The Fly

It’s hard to fathom that it’s been decades since David Cronenberg was actually a horror-movie director. Yes, some of his films of recent years have had horrific elements — say, 2014’s Maps to the Stars — but The Fly, released thirty years ago, represented Cronenberg’s farewell to a certain type of sci-fi/horror movie he’d practically patented, the icky bio-horror film that treated bodily mutation not as a threat but as a source of fascination — even self-realization. Movies like Shivers, Rabid and The Brood were 101 courses; The Fly was Cronenberg’s doctoral thesis, and it turned out to be the biggest hit he would ever have.

For a brief moment in the summer of 1986, the mass audience bought what Cronenberg was selling — a doomed romance packaged as a dare-you-to-sit-through-it gross-out. The Fly was the perfect vehicle to introduce Cronenberg to the larger mainstream, which he then wasted no time alienating (Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, M. Butterfly, Crash). Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum, never more charismatic) is the foxiest and most attractive of the Cronenberg avatars, a genius whose motion sickness has driven him to develop a means of teleportation. Seth shows his work to science reporter Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis in a sharp early performance), though it isn’t quite ready for prime time — the “telepod” has trouble with organic material like flesh.

Cronenberg readies us for the nausea to come when an early experiment involving a baboon goes haywire. The Fly goes incredibly fast. Cronenberg’s regular editor, Ronald Sanders, clips the scenes to a bleeding edge, and it’s not long at all before Seth — jealous because his new lover Veronica still has contact with her old lover and magazine editor (John Getz) — gets drunk and decides to teleport himself. Of course, a fly stows away for the ride, and when Seth is re-integrated in the other telepod, the molecular-genetic structure of the fly has fused with Seth’s. He becomes Brundlefly, and he gains superhuman strength and speed before deteriorating into a lumpy, grotesque creature who has to vomit on his food to digest it. (Emetophobes are, understandably, not among the movie’s fans.) Eventually Seth begins to lose his humanity and pass over into insect consciousness, leading to his frightening monologue about “insect politics,” which serves to explain his personality change. “I’m an insect who dreamed he was a man and loved it,” Seth clarifies (sort of), “but the insect is awake.”

Aside from having a Fox-produced (and Mel Brooks-sponsored) big-movie sheen — and Howard Shore’s most dramatic score this side of Lord of the Rings — this may be Cronenberg’s most emotionally accessible film, and it really only has the three characters, other than sidebar figures who drift into Seth’s path briefly. It’s fast, and it’s also stripped down; you’re out of there in less than ninety minutes, but by then, you might be ready to go. The Fly also marks the beginning of Cronenberg’s second phase of films, the terribly sad meditations on the fragility of sanity (his next, Dead Ringers, is among the most depressing movies ever made). The movie follows Seth through the twin breakdowns of mind and body.

The transition wouldn’t work nearly so well, of course, without Geena Davis convincing us that she still loves the man underneath the monstrosity, and without Jeff Goldblum persuading us the man is still there. There’s none of Goldblum’s later grinning, apartments.com-hawking smugness in this hyperverbal turn. Seth maintains a lively scientific interest in his own grotesque transformation, more for his own edification than for posterity. Cronenberg was right to keep Seth restlessly eloquent right up to the full transformation — Seth crests on his own ersatz insights, like someone on a cocaine rush, and then collapses into rage and lust, while Veronica looks on helplessly. (Without being condescendingly dumbed-down — she does know her way around a lab, after all — Davis’s Veronica is the audience’s stand-in, staring aghast as Seth riffs mumbo-jumbo about “the plasma pool.”) Seth has a way of dancing rhetorical circles around his topic, then focusing his ire abruptly on his listener and spitting vituperation. Nobody can keep up with Seth; he’s the foremost expert on his condition because he’s its only host body.

