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In the absence of special physiologic factors (such as a sudden androgen increase in either sex), and putting aside the obvious effects that result from direct stimulation of erotic body parts, it is hostility-the desire, overt or hidden, to harm another person-that generates and enhances sexual excitement. .. The hostility of eroticism is an attempt, repeated over and over, to undo childhood traumas and frustrations that threatened the development of one's masculinity or femininity. The same dynamics, though in different mixes and degrees, are found in almost everyone, those labeled perverse and those not so labeled.

-R. J. Stoller

Introduction

David Cronenberg's M. Butterfly is adapted from the play by David Henry Hwang. It is based loosely on a notorious spy scandal involving a member of the French diplomatic corps (M. Gallimard in the play and film) who was stationed in mainland China sometime after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. M. Gallimard (played in the film by Jeremy Irons) became sexually involved with a Chinese Communist spy (Song Liling in the play and film) who obtained diplomatic secrets from him over a period of many years. Song (played by John Lone) was actually a man impersonating a woman and apparently succeeded in concealing this fact from M. Gallimard through the duration of their intimate relationship. According to the play and the film, Gallimard fell in love with Song while watching him singing the death song in the role of Madame Butterfly and was confronted with the truth about Song's gender only during the espionage trial many years later in Paris. At the end of the play and the film, Gallimard, who has been imprisoned for revealing state secrets, commits suicide during a performance for the other inmates in which he impersonates the operatic role of Madame Butterfly. Although the film is based on the text of the original Broadway production, Cronenb erg subtly shifts the emphasis away from Hwang's political allegory to his own favoured themes of infantile sexuality and the bodily figuration of the unconscious.

René Gallimard says that people think he is a very cultured man. He is, in fact, the type of civilized human being described by Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals and Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents: domesticated, filled with ressentiment, schizoid, obsessional, passive-aggressive. The great external authority and power of the state, the church, the father, or the French Embassy in Peking, has been internalized in the position of the archaic superego. The rebellious violence provoked by such intimidating authority has been turned inwards and swallowed back, so that it appears to us as politeness, the social impression of a refined and deferential superiority, as exemplified in the mannerisms of Ambassador Toulon (Ian Richardson).

Of expense account reports and their attached documentation, Gallimard claims that "nothing could make [him] happier." "I'm only doing my job," he says. In practice, this means putting the screws to his free-spending colleagues, who bitterly resent his meticulous bureaucratic tortures and threaten in revenge to "break all his pencils in half."

The embassy world is in fact a sado-masochistic subculture, seething with suppressed aggression and latent homosexuality. One is reminded of Darwin's primal horde, as Freud imagined it in Totem and Taboo (1912). The men are obsessed with the power of the father and leer hungrily over the women he controls. At their tribal gatherings in the diplomatic lounges, the men gossip about Frau Baden (Annabel Leventon). She is "built like the Forbidden City," they say. "All may look, but none may touch." The men imagine that she is somehow connected to the real sources of diplomatic power, that perhaps it is really she who runs the embassy. Although she is certainly a sexual object in the Oedipal sense, Frau Baden is also a phallic object for these men-more like a totem animal than a mother. To sleep with her, as Gallimard later does, is to partake of the power of the "dead father," to receive the paternal phallus as though it were the body of Christ in the Eucharist. Thus we see very quickly in this film that behind the heterosexual possession of the woman there often lurks a fantasied homosexual transfer of power from the father to the son.

As Gallimard says when he is surprised by Frau Baden's naked body in her hotel room, "You look exactly as I imagined you would under your clothes!"

"What did you expect?" she replies, with a teasing glance, "Come and get it."

In fact, Gallimard had unconsciously expected something else. He is shocked by the contrast between the reality of Frau Baden's woman's body and her imaginary phallic significance in the unconscious fantasy of the totemic meal.

