I think for now I'm going to use this space as a kind of writer's notebook to collect ideas concerning pieces I'm writing. I've got something in the works on Cronenberg for [cool publication redacted], so I decided to revisit The Fly. I hadn't seen it in years, but I found I remembered virtually every beat from repeat viewings years ago when, if I recall correctly, I had a taped-off-HBO copy on VHS.

Like The Dead Zone in 1983, this was Cronenberg tiptoeing into the mainstream and, maybe unexpectedly, finding a place there without compromising his vision. Which is to say that The Fly is as filled with the same obsessions found in his earlier work -- decay, disease, the way the mind and the body often seem at odds with one another, isolation, obsession -- and it's every bit as gross. Sure, The Brood features Samantha Eggar eating her own afterbirth, but Jeff Goldblum's corrosive vomit in this film is every bit as disgusting. It's just a bigger star doing the gross stuff.

About that: Could anyone else have played this role? The Venn overlap of "sexy, cerebral, tragic, and awkward" pretty much just contains one actor. Which isn't to take anything away from Geena Davis. You can see why she's attracted to this guy to the point of getting in too deep.

The Fly drew some praise for working as an AIDS metaphor, and it works well as such, even if Cronenberg has said he saw it as a broader metaphor for disease and aging. We grow up in these bodies and then, through no fault of our own, they start to betray us. We fall apart. We watch those around us fall apart. If anything, the film's horrors feel a little less horrific and a little more familiar to me now. In one memorable scene, Goldblum's Seth Brundle pulls out two of his soon-to-be useless teeth, the fly DNA forcing him to digest his food externally. A couple of months ago, I bit into a crouton while eating lunch. Something felt not quite right as I kept chewing and I pulled out two hard nuggets that I assumed were a burned part of the crouton. Instead, as a quick inspection with my tongue revealed, they were the shattered halves of two teeth. We're all metamorphosing into something our younger selves wouldn't recognize, it's just a question of how fast.

There's no shortage of horror in this movie, but I don't know that I previously recognized the depths of its pathos. Until he starts patrolling the streets of Toronto for another test subject -- the beige, blocky, '70s/'80s Toronto that Cronenberg always brilliantly used to unsettling effect -- we see Brundle talk to no one but Davis' "Ronnie" Quaife. Any love and companionship he might have had in his past remain purely theoretical. (When he thinks, wrongly, she might have strayed, he loses it, leading to the drunken experiment that seals his doom. This is not the response of a man who understands how adult relationships work.) Then he finds that not only is she true to him, but at last his body can live up to the potential of his mind. He's a gymnast. He's a stud. He's an intellectual powerhouse. He's marshaling a new rush of manic energy. He doesn't know he's peaked, that from here there's nowhere to go but down. Who among us does?

(Stray thought: I never thought how much this movie owes to Flowers for Algernon or how much Limitless owes to both. Other stray thought: Worth noting how much this works as a metaphor for mental illness as for physical deterioriation. The high-highs followed by the crushing lows, isolation, alienation.)