The emotions as well as the intellect carry us through the gushers of goop. At its best, the movie comes close to the power of classic tragedy — the moods are exaltation, dread, disgust, grief. Some have taken it for an allegory about AIDS or cancer, but Cronenberg means it to be less ripped-from-the-headlines and more timeless: a meditation on anything that changes us physically, and the corresponding mental changes. After The Fly, there was really nowhere else Cronenberg could take his body-horror obsessions. It’s a remarkably economical distillation and commercial apotheosis of his pet themes, and it works brutally well in the realms of heartbreak and skin-crawl. It’s a full package.

Blue Velvet

David Lynch’s masterpiece Blue Velvet, which is getting a limited 30th-anniversary re-release in theaters this year, has lost very little of its juice or shock in three decades. Since it wears the sheep’s clothing of fifties retro, not much ties the film to the mid-‘80s, either (other than the Aqua-Netted hair on some briefly seen high-school girls). It’s just this angelic/satanic hybrid reality, full of dichotomies and abstracted imagery and behavior. Like Lynch’s Twin Peaks, the film has a mystery at its center, but Lynch just uses it as an excuse to swim around inside his own obsessions, which become — and this is his artistry — our obsessions, at least for two hours.

The mystery here activates when college student Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), walking home through a field, finds a severed human ear. At one point, Lynch’s camera travels into the earhole, and the rest of the movie could be said to be a walkabout inside Lynch’s head. The ear leads to a drug ring, a kidnapped father and child, and the ultimate sadist and masochist — Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), who seems to be made out of profanity, and Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), who seems to be his not-quite-unwilling sex slave. I really have zero interest in summing up the plot, though, because if there’s one movie that is resolutely not about its plot, Blue Velvet is that movie.

Soaked in Freud and Jungian dream logic, the film proposes a split between darkness and light in which both sides are absurdly, almost cartoonishly heightened. It’s either picket fences or industrial rust, colors that pop in the sunshine or shadows that hide secrets and kinks. Even the dialogue echoes with oppositions: “I don’t know whether you’re a detective or a pervert”; “I don’t want to hurt you, I want to help you.” (With both these examples, the movie proves that there’s no reason both can’t be true.) Frank, enacting his ritualistic tryst with Dorothy (in which conventional coitus, including penetration, seems off the table), flips between being “Daddy” and “Baby” — infantilized by his own thirst for macho domination. Hopper is certainly ferocious as this rough beast, but then he goes beyond that into a weird heartsick sensitivity. Face to face with Jeffrey, his opposite number, Frank taunts him by whispering “You’re like me” and then plants some lipsticky kisses on him. The movie is, in part, about how Jeffrey recognizes this kinship to Frank but then rejects it. The question is whether such kinship, once recognized, can be rejected.

Frank’s violently sexual/sexless relationship with Dorothy and his tweaking of Jeffrey seem to proceed from the same impulse that brings him to Ben (Dean Stockwell), a “suave” and fey criminal of some sort. Frank takes Jeffrey, Dorothy, and his amusingly bedraggled posse of ne’er-do-wells to Ben’s for a brief business meeting, and also so that Dorothy can see her little boy, who apparently rejects her. (Is it because he can sense that Jeffrey has “put his disease” in her?) Ben’s pad is full of matronly women with cat’s-eye glasses and bouffants; whatever else it is, it’s the least likely place of criminal business anyone has ever seen. Frank, who abuses and yells at everyone, seems to respect the effeminate Ben, and stands mesmerized and agonized as Ben lip-syncs Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams.” Frank seems to need this song as much as he needs whatever he huffs from his gas mask; his blasted, hopeless shard of a soul reaches towards the tune. He’s a bastard and a maniac but also infernally human.