What led Gallimard into Frau Baden's hotel bedroom? Her taunting repartee provides an excellent example of the way in which duplicity, double entendre, reversal, and repetition are used in order to weave the leitmotif of seduction throughout the film. Gallimard has become something of a catch, the latest of Ambassador Toulon's proteges, and Frau Baden cannot resist the opportunity to deflate his drunken preening: "Still playing the missionary are we Gallimard?" she taunts at a diplomatic evening function. "Or are there other positions that interest you as well?" She hooks Gallimard by giving him the impression that she knows his secret. In fact, Frau Baden does not know his secret, but she can spot a man who has one, and knows how to use this to her advantage. Her ploy creates a beautiful piece of dramatic irony. Gallimard is of course aware that he has been making love to Song Liling, the Peking Opera singer, and not in the missionary position; but only the audience knows that she is a transvestite and that Gallimard has been having anal intercourse with her. At another level, Frau Baden is referring to Gallimard's new relationship with Ambassador Toulon. Gallimard's possible interest in another "position" suggests not only other ways of performing sexual intercourse, but political positions as well. In his role as accountant, Gallimard poses as a do-gooder, but he also aspires to higher status and power. So in a way Frau Baden's question is about who is really on top. Or to put it more crudely, who is "fucking" whom in this diplomatic underworld? It's not just that Gallimard is screwing around, but that Ambassador Toulon is screwing Gallimard.

In an earlier scene, Toulon had described Gallimard as a "new, aggressive, over-confident thing." He says this in a proprietary way, with evident pleasure. The suggestion is that he now wants Gallimard as his new sado-masochistic plaything. The scene rather nicely evokes a certain hollowness in ritualized masculine sexual identification-or what might be termed, in imitation of a well-known phrase of Joan Riviere, "manliness as masquerade." The ceremonial aspect of this meeting has to do with the sadism of the homosexual transfer of power, in which symbolic masculinity is passed from the authoritarian patriarch to his passive-aggressive rival son, who wallows masochistically in submissive identification with the cruelty of his master.

This scene shows the classic pattern of sado-masochistic sexuality in social microcosm. Toulon delights in making Gallimard squirm, drawing out the agony until the moment of climax, when he reverses the meaning of the scene and rewards Gallimard. In the embassy shakeup, Gallimard will not be transferred out with the others-he will be the new vice consul! Clearly, Toulon is basking in Gallimard's emotional bewilderment. "Scare you?" Toulon asks, with a gloating leer. In effect, Toulon has fucked Gallimard through projective identification, discharging his own fear into the victim until the orgasmic moment when he intervenes to rescue him. There is a symbolic exchange of bodily fluids at the climax, as Toulon offers Gallimard a cup of tea. Toulon probably regenerates himself by identifying with Gallimard in order to appropriate not only his youthful good looks but his unexpected relief and triumph. In turn, through identification with the aggressor, Gallimard acquires a new quality of coldness and cruelty. This shows through immediately in the next scene, where Gallimard tries for the first time to make love to Song Liling, the Peking Opera diva and female impersonator. He bursts into her apartment late at night, announcing with boyish pride that he has been promoted to vice consul. He demands to know, "Are you my butterfly?" like the collector who has caught his prize specimen. He taunts her with words from her billets-doux; "I have already given you my shame," he quotes. But the balance of power just as quickly reverses. Now he begs her. And it reverses once again when she reveals her sexual inexperience. "As we embark on this most forbidden of loves, I am so afraid of my destiny," she pleads.

In order to understand this coldness and cruelty more deeply, however, we must return to an earlier scene, the bedroom scene with Gallimard's wife (Barbara Sukowa), which directly follows his first exposure to Puccini's Madame Butterfly and the haunting idea of death in love, his first encounter with the beguiling Song Liling.

As he and his wife get ready for bed, Gallimard is clearly preoccupied with the woman he thinks he has just met, Song Liling; and there is no doubt that through her, or more precisely, through his projection onto her, he is discovering something new and exciting, but also very frightening, about himself. The scene begins with his attempt to translate these new feelings into terms that would make sense in the context of his marriage and his domestic relationship with his wife. He seems at first to believe that somehow he can share the mystery of his fateful encounter with Song; but the fantasy in which his feelings are wrapped is, in fact, incommunicable, even to himself, and the conversation flounders. He joins her in the bed, sitting beside her as she begins to hum the tune from Madame Butterfly, fanning herself coquettishIy with the fashion magazine she has been reading. The extraordinary irony of the scene derives in large part from the fact that Mme Gallimard, no doubt responding to some unconscious cue, actually offers herself as the fantasy he could not articulate, as Madame Butterfly in the flesh! And she does it quite well. But Gallimard cannot respond. He is frozen in the gap between the real and the imaginary. It is not just that his mind is elsewhere. He is conscious that his wife is with him, offering him the very thing he is dreaming; but he is struck dumb by his own incapacity to receive her gift. This is the first appalling realization that he can never bridge the chasm between the image of his narcissistic fantasy, which Song has drawn out of him-that is, the image of the love object as a redemption of himself-and the woman who is really in a position, at least in theory, to give her whole self to him in the flesh, and for life. More poignant still, we see in her sudden look of shocked recognition that she has understood this predicament (though perhaps not consciously): she knows that her desire, which she represents as the desire to be desired by him, will forever perish in the abyss that is now and suddenly opening between them.

