Fashioning Brundlefly

Ronnie Quaife dresses for the sentimental girlies

The Cronenberg siblings are efficient storytellers. As director David Cronenberg swiftly introduces us to our protagonists, costume designer Denise Cronenberg wastes no time in characterizing them through their clothing. Within the first moments of 1986’s The Fly, we meet Seth Brundle, a scientist developing a teleportation device, and Veronica Quaife, a spunky young reporter on the science beat, mid conversation. Veronica, or Ronnie, is wearing an ungodly amount of leather. Only an actress as devastatingly beautiful as Geena Davis could convincingly pull off a leather skirt, bomber jacket, and capacious over-the-shoulder bag as chic meet-the-press happy-hour attire. On anyone else, it could appear obscene. Besides costuming a character, these garments stand to represent what Ronnie will bring into Seth’s work and life.

Clothing immediately becomes a medium of interaction between Ronnie and Seth. After convincing her to come observe his new invention at his live-in lab, the first thing Seth asks from Ronnie is an article of clothing. He requests “something of sentimental value” in order to demonstrate his telepods’ on an inanimate object, the extent of their teleporting abilities at that junction. Intrigued and obliging, she proffers a single sheer black stocking. Although the telepods are still incapable of transporting living beings, this erotic gesture foreshadows that impending scientific breakthrough by symbolically transforming the stocking from an inanimate object into a sentimental object of desire. When it appears in the second pod, it is somehow more than just a matrix of nylon and spandex fibers. It is still warm.

By comparison, Seth’s wardrobe is lifeless. On her second visit to his loft, Ronnie discovers that Seth wears the same drab outfit everyday. In his closet hang five identical white shirts, tweed suit jackets, and black slacks. The five identical pairs of dusty brown dress boots lined up on the floor always cracks me up. He explains that he “Learned it from Einstein. This way I don't have to expand my thought on what I have to wear next, I just grab the next set on the rack.” Ronnie is unimpressed.

We learn that Ronnie was educated as a scientist, but works as a reporter for a science magazine. She understands Seth’s analytical approach to life but, as a sleuth and a writer, her actions are often driven by instinct. She has a gut feeling about Seth’s invention and follows him home. Her understanding of the human, “the flesh”, is illustrated with a steak she brings over to the loft to cook for Seth. Instead, he sends half the slab of meat through the telepods, rendering it indescribably inedible. The distinction of the flesh and its ability to craze is enlightening to Brundle, altering his approach to coding the machine and paving the way towards the successful teleportation of a living being. The sanctity of the scientific method is peeled away in this experiment. Pillowtalk bleeds into hypothesizing. Materials migrate from the kitchen into the lab. For the first time, Brundle is working out of his uniform. His jacket is off and Ronnie is in his shirt, leaving him in just his white tee and slacks as he plates the two cuts of meat. 

Ronnie’s editor and jealous ex-boyfriend confronts her over her budding relationship with Brundle in a department store as she is buying a leather jacket for Seth. Like the steak, this sartorial flesh represents a human element beyond Brundle’s analytical grasp. The first time an animated creature survives teleportation, Brundle has completely discarded his once rigidly uniform wardrobe. He wears a casual buffalo plaid flannel in soft grays and dusty reds. Like the steak and the leather jacket, this shirt was presumably also purchased for him by Ronnie 

Lack of clothing is just as communicative as apparel choices in The Fly. Be they monkey, fly, or human, one must enter the telepods nude. The morning after Seth’s teleportation, his body gains new capabilities. He galivants around his laboratory shirtless, flipping around exposed beams like a gymnast. Unlike the carnal, human nakedness displayed the night before, this nudeness feels distinctly less human. Ronnie looks on in silence wearing only his white shirt as Seth swings from the rafters in the cold light of day.

After his feats of newfound strength, Brundle stops by a vendor in St. Lawrence Market to pick up a small golden heart shaped locket for Ronnie. As the story progresses, Ronnie’s wardrobe transforms as well. Her initial Hawksian silhouette softens with tactile knits and feminine colors. Her approach to dressing for the cold weather of Toronto shifts from leather layers to blanket-like scarves and berets. 

The next time they sleep together is the first time Ronnie notices a physical manifestation of Fly DNA in Brundle. She quickly becomes worried after plucking thick, insect-like hairs out of his back, but Brundle pays them no mind. His nudeness is no longer human as he urges her to be cleansed with teleportation in his underwear. Ronnie’s new locket shines behind the collar of her plush white robe as she resists Seth’s urging of her into the telepod. 

After Ronnie’s departure, Seth doesn’t even bother to put on a shirt under his leather jacket before he stalks his way to a dive bar. When Ronnie next returns to the apartment, bearing an inhuman DNA analysis of the plucked wiry hairs, Brundle is again nearly nude and evidence of decay mars his face. Ronnie’s entrance interrupts a familiar scene, Brundle dragging a protesting one-night-stand wearing only her jean jacket toward the telepods.

Eventually, as Seth Brudle transforms into Brundlefly, he ceases wearing clothing all together. Despite this, the gold heart charm continues to hang heavy around Ronnie’s neck for the remainder of the film as an ever present reminder that she still deeply cares for a man who is clearly gone.

The only piece of jewelry I wear everyday is a chain with two golden lockets. In the larger oval locket, I keep a lock of my boyfriend’s hair that he mailed to me a few years ago when we went long distance after college. Last winter, I found a small vintage heart locket in Kensington Market while visiting friends in Toronto and added it to the chain. In the heart, I keep a tiny braid of strands from my mom and two sisters. While gifting a lock of hair has long been a token of affection, hair jewelry specifically was very common in the Victorian era as a mourning practice. It’s incredibly saccharine and just a smidge morbid.

Yet even in the throes of “insect politics”, Brundlefly exhibits a similarly human weakness for nostalgia by displaying his lost body parts in a makeshift “museum”. Crammed behind his bathroom mirror, the vestiges of Seth Brundle sit starkly against Brundlefly’s reflection. Half scientific curiosities and half sentimental keepsakes, like a mother’s meticulously kept baby book, the collection of molted appendages remind me of Victorian mourning rites as much as the locket.

Ronnie’s final on screen outfit is the softest garment we see her in. The shapeless, matronly gray sweater dress is a far cry from any of her stylish outfits from the beginning of the film, but makes sense as the garment she would throw on for a frantic late night trip to an abortion clinic. After she is abducted from the clinic by Brundlefly, he attempts to merge the two in order to decrease the percentage of fly DNA in his body. As he throws Ronnie into the telepod, her opaque gray leggings contrast from the sheer stocking she sent through the transportation device on her first visit to the loft. Even as she levels a rifle to kill Brundlefly, the creature begging to be put out of its misery, the locket at Ronnie’s collar shimmers in the lab’s unnatural blue glow.