'life' or 'choice' and be against either?  C'mon!  The pro-life position, or "anti-choice" as their opponents sometimes call them, is a fairly easy one to make and basically comes down to being against murdering babies.  They might as well be protesting people sodomizing puppies.  No healthy human being is in favor of sodomizing puppies, and no normal human being is in favor of murdering babies.  However, life is complicated, and situations of rape, incest, risk to the mother or, in rare cases, impregnation by Brundlefly do occur, and those are solid arguments on the the pro-choice side, or as their opponents might call them, baby murderers.  'Choice' as an issue is trickier to defend if you're not a woman who genuinely feels the need to have an abortion right now.  Practically every person is intensely in favor of their own individual right to choose for themselves, but we're all a lot stricter when it comes to the choices of others. 
Now, it may have only been a nightmare, but in a movie where a man is gradually transforming into a giant fly, there's a healthy chance that Geena Davis is carrying a horrifying giant maggot in her womb.  This is just a guess, but I suspect even most anti-abortion hardliners probably wouldn't be against this particular abortion, but we're working with metaphors here, so bear with me.
Being of the not-a-woman persuasion, I'm particularly unlikely to ever personally want an abortion myself, but that doesn't mean haven't given some thought to the issue.  It's a pain though, because if you haven't already dug yourself in with the talking points of either end of the spectrum, it's so easy to become caught in a never-ending loop of moral relativism and moral equivalences.  If it's about when life begins, I start thinking about the TV commercial for anti-bacterial Kleenex tissues where a stereotypical Himalayan monk sneezes into a tissue and is horrified to realize how many living creatures he just killed.  Technically, a fertilized egg is a form of human life in that it's comprised of multiplying cells with human DNA, but human cells multiply into a lot of things, tumors, for instance.  The difference is that these zygotes, embryos and fetuses all have the potential to develop into a viable human being.  So do sperms and eggs for that matter, and then you fall into that weird "Every Sperm is Sacred" territory.  It just goes on and on and on.
Geena Davis's character is so desperate, she calls up her skeezy ex to take her to the doctor, and the doctor is bewildered, asking why it's so urgent that she requested to seem him in the middle of the night.  "Because I don't want it in my body!  I don't want it inside my body!" she shouts between sobs.  I was watching that, and it suddenly clicked for me.  Their bodies.  Like, holy crap.  I've heard the arguments that laws restricting abortion were made by old white men trying to legislate women's bodies, but it hadn't resonated for me the same way until this moment while watching this ultra-gory monster movie.  This is about something inside and using up a woman's body, something she didn't want, maybe which she can't afford either financially, emotionally or physically, and should she be forced (mind you, not merely encouraged to but forced) to provide herself as a human life support system? 

"Should a woman be forced to provide her own body as a life support system?"

I mean, it's still a complicated issue, but even then, no matter how hard you try, you can't actually force that on anyone.  People will try to find an alternative, so that alternative needs to be safe and available.  People don't have abortions for abortions' sake; in this increasingly bizarre world, I suppose there may be an exception out there, but women don't intentionally get pregnant so that they can have an abortion.  I suppose you could say that if they can't afford to have a child then they shouldn't be having sex, but then again, if you can't afford a car accident, maybe you shouldn't be driving anywhere.  It's a cruel and vindictive argument, and a standard that most people would not hold themselves to.  If it's practical for a woman to carry a pregnancy to term and then give the child up for adoption, that's probably a more desirable option than terminating the pregnancy, but if it isn't practical, it's not right to put that all on the individual woman. 

"If you can't afford a car accident, maybe you shouldn't be driving anywhere either."

The idea of heavily discouraging the abortion option is troubling too, because there are cases where it really is the best option for a person, and they shouldn't be made to feel bad for doing what's right in their situation.  The issue of what constitutes sentient human life between gametes, zygotes, embryos and fetuses is still a frustrating one, and while it would open a whole new massive and absurd can of ethical worms, if fetuses not viable outside the uterus could be sustained in an artificial womb, maybe that would be more desirable (that's a huge-ass 'maybe', I recognize the risibility of this hypothetical).  As long as it's entirely reliant on the woman's body, though, it has to come down to the individual woman.  When a person is being kept clinically alive by a life support system, we trust the family or whoever to determine whether or not to maintain life support, and heaven knows where the line between life and death in regards to a beating heart and an inactive brain.  A healthy pregnancy that a woman may feel the need to terminate is different, admittedly, in that a continued course will naturally lead to viable life, but a woman should probably be allowed to decide whether her body will be used as a life support system at whichever time.  But I'm only talking about abortions in respect to otherwise healthy pregnancies.  In cases of pregnancies that risk the life to the mother, I'm all for it and trying again another time.  For now, people who claim to be "pro-life" should be in favor of responsibly caring for life throughout its course and not only in its creation, and the falsehoods and blatant manipulations will only hurt their cause in the long run.  Anyway, that's what I took away from THE FLY.
THE FLY 
(HORROR/SCI-FI, 1986)
Directed by David Cronenberg
Written by Charles Edward Pogue & David Cronenberg
Starring: Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis, John Getz, Joy Boushel, Leslie Carlson, George Chuvalo, Mike Copeman, David Cronenberg, Carol Lazare, Shawn Hewitt
Rated R for unspecified reasons (disturbing violent content and gore, sexuality and language).
96 minutes