Lynch and his invaluable sound designer Alan Splet turn Blue Velvet into an apocalyptic, chthonic noise-scape, wedded to Angelo Badalamenti’s lush, minacious score, whose main melody seems an extension of Bernard Herrmann’s looping music for Vertigo. The movie is perhaps the most conventionally plotted of Lynch’s weirder work — it has clues, narrative beats, a resolution — and that might be why it ranks as many people’s favorite Lynch film, but I think its undeniable technical sophistication also helps put it over for those who would have little patience for Lynch’s later puzzles (Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive). It walks and talks like a classically structured movie, and yet it doesn’t; it’s decayed and curled at the edges in so many ways. The movie’s eroticism — the dangerously intimate bits between Jeffrey and Dorothy that pass over into rage and release — is probably still unsurpassed, except perhaps by Buñuel’s Belle de Jour. Rossellini possibly isn’t quite acting; she gives physically of herself totally, and her spiky emotions derive from her literal nakedness.

One of Blue Velvet’s last images, famously, is of a (fake-looking) robin with an insect in its beak, calling back to the vision of Sandy Williams (Laura Dern), the local detective’s daughter and Jeffrey’s sometime helper on this “case,” of the arrival of robins to dispel the darkness. The equally famous opening of the movie, with its hyper-bright flowers and fire truck giving way to Jeffrey’s dad’s stroke (I always think the kinked-up garden hose somehow causes the stroke — does anyone else?) and the subterranean black bugs, seems to be the entire movie in miniature, all its themes laid out in pictures — even the TV playing in Jeffrey’s house foreshadows things to come.

The fake robin may or may not triumph over or devour the insect it’s carrying. Entire books could be (and probably have been) devoted to that one bothersome image. But the very final image is of Dorothy, still wearing her fetishistic performer’s wig, in what you’d think is a moment of reunion and rapture, except that something seems to remind her of her bombed-out rendition of the movie’s theme song, and for a moment her expression becomes troubled. Even if the insect is vanquished by the robin, there are many more like it hiding in the grass, in the shadows under the white picket fence. I think Lynch sincerely wants to believe in Sandy and her vision, but Blue Velvet’s position during the “morning in America” Reagan era is neither an accident nor a coincidence; Lynch wants us to look under the shiny surface, as he did at greater length in Twin Peaks. Days are not always sunny, but nights are always dark.

Elstree 1976

A friend of mine collects Star Wars action figures, including custom-made figures of the more obscure characters, and likes to have the figure “cards” signed by the actors who played the obscure characters. I was with him at a local convention when he got an autograph from a guy who played, I think, some Imperial commander (I’m sure he’ll correct me if I’m wrong). People like that actor are the focus of Elstree 1976, a documentary about the bit players, masked heavies, and helmet-wearers who added texture to the tapestry that was the first Star Wars film. Extras, of course, have been the subject of other projects, including Ricky Gervais’ show of the same name, but the extras from any Star Wars movie, it seems, have the edge over any other extra. Thirty years from now, nostalgic fortysomethings will stand in line to get autographs from the guy who played the stormtrooper who bled on Finn’s helmet in The Force Awakens.

A crowdfunded effort from director Jon Spira, Elstree 1976 is largely a matter of talking heads, some of whom are more interesting than others. Most of the budget probably went to the rights to use clips from Star Wars that illustrate where, exactly, in a crowded frame a particular X-Wing pilot is, a nonspeaking role whose portrayer dines out on it to this day. At least the X-Wing pilot had his face on camera. Many others didn’t, including Paul Blake as Greedo, the green goblin who infamously shot first in George Lucas’ 1997 second draft of the dust-up between him and Han Solo. (The clip used here is the “special edition” Greedo-shoots-first version. If you have no idea why that’s an issue with fans — and there’s no reason you should — Elstree 1976 might not be for you.)

Spira’s biggest “get” is David Prowse, who wore the helmet and cloak of Darth Vader (James Earl Jones provided the voice). Prowse could probably anchor a documentary of his own, since his odd career straddles many fandoms (he worked for Stanley Kubrick and Terry Gilliam, played the Monster in two Hammer Frankenstein films, and appeared on Doctor Who, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Benny Hill). Like all the others here, he seems amiably resigned to having Star Wars on his gravestone, though there’s apparently no love lost between him and Lucas. The second biggest name here is Jeremy Bulloch, the man under Boba Fett’s helmet (he’s the only one from The Empire Strikes Back, making his sections of the documentary Elstree 1979). Most of you would recognize neither man if you tripped over him, yet they both make a living from signing at conventions for starstruck acolytes.

