“...Mas o sonho acabou e o inseto está acordado”: horror, humanidade e corpo doente em A Mosca (1986)

Abstract

The end of the 20th century was marked by the emergence of a new way of reading and giving meaning to the body and corporealities. From the advances in biotechnology, genetic engineering, and informatics research, new representations and discourses began to produce new truths about bodily materiality, causing the eruption of fears and anxieties that circulate in the social imaginary of a particular era and that can resonate in cultural products and practices. This research, therefore, aimed to conduct an analysis of the representations of the body present in the film The Fly (1986, dir. David Cronenberg). Released amidst the health crisis caused by AIDS, the cinematic work has, as its main narrative arc, the transformation of the main character, Seth Brundle, into a monstrous hybrid of man and fly. In this direction, we observe how the cinematic narrative, thru the esthetics of horror and science fiction of the work, creates representations that relate the character's bodily metamorphosis to a transformation of subjectivity, to the transgression of boundaries between the human and the non-human, and, finally, how the relationship between social and political issues about the body in the 1980s appears in the plot. Using the theoretical assumptions from the field of body history studies (Haraway, 2009, 2023; Courtine, 2008, 2013), Foucauldian studies (Foucault, 2008; Orlandi, 1999; Spink, 2013), cultural studies (Kellner, 2001), and studies on cinematographic language (Morettin, 2007; Napolitano, 2008; Machado, 2014; Mascarello, 2006), we conducted an analysis of the discourse of the cinematographic narrative of the movie. Thus, the analysis allowed us to understand the historical discursive formations that permeate the film's plot and to grasp how fears and anxieties regarding the body are present in the document we analyzed, especially in the relationship between metamorphosis and the break with humanity, in the character's devolution into animality, and, finally, in the metaphors that the transformation with the sick body.