Sinful Sunday: The Powerful Enigma of Queerness in "M. Butterfly"
Song Liling remains an a mystery throughout David Cronenberg's adaptation of David Henry Hwang's play, and therein lies her extraordinary potency as a quasi-queer villain.
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Welcome to “Sinful Sundays,” where I explore and analyze some of the most notorious queer villains of film and TV (and sometimes literature, depending on my mood). These are the characters that entrance and entertain and revolt us, sometimes all three at the same time. As these queer villains show, very often it’s sweetly good to be bitterly bad.
M. Butterfly is one of those films which has been on my to-watch list for quite a long time now, for obvious reasons. Based on the play of the same name by David Henry Hwang (who also wrote the screenplay), it focuses on the affair between French diplomat René Gallimard, portrayed by Jeremy Irons, and opera singer Song Liling, portrayed by John Lone. As the film unfolds, it becomes clear that Gallimard is not nearly as in control of the situation as we, or he, believe and that in fact he is but a piece in a much deeper game.
From the very moment that Irons’ Gallimard sees Song performing on stage, it’s clear how much he is enraptured by her beauty and, just as importantly, by her seeming embodiment of all of the things he fetishizes about Asian femininity: docility, circumspection, total abasement before his own White, European masculinity. Unable to escape his own rather pathetic Orientalism, he can never really see Song as anything other than the image she has created for her benefit. Irons delivers a remarkable performance as Gallimard, his slightly too-wide eyes and gravelly voice expressing both his desire and his desperate efforts to keep control of a situation that always threatens to slip out of his control.
For, of course, Gallimard is being manipulated from the very beginning; Song is playing not just a double but a triple game. Not only is Song working on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party to procure state secrets from the Frenchman, but Song is actually a man pretending to be a woman. Song’s brilliance lies in her ability to perfectly sculpt herself into an ideal to such an extent that Gallimard can’t or won’t see the truth behind the illusion. This isn’t to say that she is truly docile, far from it. Indeed, time and again we see Song engage in a bit of baiting and barbed wit, and it’s her oscillation between absolute submission and scathing contempt that makes her so alluring for both Gallimard and for those of us in the audience. She makes no bones about the contempt she has for the fetishizing impulses of the European mind, and this seems to inflame Gallimard’s passions all the more.
Like Irons, John Lone fully commits himself to the performance. If you knew nothing about the film going in, you might even find yourself falling under the same sort of spell as Gallimard, so convincingly does he inhabit the body and mannerisms of a woman, with his husky, androgynous voice, his sharp cheekbones, and his graceful gate and deportment. But then, as he says to his Party handler, it’s men who understand how women are supposed to look and to behave, so it makes sense that he would be able to adopt this persona so convincingly. Moreover, Song really does go the extra mile when it comes to his deception. Not only does he live as a woman even when he isn’t engaged in pursuing Gallimard–something that causes his handler no small amount of consternation–but he also undertakes to find a baby that he can pass off as his lover’s.
Of course, nothing lasts forever, and though Song is remarkably effective at getting the information she needs from Gallimard, right up until the moment he is arrested and put on trial, during the course of which the truth of Song’s gender is revealed to him. Though this lacks the potency it had in the stage version, Irons does a good job of expressing the character’s incredulity at both his own gullibility and the fact that the ideal woman for whom he has sacrificed so much is, seemingly, far more a creation of his own imagination than a person of flesh and blood and feelings.
Perhaps the most fascinating thing about Song is that he remains an enigma until the very end. Despite the fact that he seems to offer himself up to Gallimard while they are confined together, he ends the film presumably returning to China, having done his duty and having no further use for his erstwhile lover. The film leaves us wondering: did he ever really have feelings for Gallimard, or was all of it just a performance, signifying nothing except his desire to regain some measure of credibility with the Party? My partner believes that it’s the latter, but I can’t help but read the moment in which Song reveals his naked male body to Gallimard somewhat differently. To me, it’s his last effort to get this man to see him as he truly is, to acknowledge the desire that he feels for him as a man, and the fact that he is unwilling or unable to do so is deeply wounding. There is such vulnerability in this moment that I can’t help but think that we are being shown a part of Song that he has been unwilling or unable to show to anyone else. That he is spurned by the man for whom he sculpted himself into something else entirely is the final indignity, and it seems only fitting that Gallimard, while in prison, should turn himself into Madama Butterfly–or at least a grotesquery approximating her–before taking his own life.
M. Butterfly is one of those films in which queerness always lurks in the background, refusing to ever make itself known even though it can be felt in almost every scene. The film refuses to give us a definitive answer to any of the questions it raises, and at the end we’re left with no more insight into Song or his/her (and I’ve been deliberately inconsistent with my use of pronouns) identity or her desires than we were at the outset. In fact, it’s unclear just whether or not Song is actually a villain, at least in the sense that we usually use that word. There is something almost perversely pleasurable about the fact that this enigmatic character manages to so thoroughly flip the tragic Orientalist script, using gender and sexuality as a weapon against European imperialist ambitions.
In queerness there is power, even if remains an enigma.