About That Twist: A SPLIT Review Addendum **SPOILERS**

There are some well-hidden revelations in M. Night Shyamalan's new film SPLIT that warrant discussing within the film as a whole, but if you haven't yet seen the movie, please be warned this post contains major, big-ass "spoilers" that won't necessarily ruin the experience of the movie for most viewers, but going in blank is an important aspect of the movie-going experience for some people, and what's more, this twist is pretty fun.  You have been warned.








The last scene of the SPLIT, not quite a post-credits "stinger", but which immediately follows an ending title card, reveals that the movie takes place in the same fictional universe as Shyamalan's 17-year-old fan-favorite UNBREAKABLE, and is in fact a sort of "quasi-sequel."  As patrons in a bar watch the news report of the kidnapping of three high school girls by Kevin Crumb, a man with dissociative identity disorder that manifests as 24 distinct personalities including a superhuman, cannibalistic one called "The Beast", and taken together referred to in the news report as "The Horde", some of the patrons remark on the similarity of the case of one from 15 years ago involving a man in a wheelchair, but they can't remember his name.  The theme from UNBREAKABLE plays on the soundtrack, and although I admit that I didn't spot it right away, I knew it was from an older Shyamalan movie, but once they mention the "man in a wheelchair," I caught on.  Bruce Willis, at the end of the bar, leans forward, wearing a security guard uniform labeled "Dunn," (David Dunn) just in case there was any doubt, and answers that the man's name was "Mr. Glass."
People have been asking Shyamalan to make a sequel to UNBREAKABLE for years, noting that the original thriller that followed up Shyamalan's break-out hit THE SIXTH SENSE was a superhero movie before superhero movies had become popular.  Superman and Batman had had their moments of box office success of course, but the Superman film series had been dead in the water for 13 years and an attempt to bring it back with Tim Burton in the '90s had ended in expensive failure, and the Batman series had ground to a halt shortly after the poisonous fan and critic response to 1997's BATMAN & ROBIN.  Sam Raimi's SPIDER-MAN was still two years away, and Marvel Studios wouldn't begin independently producing their own movies for the "Marvel Cinematic Universe" until 8 years later.  The superhero genre was dormant, and UNBREAKABLE was marketed as a psychological thriller to capitalize on the runaway success of THE SIXTH SENSE a year earlier.  But UNBREAKABLE doesn't feel much like a superhero movie anyway.  It has a somber tone similar to other Shyamalan movies, and it approaches superheroes in a meta, sort-of grounded way.  David Dunn is, by all appearances, physically invincible to any means except for drowning, but there's some suggestion that there's a bit of magical thinking his improbable survival of deadly accidents, and when his son nearly shoots him with a gun to prove David is indestructible, the scene is tense and ends with David talking his son down from pulling the trigger, rather than going for the wonder and awe of a bullet bouncing of the hero, Superman-style.  We never find out is David would survive a point blank gunshot.  We know he can survive a horrific train wreck, though.  David also never lifts a car over his head or gets thrown through a building, but he bench presses 350 lbs. and rips a car door off of its hinges, despite having the appearance of an ordinary man.  He initially mistakes his extrasensory abilities to read people's ill intentions as mere hunches.
UNBREAKABLE is good, but more importantly, it's unique in a way that has made it stand out and develop a strong cult following.  I first saw it on TV when I was 14 or 15, and I hadn't heard of it before then that I remember.  I remember THE SIXTH SENSE opening in theaters and people talking about it in 1999.  I remember everyone talking about SIGNS in 2002.  UNBREAKABLE just passed by.  It wasn't a box office failure, grossing a solid $248 million worldwide against a $75 million budget, but it wasn't on the level of THE SIXTH SENSE's $672 million gross or SIGNS's $408 million.  Reviews were positive, but less enthusiastic than with THE SIXTH SENSE or SIGNS.  But now, it's probably Shyamalan's most highly regarded movie, surpassing THE SIXTH SENSE in popularity (if not familiarity), and it frequently appears on lists of the best superhero movies.  Frankly, it's overrated.  It's good, but it's greatest strength is that it's conceptually interesting, and it has the same narrative and tonal clumsiness as Shyamalan's more successful movies.
What's really great about SPLIT turning out to be connected to UNBREAKABLE though is how the reveal ties together what are otherwise some very strange loose ends.  Even (or often) when he doesn't realize it, Shyamalan is not above being ridiculous, so sometimes it seems like SPLIT's portrayal of DID is symptomatic of a typical Shyamalan leap of logic, that the mind is so powerful that it can physically transform the body.  It would be one thing if The Beast personality took over and made Kevin behave like a cannibalistic wild man and that would be that, but blue veins also bulge all over his body, he grows taller, is able to bend iron bars and scale walls with his bare hands.  We're not talking a full-blown Hulk-out, but it's something similar that could exist in the established UNBREAKABLE world of restrained superpowers.  Without the final scene, SPLIT is a rough and rowdy little thriller that jumps the shark from improbable territory to unreasonably supernatural.  In some ways, the last scene reveal may be pandering for an audience's amused recognition with which comes temporary good will like a lazy cameo, or it may be a tacked-on and unearned justification, but it works better than that.  There is a pleasant sensation of recognition, but it's also really cool how that combines with something that elevates the themes and events of the plot that just played out.