This sequence of thoughts is captured in the transitions, during the scene, from direct camera shots of Gallimard in the bathroom, alternating with his wife in the bed, to the image of them sitting together in the bed, which is then shown reflected in a mirror. In a way, the switch to the mirror gives us the perfect cinematic shot/reverse shot sequence. Normally, the reverse shot is employed to create the impression of alternating perspective in a dialogue. Here, this device serves to create a very precise image of narcissistic self-enclosure. In the Gallimard bedroom scene, we see that the marital relationship is trapped in the mirror, where it is reversed and repeated, Ionesco-like, in empty non-communication: two disconnected monologues. We are shown the emptiness of the false self, and the tantalizing enigma of the invisible personality behind the mask.

There is a long tradition in cinema, dating to The Student of Prague in 1913, of using the mirror image as a technique for evoking the existential gap between the social self and the unconscious psyche of desire and fantasy (Rank, 1971). What the mirror reveals, in effect, is the irreducible doubleness and otherness at the heart of self-experience-what we might call the dilemma of narcissism: the desperate need to fulfill ourselves, and to escape ourselves, at the same time.

René is thinking of Song-yes! But he is also paralyzed by the coincidence of his wife beside him. The transvestite Song has, for reasons we shall explore, stirred his vital narcissistic self. But he feels that this vital self has no possible relation to the woman he has married. Gallimard has long hidden from himself behind a system of professional rationalizations, the values of accounting and diplomacy. He had never expected to receive anything directly from life, but only through the mediations and compromises of his false self. It had never occurred to him actually to put the vital self directly into play. Perhaps his wife had once answered to something deeper in him, but he has already reduced her to a career option. In all likelihood, he had almost forgotten that he had the juicy, desiring relationship to life that Song has aroused in him. But now that the reality of the demand on the world concealed within himself has come to life, his rediscovery of this potential makes him realize that for many years he has been psychically dead. Indeed, he may wonder if this deadness expresses a fundamental incapacity to be alive. He looks distractedly at the fashion magazine cover as his wife hums the Madame Butterfly deathsong; she lifts it away from his eyes and transforms it into a Madame Butterfly prop, a fan. Perhaps the presence of his wife makes him think that he lacks the courage to realize his own vitality, that his desire can subsist only in his projective relation with the image, the image of the dying Madame Butterfly, which will soon become a lonely addiction leading eventually to suicide. He already knows, at this moment captured in the closed reverse shot, that he is spiritually doomed, that he can never express his soul in the substance of his life, which he will consequently inhabit like a ghost unseen by the world around him. And Mme Gallimard, mimicking his Madame Butterfly, seems to recognize that her own vitality is also trapped in the mirror of his desire (like Isolde on the body of the dead Tristan, singing the "Liebestod," or like Echo faintly repeating the desperate cries of Narcissus), which is closed in a narcissistic loop with its own projected/reflected image.

