Hacker Cinema
The Fly
1986 · Film · 96 min
Directed by David Cronenberg
When brilliant, eccentric scientist Seth Brundle makes a huge technological breakthrough in teleportation, he decides to test it on himself. Unbeknownst to him, a common housefly manages to get inside the device and the two become one.
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19 comments on Hacker News
> Somebody needs to include this thing in the script of a science fiction film.
"The Fly" is ready for a quick rewrite.
I'm a transwoman who had dysphoria the moment puberty started. Before puberty I as fine with my body, but once it started it became complete body horror. The word dysphoria is used a lot, but I think body horror is a more relatable concept. Have you ever seen the movie The Fly? It's like that. It's not that I felt I had the wrong body, it's that my body was literally changing into something I did not want and did not fit me. When my voice changed it wrecked me. I begged the adults around me for hormones or blockers something to make it stop and they all refused. If I was born a girl, people would think it was fucked up if the adults forced me to take testosterone and develop male characteristics. But because I was born a boy, that means I'm forced to take testosterone even if I know 100% I'm not? I know they were trying their best and wanted to make sure I didn't make the wrong choice, but by doing that, they deprived me of being able to make the correct choice. I started estrogen at 18, the moment I had autonomy, and haven't once had a doubt and that was back in the late 2000s.
As for male interests, I like computers and programming. I think of it as less of a "male interest" as a "nerd interest" since most of the males I grew up with were into sports, something I'm very much not.
As for relating to men, I'm attracted to men. I like programming which is male dominated. But I wouldn't say I fully relate to them. I don't really understand a lot of things about men and I think outside of some interest overlap, I don't relate that much.
Cronenberg’s best film after Videodrome is Existenz; it’s not as we’ll know as The Fly which has always puzzled me.
Some that haven’t been mentioned yet: Matinee, The First Great Train Robbery, Dave, Ghibli movies (Laputa, Mononoke, Totoro, Kiki, …), Mad Max 2, Nightmare Before Christmas, Edge of Tomorrow, Tremors, Godzilla Minus One, Watchmen, The Fly, Dark City, Passengers, Predestination, Strange Days, WarGames, Tron, Timecrimes, Sneakers, The Frighteners.
It needs to be done at the embryonic stage before cell division so that as the cells replicate, they inherit the desired changes. The technology isn't quite there yet to transfect every single cell in an adult body with a virus containing the desired genetic modifications. Also, I can only imagine the downstream of effects of the body transcribing this modified dna in a fully-developed human. Have you ever seen the movie The Fly?
Have You ever seen the movie "The Fly?"
I get the sense that you would like some adult themes, but not too slow?
Top of my mind (and in no specific order) would be:
- Dark City
- The Thirteenth Floor
- City of the Lost Children
- Tron (original and maybe new one)
- Interstellar
- Inception
- A Clockwork Orange
- Her (very relevant to our times)
- Dune (2021 version)
- Brazil
- The Martian
- Children of Men
- Edge of Tomorrow (most like Marvelverse on this list but still very good)
- Moon
- Twelve Monkeys
- Upgrade
- The Fifth Element
- Contact
- Okja
- District 9
- Predestination (very relevant to our times)
- Serenity (but might need some prep from the tv show before watching)
- World on a Wire
- The Abyss
- Minority Report (very relevant in our times)
- The Fly
- Videodrome
- Equilibrium
- Strange Days
- The Andromeda Strain (relevant after Covid)
- eXistenZ (trippy but I loved it when it came out and was only around your sons age)
- In Time (interesting class dynamics on display)
- Enemy Mine
- Franklyn (some interesting takes on mental illness)
- The Arrival
If you skip his body horror films (which admittedly is 70+ percent of his oeuvre), and look at Eastern Promises, Maps of the Stars, A Dangerous Method, or a History of Violence, and you'll likely come away with a different view.
Crash, Dead Ringers, and the Fly, while exceptionally interesting films, and well directed, are definitely difficult for a lot of audiences.
I asked ChatGPT. It gave me bunch. I got some I've never heard of. I think I'll look into them.
<ChatGPT>
list 50 interesting movies that explore AI.
The Matrix
Ex Machina
Blade Runner
The Terminator
I, Robot
The War of the Worlds
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Transcendence
The Fifth Element
2001: A Space Odyssey
WarGames
Westworld
The Machine
Her
The Iron Giant
Automata
The Truman Show
The Prestige
The Martian
The Fly
The Bicentennial Man
Surrogates
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Limitless
Robocop
Electric Dreams
The Island
The Time Machine
The Circle
The Arrival
The Host
The Stepford Wives
The Brain that Wouldn't Die
Frankenstein
The Invisible Man
Metropolis
The Thing
Jurassic Park
Independence Day
Gravity
Artificial Intelligence: AI
Avatar
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Matrix Reloaded
The Matrix Revolutions
Inception
Interstellar
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Butterfly Effect
The Future.
</ChatGPT>
I've been buying DVDs for ... 20 years now? I have quite a few old movies now.
I wrote an app that is playing them (according to a schedule I created) on a Raspberry Pi from a 5TB drive (they're ripped to drive). It's kind of fun to walk by the TV downstairs and see the original "The Fly" or whatever on. No fast-forward or pause, but no internet required either (no ads, of course).
