A deep, penetrating dive into the plasma pool. I'm catching The Fly (1986) again this evening, excuse the pun—no particular message in this one, just thought I'd share. The meagerness of the film's conception is borderline painful: the trite weasely-ex-boyfriend backstory, the bald, silly thematic pronouncements about "the flesh." ("Only inanimate objects. I have to learn about the flesh." "I have to teach the computer to be crazy about the flesh," which must have sounded every bit as implausible a thing to teach a computer when the film was made, in a more innocent era.) But the flesh stuff is just a Maguffin, anyway. And the cheapness is somehow instrumental to the film's operatic camp.

In the service of that camp, Jeff Goldblum gives what must be the only great performance he ever had in him. I've always found Goldblum's predominant affect of smarmy self-satisfaction off-putting, but it's hardly apparent here, and when it is it's perfectly deployed. Goldblum gives two great performances, in fact, set-piece performances—one psychological, in the post-teleportation sequence where Brundle goes from hypomania to full-on delusions of grandeur, and the other ... My first temptation is to call the other one, Brundle's fly-ification, physical, but I think it's better called moral. Mediated by Goldblum's odd physical awkwardness, which is a perfect substrate for David Cronenberg's body-disgust, but with a dimension of horrified self-awareness that strikes me as genuinely remarkable (from an actorly standpoint) and is genuinely moving, especially contrasted with the furious loss of self-awareness in the manic episode that precedes it. I'm hard put to think of another actor who could simultaneously have managed to hit all the camp notes in the great "insect politician" speech and reveal such a pathos of moral and intellectual self-disgust. The rickety structure of the movie around him is almost necessary, as a foil to set off the brilliance and depth of Goldblum's work.

posted by michael  9:25:08 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Dept. of Self-Promotion. My feature article on James Guckert/Jeff Gannon, "Becoming Jeff Gannon," is up now on Alternet. I mention it because it's the first thing of this sort I've published, if you discount some local journalism I did while I lived in Baton Rouge, and I'm pleased with it (in spite of a couple of slightly tone-deaf edits in the intro). Also because Alternet, presumably following its standard practice for assigning credit, has somewhat misrepresented things: it cites Tex MacRae and blogslut at the bottom of the piece for "additional research," but that's not good enough. "Additional" implies that the primary research was mine—it wasn't; Tex was responsible for the research, and for the initiative that brought me on to write the thing at all. I just slung the words together. Tex did all the hard stuff, the spadework, and without blogslut's analysis of Guckert's Web pornmastering I wouldn't have come close to getting that part of the story right. Much thanks to them both. (It's a bonus of my collaboration with Tex that we've kind of become buddies as a result.) I think I could get a taste for doing this sort of writing regularly.

Now for the acid test—let's see if the tough audience of Freepa hatas over at Clown Posse think the piece is worth something.

Oh and Jeff, if you work your way over here, I owe you thanks, too. There's something about your story that just works for me, you know? And you open such a nice, wide avenue into understanding how the noise machine gets put together ...

posted by michael  12:28:11 AM  
tell me about it []