The Fly (1958)

The Fly (1958) is not a film noir. C'est pas un noir La Mouche.

The Fly (1958) is a classic nascent colour monster body horror early horror period monster thriller with legs, six legs in fact, all connected to its thorax, and those six legs are out of control science in the optimistic 1950s; gendered and queer multi-image vision of swarm politics; tragic pathos in the abject pursuit of individual destiny over marriage and family; a Lacanian mirror stage, gaze and castration anxiety Name-of-the-Father explosion of fear write large and technicolor; a biopolitics state of exception, killable life and mercy outside the law melodrama; a promissory technoscience, normal accident and precaution and public ethos thriller presentation; and a teen coming of age date and horror exploitation fantasy.

The machine is called The Disintegrator Integrator. It's product is The Fly. That's product is The Fly (1958). The Fly (1958)'s product is base social and critical theory.

Of all the genres, and disciplines, insects and swarms operate in science fiction, political theory, and military technology, and the reason for this is that what once functioned as a metaphor now animates material practices of biopolitical and necropolitical control. 

The Fly of 1958 offers a key case of becoming insect as abjection, anxiety about reproduction outside patriarchal control, and the collapse of human sovereignty into multiplicity. By tracking the film’s plot and imagery, you will observe that the insect figure threads together fears of feminization, the unmaking of the rational Enlightenment subject, and the emergence of a world of killable life.

In The Fly a scientist sets out to solve a logistical problem through a teleportation device that transforms matter with electricity. The machine works for objects, but living beings cannot pass through intact. When the scientist tests on himself, a stray fly is caught in the mechanism, splicing their bodies. 

He acquires a fly head and arm, while the fly scurries about with a human miniature head. As his mind degrades he types to his wife about strange thoughts and weakening will. His perception shatters into kaleidoscopic, multi-image vision. 

He attacks his wife, then pleads for death before his intellect is lost entirely. A detective ultimately crushes the human-headed fly, and the wife is absolved once the deaths are framed as not truly human. The plot literalizes the fear that scientific modernity can unmoor the sovereign, unitary male subject, replacing it with an unstable, insectile multiplicity that no longer qualifies for the protections of the human.

Wilcox interprets the film through Barbara Creed’s concept of the monstrous feminine and Kristeva’s abjection. Insects are figured as radically other bodies that transgress boundaries between inside and outside. They are sticky, oozing, alien.

The Fly harnesses this abject quality to dramatize a specifically gendered terror. The scientist’s loss of rational mastery reads as a collapse into a feminized swarm logic, a move from the One to the many, from self command to diffuse sensation and appetite. The wife’s failure to capture the hybrid fly seals his fate. Female agency here is ambivalent. 

She is both caretaker and the instrument of his death at his request. Yet in the moral calculus that follows, the human standard remains the rational, disembodied male. Once he becomes insectile he is expelled from the category of the killable subject whose death could count as murder. Wilcox aligns this double killing with Agamben’s figure of homo sacer, a being whose life can be taken without sacrificial or legal consequence.

Pharr begins by noting the everyday contempt for flies, then turns to the surprise that a humble nuisance anchors one of the most popular mutant horror stories. She brackets the 1986 remake and insists that all versions are finally myth rather than science.

The technical premises in the tale are implausible, which is precisely the point. The machine and the fly serve a moral fable, not a laboratory hypothesis. Contemporary critics, Pharr observes, often fixate on the mechanics, whether molecular swapping in 1958 or code and genes in other tellings, but this narrow focus obscures the deeper thematic architecture. 

The 1958 film works because it wraps its grotesque conceit in a carefully idealized social world where love, decency, and a belief in a providential order are palpable. Within that frame the horror reads as a brief aberration in a cosmos of meaning rather than a revelation that the cosmos itself is meaningless.

The film’s frame is meticulously built. James Clavell’s screenplay relocates George Langelaan’s French setting to Montreal, home of Delambre Frères Electronics, and constructs an Edenic North American normalcy. Pharr emphasizes the images of order and cultivation. The scientist has a garden. A policeman plays chess. A monumental discovery is celebrated with ballet tickets. The world is fair in both senses, visually lovely and morally moderated. 

The opening image is a torn screen with a fly crawling through it. This is a small but telling graphic of a tear in an otherwise protective mesh. Moments later an elderly night watchman hears the crash of a hydraulic press that has already killed André Delambre. The tear has appeared, but it has not ripped the whole cloth.

From that moment Neumann and Clavell shape the narrative as an inquiry into how a good family in a decent society responds to an accident that should not have happened. Pharr treats Hélène Delambre’s calm confession as the film’s ethical center. She tells her brother in law François and Inspector Charas that she threw the switch that crushed her husband’s head and arm. 

The bulk of the film is her long flashback, which Pharr reads as a three strand meditation on humanity, God, and progress. Before the accident André shows his matter transmitter to his wife and calls it a miracle. He dreams of an end to want and fear. 