Review: SPLIT

SPLIT
(THRILLER) 
★★★
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
Starring: James McAvoy, Anya Taylor-Joy, Betty Buckley, Haley Lu Richardson, Jessica Sula, Izzie Leigh Coffey, Brad William Henke, Sebastian Arcelus, Neal Huff, Kim Director
Rated PG-13 for disturbing thematic material and behavior, violence and some language.
117 minutes
Verdict: Shyamalan's latest is at least as flawed as his best movies, but it's also fun, funny, clever and ends with one hell of a mic drop to make for his strongest movie in years.
YOU MAY BE INTERESTED IN SPLIT IF YOU LIKED:
THE VISIT  (2015)
10 CLOVERFIELD LANE  (2016)
DEVIL  (2010)
UNBREAKABLE  (2000)
MORGAN  (2016)
I still haven't seen THE VISIT, but it seems that most people agree that it was a substantial improvement on filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan's more recent howlers like AFTER EARTH and THE LAST AIRBENDER.  A lot of people see THE VILLAGE, which I actually think is fine with some prominent strengths, as his turning point from the promising writer-director of THE SIXTH SENSE to becoming a much-loathed one trick pony, but even between THE SIXTH SENSE, UNBREAKABLE and SIGNS, even his best movies have big problems.  LADY IN THE WATER was the worst one, at least, maybe about on par with THE LAST AIRBENDER.  He has a juvenile, somewhat schlocky style, but also an occasionally overwhelming sense of self-importance.  In SPLIT, however, with a low budget of $10 million (still double that of THE VISIT, but only a quarter the cost of THE SIXTH SENSE), Shyamalan embraces the schlock and plays well to his strengths in a weird, imperfect and exploitatively fun thriller.  Are we seeing the Shyamalanaissance?
SPLIT showcases a knockout performance by James McAvoy as "Kevin", a man with an exaggerated form of dissociative identity disorder that manifests in 23 different distinct personalities that battle for prominence in "the light".  Usually the most sensible of his personalities, "Barry", maintains control, but recently, three others have taken over; the orderly and harsh "Dennis", the supposedly sweet but cruel "Patricia", and the innocent "9-year-old" boy "Hedwig," who kidnap three high school girls (Anya Taylor-Johnson of THE WITCH, Haley Lu Richardson and Jessica Sula) as sacrifices to a previously unrevealed personality they call "The Beast."

Far and away the highlight of the movie is McAvoy, who goes all in with each of his many characters, frequently alternating between and combining menace and humor.  Occasionally, Hedwig feels like a little too much, like a cartoonish representation of a mentally handicapped person, but he also has a great dance sequence, and in a turtleneck sweater, pendant and skirt, McAvoy makes Patricia hilariously weird with a bit of formality and a bit of sass.  One of the weaker points of the movie is a subplot involving Kevin's psychiatrist, Dr. Fletcher (Betty Buckley), who gives a lot of Shyamalan-style exposition about dissociative identity disorder (a highly fictionalized version of it anyway), and there are aspects of the plot that play pretty clumsily until some very late developments tie them together with unexpected and exciting efficiency, if in a slightly questionable way.  I can't say any more about it here than that.
It starts to feel long around the third act, and at two hours, it might play better if it were about 20 minutes shorter.  On the other hand, most of the movie moves along really well, with the action kicking off very early on and then leading from one doomed escape attempt after another as the girls try to manipulate the naive but not altogether innocent Hedwig.  Suffice it to say, that while it may not be perfect, SPLIT is undeniably fun and unexpectedly funny, and easily Shyamalan's best new movie in over a decade.

Images via Universal