The Body and Social Identity in Cronenberg Films "Infinity Pool" and "The Fly"

This essay examines "The Fly" and "Infinity Pool" through the lens of body modification, focusing on how physical transformation reveals deeper tensions around identity, sexuality, and capitalist systems. It draws connections between the grotesque and the psychological, showing how each film critiques social norms through bodily disruption. The analysis emphasizes the interplay between horror, desire, and control in the Cronenbergs’ cinematic worlds.

IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10365998/mediaindex/

Introduction and Thesis

Director and cinematographer David Cronenberg's career has spanned more than four decades, receiving notoriety for a number of films from The Dead Zone (1983), Naked Lunch (1991), and Crimes of the Future (2022). Cronenberg is known for utilizing unique, often disturbing motifs, such as the body modification1 in The Fly. His son and legacy, Brandon Cronenberg, has brought an experimental, fresh perspective to similar themes with films like Infinity Pool (2023). Despite their different approaches to cinematography and societal commentary, David Cronenberg’s roughly 20 sf-horror films and his son Brandon’s three sf-horror films share frequently utilized depictions of grotesque body modification, the societal implications of capitalism, and ever-growing demands for technological progress. I argue that in Infinity Pool and The Fly, the father-son Cronenberg duo create characters that rely on bodily modification, “deviant” sex, and technological progress at the cellular level to ultimately escape insecurity within their relationships and society. By analyzing cinematography through the lens of critiques of capitalism, I hope to prove that the Cronenbergs’ niche and boundary-pushing methods serve as a larger criticism of the freedoms granted by late-stage, technology era capitalism to the intellectually and monetarily privileged classes to manipulate their own identities in an attempt to escape the mundane. Ultimately, this project serves as a starting point to investigate the harms of capitalist class divides on the human identity as conveyed through film. 

1 It is important to note that I do not use the term “body modification,” in the colloquial sense, that often refers to tattoos, piercings, medical procedures, etc. Rather, I use the term to refer to body horror/biological horror, i.e. genetic alteration, replication, and mutilation found in the two selected films. 

Body Modification

While both Infinity Pool and The Fly assert that body modification has deeply disturbing and negative consequences as a whole, Infinity Pool maintains a focus on body modification as a futile method of pleasure and self-discovery. In the film, the mediocre, once-published writer James Foster (Alexander Skarsgård) and his well-established, wealthy wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman) are jailed for a lethal hit-and-run in a stolen car and are forced to choose between being executed or paying a substantial lump-sum of money to have a clone created to be killed in their place. Being the primary culprit, James is the only inmate who must act on this choice. During this near-inexplicable process, James sees visions of sexual deviancy between himself and both identifiable and unidentifiable members of the resort (34:08) in which the film takes place, including that of resort member Gabi Bauer (Mia Goth), who claims to be a fan of James’ implied-to-be subpar writing(07:01). James is dipped into a pool of red liquid and experiences something similar to a psychedelic experience. When he awakes, James watches himself being stabbed to death, forcing viewers to contemplate: Is the real James being executed or his clone? In other words, who is the real James? (41:44). 

This question plagues both James’ character and the audience throughout the remainder of the film, becoming compounded as the viewer witnesses James repeat the process of committing felonies only to re-clone himself. We watch James slip into a shell of his former self, apathetic, withdrawn, and depressed. Clearly, his identity has been manipulated, damaged even, as a result of his traumatic experiences. Yet, his trauma is complex and unique in the sense that it occurred due to his own choices that he was privileged enough to make. While the poor citizens of Li Tolqa are seen in starvation and destitution, James is able to pay tens of thousands of dollars - more money than the average Li Tolqan citizen will ever encounter - to have himself cloned a total of 5 times. Yet, his privileged financial status did not alleviate his inevitable trauma. While he may have been allowed to commit unspeakable crimes against the state and its people, he was left forever questioning if he is himself, if he even has a “self,” forcing the viewer to contend with this same question. 

In contrast, David Cronenberg’s The Fly depicts scientist Seth Brundle being torturously transformed from a man to a fly-machine hybrid after he mistakenly allows a fly into a teleporting system when testing it on himself. There is an immediate stark contrast with James’ previously described experience with body modification, as Seth’s experiment unintentionally undergoes bodily transformation but encounters horrific conceptions of his own identity. Early on in the film, Seth explains his search for his own identity through science and experimentation: “I think it’s gonna help me realize the personal potential I’ve been neglecting … I’ve been obsessively pursuing goal after goal … I’ve never given me the chance to be me” (43:58). Despite having already displayed the violent and disturbing side of bodily experimentation by mutilating sentient non-human animals through his experiments, Seth is in a state of sheer desperation to find himself that he continues with his dangerous technological expeditions2. Ultimately, his search for his identity results in a complete destruction of the self (both mentally and bodily) as he becomes a disfigured, half-fly-half-human creature of nightmares. The audience is similarly left with the question: Is this creature still Seth? Moreover, what is Seth? 

