The Fly

Recently, I re-watched The Fly on HBO. Not the original Vincent Price movie, but the David Cronenberg remake w/ Jeff Goldblum. I've always liked the movie but hadn't seen it in a long time. Funny thing is -- and this is admittedly slightly twisted -- after watching it now as a parent, I looked at it in a different way. So consider this my Halloween-themed post.

In the movie, Seth Brundle becomes merged at a DNA level with a fly, ultimately becoming a human-fly. It's pretty gruesome and frightening, but you feel empathy for Seth. Seth and the fly are sort of combined as a gene splice. So, in my slightly twisted way (see above), I thought of producing a kid as a same sort of gene splice w/ my wife. And obviously I don't think it's gruesome or frightening (well, maybe a *little* frightening), but loosely the same idea.

And I think the movie touches on this when Seth realizes that his unborn child is being carried by girlfriend Veronica. After finding out, he decides that the best way to correct his problem is to horrifically combine himself (plus the fly), Veronica, and his unborn child into one being, in that way mixing up all the DNA together. Which again made me think of what a child is -- a combination of many generations of DNA. But of course, normally a child is it's own entity. Seth even makes the comment that by doing this he would be creating the ultimate family unit (or something to that effect).

Dunno, after writing this out it all sounds more than slightly twisted, but somehow I related this to producing another human and combining DNA with my wife. Horror movies often deal with science-gone-bad, or paranoid technology fantasies that produce terrible results. Same thing w/ The Fly. So I looked at it as a comment on gene splicing and manipulating DNA and how doing something as unnatural as that will only lead to trouble. Let mother nature take care of things in the proper natural way.

In any case, I do like the movie a lot, even though after watching recently I found Jeff Goldblum to be more annoying than I remember him being. He got a lot of praise for that role as I remember. Anyway, that's sort of my disjointed take on The Fly and babies.