Caught in the act: do you reckon Jeff Goldblum's a natural tenor?
The announcement of one of the odder artistic hybrids of recent times raises the prospect of puzzled fans of Placido Domingo and David Cronenberg blinking at each other across a crowded opera house.
An opera based on Cronenberg's 1986 masterwork The Fly, with Domingo conducting and the movie director overseeing the adaptation, is to open at Paris' Théâtre du Châtelet in July 2008. It will move to Los Angeles later that year.
It seems unlikely that the makers of the much-loved 1958 B-movie on which Cronenberg based his remake could have foreseen their addled creation (or at least a version thereof) being peered at through opera glasses. It seems equally unlikely that the idea would have occurred to many of us while watching Jeff Goldblum transmogrify a baboon almost 30 years later.
And yet on another level it makes a strange kind of sense. The plot, after all, is a classical tale of hubris, overlaid with all manner of thematic ponderings on mortality and science. On reflection, Cronenberg's involvement doesn't seem too outlandish either. He has always been one of the most curious minds in the movies, a genuine intellect whose creative instincts could have easily found an outlet aside from film, and whose professorial manner almost comically belies the lurid reputation his movies accrued in the 70s and 80s.
That said, it's interesting that it's one of (to paraphrase Woody Allen) Cronenberg's early, disgusting films - albeit the most glitzily big-budget of them - that's being elevated to High Art, rather than the more conventionally cerebral likes of Spider or A History of Violence. The Fly is, after all, a horror movie, and perhaps there's something about the horror genre with its primal invocations of fear and loss that particularly lends itself to opera. Certainly there's a minor tradition of horror film-makers becoming smitten with the form, ranging from slasher icon Dario Argento's typically baroque 1987 project Opera to the latter-day moonlighting of Exorcist director William Friedkin on international productions of Bartok, Puccini and Strauss.
Still, for any other horror movie to make a similar transformation, you'd imagine there needs to be plenty of the one thing modern examples have dispensed with altogether - memorable and easily distinguishable characters who offer more than simply a range of limbs to be violated. The prospect of Pavarotti belting out a libretto based on the Saw trilogy seems, for instance, mercifully remote.
Further back in the canon, however, the story may be different - the bloody vengeance of Carrie would seem ripe for some Wagnerian accompaniment, while I surely can't be alone in imagining The Shining complete with a hundred-strong chorus of identical twins and Jack Nicholson's "Heeeeere's Johnny" delivered in a soaring, richly melodic baritone that would make Shelley Duvall sigh contentedly before he attempts to put an axe through her head.
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