The Cronenberg Crawl: It's Not Easy Being Racist Edition

I first encountered the movie M. Butterfly (1993) in a Zizek essay on courtly love that I read for a medieval lit class in undergrad. The article was about the bizarre impersonality of many of the longed-after heroines in medieval poetry. They seem to often be just beatific names and faces (automatons, Zizek called them) onto which the more three-dimensional heroes can project their own whims and assumptions on. They are the Bella Swans of epic poetry, the blank spaces into which the hero can insert his own perfect woman under the template of the lady.

M. Butterfly is about a European imperialist who projects his fantasies onto a woman of the empire. At the end of M. Butterfly, the empire strikes back.

Rene Gallimard (Jeremy Irons, who’s so damn sexy and tormented in this role that I ate up his ham-fisted performance like popcorn) is a French diplomat in 1960s Beijing who’s had it up to here with European women and their headstrong, modern, feminist ways. He wants himself an Oriental (sic) woman, a Madame Butterfly, a submissive, sweet-tempered virgin who will worship him unquestioningly and bow to his every whim. He has absolutely no suspicion that he will fail to find such a woman in China and never doubts that he even has such a right to expect this of someone. The fact that he’s never met a woman like his “Oriental” ideal does not challenge his fantasy. As one character pointedly notes, “Only a man knows how a woman is supposed to act.”

If that’s so, Rene’s yellow fever gets him more of a woman than he bargained for when he meets “Butterfly,” a singer of classical Chinese music who plays the female roles in the Beijing Opera’s performances. If you think it’s redundant that I specified that Rene’s lover plays the female roles, it’s not. Butterfly is Song Lilling (John Lone), and the female roles in traditional Chinese theatre are played by men with high voices, trim figures, and good wigs. It’s clear that Rene doesn’t know all this the first time he hears Butterfly sing. Whether he catches on  at all during their twenty year affair (this is based on a true story) is left to the viewer. We don’t see Rene discover that Madame Butterfly is Monsieur during one of their clothed, discretely-backdoor lovemaking sessions (Butterfly cites the importance of modesty in Chinese culture and even fakes a pregnancy), but Cronenberg doesn’t exactly go out of his way to hide Butterfly’s identity. With a clearer screen than the laptop on which I watched this movie, you can apparently see John Lone’s mustache beneath his makeup, and his gravelly, androgynous voice leaves plenty of room for speculation before we see him naked in the final scenes. As previously stated, throughout their affair Butterfly will not let Rene strip him, fondle him, or see him naked. After twenty years of cohabitation and the birth of a child, with no relaxing of Butterfly’s strict code of modesty, surely Rene had more than enough evidence to suspect that something was amiss.

For the record, Butterfly is not presented as gay or transgender. You’ll notice I’ve called him “he” throughout this review -- on purpose. Butterfly is a Communist informant, taking advantage of Rene’s standing with Western governments to gather information on American troop movements in Vietnam. While he begins by reporting only the information that Rene throws around casually in conversation, eventually Rene becomes party to Butterfly’s espionage and finds work as a government courier to steal classified documents. By the time their affair reaches its disastrous conclusion, Rene is hopelessly devoted to a fantasy female, utterly exploited by a man who knows how to use Rene’s own stereotypes and desires against him, and a traitor to his own nation and homeland. He is, as Cronenberg delights in spelling out for us, Madame Butterfly himself.

And because the scenes between them are so tender, so tormented, so scene-munchingly excessive and wonderfully hammy, you often forget that you’re watching John Lone go down on Jeremy Irons. Irons’ fantasy actually begins to draw you in. There’s no getting around the fact that the script and performances are ludicrously melodramatic, but I’m willing to let that slide. Anyone who’s ever had it really bad for someone knows that, given enough time, you start acting like Jeremy Irons too, so when Rene falls on his knees before Butterfly and begs her for her love  you’re kinda rooting for him. Grand gestures, big speeches, and sappy declarations are hilarious to everyone but the person giving them. But I believed that Irons was feeling every emotion he was so wildly telegraphing to us, the audience, so I gave him a pretty wide berth. And Lone’s character is, of course, egging him on, so I gave Lone a wide berth too.

"This is awkward."

