The Talking Fly and Other Cautionary Tales

I caught the end of "The Fly" last night on American Movie Classics -- the original with Vincent Price and David Hedison, not the remake with Jeff Goldblum. The one that requires you to use a little imagination and is chilling, but not gross. I loved this movie as a kid. In the days before you could copy or burn or download a movie, you watched it when the TV Guide said it was on. You made your popcorn, plumped the couch pillows, turned down the lights, and got ready for the show. In my case, I had a birthday sleepover and forced several innocent, unsuspecting girlfriends to watch the horror flick with me. Have they ever forgiven me for the inevitable ensuing nightmares?

Now, I watched with a smile on my face wondering if the movie would hold up all these years. It's still wonderful, the ending as creepy as ever. Seeing it as an adult, though, started me thinking about other cautionary tales of the consequences of trying to usurp nature’s power. Icarus flew too close to the sun. Eve was banished from the garden. Prometheus was punished for stealing fire from Zeus. Pandora gave us Death. Frankenstein unleashed a monster. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice almost drowned the world. The list goes on. All of those unfortunates paid dearly for playing with power they did not really have or understand.

A not-so-subtle message of warning shines brightly in those stories. Yet our culture, heeding not this warning, greedily throws an ever-widening net of control over the natural world. The cautious among us love those tales because even in the glow of infatuation over a new scientific discovery, we still fear the monster that might arise. There are already frogs that glow in the dark, killer bees, non-native species destroying native ones, antiobiotic-resistant bacteria—all Frankensteinian developments for which we have no one but ourselves to blame. The cautionary tales are all imaginary, but in today's news stories where does science fact end and science fiction begin? We know not the answer, but we have met the monster and it is us.