A note of discord is struck when Angus MacInnes, probably the most steadily working bit player to come out of Star Wars, sends some darts of resentment towards those who work the autograph circuit without having received a screen credit for the film. (He played Gold Leader, in case you were curious; I wonder if my friend has his autograph.) Mostly, though, the folks in Elstree 1976 (including a lone woman, Pam Rose, who played an alien in the cantina scene) are friendly and grateful for the opportunities their glancing brush with film history has afforded them. They seem happy to bring some joy to fans, and I suppose it’s better to have been Third Rebel Soldier on the Right in Star Wars than to have been Third Civilian Casualty on the Left in Batman v Superman.

All these people are part of something larger than themselves, and so someone like Garrick Hagon (who played Luke Skywalker’s mostly-edited-out friend Biggs Darklighter) has something in common with, say, Harrison Ford, although Ford will never need to make ends meet by signing posters in hotel meeting rooms. None of them, including Ford probably, had any idea that the thing larger than themselves would become so large as to dominate multiple industries. But so it has, and so here we are, living in a Star Wars world where the already-hyped Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is coming this Christmas, and perhaps the extras in that film will want to have a long cold look at this documentary and their futures.

Packed in a Trunk

It’s bad enough when artists die in obscurity; it’s far worse when they are condemned to live in obscurity for much of their existence. In Packed in a Trunk, which hits DVD and various streaming platforms on April 26, we learn about Edith Lake Wilkinson, whose misfortunes were threefold. Edith had the bad luck to be a woman, an artist, and gay in an era, the late 19th and early 20th century, that had little respect for any of those attributes. After her parents died, Edith had an inheritance, which was allotted to her a little at a time by an unscrupulous family lawyer who had a large degree of control over her. This lawyer discouraged her from living in Provincetown, forever a place of tolerance for artistic gays, and from living with her lover Fannie. Most damagingly, he saw to it that she was admitted to an asylum; Edith spent 32 years locked away, until her death in 1957 at age 89.

Probably none of us would have heard of Edith if not for her great-niece, Jane Anderson, who’d grown up surrounded by Edith’s paintings in her childhood home. Now in her fifties, Jane has a career of writing and/or directing quirkily feminist movies (When Billie Beat Bobby; Normal; The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom). Like her great-aunt, Jane is artistic and gay. She feels a connection to Edith, and wants to rescue her from darkness. Her goal is to get Edith’s work shown at a Provincetown gallery; spookily, a gallery owner reaches out to Jane, and his gallery building is the same one that once appeared in a painting of Edith’s.

The title, of course, has dual meanings — not only Edith’s art was packed in a trunk. If she’d been allowed to carry on as she wished, her “white line” wood block technique might have been recognized as innovative and influential. Her work is fresh, unpretentious, and increasingly colorful as she found her groove in Provincetown, surrounded by all that Cape Cod beauty. The movie, however, doesn’t really try to recast Edith as a LGBT martyr. Jane Anderson doesn’t want to wallow in the unfairness of what happened to Edith; she wants to air Edith’s work, let it speak loudly and beautifully for itself. And it does; many people come to see the paintings, many more will see them via the movie, and all that will be remembered of her attorney and persecutor is that he was a bastard. Posterity wins this time.

Packed in a Trunk is sometimes a little iffy technically — it has occasional problems with camera focus. But the essence of Jane’s mission stays clear and readable, and we are pleased to see the Provincetown community’s embrace of its lost daughter. As luckless as Edith’s life seems to us, there is also a fair amount of good luck: here was a woman whose work happened to wind up in the home of a girl who would grow up into a position to rehabilitate Edith’s reputation. How many other artists, male or female, white or otherwise, have been denied us forever because they were gay in the wrong place and time, and did not have a distant relative to tend to their work a century later?