In both cases, body modification produces resounding and disturbing questions of identity. I find Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to shed light on this hopeless search for identity under capitalism. In their famous work, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari have a pessimistic tone when discussing identity, the body, and the self: “You will articulate your body—otherwise you're just depraved. You will be signifier and signified, interpreter and interpreted—otherwise you're just a deviant. You will be a subject, nailed down as one, a subject of the enunciation recoiled into a subject of the statement” (159). This explains the forced contention subjects have with identity - should you fail to discover, express, and maintain a singular identity at the intersection of the body and the subject, you have failed in existence. Specifically, Deleuze and Guattari are able to convey the embodied aspect of identity. In drastically changing, mutilating, or reinventing the body, characters and viewers alike are left with concern and confusion regarding the concept of identity. Yet, we cannot ignore the privileged position that both James and Seth operate from, finding themselves able to participate in technological feats unimaginable to the working class. 

2  Seth mistakenly mutilates a baboon when testing a prototype of his teleportation machine (19:00).

Unconventional Depictions of Sexuality

Another point of comparison is the eventual outcome of both James’ and Seth’s original state of self. James is forced to not only witness his own death within the confines of the Tolqan law, but harass and murder clones of himself through Gabi’s manipulation. After running away, he is subsequently harassed and forced to walk back to the resort while Goth’s character sits on the hood of a car and shames his writing (1:29:31). Initially, James murders himself for sport, but is found towards the end of the movie in the arms of Mia Goth breastfeeding his own blood from her breasts out of a form of regressive fear and terror (1:43:09). Likewise, Seth finds himself yearning for his lost-love Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis) to visit him during his times of need, but he often feels embarrassed and ashamed. At the end of the film, Seth tries to force Quaife to keep his human-fly hybrid child she is carrying and insists Quaife go through the telepod with him to help him bring back some of his humanness (1:26:56). 

The common theme between Seth and James is both the intentional and unintentional relishing in shame and self-hatred. Both characters recklessly forced themselves into their unfortunate yet deviantly-explorative circumstances: Seth in that he recklessly teleported with a fly during a fit of jealousy after finding out Quaife was still sleeping with her boss (33:56), and James in that he continued to associate with Gabi although  his wife insisted he come home on account of his traumatizing experiences. Where Seth’s morphing with the fly is accidental, James’ continuous interactions and cloning is entirely intentional, going as far as to lie to his wife in order to remain in Li Tolqa longer (1:25:21).3 Regardless, the outcome is frighteningly similar: our main characters lose their primary love interests, being left solely with sexual experiences depicted as deviant and disturbing. In Seth’s inferior feelings concerning his inability to master relationships between others and within himself yet being able to master scientific projects, and in James’ ability to savor infidelity and deviance but not entice readers to savor his poor writing, David and Brandon Cronenberg clearly depict the consequences of subconscious self-sabotage amongst men with already weakened identities and less-than-secure senses of self. 

Additionally, this film is inherently indicative of the human nature of exploitation outside of the film’s plot, as Mia Goth is famously known for producing sexually explicit films such as X, A Cure for Wellness, and Maxxxine. Skarsgård was an executive producer on the film and therefore had as much of a choice as Goth did to consent the scene in the NC-17 version of the film in which Goth masturbates to completion (arguably assaulting) Skarsgård’s with no censoring(17:05). While it has been clarified that Skarsgård utilized a prosthetic penis for this scene, it nonetheless reveals the depravity of members of the crew themselves and perhaps suggests that the Li Tolqa resort serves as a place for ethereal, sinister-play for more than just the fictional cast. Ultimately, there are shared implications (regardless of their nature) between the fictional characters within the film and its real-life cast including but not exclusive to Mia Goth, considering the circumstances in which Goth’s character lives, Goth’s controversial romantic relationships4 and her recurring sexual roles outside of Infinity Pool’s fictional world. These elements of the film production may indicate some identification with sexual depravity as seen in the film amongst additional cast members and producers. I must clarify that I am in no way condemning the sexual nature (or sexually explicit nature, whatever) of the filmmaking - rather, I seek to identify connections, but rather identify connections between real-world relationships and on-screen sexual content. While beyond the scope of this piece, I believe analysis dedicated to identifying ways in which prominent members of the cast and crew, including Cronenberg himself, might align or resonate with the sexual depravity of the characters in Infinity Pool is necessary, further investigating how this contributes to the quality and meaning of the film itself. 