Your comment reminds me of Jeff Goldblum’s character in the movie The Fly, when the reporter asks him how he could have built the teleportation system by himself and he says:
“I don’t work alone. There’s a lot of stuff in here that I don’t even understand. I’m really a systems management guy, I farm bits and pieces out to people who are much more brilliant than I am. But none of them really knows what the project is. I say build me a laser this, or a molecular analyzer that - and they do, I just stick them all together.”
I recently had to build an e-commerce portal for our customers to be able to order 3D printed parts on-demand. Did I write my own algorithms for rendering 3MF files and calculating the volume of a mesh? Nope, I just used three.js and a mesh volume algorithm I found on Stack Overflow and problem solved.
...is unmatched by what's seen here in the U.S. Is it because the movie industry there is more permissive towards such genere?
Can you elaborate on this? On the face of your comment, I think you might just be unaware of a lot of films that have been made in the US. The article mentioned the American David Lynch's Eraserhead as an influence of these works. David Cronenberg is also undoubtedly a huge influence here as well (I know he's Canadian, but he largely works in the American movie industry).
It's not like Tetsuo: The Iron Man was a huge financial or mainstream success. Most of these movies were mostly relegated to the grindhouse, and American has more than its share of grindhouse film makers (ala John Waters). Also consider that The Fly was as big a financial success as Akira.
Basically, what I'm saying is that I don't think Japanese artists & audiences are very different from their American counterparts in this regard. It is not distinctly Japanese or American to dream up horrific stuff, but rather, it's human to hold up a mirror to an, at times, horrific existence.
I am a long-term user of Unison (https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/) from the command line, to synchronize directories between my machines. If Unison weren't available, from studying the Syncthing documentation it would be my next choice.
You wouldn't think that writing synchronization software would be rocket science, but apparently it is: Unison's author is Benjamin C. Pierce, a prominent computer scientist and author of "Types and Programming Languages". Together with an active user community, he makes the correct call on some key design decisions.
I have tested many alternatives to expose these issues. I have not tested Syncthing, as this HN post is so poorly titled that it would sync into oblivion before I could complete the tests. I recommend writing your favorite sync software author if you find their handling of these issues problematic, though expect defensive replies.
[1] Symbolic links. They should be copied as is, not considered for their semantic content. Would you want sync software taking a half hour break if it found porn on your computer? Why should it think about symbolic links, either? It is your responsibility that they have some meaning on the target machine. Unison and Syncthing copy Unix symbolic links. All other programs wreck them or follow them. It confuses matters that some users beg for such behavior, in hopes of extending the capabilities of sync software beyond their original design.
On MacOS an application bundle, not meant to be examined by casual users, can contain internal symbolic links, for example from "latest" to a versioned directory. Software that mangles this will claim that it isn't meant for "system files" as if that is some dangerous art. It is not; they are simply handling symbolic links wrong.
[2] "Atomic" directories. If one has for example a MacOS sparse disk image open on two machines, and makes conflicting changes, one cannot simply merge the pieces, deciding arbitrarily on conflicting index files. Think of the movie "The Fly". A sparse disk image is again a directory of many files. This has many advantages, including ease of incremental backup. However, one needs to decide which copy to keep in case of conflict, at the directory level.
Unison has a way to declare this. I've never seen other software with this capability. This also applies for example to .git directories.
[3] Interactive conflict management. Using Unison, one chooses interactively how to resolve conflicts before committing to the sync. I sync many gigabytes of data, and I have no interest in dealing later with scattered renamed copies of files, many of which matter to automated tools and will never see my manual attention. I either choose a preferred copy at the time of sync, or I abort and fix the problem before the sync.
I prefer Unison's handling here to Syncthing.
Some more movies in no particular order if you want to explore more of psychological horror:
Pandorum
The Lighthouse
eXistenZ
Videodrome
Hellraiser (I’m a fan of the series, some are better than others)
Blue Velvet
Mulholland Drive
The Thing
American Psycho
The Fly
Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1978 version with Leonard Nimoy)
They could edit the DNA to do something truly horrendous. E.g. The Fly movie via DNA modification.
There was also oral tradition of reciting the films. Typically one lucky kid who've seen the movie would be the playground hero reciting it to others over and over again: often with some added cool detail that wasn't there.
I got familiar with The Fly and Terminator that way years before watching them firsthand.
Keanu Reeves in the former, Willem Dafoe in the latter. I'll give both a whirl, thank you.
From what I can tell nobody brought up David Cronenberg either. I liked his works [1] when I was younger (not sure if I still would now). I especially liked eXistenZ, but also Videodrome, The Fly, and Scanners.
I just started binge watching The Man In The High Castle and it exactly underlines my statement in my previous post: great storyline (IMO), but not depending much on CGI. I think if the story lacks, all you got going for it is CGI (or not if there is none). CGI may impress you when you're still young, but as you grow older you see through the façade. Especially when its overdone. Because older movies lack it, and therefore are rather limited (take for example old Star Wars which heavily used costumes, models, and camera tricks). It might feel a bit dated, if not just from the hair models. Yet sometimes the nostalgia hits the nail (such as in Black Mirror's San Junipero episode). Not exactly sure why. While I'm thoroughly enjoying The Man In The High Castle series my partner hates anything related to WWII so thats yet another series we cannot watch together.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Cronenberg#As_director
Is it just me, but have all forms of art simply melded with self-promotion? (Melded in the sense found in the movie "The Fly.")
Also predicted in the movie 'The Fly' where Goldblum's character fails the voice recognition during his transformation.
All future technology has, apparently, been predicted by 1980/90s sci fi.