M. Butterfly

Tonight!!!

I'm so looking forward to it. I did a research paper in college for a Film & Screenplay class. Since then I've been wanting to this play. Finally, 8 and a half years later, I wish is granted.

Later I'll post the screening notes.

Below is a copy of my original research paper. Not bad for a foreign student in her 3rd semester, eh?



The Butterfly Illusion


Since 1897, first introduced in Century Magazine, the story by John Luther Long, Madame Butterfly, has become one of the most told in this century. It soon was adapted by David Belasco to a successful Broadway play in 1900. Four years later, opera maestro Puccini turned it into worldwide-loved masterpiece Madama Butterfly. The 1988 Tony awarding-winning play, M. Butterfly, was created tactfully in combination of Madame/Madama Butterfly and a true story, which even was retold in 1993 in the big screen by the same writer, David Henry Hwang, in collaboration with filmmaker, David Cronenberg. What in this story captured these finest minds, one might wonder? Perhaps the romance, perhaps the exotic Oriental flavor. Again and again its beauty from printed page, on the stage, or through music as well as camera seizes our hearts and not to be forgotten as the name, butterfly, suggests.

If not from reality, no one would find such a story of a man's unawareness of the gender of his twenty-year mistress being actually male, convincing. The film M. Butterfly shares similar story line as well as plots with its origin, the stage play M. Butterfly; yet, each has its own way of narration and emphasis in its theme.

"From my point of view," says the playwright, David Henry Hwang, "the "impossible" story of a Frenchman duped by a Chinese man masquerading as a woman always seemed perfectly explicable; given the degree of misunderstanding between men and women and also between East and West." The playwright is also pleased that the political issue on cultural stereotype he intends to raise in the play is not eclipsed by the sexual controversy among the critics and the audience. As an Asian-American, the racial and political concerns seem to play a greater part than sexual confusion in Hwang's work.

(M. Butterfly, Act Three, Scene One, Courtroom)

Song (the Chinese man): The West thinks of itself as masculine--big guns, big industry, big money--so the East is feminine weak, delicate, poor...

You expect Oriental countries to be submit to your guns, and you expect Oriental women to be submissive to your men.

When being asked by the judge what this has to do with fooling the Frenchman, Gallimard, Song replies:

One, because when he finally met his fantasy woman, he wanted more than anything to believe that she was, in fact, a woman. And second, I am an Oriental. And being an Oriental, I could never be completely a man.

Such concerns are criticized by Terrence Rafferty as too much weight on the Song. The problem of the play (and the movie), according to the Rafferty, is that the audience gets the point right away and has to listen to tiresome restatement of it; in addition, Hwang does not get most out of the true story of Bernard Boursicot and Shi Pei Pu. The rhetoric of this play, indeed, is crude and direct. It is the playwright's point of view; through his character, Song's mouth (mainly in Act Three), he tries to state to the world that such an incident is merely one of thousands cultural misperception cases between the East and the West since late nineteen century on up to now. Perhaps it is too heavy an ideological debate. I would say, though in recent years Asian-Americans work very hard in fighting with stereotyping, no one ever proposed such a view to this question nor have anybody had analyzed the "mentality" of the West, and Hwang did it all. It needs not be faithful to the original story; it is not a biographical play, after all.

The play opens with Gallimard's self-mockery of being a national joke. The summary of this bizarre story is offered to the audience at this point. If anyone is interested in conventional third-person narration, one probably will feel this first-person discourse devises simply Gallimard's self-justification of his stupidity, and maybe a little lengthy and repeated. From how he loves the opera Madama Butterfly, he was not interested in girls hunting with peers in his teens, the minute he met Song he thought he met his own Butterfly, to how he realizes the image of Butterfly is only a fantasy, then he chooses to end his life the same way Cio-Cio-San (Madame Butterfly) does in the opera. Gallimard's self-discovery and self-analysis fill large proportion of the first two acts. He quests for his own sexuality by bringing his juvenile experiences; he owes his vision of the Oriental to the all time favorite opera. The path for searching his own mentality, a metaphor of the Weasterners', is long yet logical. Within drama, the playwright blends in reason. It is entertainment; it is also brainstorming. It is a play full of actions, and ,again, rhetoric.

In David Cronenberg's film, on the other hand, the political elements are reduced; in stead, the director focuses more on the relationship between the two protagonists. "I hate politics... and it's conceivable someone might accuse me of depoliticizing it," says the director in an interview. He later adds, "the relationship between Ren� (Gallimard) and Song is built on layers of unspoken complicity. I saw this not as the deception of one person by another but the deception of two people by themselves." Interestingly, the stripping scene of Song in the play is meant for Song to be sarcastic about Gallimard's fantasy. Song also forces Gallimard to admit he knows all the time that Song is a man. However, this self-revealing action in the movies turns out to be Song's heartbreaker: he sobs after Gallimard declares he never loved "him" (Song), after Gallimard calls him (Song) nothing like his Butterfly, which appears to be perceptible homosexual content.

