Seth Brundle

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Seth Brundle
Jeff Goldblum as Dr. Seth Brundle
First appearance	The Fly
Last appearance	The Fly II (in archival videotape footage)
Created by	David Cronenberg
Portrayed by	Jeff Goldblum
Information
Species	Human (pre-teleportation) Human/Insect Hybrid (post-teleportation)
Gender	Male
Date of birth	1952
Date of death	1986
Occupation	Molecular physicist
Relatives	Martin Brundle (son)

Seth Brundle is a fictional character and the protagonist in David Cronenberg's 1986 remake of The Fly. He is played by Jeff Goldblum. Brundle was the first of Goldblum's "nerdy scientist" roles (a character type he also played in the films The Race for the Double Helix, Jurassic Park, and Independence Day), and is one of his most famous roles to date.

[edit] Fictional biography

Seth Brundle suffered from motion sickness beginning at an early age. As a child, he vomited on his tricycle, and developed an intense dislike of vehicles as a result of his condition. Later, by the age of 20, Brundle had become a molecular physics Wunderkind, and was the leader of a project known as "F32", which very nearly netted him a Nobel Prize in Physics. He also earned his doctorate at some undisclosed point.

Years later, Brundle focused his attention on creating a functional teleportation system, in part so he would no longer have to worry about his motion sickness when traveling. At some point, he became the sole occupant of an abandoned warehouse, the fourth (and top) floor of which he converted into a combination laboratory/living quarters. Brundle, who was a shy, virginal recluse, also adopted a habit of Albert Einstein's when he bought five identical sets of clothes so as not to waste mental energy deciding what to wear each day. Brundle's teleportation system was funded by Bartok Science Industries, which was unaware of the nature of the project and did not interfere since Brundle's requirements were relatively inexpensive. Despite his scientific brilliance, Brundle subcontracted the design and construction of various components out to other scientists, components which Brundle then put together himself (thus keeping the nature of the project secret). Eventually, the first prototype "Telepod" was completed, and when it proved successful, Brundle had two refined models built. All in all, the project took six years to complete, but at this point, Brundle could only teleport non-living objects successfully.

One night, while attending a meet-the-press party sponsored by Bartok, Brundle met Veronica Quaife, a journalist working for Particle magazine. After convincing Veronica that he was working on something that would change the world, he drove with her to his warehouse and demonstrated the Telepods for her. However, Brundle had been under the impression that their meeting was an off-the-record social affair, but Veronica felt otherwise and proceeded to tell her editor and former lover, Stathis Borans, about what she'd seen. Eventually, Brundle was able to convince Veronica that the project was not ready to be revealed to the world, since the Telepods could not yet cope with living matter. The pair then made a deal; Brundle would allow Veronica an insider's access to his work on the Telepods (with her end goal being a book documenting the project) in exchange for her keeping the project's existence quiet.

Veronica then set about documenting Brundle's quest to perfect the Telepods, including a disastrous experiment in which a live baboon was turned inside-out during the reintegration process. Brundle and Veronica soon became lovers, and during their first sexual encounter, he accidentally rolled onto a small circuit board, which created several small scratches on his back. Brundle's sexual awakening also provided him with a key moment of inspiration when an off-hand comment of Veronica's led him to realize that the Telepods were reinterpreting living flesh instead of reproducing it. As a result of this epiphany, Brundle reprogrammed the Telepod computer to be creative when reintegrating organic material. Soon after, a teleportation experiment with another baboon proved successful.

However, as Brundle and Veronica were about to celebrate this scientific triumph, Veronica became aware of the fact that the possessive and jealous Borans was threatening to reveal the Telepods' existence to the world prematurely. Keeping Brundle unaware of this so as to avoid hurting his feelings, Veronica abruptly left to confront Borans. Incorrectly suspecting that Veronica was still seeing Borans romantically, a drunken and jealous Brundle decided to teleport himself so as to deprive Veronica of the opportunity to see a historic moment in science. However, a common housefly slipped into the sending Telepod unnoticed by the preoccupied scientist. After his successful teleportation, Brundle went to bed, and was awoken some hours later by Veronica. He told her about his rash teleportation and the reasons behind it, and the two then reconciled and made love.