When Hélène wonders whether man should play God, André answers that intelligence is God’s gift for uncovering nature’s wonders. Later he lies in the garden and looks at the sky, looking at God perhaps, and admits the happiness of being alive. Pharr insists that this protagonist is not a mad scientist. He is a gentle visionary who reads invention as stewardship.

Carelessness, not hubris, brings catastrophe. On the day André plans to reveal the device to François, he sends himself through. Once successfully, then again without noticing a fly in the chamber. The reintegration splices man and insect. 

Pharr admires how Neumann sustains both suspense and tenderness as the household hunts for a white headed fly that might allow a reversal. The film allows moments of macabre humor, but never irony. Servants, child, wife, and brother all do what they can. The mood is communal concern rather than panic. This tonal choice matters for Pharr’s thesis. Horror here is not a judgment on human folly. It is a test of a community’s compassion and prudence.

Pathos deepens as André’s mind begins to slip. He has not yet shown his face to Hélène. He types notes because his voice is changing. He admits that strange thoughts are coming, that his will is weakening. Hélène tells him he is still a man with a soul. André, now scientist second, human first, answers that there are things man should never experiment with. 

He chooses death over a predatory life he fears he will lead if he continues to deteriorate. Once she sees his fly head, Hélène screams, faints, and then agrees to help. Pharr lingers on the small acts that render the scene genuinely compassionate. André destroys notes and equipment. On the blackboard he scrawls Love You. There are no more theories left to defend, only a final fidelity to a shared ethic.

The image of the press matters. It is not a lightning strike or a blind explosion. It is a device the couple controls together, the same machinery that built the family’s prosperity now enlisted as a merciful instrument. Yet one consequence remains unresolved. Somewhere in the garden the fly with André’s human head and arm still lives. 

When Inspector Charas, who has suspected madness all along, and François find that tiny figure trapped in a spider web, the film’s most piercing cry of pathos rings out. Help me, please help me. Pharr notes that Charas is too stunned to act quickly, then crushes the spider only after it has devoured the fly. The choice devastates him. In that moment both men grasp the truth of Hélène’s story and the impossibility of any legal framework to contain it. 

They fabricate a suicide narrative to spare her confinement and to return the household to what order can be restored.

Pharr reads the coda as decisive. In the garden, with the horror gone, Hélène, her son Philippe, and François recompose a family. François answers Philippe’s question about his father’s death with a lesson. André was an explorer searching for truth, the most important and most dangerous work in the world. The boy says he wants to be like his father.

Pharr calls attention to the fact that André is the only one who dies, and that his death upholds not the glory of science but the principles of his society. Love and sacrifice are the cardinal virtues here. The policeman who plays chess is the figure of patient order. 

The husband who gardens and attends the ballet is the figure of civilized aspiration. The wife who obeys her husband’s last wish is the figure of tragic tenderness. Together they neutralize the grotesque without collapsing into cynicism.

Throughout, Pharr insists that the soft science does not matter. The film admits its implausibility in the famous white headed fly and human headed fly pairing. It invites the audience to suspend disbelief not for the sake of spectacle, but for the sake of the moral question. What happens when a decent man’s mistake places him outside the recognizable boundaries of the human for a time. 

In this version becoming insect does not license cruelty or domination. It produces a crisis of conscience, followed by a communal effort to limit harm, followed by a sorrowful determination to keep faith with ethical limits. The policeman, the brother, the wife, even the child, all act within a code that treats life as sacred, mercy as a duty, and truth as both precious and perilous.

Pharr’s final claim is that Neumann’s film belongs to a cultural moment that still trusted order. The torn screen can be mended. The tear is real, the cost is real, yet the moral horizon holds. God is named without embarrassment. Progress can be celebrated and chastened in the same breath. The scientist’s last message is not an equation. It is a declaration of love.

The film ends not with a plunge into despair, but with a boy’s aspiration to explore and an uncle’s sober warning about danger. In Pharr’s reading, that is what makes The Fly in 1958 a gentle shocker and perhaps one of the most humane horror films on record. Its horror is the price of progress, paid by a man who refuses to live as a monster and a family who refuses to let a single accident define the meaning of their world.

This feminisation is not about women as such but about a fear of becoming woman that Deleuze and Guattari identify with movement away from phallocentric coding. In The Fly the scientist is not assimilated into a communal hive. 

He remains a singular body that is unravelling. Even so, the film links insect life to the breakdown of sovereign identity through sensory multiplicity and the erosion of will. Wilcox notes that mid century science fiction repeatedly channels political anxieties through insect imagery, whether communist hordes or monstrous fecundity beyond patriarchal control. The Fly participates in this pattern by equating technological transgression with biological disorder, then treating the resulting life as disposable.