A few critics believe this film and play as well on some level dealing with a repressed homosexual passion. In the play, Hwang lower the possibility by making Gallimard admit he only live in his own fantasy. In the film, Gallimard refuses to accept Song as a male, which seems to deny himself the possibility of being gay; Song, on the other hand, expects Gallimard to take real him. To, Cronenberg, it is not a matter of gay or straight. "Sexuality, for human, is an invention." And "there's no absolute sexuality any more."

From the two people met to Gallimard commits suicide in the prison, the film utilizes conventional third person narration in chronological order. The director puts his energy more in characters than the film form. Inspired by The Crying Game, he is very interested the possibility that a person can be both a man and a woman. Song is his creature though much different from he previous sci-fi work. Taking the advantage of cinematography, a delicate Chinese woman is born on the screen. Several main steam film reviews on Time, People and The New York Times either criticize that Cronenberg handles this matter awkwardly or point out John Lone, the Chinese-American who plays Song, doesn't show enough feminine voice or body figure. Personally, I love to say the director does a fine job in portraying Song, her/his graceful movement and slow speaking rate is exactly identical to those stewardesses in China Airline commercials. Not every woman owns a perfect voice or body figure. I am convinced.

Madame Butterfly, an important source of M. Butterfly, was born in late nineteen century. Interestingly, the very first one to write it, Long, an American, also got it from a true life story. But Puccini, with his opera, made this story worldwide known and loved. An American Navy officer, Pinkerton, while in Japan, married Cio-Cio-San (Butterfly) but he was not serious about their marriage. When he returned to United States, he completely forgot about his faithful Butterfly awaiting him. Notified that Butterfly gave him a son, Pinkerton came back to Japan with his new American wife. As Butterfly saw Ms. Pinkerton, she chose to give them her son and ended her life. Such "East meets West" material in those years was quite a fashion- -stories with exotic flavor. It is sort of a by-product of the expansion of the West to the East, argues Jean-Pierre Lehmann. Titles as Madame Chrysanth�me (1887), Out of the East (1895), and Exotics and Retrospectives (1898) were pretty popular. Whether if Puccini were attracted to the story because of exoticism, we are not told. The audience, even today, love to pay to see foreign settings.

The beautiful music, needless to say, lasts any opera; the story itself romanticizes our perception of pure music; alone with its poetic lyrics, Madame Butterfly becomes opera fans' favorite. Opera scholar Joseph Kerman believes that opera is not only music but also functions as drama. In this singing art, he points out: music gives life to a character; music subverts a character; music generates an action; music establishes a world. Madame Butterfly contains these characteristics if one examine carefully.

The beauty of this story, as Hwang put in M. Butterfly, is only from a Westerner's point of view. "Consider it this way," Song said to Gallimard when they first met:

What would you say if a blonde homecoming queen fell in love with a short Japanese businessman? He treats her cruelly, then goes home for three years, during which time she prays to his picture and turns down marriage from a young Kennedy. Then, when she learns he has remarried, she kills herself. Now, I believe you would consider this girl to be a deranged idiot, correct? But because it's an Oriental who kills herself for a Westerner--ah!--you find it beautiful.

"It is the music not the story," Song adds such a comment in the movie but not in the play.

The artistic achievement of the opera Madama Butterfly was never questioned; yet the ideology as Hwang raises in his play truly shakes every Western mind. Do we always need to apply such critical thinking in art appreciation? Hwang's assertion certainly is accepted by the critics and the audiences for a Tony Award and the popularity of this play answers clearly enough. However, Cronenberg's attempt to explore human nature from different perspective is not proved by the critics. M. Butterfly means to mock Madama Butterfly, though genius, do you think it "beautiful?"


References:

Corliss, R. (1993) Betrayal in Beijing, Time, 10-4-1993, 85
DiGaetani, J. L. (1989) M. Butterfly, An Interview with David Henry Hwang, The Drama Review, Fall 1989, 141~153
Greenfeld, H. (1980) Puccini (A Biography), New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons
Hornby, R. (1988) New Life on Broadway, Hudson Review, Autumn 1988, 512~514
Hwang, D. H. (1989) M. Butterfly, New York: Penguine Book
James, C. (1993) You Are What You Wear, The New York Times, 10-10-1993, 13, 16
Johnson, B. D. (1993) A Director's Odssession, Macleen's, 9-13-1993, 38~41
Kerman, J. (1988) Opera as Drama, Berkly: University of California Press
Lehmann, J. (1984) Image of the Oriental, Madam Butterfly/Madama Butterfly, New York: Riverturn Press Inc.
Maslin, J. (1993) Seduction and the Impossible Dream, The New York Times, 10-1-1993, c3
Moy, J. S. (1990) David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly and Philip Kan Gotanda's Yankee Dawg You Die: Repositioning Chinese American Marginality on the American Stage, Theater Journal, March 1990, 48~56
Murphy, K. (1993) Scented Memories, Whiffs of Bad Faith, Film Comment, Nov/Dec 1993, 66, 67
Novak, R. (1993) Picks & Pans, People, 10-18-1993, 22~23
Rafferty, T. (1993) Blind Faith, The New Yoker, 10-11-1993, 123
National Video Corporation (1983), Madama Butterfly (videotape)

*** Written December 6, 1995 ***