July 5: The summer of the atom, and a swimsuit named after a bomb
On July 5, 1946, the bikini swimsuit debuted in Paris, named after a nuclear test site. Tonight's film: The Fly (1986).
1946 was the first full summer after the bombs. The war was over, but the bomb itself was everywhere. It filled the newspapers, the newsreels, the dinner-table talk. That July the United States had invited the world’s press to Bikini Atoll, a ring of islands in the Marshall Islands, to watch it blow up a fleet of leftover warships. The operation was called Crossroads. The first shot, Able, went off on July 1. (The underwater shot, Baker, came on July 25.) Four days after Able, on July 5, a French automobile engineer turned fashion designer named Louis Réard presented a two-piece swimsuit at the Piscine Molitor, a fashionable public pool in Paris.
The suit was tiny. No professional model would wear it. Réard had to hire Micheline Bernardini, a nude dancer from the Casino de Paris, to step out in it. He named it the bikini, after the atoll where the Americans had just set off their bomb. He said he expected the reaction to be just as explosive. A rival designer, Jacques Heim, had already shown his own two-piece a few weeks earlier and called it the Atome. Réard went smaller, and reached for the actual bomb.
This is the part that hooks a science-fiction watcher. The name was not cute. It was a provocation built out of a real and recent dread. The bomb had taught the whole world, in one flash, that the unseen could reach into a body and remake it. Radiation was in the air, literally, and no one yet knew exactly what it did to living tissue. The double-helix structure of DNA was still seven years away, in 1953. The bikini sold that unease back to the public as a joke, a fashion wink at the apocalypse.
David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) takes that unease and refuses to let it be a joke. Jeff Goldblum is Seth Brundle, a brilliant, jittery scientist who has built a pair of teleportation pods. He calls them telepods. They take matter apart in one chamber and reassemble it in another, across the room. He tests the device on himself while drunk. A common housefly has slipped into the pod with him. The machine, unable to tell the two organisms apart, fuses them at the level of their genes. What walks out still looks like Brundle. Then, over the weeks that follow, he stops being Brundle.
This is body horror, the genre Cronenberg built his name on, and The Fly is its high point. The transformation is not a clean monster movie. It is a slow, disgusting, deeply sad account of a man watching his own body stop being his. At first Brundle is stronger, faster, more virile, and he thinks the teleportation has purified him. Then his nails fall out. His skin blisters. He vomits a corrosive fluid onto his food to dissolve it. He gives a name to the thing he is becoming: Brundlefly. Geena Davis plays Veronica, the science journalist who loves him and ends up filming his disintegration. The makeup, by Chris Walas, won the film its Academy Award, and it earns every frame. (The film is a loose remake of the 1958 original, which itself came from George Langelaan’s 1957 short story. Cronenberg kept the premise and drained out the camp.)
The thread that runs from July 5, 1946 to 1986 is the body as a thing that can be rewritten by forces we set loose and cannot call back. Réard named a swimsuit for a blast that scattered invisible damage across an atoll and its displaced people. Cronenberg made a film about a man whose own invention scrambles the code that built him. Both assume the same frightening idea: the body is not fixed. Put the wrong kind of energy through it, and what comes out the other side is not you.
I will not pretend The Fly is easy to sit through. It is gross on purpose, and anyone who watched it once remembers the moments they wish they could forget. But it earns its disgust. It takes a joke about radiation and transformation, the same joke the bikini was cracking in 1946, and turns it into a love story about the one transformation none of us get to refuse: the body turning against the person living inside it.
So tonight, if your stomach is up for it, press play. Watch Brundle shed his humanity one scene at a time. And then spare a thought for that afternoon at the Piscine Molitor, when a dancer stepped out in a scrap of cloth named for a bomb, and a room full of people laughed at what they thought was the end of the world.
What else could have been tonight
Two other July 5 events that would have stood in just as well for tonight’s film:
1996: Dolly the sheep is born. At the Roslin Institute in Scotland, a team led by Ian Wilmut produced the first mammal ever cloned from an adult cell. The donor was a Finn-Dorset sheep; Dolly was carried by a surrogate of a different breed. They named her after Dolly Parton, because the cloning used a mammary cell. She lived nearly seven years before she was euthanized with lung disease in 2003. If this were tonight’s topic, the film would be The Island (2005), Michael Bay’s thriller about human clones raised in a sealed facility, told the outside world is poisoned, and quietly harvested as spare organs for the wealthy originals who paid for them. Dolly proved a grown body could be copied. The Island asks who that copy belongs to.
1937: Hormel Foods introduces SPAM. The canned meat, pork shoulder and ham cooked in its own tin and shelf-stable for years, was renamed in a company contest by Ken Daigneau, who took home $100 for the portmanteau of “spiced ham.” It went on to feed Allied armies by the hundred-million can during the war. The matching film is Soylent Green (1973), set in an overcrowded, broke, sweltering 2022 where the masses survive on colored wafers rationed out by the Soylent corporation. SPAM was the honest version of the story: cheap, industrial food for a hungry planet. Soylent Green is where that same road ends, and the line Charlton Heston screams in the final scene is the one nobody wants to hear about their dinner.
Sources
The main event: the bikini debuts in Paris, July 5, 1946
History.com, “Bikini introduced” (Louis Réard presents the swimsuit at the Piscine Molitor on July 5, 1946): https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/july-5/bikini-introduced
Wikipedia, “Micheline Bernardini” (the Casino de Paris nude dancer who modeled the bikini on July 5, 1946): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micheline_Bernardini
Wikipedia, “Bikini Atoll” (the Marshall Islands test site the swimsuit was named after): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikini_Atoll
Wikipedia, “Operation Crossroads” (the 1946 nuclear tests: Able on July 1, Baker on July 25): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Crossroads
Tonight’s film: The Fly (1986)
Wikipedia, “The Fly (1986 film)” (Cronenberg’s body-horror remake, Brundle and the telepods): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fly_(1986_film)
IMDb, “The Fly (1986)” (cast and plot): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091064/
The side events
Dolly the sheep, Wikipedia (born July 5, 1996 at the Roslin Institute, first mammal cloned from an adult somatic cell): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolly_(sheep)
National Museums Scotland, “The story of Dolly the sheep”: https://www.nms.ac.uk/discover-catalogue/the-story-of-dolly-the-sheep
The Island (2005), Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_(2005_film)
SPAM, Wikipedia (introduced by Hormel on July 5, 1937, the “spiced ham” portmanteau): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_(food)
Britannica, “SPAM” (the name coined by Ken Daigneau in a contest): https://www.britannica.com/topic/SPAM-food
Soylent Green (1973), Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green