The film’s visual language is crucial. The kaleidoscopic perception sequence does more than frighten. It rehearses a logic central to the swarm. Many eyes see at once. Depth gives way to planar repetition. The world becomes a field of signals rather than a mastered space organized by a single point of view. Wilcox connects this logic to contemporary targeting systems and drone optics, where multiple lenses and distributed sensors constitute a new regime of seeing. 

In that later world the swarm is not only a metaphor. It is a programmable tactic and a material composition of bodies, algorithms, and airframes that enacts state killing without symmetrical risk. The Fly thus reads as a prehistory of the technopolitics of swarming. It stages the dread of becoming many, then resolves that dread by removing the newly many from the circle of human concern.

Everybody I know contrasts the 1958 film with Cronenberg’s 1986 remake to stress a historical shift. The original frames becoming insect as a catastrophic split into two beings, one mostly human with fly parts and one mostly fly with a human head. The horror is ontological rupture and the loss of reason. The remake reframes becoming as code level fusion. 

The human and the fly merge at the level of DNA, with change unfolding gradually. For a time the transformed man gains superhuman capacities. In Braidotti’s terms this models becoming animal as a scramble of the master code, which can displace sexual difference without erasing it. Although all the current thinking about The Fly (1958) ranges more widely than this comparison, the juxtaposition clarifies what is distinctive about 1958.

The earlier film is haunted by nuclear age hubris, psychic fragmentation, and the policing of the human. It treats becoming insect as a fall from humanity that authorizes killing. The later film experiments with posthuman openness and then returns to horror when that openness turns catastrophic. Reading both together helps us mark the move from sovereign anxiety about degeneration to a computational paradigm where life is coded, recombined, and optimized. 

The 1958 version is the purer emblem of the abject insect that must be eliminated.

From this core reading everybody here expands to the politics of the swarm. Insects are not only metaphors but design templates for military systems. The same distributed perception and collective problem solving that horrified earlier audiences becomes a prized capability in contemporary warfare. Swarming drones coordinate without central command, adapt faster than humans, and accept losses without grief. The human subject of war is reconfigured by these assemblages. 

Sovereignty no longer requires a single rational pilot in a cockpit. It can be exercised through a network of miniaturized, semi autonomous agents whose vision is literally multiple. When states deploy these swarms over racialized populations, the old language of pests and bug splats resurfaces. The abject insect of The Fly becomes the abjected enemy whose life is already outside the human.

Everybody who is here insists that this transformation has gendered and queer dimensions. The swarm is often coded as feminine or queer because it confounds singular mastery and linear command. Yet in practice these codes are folded into necropolitical projects that include women and queer bodies as operators or icons while targeting racialized others for death. In this light The Fly’s narrative offers a genealogy of murderous inclusion. 

The boundary of the human is policed by a combined aesthetic and ethical economy. Once the subject becomes insectile he is no longer protected. Later, swarm war reuses the insect figure to sort who counts and who can be killed.

The film also illuminates the essay’s concept of figuration. For me a figuration is a performative image that can be inhabited. The Fly gives us a potent figuration of the posthuman as horror, one that continues to shape imaginaries of technology, embodiment, and control. It condenses fears about female reproductive power beyond patriarchal management into a spectacle where the only cure for disorder is elimination.

It also crystallizes an epistemology where multiplicity equates to madness or monstrosity. WE all know that and are aware that we observe how we argue that this epistemology persists in how swarms are welcomed as instruments of order while enemies are represented as formless swarms that justify overwhelming force.

Finally, there is no way that The Fly (1958) should be examined for anything else other than critique, does not stop at critique. Looking at this film everybody sketches counter figurations in feminist and queer science fiction that reclaim insect life as a model for cooperative, non hierarchical worlds. In this register becoming insect can be a utopian opening rather than a reason to kill. The 1958 film sits at the antagonistic pole of that spectrum. It stages the end of the sovereign man as a nightmare and sanctions necropolitical disposal.

By reading The Fly alongside the material rise of drone swarms and the rhetoric that accompanies their use, Wilcox shows how science fiction scenes of horror migrate into doctrines, prototypes, and tactics. The film’s closed ethical universe becomes a cautionary map. If becoming many is always monstrous then distributed power will be monopolized by the state. If, however, multiplicity can be figured as care and connection, then the swarm might inspire different futures.

The Fly of 1958 is the world's pivotal illustration of how insect imagery binds together gendered abjection, the unmaking of the liberal subject, and the authorization of killing. The Fly (1958) reveals the historical roots of a political ontology in which life that deviates from singular rational mastery is stripped of moral status. 

That ontology now underwrites a swarming form of war. We know observe The Fly (1958) as the film to argue that feminist and queer theory must grapple with insects and swarms not only as metaphors but as material logics that shape who lives and who dies.

The Fly (1958)

Directed by Kurt Neumann

Genres - Drama, Horror, Science Fiction  |   Sub-Genres - Monster Film  |   Release Date - Jul 16, 1958  |   Run Time - 94 min.  |