The next morning, Brundle awoke feeling strangely energized. He was surprised at his reflexes as he plucked a fly out of mid-air, and then performed a series of highly complex gymnastic exercises for Veronica. Unable to account for his new strength and agility, Brundle theorized that the teleportation process had somehow improved and purified his body. By this point, he and Veronica had begun to affect each other; he began wearing new clothes that she had bought for him, and she began wearing a necklace with a heart-shaped charm that he bought for her (despite her previous assertion that she never wore jewelry). However, Brundle's newfound energy, which now included incredible sexual stamina, quickly turned to all-out mania. He became arrogant and aggressive, and when Veronica discovered several coarse hairs growing out of the scratches on his back during a long lovemaking session, Brundle dismissed her concerns. Instead, he was obsessively focused on his new feeling of euphoria, and attempted to force Veronica to undergo teleportation, claiming that the process was like "a perfectly pure and benign drug." Shocked by his behavior, Veronica refused, and Brundle, seething with energy, abandoned her and stormed off into the night, determined to find someone who could "keep up" with him sexually.

Eventually, Brundle entered a local bar, where he volunteered to arm-wrestle a burly man, Marky, with the prize being the sexual favors of a young woman named Tawny. He then used his newfound super-strength to give Marky's arm a compound fracture, and spent the rest of the night bar-hopping with Tawny. The next morning, Brundle took Tawny to his warehouse, where he teleported himself once again during a lull in their sexual escapades. Soon after, Brundle, now feeling less energetic than before, tried to force Tawny to undergo teleportation. However, Veronica arrived in time to prevent this, and Tawny subsequently left the warehouse. Veronica then tried to warn Brundle that something went wrong during his first teleportation, and explained that scientific testing of the coarse hairs she'd previously trimmed from his back revealed that they were not human. Refusing to listen to her, Brundle threw Veronica out of his warehouse and told her never to return. However, after her departure, he went into his bathroom to examine himself, and was horrified to discover that lesions were appearing on his face, and that his fingernails were beginning to fall off. Humbled by this discovery, Brundle checked his computer's records and learned that the Telepod computer, confused by the presence of two separate life-forms in the sending pod, merged him with the fly at the genetic level.

"I'm becoming...Brundlefly. Don't you think that's worth a Nobel Prize or two?"

After a month-long period of self-imposed isolation, Brundle finally mustered up the courage to call Veronica and reconcile with her. His body had been progressively degenerating during this period, with each day bringing new horrors and the loss of various body parts. Eventually, Brundle came to realize that his genetic fusion with the fly was slowly transforming him into a deformed hybrid creature, which he subsequently dubbed "Brundlefly". He soon began to exhibit fly-like characteristics, such as his need to vomit corrosive enzymes (which Brundle named "vomit-drop") on his food in order to pre-digest it. Brundle also developed a craving for sugary foods, and his lab quickly became a cluttered mess, full of half-eaten donuts, cakes, and other junk-food items. Overwhelmed by the horror of it all, Brundle began using gallows humor and took a perverse pleasure in certain aspects of his metamorphosis, such as his new ability to cling to walls. He was also morbidly fascinated with his transformation from a scientific perspective, and even videotaped a demonstration of his new fly-like eating technique "for posterity". Regardless, Brundle still desperately searched for a cure to his condition, even as he continued to disintegrate mentally, emotionally, and physically. A scene deleted from The Fly, which would have fit in at this point, featured an experimental test of Brundle's "cure", in which the desperate scientist used the Telepods to fuse the surviving baboon and a cat together into one entity. However, the resulting "monkey-cat" creature was horribly deformed and in terrible agony, and Brundle put it out of its misery by beating it to death with a metal pipe. A small fly-like leg then burst out of Brundle's left side, and, unable to cope with this new appendage, he amputated it with his teeth.