3 James claims to Em he lost his passport but eventually reveals he hid it under the toilet on purpose.

4  Shia LeBeouf and Mia Goth filed for divorce in 2018 after being married for two years and have since reconciled their relationship. In 2021, LeBeouf’s previous partner, FKA Twigs, filed a civil lawsuit against Lebouf’s alleged sexual abuse. This lawsuit is ongoing as of January 2025.

Infinity Pool (2023)

Capitalism and Social Constructs

In The Fly and Infinity Pool, elements of late-stage neocapitalism can be found in the prioritization of profit, push for progress over preservation of the self and collective, and the falsity that one can fundamentally change their otherwise monotonous, robot-like identity to increase a sense of belonging and interest. At the beginning of the Infinity Pool, Em speaks to James: “You're so frozen these days I can't even tell if you're sleeping or awake” (01:50). James’ general malaise and disconnection from himself, his relationships, and the society can be blamed for his lackluster writing that creates vulnerability and insecurity within his identity. The audience watches his character hold onto Gabi’s praise tightly, insinuating that he never receives such praise and support otherwise. This is further complicated by the fact that James was only able to publish though his wife Em’s father, who owns a publishing house. Without Em’s wealth and connections, James would otherwise be suffering in his previous feelings of inadequacy with less than what he already has - incredibly parallel to the freedoms that wealth provided to clone himself, leaving James damaged and alone. 

In The Fly, Seth explains where his funding comes from to Quaife: “Mm-hmm. But they leave me alone 'cause I'm not expensive. And they know they'll end up owning it all, whatever it is” (10:20). Where James is disillusioned with his lack of naturally occurring, “no strings attached” opportunities, Seth seems to be indifferent towards what the government provides for him, yet throughout the film, he is hesitant to release what he is working on. Seth’s hesitance can be interpreted as a fear of his work being claimed before it is mastered, being reproduced or made at a lower price, or being stolen from him without maintaining his rights to the project entirely, highlighting the complicated economic aspect operating in the story’s background.  While The Fly addresses a very different era of economic society, the film serves as a broader commentary on property (intellectual and otherwise) which were prevalent in the 1970s–crucial developing years of technology. 

After James is cloned in Infinity Pool, Gabi greets him along with the other convicted criminals who opted to be cloned: “James, you made it. You're completely transformed. You look so beautiful now. I can see the beauty just pouring right out of you”(49:39). The cloning in Infinity Pool is analogous to the societal transition from socially acceptable norms under a capitalistic society to a liberated, undetectable status as a citizen. Evading the law not only saved the lives of the clones' criminals, but saved their egos from death by dread due to the monotonous routines in which Americans and other predominantly capitalistic societies live. Critics M. Kieth Booker and Isra Daraiseh explain the capitalist themes in Infinity Pool: “Questions of just what constitutes the continuity of identity over time are in a sense set aside in the postmodern era of neoliberal capitalism if the narrative continuity of identity in this era has already been shattered” (72). Because identity - both as a concept and as a sense of oneself - has already been disfigured by capitalism, the hyper-capitalist setting of privileged men with rampant access to unfathomable technology is able to highlight how deep this disfigurement truly runs, impacting the characters on bodily and psychological levels alike. 

Gabi confronts James after he returns back to the resort after being cloned: “A discovery. Are you upset? Maybe think of it as a gift. You said you were looking for inspiration. There's something to the experience, isn't there?”(47:50). Even within the lawless, outlandish realm of the resort, there is still gain to be had at the cost of what otherwise might be a purely “poetic” experience (1:03:23). Gabi supports the idea that even pain should be profited on in the capitalistic society in which they are from, and perhaps she even emphasizes this throughout her harassment of James. James’ identity as a writer is pushed aside and perhaps the last thing he is thinking about is inspiration, considering how the film ends. At the end of the film, Gabi and other members of the resort club are seen bussing back to the airport discussing mundane things such as “rearranging the house again” and “pay Jonas for the work he did on the garage” (1:45:34). Amidst the casual shuffle of conversations, James is left paralyzed in a compelling shot wherein he is sitting center frame on the bus with not only fear of the horrors he saw at the Li Tolqa resort, but arguably worse fears of returning to his life as a bad writer in a miserable, conventional, meaningless relationship he entered in for a chance to take advantage of Em’s resources. After arriving at the airport and bidding farewell to the Bauers, James gets back on the bus and stays at the resort for an undisclosed amount of time during the rainy season (1:47:37). As Nick Davie explains: “By peeling back the facade of Li Tolqa’s tranquil Mediterranean aesthetics, the film presents like … an organised complex that was once appealing but now feels overwhelmingly inescapable”(128). In confronting the true nature of what I previously described as a hyper-privileged setting, James is now trapped, alone, and empty in his questions of who he is, what he is, and what he has done. 