All this to say: Roger Ebert doubts that Rene could have really not known that Butterfly is a man. Having watched this movie, I think the strong evidence against Butterfly’s femininity is irrelevant to this movie’s character motivations and story arc. Rene didn’t know Butterfly was a man because he didn’t feel like knowing. All of Rene’s dialogue and actions indicate that Rene is solidly insulated in his own world of loving a doting, submissive fantasy woman from the East, and if this fantasy requires this skinny Chinese opera singer to be a woman, then dammit, he’s a woman. Any evidence that does not fit with who Rene has imagined Butterfly to be does not even register. Even at the end when Rene has seen Butterfly au naturale with his own eyes, he still opines that he has been “loved by the perfect woman.” And in Rene’s world, he absolutely has. The fact that this perfect woman is not a real woman is utterly beside the point.

All in all, I love M. Butterfly, warts and all. It’s a fascinating study in self-deception and the blind spots that come with one’s own assumptions about culture, race, and gender. It’s also a satisfying portrayal of a racist sexist jerk getting what’s coming to him, but I digress. If you follow Ebert’s incredulity (“Did Rene’s hand never once wander?”) about this film, I don’t think you’re wrong, but I think you’re off-topic. Irons does a solid job portraying a man who is so deluded, and so comfortably deluded, with the woman that he has invented for himself, that there is nothing he could possibly find under Song Lilling’s clothes that could penetrate this character’s defenses. And as we watch him tormented, suffering, and still in love with Butterfly from a Parisian jail, we’re almost tempted to say he deserved it.

He still has his dignity, though.

For more Beth and Louise, follow us on Twitter at @BandLHateMovies or subscribe to the podcast. Give us a rating and leave a comment on iTunes!

The Cronenberg Crawl: The Trifurcated Cervix Edition

This looks legit. Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers.

In Dead Ringers. Jeremy Irons plays a pair of twin gynecologists who share a clinic and, unbeknownst to the women they seduce, most of their lovers. When the meeker twin falls in love with an actress who comes to them for fertility treatments, the relationship between them begins to sour.

Dead Ringers is a movie about twins and vaginas. If this leads you to conclude that it’s a titillating sex romp, you’re going to have a bad time.

Unfortunately for porn enthusiasts, the leading twins in Dead Ringers don’t have vaginas. They fix them. And because this is a David Cronenberg movie, fixing a vagina in this movie means stuffing it full of custom-made spiny instruments while dressed like a delegate at the Council of Nicea, at least in the second half of the movie.  This is because Elliot and Bev (played by Jeremy Irons and, when both Elliot and Bev are on screen, Jeremy Irons and the back of somebody else’s head) share the responsibilities of running a cutting-edge fertility clinic. They also share a crippling drug addiction, paranoid fantasies about mutant women, and a debilitating co-dependency on the other twin. They live in the house, sleep in the same bed, and pass unsuspecting patients and lovers back and forth between them without informing these women when this switcheroo occurs. 

If this doesn’t sound toxic enough already, the situation goes even further to hell when shy, subordinate twin Bev falls madly in love with their patient Claire, a famous actress who is infertile because her cervix has three holes in it. The good news is that a quick Google search reveals that a “trifurcated cervix” is a medical condition that exists only in Cronenberg’s head; at any rate, both brothers acquaint themselves thoroughly with said cervix both with and without a speculum, until Claire finally realizes she’s being tricked and has slept with both Bev and Elliot when she only intended to sleep with Bev. Clare’s furious rejection of the brothers devastates the twin who loved her. As a result, Bev begins to abuse prescription medications, hallucinates that his female patients are “mutants” with severe reproductive deformities, and, worst of all, begins operating on these women with a series of custom-ordered instruments that look like rejected props from the Hostel movies combined with titanium beetles. 