As his diseased transformation progressed, Brundle installed a fusion program in the Telepod computer, and the computer suggested to him that the most logical way to make himself more human was to fuse genetically with one or more pure human beings. Veronica then came to visit him once again, but he explained to her that he was losing his human compassion and told her to leave him forever before he could hurt her. While on the roof of the warehouse to watch her depart--with her confidant, Borans--Brundle overheard Veronica say that she was pregnant with Brundle's child, and wanted an abortion. He then proceeded to smash into the clinic Veronica and Borans had gone to, and abducted her before she could abort the fetus. On a nearby rooftop, Brundle begged Veronica to carry the child to term, since it could very well have been conceived before his fateful teleportation and thus might have been "all that's left of the real me." Veronica replied that she was too afraid to have the baby, and a distraught Brundle took her back to his warehouse.

After being merged with a portion of Telepod 2, Brundlefly silently begs for a merciful death.

Seeing that Borans, armed with a shotgun, had broken into the laboratory, Brundle leapt through the warehouse's open skylight and pounced on him. The crazed mutant dissolved Borans' left hand and right foot with his corrosive "vomit-drop", and only Veronica's pleading prevented him from killing Borans. Brundle then revealed his desperate plan to Veronica: he intended to use Telepods 1 and 2 (as well as the old prototype, which would serve as a receiving pod) to fuse with Veronica and their unborn child. He believed that this would make them the "ultimate family", an entity "more human than I am alone." Veronica resisted, and in the ensuing struggle, she accidentally ripped off his jaw, prompting his final transformation. Brundle's body shed its outer layer of decaying flesh, revealing the monstrous combination of man and insect that had been growing underneath it. The now-mute "Brundlefly" then threw Veronica into Telepod 1 and stepped inside Telepod 2. However, the wounded Borans managed to stay conscious and used his shotgun to sever the power cables connected to Telepod 1, allowing Veronica to escape unharmed. Seeing this, Brundlefly attempted to break out of Telepod 2 just as the fusion sequence occurred, and was molecularly intertwined with chunks of metal and other components. As the mortally wounded Brundlefly-Telepod fusion creature crawled out of the prototype Telepod, it begged Veronica to end its suffering with Borans' shotgun by placing the barrel against its own head. A devastated Veronica hesitated for a moment, and then pulled the trigger, mercifully blasting Brundlefly's head off.^[1]

Several months later, Veronica died giving birth to Brundle's son, Martin. Martin was persuaded to continue his late father's work on the Telepods when he was shown videotape footage of his father being interviewed by Veronica about his work. Despite eventually transforming into an insect-like creature himself (one which proved to be far more deadly than its father), Martin eventually found a cure for his condition, and was successful in getting the Telepods to work again, thus redeeming his late father's legacy.^[2]

[edit] Skills and Abilities

Prior to his first teleportation, Seth Brundle was a normal human being who possessed a genius-level knowledge of molecular physics, but suffered from chronic motion sickness. He was also a talented piano player, and was fond of the works of composers such as Beethoven and Bach.

After his teleportation and subsequent genetic fusion with a common housefly, Brundle became extremely energized, and possessed incredible strength, agility, and sexual potency, as well as little need for sleep. Even after he began to deteriorate, he retained his superhuman strength, as well as developing other abilities, which allowed him to scale sheer walls (as a result of sticky, cushion-like pads on his hands and feet) and vomit highly corrosive enzymes onto his food (or foes). Despite this, the "Brundlefly" creature that resulted from Brundle's teleportation accident was a deformed, sickly, asymmetrical monster.

[edit] Notes

• Seth Brundle, who suffered from motion sickness, was ironically named after race car champion Martin Brundle (which was also used as the name of his son in The Fly II).^[3]
• Brundle's diseased metamorphosis was broken up into six stages by Chris Walas, Inc.'s makeup and creature effects crew (seven, if one includes the Brundlefly/Telepod fusion seen at the end of The Fly), ranging from facial discoloration to full-body rubber suits to highly-articulated puppets.

[edit] References