Brandon Cronenberg ultimately depicts James’ newfound lack of finding common identity amongst a previously familiar group of people to highlight the sense of insanity one might need to experience the horrors at Li Tolqa and promptly afterwards resume a conventional, ordinary life. James’ struggle with comprehending how Gabi can be a murderous psychopath on the island but a normal woman outside of an outlet for deviancy appears to be beyond James and viewers are left just as shell shocked as we presume he is.

Comparatively, In The Fly, Seth latches onto the idea that he was always meant to be a bug when Quaife approaches him to tell him (but fails to) about the abortion she will have for their child: “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”(01:17). Through the emasculation of Seth, David emphasizes that capitalism creates a false sense of security and self through the establishment of employment and how one contributes to the system of capitalism itself. During a different address to Quaife, Seth asks: “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”(1:17:04). David’s utilization of profound dialogue mirrors that of the disillusioned feelings of James. Additionally, David implies through Seth's speech that the only way to understand politicians is to become that of an insect, inhuman rather. David’s clear criticism of capitalism is seen through Seth’s sorrows. Brandon’s criticisms, on the other hand, are seen through James’ lack of dialogue and inclusion of disillusionment and shock. Ultimately, both directors reveal the cause of the main character’s horrific endings to be in part a failing of the capitalist system. 

Infinity Pool (2023)

Technological Progress

In both films, the directors provide technology as a means to better oneself under false pretenses unbeknownst to them. When discussing his new state in a cafe with Quaife his unintentional transition, Seth states: “I think it’s going to allow me to realize the personal potential I’ve been neglecting all these years, that I’ve obsessively been pursuing goal after goal. I just don’t think I’ve ever given me a chance to be me”(44:00). Today’s social media and society reflects Seth’s views on false self-improvement, as technology has become a commodity to sell new versions of oneself. Additionally, in his possible delusional state of finding purpose as an insect, Seth states “Most people would give anything to be turned into something else”(01:08). While these themes are not explicitly mentioned regarding technology in Infinity Pool, there are nods to the cloning technology being expendable and ever-available. Where David’s film presents technology as a failed experiment under the control of a poorly-adjusted male, Brandon depicts technology as a privilege to be taken advantage of in order to buy one's sanity, insanity, guilt, or innocence. Without Seth’s intellectual privilege to manipulate technology and Em’s financial ability to pay for James’ mistakes, both characters would be stuck in versions of themselves they are not only bored with, but versions of themselves that they hate. 

Conclusion 

While the Cronenberg father-son duo shares many themes and messages alike in their work, Brandon states in an interview with The Independent: “That is one of the problems when you have a well-known parent, people are interested in that relationship, but it also got quite boring after a while and I didn't want to be defined by it. I'm just doing what is interesting for me." Regardless of the inspiration Brandon takes from his father, Infinity Pool is a phenomenal experimental masterpiece of the modern age and serves as a great accompaniment to his father’s work. This paper can be furthered with additional examination of how my analysis of the films interacts with concepts of “Otherness” within the self and amongst individuals or society. 

David Cronenberg’s film criticizes uncontrolled access to technology as a precursor to his son’s film about how mastered technology can manage to perfectly replicate one’s body and memories, but perhaps shift “something else” within the original self. While this “something else” is not directly addressed in either film (which is a point of contention for some critics), the ambiguous shift from sexual uncertainty, insecurity and general malaise in the protagonists identities can can be attributed to epiphanies regarding the primal nature of humanity. Further, Seth’s insistence on perfecting the telepod system regardless of the consequences for his test subjects mirrors that of the financially seizing Tolqan society’s disregard for potential changes within the original self.

Works Cited

• Aftab, Kaleem. “The Trouble with Sitting in Dad David Cronenberg’s Director’s Chair.” The Independent, 6 Nov. 2012, Accessed 06 Dec. 2024.

• Beard, W. (1994). Cronenberg, Flyness, and the Other-self. Cinémas, 4(2), 153–173. 

• Booker, M. Keith, and Isra Daraiseh. “I Think I’m a Clone Now: The (New) Weirdness of Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool.” Science Fiction Film & Television, vol. 17, no. 1, Feb. 2024, pp. 53–78.

• Cronenberg, Brandon, director. Infinity Pool. Elevation Pictures, 2023. 

• Cronenberg, David, director. “The Fly.” 20th Century Fox, 1986. 

• Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.  Les Editions de Minuit, 1980.

• McGinn, Colin. “The Fly and the Human Ironies of Disgust.” The Philosophy of David Cronenberg, University Press of Kentucky, pp. 9–23. 

• Nick, Davie. “Infinity Pool.” Foundation, vol. 52, no. 146, 2023, pp. 126–128.