CW: gross
There’s a scene in David Cronenberg’s “The Fly” where Jeff Goldblum’s character stands in front of his bathroom mirror looking at his sickly and pustule-filled face. He examines his discolored cheeks closely and decides to shave. He brings himself even closer to the mirror to do so and notices that his tooth is loose, and starts to wiggle it. The tooth begins to give, and he wiggles it more, causing it to come clean out of his mouth. In a state of shock, he stares at his hands and presses lightly on his finger tips, pushing out a strong squirt of puss. He presses on his finger once more, and his fingernail falls neatly off.
The “fingernail scene” is a trope that has been copied in other horror flicks, for example in District 9, in which the protagonist is is sprayed with a toxic alien chemical and slowly becomes an alien himself. The start of that transformation is another panicked bathroom scene in which a fingernail falls off way too easily.
The fingernail represents only the beginning, after which the protagonist’s body attacks itself, becoming sickly and then turning into a putrid horror. The fingernail represents the starting point of an inevitable path of decay. Jeff Goldblum is still hot when pieces of his body start falling off, but not for long.
I get why this is horrifying to people. I too have spent time agonizing in the bathroom, in the bedroom, or pretty much anywhere private or in front of doctors regarding: what the hell is wrong with my body?
Chronic pain is the start of a long journey in which the protagonist first believes that she is fine. It’s probably fine to feel this way, it will go away, the fingernail will grow back soon. Then she slowly realizes that this is who she is now, who she has become, a pain-filled person. Someone who is being attacked from the inside out.
It’s scary when your body betrays you, whether you’re slowly turning into a giant fly because one slipped into your teleportation devise and as a result your DNAs became fused, or whether you’re always hurting. It’s scary because it’s the ultimate trap. You can walk out of a room, you can leave a city. You cannot step out of your body.
On the outside I know I’m not a monster, but on the inside I feel fundamentally broken. Less of a person somehow.
And yet there are a few key differences between our arthropod protagonist and myself. Turning into a giant fly tends to consume all aspects of one’s life. Eating becomes difficult without spewing caustic chemicals onto food in order to digest it, dating becomes difficult when you look like a creature with half human half insect DNA.
I can live beyond my pain, I can dive headfirst into the things I love to do. Pain does not consume my very existence, although at times it feels like an existential threat.
I know this to be true, and I work on reminding myself of this everyday.
Nevertheless, my heart goes out to all the body horror protagonists that have agonized in bathrooms across the globe, asking: “What the hell is happening to me?”
Natalia is 22 years old, a horror fan, and packing her stuff to start a new chapter post-Life Together.