In this scene, Mme Gallimard (evidently from a conservative family of colonialists) quotes her father with the saying "East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet." (One suspects that Mme Gallimard would have difficulty allowing her husband to replace this father in her heart of hearts.) This folk wisdom states the paradox of boundaries that Gallimard can neither accept nor move beyond. Song's impersonation of the oriental butterfly represents Otherness to him. His attraction to this stereotyped Otherness expresses both a violent wish to appropriate and destroy what is different from himself, but also a more creative wish to overcome his fear of life, to reconcile his hidden narcissistic vitality with the dangers of actual living, and thus to overcome the threat of Otherness that his sheltered existence has so far managed to avoid and deny (Benjamin, 1998). What is emerging in him are the traces of repressed rage and hatred, but always in the form oî ressentiment and passive-aggressive manipulation. Gallimard 's new boldness will surface mainly as impulsive and superficial meanness, as when later he forces his affections on Song, idly threatening, like Pinkerton in the Puccini opera, that she has no assurance of his return. "You are cruel," she exclaims. The element of hostility that forms the dynamic core of his sexual excitement (Stoller, 1979) has been released in him. He is now driven towards a kind of tragicomic destiny of transgression: he will smash the boundaries that divide East and West, woman and man, love and hate, and destroy the pretence of his safe and practical marriage-as in the immediately following image, the abrupt non sequi tur of Gallimard at the embassy swatting a fly on a pane of glass, which shatters the frozen image of the couple in the mirror of the bedroom scene-like a man crushing an insect on the window of his tormented soul.

Let us now review the pattern of Gallimard 's specular (i.e., mirror) relationship with Song Liling, or Butterfly. It is important to remember two things. The first is that, in the game of seduction, especially when it is cast in this sado-masochistic form, one never can be sure who is the seducer and who is being seduced. By the same token, it is difficult if not impossible to determine the nature of the gender relationship in the actual sexual encounter. I am not just referring to the fact that Song is masquerading as a woman, which is confusing enough, but also to the much more profound sense in which Gallimard may be impersonating a man (see Zavitzianos, 1977), as seems to be implied in the scenes with Frau Baden and Ambassador Toulon. Is this a man with a woman, or a man with a man, or a man pretending to be a man with a man pretending to be a woman? In some ways, the actual anatomy is no more revealing of the truth than the costume, for an impenetrable psyche and its hidden fantasies lie underneath the skin, and the costume may reveal more about those fantasies than the literal body. We shall see that neither Song nor Gallimard really knows whether he wishes to dominate or to submit in relation to the other. The relationship is like a hall of mirrors. It endlessly refracts the illusive image of sexual power in a game of repetition and reversal that has no origin or end apart from death-a death that they may secretly long for.

The first conversation of the prospective lovers is an allegory of sexual politics and cultural imperialism with clear psycho sexual undertones. Their fateful encounter is followed by a teasing play of seduction in which tormented love letters and calculated silences serve as opening moves in the game of master and slave, teacher and student. But who is teaching whom? Song begins by announcing that she will take charge of Gallimard's education. But this soon changes, or so it appears, when Song confesses that she has never had sex with a man, which may well be true. "I don't want to be cruel," says Gallimard. "I want to teach you gently."

In the scene by the Great Wall, the pretence that Song is Gallimard's pupil and slave continues. She is the "young innocent schoolgirl waiting for her lessons." Of course, Song is manipulating Gallimard. There is no doubt that Song has a great deal of control over him, and power to define the relationship. But this power is always limited, and in turn defined and controlled, by Gallimard's fantasy, whose terms of reference she must use all her skill to meet. Thus, Gallimard may be Song's dupe, but Song is always at Gallimard's mercy, at least indirectly. Song must give him what he wants-what he later calls the "perfect woman"-if she is to receive from him what she needs in order to survive in the repressive Maoist regime. Moreover, Song needs not just political, but also spiritual, cover, both of which she receives from Gallimard. When she says to Gallimard, at the Great Wall, "I know that you are not threatened by your slave's education," she is not just humouring him. The fact is that she is freer as his slave than as an ordinary citizen in Maoist China. From this point of view, China stands for sexual and cultural intolerance, an overly rigid social attack on the complexity and diversity of human personalities. Moreover, the relationship with Gallimard turns out to be more than just a matter of convenience for Song, the Communist spy, but an attachment of some emotional significance for her. "The days I spent with you were the only days I ever truly existed," she later tells Gallimard with at least some degree of sincerity.

But while Gallimard does in fact control the relationship in crucial ways, he is not simply the reciprocal of Song, for he never uses his power in a manner that he understands or consciously exploits. They may be equally cold and cruel to each other, but Song is much more conscious and calculating in the defence of her sexual insecurity. This is crucial to a psychoanalytic understanding of the film because it means that Gallimard represents a man who is entirely in the grip of unconscious forces. In this sense, Gallimard is a bit like the psychoanalyst who is blinded by his own authority to the implications of his own counter-transference: he is dangerous because while he lets the patient seduce him, this is only in the service of his own much more insidious unconscious seduction of the patient, who is rendered relatively defenceless by the unequal circumstances of their relationship.

