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.

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