Cronenberg's The Fly as an Allegory for Partner Abuse

When the most manic pixie of dreamboats sweeps you off your feet, you follow, you flit, you fawn, you fly. He'll shower you with gifts, candles, flowers. He'll say you're the most beautiful woman he's loved. He wants to make you aware of his intentions. You put yourself in a situation that elevates and admires their excentricities and you ignore the hints of horror that lie ahead. You fall in love. You don't know yet that he's turning into a monster. 

It does not help that he looks a little like Jeff Goldblum, and he's also a researcher. That is to say that this film struck me too close to the core because, like a child reenacting a Disney confection, I saw each of us as the respective romantic leads living out these suddenly very distinct roles. 

Kismet. The lovers meet. Veronica, Ronnie: She's a reporter; Seth: he's a charmingly unhinged scientist. He possesses a tingle of mysterious charisma and whimsy. He seems put-together, tall, dark, handsome but in an unlikely way, like a candid photograph or an old painting of someone who changed history. He fascinates her with his cultivated idiosyncrasies, and she has no idea how beautiful she is or how she sparkles on her own. She follows him home, swept up in the passion of happenstance and his impressions upon her, seduced by her heart's instinct. And she awakens thereafter, practically eaten alive by an off-camber bed and swollen mattress, seemingly off-balance too in what is a dusty morning or day, we are unsure because it could be they haven't left each other's side, it doesn't seem so. She observes his lifestyle, his choice of the same outfit every day, his lack of personality outside the area of his research, and yet her heart is fully devoted despite the portents and landmines, the medals of failure, the garbage, and the delusion. And when she's unable to visit him one evening, in a stupor of sudden drunken obsession, jealous rage, and codependent self-pity, our anti-hero initiates what would become the Fly.

And the Fly is who he was all along, in a way, a man completely prostrate to the god of science, willing to sacrifice everything, but one day finding himself naked like the day he was born, reverted. He is not checking all variables, he is acting without logic, simply under a delusional propelled by inebriated passion and emotion. A man who has checked every box in the past has found his Hyde, and it's love. His layers, his tissues, literally begin to rot and fester away. He has lost control. 

The Fly is a man who seems neglected, and neglectful of himself. He doesn't bother with the trivial sides of life, he does not decorate himself, nor his affect, nor his home, and he may as well sleep on the floor surrounded by his hobbies, scattered about him in his room almost like a prehistoric burial site demonstrating the character of a person no longer living, a history of a human. Previously, he was a simple, rather reclusive entity living on his on whims, and who aspired to create a new means of transferring matter through dedicated and practiced research to one thing. Then, Ronnie, a new dark object of desire enters his narrative. She is his distraction, which for some would be healthy, but for Seth, it inspires him to make poor choices and demonstrates his instability. Suddenly, after what appears to have been years of solitude, he cannot function without her, and this is where the allegory of the abuse particularly shows. In his loneliness, he never noticed how much he actually needs help. He has both an emotional, and eventual physical dependence on her, but expresses it to her as though he is a victim.

Often I feel as if films don't tell us the full story, and more and more I wonder what characters' lives were truly like before the beginning of the film. Do we assume Seth has never struggled in the past with relationships? Do we know that he's never been obsessive? Analyzing his eccentric lifestyle choices, he doesn't really align with mainstream society, even in 1986, when the film came out, and he appears to have led a quite solitary existence. 

Looking at Ronnie, she seems like she is in a place where she wants to feel loved and seen, and is vulnerable in the wake of a breakup. Seth, a loner, was absolutely lazer-stunned by her gaze and tenderness. She is a giver. Ronnie was apparently healing from her previous relationship, which is, in modern terms, an HR violation, with her boss, Stathis. Ronnie, too, demonstrates a history of patterns with unconventional, even controlling, and abusive partners through Stathis. He exhibits many unhealthy habits with Ronnie and evidently violates/violated a lot of boundaries. In the end, you could say that Ronnie cycles back to old habits by relying on Stathis for support and that he "saves" her, which could no doubt be used as emotional blackmail in the future. Stathis' desire for Ronnie is equally as imbalanced as that of Seth's, and though he calls it love, it neither walks nor talks like a duck. Ronnie is a woman deserving of love in a world of toxic masculinity, where no man has been taught how to love.

For me, the most ground-shaking moment as a survivor of a variety of abuse, was the near-American-Psycho-moment (Joan and the nail gun, eating ice cream on a leather couch, preparing to excuse herself from near death) where Seth, in transformation, revealing more and more his full self, completely nude and molted, warns her that he won't be able to stop from trying to hurt her. It is his nature, and it may have always been. Did the fly change him, or did he develop a more advanced form of psychosis than before? Removing the fly as the variable leaves room to interpret how healthy Ronnie and Seth's love might have been in the future if Seth had never made the manic choice to test fate.

In the final culmination of the film, Ronnie is yet again faced with multiple situations in which she has no agency due to Seth's imposition upon her. He begs her both to keep his child and to take his life, thereby demanding that she take on two massive burdens in his memory. She is left without choices of her own, and as a caring, gentle human she feels obligated to do as asked. She is a saint, and a shining martyr of the abuse she has endured, and now, she can testify to the horrors of the transformation she experienced, seeing the man she loved, the father of her child, transform into a real-life monster. How did she not notice from the beginning, or see the signs? Did he hide them, or did she choose to ignore them? What did you see?