You can pretty much divide Jeremy Irons’ entire filmography into films where he either chose to act or not to act, and this is fortunately the former. There’s undeniable power in his performance. Irons manages the nigh-impossible feat of rendering the brothers’ relationship as multi-dimensional and not relentlessly creepy; it’s by turns tender and terribly sick. Irons also manages to make the brothers distinguishable from one another without relying on obvious character foils or stock tropes. For this reason, then, Dead Ringers works because the dynamic between Irons and Irons works. He has excellent chemistry with himself. We believe that Bev and Elliot love each other powerfully and could share a beneficial partnership in their personal and professional lives if they weren’t so toxically consumed with one another. We also believe that their natural bond has mutated beyond healthy limits into a dangerous absorption with the other, coupled with a shocking disregard for all external parties. We believe Bev and Elliot’s ability to both love and resent each other for the power they have over the other, and we believe that they simultaneously long for freedom and crave the sustained safety of their own exclusive relationship. On this level, then, Dead Ringers works. It is a solid film about an unbreakable, consumptive, and tragic bond between two people who share everything, including genes and a womb.

So does Dead Ringers work? Sure, but not as well as it could. The problem is that Cronenberg doesn’t want his movie to be about a destructive relationship between twin brothers. He wants it to be (as near as I can tell, given the tone and third-act horror tropes) a genuinely unsettling psychological thriller with body horror elements. And this is where the movie doesn’t deliver. The average horror movie relies not only on tone but on a premise that that the audience will immediately relate to as genuinely dangerous and frightening. 28 Days Later is scary not only because of the movie’s quick pace and ominous visuals but because of the relatable dread of being left without one’s friends and family, coupled with the terror facing a national tragedy. Nothing bad happens to Cillian Murphy during his opening walk through London, but if you don’t have goosebumps while watching that sequence, you’re not paying attention. The same can be said of older horror movies like The Exorcist and The Shining. Both feature strong scripts, great performances, and marvelous practical effects, but both movies are inherently scary because the horrors that the characters experience are so familiar to us. Isolation is terrifying. Harm coming to one’s child or family members is terrifying. A change in a loved one’s demeanor, a doctor’s inability to treat sickness, and profound religious uncertainty are all terrifying. We find these movies scary because we’ve experienced the small-scale versions of what these characters are going through.

Seriously, did no one object when Bev ordered red scrubs?

That said, for Dead Ringers to work, it really needs you to look square in the face at the world of clinical gynecology and squirm.  A lot of the power of this movie depends on the audience being unsettled by the inherent ickiness of vulvas and codependent twins, and unfortunately for this film, I have one of each. Louise and I are the daughters of doctors, and if I’m going to be scared by body horror, I need to see the horror and not just the body. When Irons says that his patient has a “trifurcated cervix” (go ahead and say that out loud, it’s a riot), I get out my laptop to see if this really happens. When I see a couple of twins cuddling in bed together, I think less about incest and more about the last five vacations I’ve taken. To me this is not a thriller; it’s a family drama about two sad, broken, and brilliant brothers. It doesn’t leave me running for the exits; it has me running to the phone so I can call Bev and Elliot and tell them they can beat this thing.

The creep factor really doesn’t even get ratcheted up when we see Bev’s madness made manifest in his treatment plan for “mutant women.” The surgery scenes just strain our credulity too much. Rest assured, ye squeamish: Bev never actually gets around to cutting on anyone, but when we get an eyeful of his special-order tools we immediately wonder why no one on his sizable surgery team has had Bev’s hospital privileges suspended. His equipment looks like Steve Martin’s dental tools in Little Shop of Horrors. The stupidity of the surgery sequence isn’t helped by the fact that the hospital staff dresses like Death Star employees. They don’t wear scrubs; they wear red Klan uniforms.  And when a fellow doctor exclaims “Jesus, Bev!” when Bev passes out on a patient, we wonder why the patient, scrub nurses, anesthesiologists, and janitor weren’t also yelling “Jesus, Bev!” when they saw the batshit cardinal uniforms they all had to wear to work that morning.

All in all, then, Dead Ringers tells a good sibling story but not a good horror yarn. Maybe I’m not the target audience, maybe I’m not squeamish enough, or maybe after watching so many David Cronenberg movies I’m just too far gone, but it just didn’t come together for me. If you want Jeremy Irons to be party to your depression today, this is a good pick alongside M. Butterfly. But if you want Cronenberg to gross you out today, watch The Fly instead.

For more Beth and Louise, follow us on Twitter at @BandLHateMovies or subscribe to the podcast. Give us a rating and leave a comment on iTunes!