The manifest content of the film suggests strongly that Gallimard is ruled by anxiety deriving from his unconscious castration complex and latent homosexual strivings. One senses that his attraction to Song is partly counter-phobic, and that with his promotion by Ambassador Toulon, he feels that he may have found a way to face down his fears, even if it is never clear what they are, or how he might resolve them. The sexual relationship with Song exudes castration anxiety, but it is difficult to determine exactly where in the relationship the anxiety is located. Like the classical fetishist, such as Freud (1927) described, Gallimard is unconsciously denying what he would see if the genitals of the love object were exposed. But in M. Butterfly there is a twist, for what he denies is not castration as symbolized by the woman's lack of a penis, but the much more enigmatic and mysterious presence of the penis in what he later calls the "perfect woman created by a man." The perfect woman is more than just the "phallic woman," in which the fetish, through a kind of symbolic amendment, stands for the penis that isn't there. Gallimard actually manages to find a woman who has a penis, and then denies that she has it. In the conventional male fetish, the woman's genital reality is symbolically denied (that is, the reality is acknowledged and perceived, but then symbolically altered). By contrast, Gallimard gives his feminine object a real penis, though he never sees it and is afraid to see it. This manoeuvre is the opposite of the usual defence against castration anxiety. It has a kind of involuted, labyrinthine quality that may be closer to the psychotic defence of foreclosure, as described by Lacan (1966). Could the significance of it be, then, not the denial of castration per se, but the denial of the denial of castration-that is, not just a symptom, but the beginning of a psychotic destructuring of the psyche, a smashing-or double-crossing-of boundaries so severe that East literally becomes West, and West East?

For her part, Song Liling is also prone to a kind of literalism in the way that she organizes her defences against castration anxiety. In contrast to the machismo tactic of displaying the penis as aggressively as possible in order to confirm its existence, she hides her penis in order to conceal it from anyone who might take it way. The danger of castration has been completely externalized, and the defence is acted out in her feminine disguise. Of course, we can also understand Song's transvestism as an effective response to the very real possibility of emasculation by the Maoist state (or at the hands of her enraged "white devil" [Gallimard] who might punish her because she cannot really change her body.)

The climax of their shared sexual anxiety occurs immediately after Gallimard has made love-or perhaps failed to make love (we cannot be sure)-to Frau Baden. Frau Baden is also a phallic woman, but only in the symbolic sense: Gallimard has seen for himself that she has real breasts, and no male genitalia. Clearly this has thrown him into a turmoil, and he arrives at Song's apartment drunk and violently agitated. "I am a man," he declares, "and I want to see you naked." Consciously, Gallimard is pumped up and defiant, demanding his rights, refusing any longer to be controlled by this Oriental wench who calls herself his slave, but still sets all the terms of their sexual relationship. Unconsciously, however, the issue is that the truth-the truth not only about Song, but about himself-is so painfully close to the surface; he is nearly overwhelmed with anxiety, which must somehow be mastered and subdued. Gallimard's counter-phobic courage has now reached its height, and it seems he is willing to risk anything-even the madness of re-encountering himself through Song as his own homosexual double. His reckless abandon is infectious. After some initial demurring and prevarication, even Song is tempted to throw caution to the winds. She toys with the possibility of giving herself over to his mercy entirely. "I am not what you think I am," she hints, in double entendres. "I do not know how to change my body into the body of another." Perhaps he will like what he finds underneath her clothes, she seems to be thinking-perhaps Gallimard 'wants to let go of his delusion and at last embrace the truth. (Near the end of the film, during the scene in the paddy wagon, we see that Song still clings to the hope that he will love her as a man.) But suddenly, as Gallimard's hands grope under her clothes and begin to caress her male breasts, her calculation of the risk falters, and she quickly improvises a desperate means of escape. How does one reconstitute a lie on the brink of exposure? By upping the ante, of course-never by diluting or otherwise minimizing the deception, but precisely by compounding it, and raising the stakes even higher. With a stroke of inspiration, Song transforms herself into a pregnant woman at the very moment when she is about to be turned back into a man. And as soon as she gives shape to this delusion, Gallimard's tide of anguish recedes into expressions of relief, and also remorse over his faithlessness. He tumbles back into this reassuring fantasy, which she has made even richer and more narcissistically gratifying through the offer of an impossible child, the psychotic child of their passionate lies. Song's relief is also palpable, and they are both swept up in a wave of mutual gratitude. Song even thanks Gallimard for saving her life.

