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The Terrifying Allure of Nonhuman Cinema
When the drama of human life is secondary to the plot
Early in the pandemic I watched two films, one that I’d seen dozens of times before, and one new to me. David Cronenberg’s 1986 classic The Fly offers a fairly standard narrative arc: A scientist named Seth Brundle plays God and is punished. His secret invention, a teleportation machine which analyzes your molecules in one telepod and reconstructs them in another, is world-changing. But Brundle gets ahead of himself, deciding drunkenly one night to teleport himself long before he’s worked out the kinks and the safety protocols for his machine. A fly buzzes into the telepod with him, and the machine fuses its molecules with Brundle’s, setting the scene for some iconic gene-splicing and gruesome special effects. His girlfriend Ronnie is initially excited by his new strength and sexual prowess, but soon he’s exhibiting other side effects. Violent, grotesque and distorted, he ceases to be Seth Brundle and becomes Brundlefly, a hideous hybrid. By the film’s end, Ronnie and her old boyfriend have no choice but to destroy the thing he’s become.
Weeks later, I watched Shane Carruth’s 2013 film, Upstream Color, the plot of which is harder to summarize. It would seem, at first, to follow a woman, Kris, who’s assaulted outside a club one night by a mysterious thief. Knocking her out, he forcibly injects a parasitic worm into her. Once inside her, the parasite renders her soporific and suggestible. The Thief keeps her occupied for days with menial tasks while instructing her to turn her home equity over to him, along with her stash of rare coins. Having bled her dry, he vanishes. Disoriented and unable to remember what has happened to her, Kris awakes to find something moving under her skin, some kind of large, parasitic worm. She finds herself drawn to a remote farm, where another man (the “Sampler”) draws out worm from her and implants it in a pig. Bankrupt, her life destroyed, with no memory of how it happened, Kris attempts to move on. A year later, she meets Jeff, who had something similar happen to him. The two slowly begin a relationship with each other, but it is a relationship motivated less by love or attraction than by a series of compulsive, unstated or undefined drives.
