Notes on The Fly (1986)

I just watched the director's commentary version of The Fly, which we recently discussed. A few things worth noting:

1) The film is definitely set in Toronto. Cronenberg notes here that most of his films are set in, and in some sense are about, the city of Toronto. This is fascinating to me because Cronenberg's films remind me of how I personally experience Toronto- intellectually stimulating, but socially and emotionally chilly.

2) A number of people speculated that The Fly is about AIDS when it was released. Cronenberg says that some of the people involved thought of the film that way; but he saw the transformation as a metaphor for disease, and mortality more generally. He says that it's much harder for him to watch now that he's twenty years older- the idea that we're slowly falling apart physically is much more real for him. It hasn't quite become real for me; but I suspect that my own love of horror films, and other sublime arts, is a way of mediating my own fears about decay and loss.

3) Of the constant videotaping that the characters do in the film, Cronenberg says that he was commenting on the increasing tendency of people to remove themselves from their own lives through technology, which incidentally I think could also apply to blogging.

4) Apparently, the film is being made into an opera. I noticed how operatic it is, with the tragic love triangle and its single set. The music in the film is similarly operatic.