Once this peak of mutual erotic deception is reached, the relationship (and the film) falls into an anticlimactic descent toward bathos and disgrace. They become grey shadows of themselves, caught in the turbulent history of East Asia, which separates them. Gallimard has been demoted to the menial job of diplomatic courier in Paris when he reencounters Song. Eventually, they are caught. In the paddy wagon driving away from their day in court (during which Gallimard has been ridiculed for never having realized that his partner was a man), he lashes out at Song: "How could you, who understood me so well, make such a mistake? You show me your true self! What I loved was the lie-the perfect lie."

Song is stung: "You never really loved me!"

Gallimard is oblivious to this plea, bitterly retorting, "I'm a man who loved a woman created by a man."

In the final scene, on the prison stage before an audience of convicts, Gallimard is made up thickly as Madame Butterfly, with a lurid Gorgonlike aspect. He surreptitiously slits his own throat with a small hand mirror, committing the ultimate act of self-castration. Having given himself over entirely to the pursuit of Song, the impossible realization of his unconscious sexuality, he has no choice in the end but to turn himself into the object of that sexual desire, to actually become "my butterfly," and to kill the illusive butterfly, which is himself.

Our temptation to believe that the enigma inhabiting the soul-Sophocles' Sphinx-can be found and resolved in a figure of the real world-a Song-is very great. The logic of submitting to this sublime lure is to undertake, wittingly or unwittingly, the arrangements for the destruction and disposal of the self and its social representative, the ego. As the Sphinx in Pasolini's film version of the Oedipus myth, Edipo Re, declares, "The abyss into which you hurl me is within yourself." Once one has taken that fatal turn (the destiny sealed for Gallimard in his frightened stare in the mirror, as his wife sings the death song from Madame Butterfly), once one has committed oneself wholly to the project of capturing and controlling the alien other within oneself (one's own sexual mystery, and the sexual mystery of one's self), once one has decided to risk all in order to penetrate the enigma of the mother's soul and to discover her truth-then one has in effect agreed to abandon, if necessary, the earthly form of existence in human society, to sacrifice the prospect of becoming a person, in favour of a dream, a memory, a hallucination of absolute being, of total, internally transparent integration and connectedness. One has chosen death.

About the Film

TITLE M. Butterfly

YEAR OF RELEASE 1993

CAST Jeremy Irons, John Lone, Annabel Leventon, Ian Richardson, Barbara Sukowa

DIRECTOR David Cronenberg

LITERARY SOURCE M. Butterfly, a play by David Hwang based on Puccini's opera Madame Butterfly

SCREENPLAY David Henry Hwang

PRODUCER Gabriella Martinelli

PRODUCTION COMPANY Geffen Pictures

COUNTRY OF ORIGIN Canada

RUNNING TIME 101 minutes

[Reference]

References

Benjamin, J. (1998), The shadow of the other: Intersubjectivity and gender in psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge.

Freud, S. (1912). Totem and taboo. Standard Edition (Vol. 1, pp. 1-162).

Freud, S. (1927) Fetishism. Standard Edition (Vol. 21, pp. 152-157).

Freud, S. (1930). Civilization and its discontents. Standard Edition (Vol. 21, pp. 64-145).

Hwang, D. H. (1988). M. Butterfly. New York: Plume.

Lacan, J. (1966). Écrits: A Selection. (Alan Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Norton, 1977.

Rank, O. (1971). The double. (Harry Tucker, Trans.). New York: Meridian.

Riviere, J. (1929). Womanliness as a masquerade. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, io, 303-313.

Stoller, R. J. (1979). Sexual excitement: The dynamics of erotic life. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Zavitzianos, G. (1977). The object in fetishism, homeovestism and transvestism. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 58, 487-495.