David Cronenberg

You have to leave now, and never come back here. Have you ever heard of insect politics? Neither have I. Insects... don't have politics. They're very... brutal. No compassion, no compromise. We can't trust the insect. I'd like to become the first... insect politician. Y'see, I'd like to, but... I'm afraid, uh...

I'm saying... I'm saying I - I'm an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is over... and the insect is awake.

I'm saying... I'll hurt you if you stay.

There was an old lady who swallowed a fly, perhaps she'll die.

What's there to take? The disease has just revealed its purpose. We don't have to worry about contagion anymore... I know what the disease wants.

It wants to... turn me into something else. That's not too terrible is it? Most people would give anything to be turned into something else.

Whaddaya think? A fly. Am I becoming a hundred-and-eighty-five-pound fly? No, I'm becoming something that never existed before. I'm becoming… Brundlefly. Don't you think that's worth a Nobel Prize or two?

A fly… got into the… transmitter pod with me that first time, when I was alone. The computer… got confused - there weren't supposed to be two separate genetic patterns - and it decided to… uhh… splice us together. It mated us, me and the fly. We hadn't even been properly introduced.

My teeth have begun to fall out. The medicine cabinet is now the Brundle Museum of Natural History. You wanna see what else is in it?

How does Brundlefly eat? Well, he found out the hard and painful way that he eats very much the way a fly eats. His teeth are now useless, because although he can chew up solid food, he can't digest them. Solid food hurts. So like a fly, Brundlefly breaks down solids with a corrosive enzyme, playfully called "vomit drop". He regurgitates on his food, it liquifies, and then he sucks it back up. Ready for a demonstration, kids? Here goes…

You're afraid to dive into the plasma pool, aren't you? You're afraid to be destroyed and recreated, aren't you? I'll bet you think that you woke me up about the flesh, don't you? But you only know society's straight line about the flesh. You can't penetrate beyond society's sick, gray, fear of the flesh. Drink deep, or taste not, the plasma spring! Y'see what I'm saying? And I'm not just talking about sex and penetration. I'm talking about penetration beyond the veil of the flesh! A deep penetrating dive into the plasma pool!

What am I working on? Uhh… I'm working on something that will change the world, and human life as we know it.

We'll be the ultimate family. A family of three joined together in one body. More human than I am alone.

I farm bits and pieces out to the guys who are much more brilliant than I am. I say, "build me a laser", this. "Design me a molecular analyzer", that. They do, and I just stick 'em together. But, none of them know what the project really is. So…

Hmm-mmm… But they leave me alone, 'cause I'm not expensive. And they know they'll end up owning it, whatever it is.

I will say now, however objectively, that human teleportation, molecular decimation, breakdown, reformation, is inherently purging.

The computer is giving us its interpretation… of a steak. It's, uh translating it for us; it's rethinking it, rather than reproducing it, and something is getting lost in the translation.

The flesh. It should make the computer, uh crazy. Like those old ladies pinching babies. But it doesn't; not yet because I haven't taught the computer to be made crazy by the…

flesh. The poetry of the steak. So, I'm gonna start teaching it now.

You were right. I am diseased, and uh... it might be contagious somehow. I wouldn't want to infect you.

Exterminate all rational thought. That is the conclusion I have come to.

Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down you dig farting out the words. It was unlike anything I had ever heard. This asshole talk had sort of a gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? Well this talking hit you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell. This man worked for a carnival you dig, and to start with it was like a novelty ventriliquist act. Real funny, too, at first. He had a number he called The Better Ole that was a scream, I tell you. I forget most of it but it was clever. Like, "Oh I say, are you still down there, old thing?" "Nah I had to go relieve myself." After a while the asshole started talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his asshole would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time. Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy in-curving hooks and start eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it, but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. Finally it talked all the time day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing did any good and the asshole said to him, "It is you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we dont need you around here any more. I can talk and eat AND shit." After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpoles tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell. So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have have amputated spontaneous - except for the EYES you dig. Thats one thing the asshole COULDN'T do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldnt give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes WENT OUT, and there was no more feeling in them than a crabs eyes on the end of a stalk.

America is not a young land. It is old… and dirty… and evil. Before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there… waiting.

I understood writing could be dangerous. I didn't realize the danger came from the machinery.

Queer. A curse. Been in our family for generations. The Lees have always been perverts. I shall never forget the unspeakable horror that froze the lymph in my glands when the baneful word seared my reeling brain - I was a homosexual. I thought of the painted simpering female impersonators I'd seen in a Baltimore nightclub. Could it be possible I was one of those subhuman things? I walked the streets in a daze like a man with a light concussion. I would've destroyed myself. And a wise old queen - Bobo, we called her - taught me that I had a duty to live and bear my burden proudly for all to see. Poor Bobo came to a sticky end - he was riding in the Duke Devanche's Hispano Suissa when his falling hemorrhoids blew out of the car and wrapped around the rear wheel. He was completely gutted leaving an empty shell sitting there on the giraffe skin upholstry. Even the eyes and the brain went with a horrible "shlupping" sound. The Duke says he would carry that ghastly "shlup" with him to his mausoleum.

I guess it's about time for our William Tell routine.

Go see the fucking parrots, Kiki.

Joan, you're starting to sound like a full-fledged Junkie. And it's BUG POWDER for God's sake!