After a six-decade absence, the New World screwworm has returned to the American southwest, though critics note its current flesh-devouring engagement lacks the raw, transgressive power of its mid-century run.
The Department of Agriculture announced last week that Cochliomyia hominivorax—the melodramatically translated “man-eater” fly—had been discovered twisting its larval form into the flesh of a three-week-old calf in rural Zavala County, Texas; an announcement that, frankly, left those of us who track the broader movements of pastoral decay feeling profoundly underwhelmed. There is, to be sure, a certain provincial charm in the maggot’s foundational methodology, consuming its warm-blooded host from the inside out in a slow, weeping pageant of biological consumption; yet one cannot help but feel that the screwworm, absent from the domestic stage for sixty years, is merely restaging a tired mid-century repertoire for an audience that has long since evolved past such literalist interpretations of the grotesque.
To observe the larvae gnawing senselessly through bovine tissue today is to be confronted not with the sublime terror of nature, but with a deeply derivative pastiche; a performance that gestures vaguely toward the agonizing, durational dread of Michael Snow’s 1967 structuralist film Wavelength, mimics the tragic, bodily transfigurations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and ultimately lands with all the frantic, attention-starved posturing of Tiffany “New York” Pollard in the inaugural season of VH1’s Flavor of Love. Where the screwworm’s original American tenure—a sweeping, continental epoch of agricultural devastation that forced the hand of federal intervention—felt urgently woven into the fabric of post-war agrarian anxiety, this current Zavala County iteration feels decidedly like a legacy act playing a sparsely attended county fair; it is eating the meat, certainly, but one senses its heart simply isn't in it.
The federal response has similarly reflected a sense of weary aesthetic exhaustion rather than genuine epidemiological panic.
We are, of course, deploying the standard sterile-fly release protocols to contain the outbreak, but on a purely dramaturgical level, you have to wonder why they even bothered mounting this comeback. When they identified four additional infected animals across Texas and New Mexico, it didn't read as a terrifying expansion of a plague so much as a desperate, poorly planned tour extension by an artist who refuses to accept that their imperial phase ended during the Eisenhower administration.
The federal government’s plan to combat the outbreak by releasing millions of sterile male flies into the affected airspace near the Mexican border is, arguably, the only conceptually rigorous element of this entire affair; a breathtakingly cynical piece of biological performance art wherein the invasive females are tricked into participating in a barren, fruitless choreography of reproduction, effectively canceling the screwworm’s own narrative arc through an imposed, state-sponsored impotence. Yet even this brilliant counter-maneuver feels somewhat wasted on a parasitic revival so profoundly lacking in self-awareness; one longs for the days when a plague genuinely challenged its audience, rather than simply chewing through a calf in Zavala County and expecting us to applaud the effort.