M Butterfly

For those that haven’t seen or read the play, or even seen the movie, I highly recommend you do so. M Butterfly is an absolutely amazing play about love—love that defies convention and really sparks your mind to begin thinking about gender in a whole new way. It is a story of a French man that finds his true love in a Chinese woman, his “butterfly,” but later discovers that his precious “butterfly” is indeed a man posing as woman to spy for the Chinese government.

In my Religion and Film class we just finished watching the movie and had an interesting discussion about the film. We discussed the different elements of love and spent a great deal of time examining the deception that took place in their relationship. The question that we spent the most time discussing though was: Did Rene Gallimard know that Song Liling was really man?

Everyone in the class was in utter shock! This couple had been together for over 20 years and the gender of Song was never discussed. There is a scene where Song is asked, “Did Mr. Gallimard know that you were a man?” The response from Song is deliciously perfect, “I never asked him.”

There was this thought floating around the class that Song deceived Rene and distorted his image of what or who his “butterfly” was. I challenged everyone to ask, “Does it matter?” Rene got everything he wanted out of his relationship with the “ideal Oriental woman.” He was loved, he got a child, he was sexually satisfied, he was happy! So in what way was his “love” distorted? Even after he discovered that Song was a man (although I argued along the lines of Song being gender queer) he was still in love!

The author of the play wrote in his afterword that it is Western mind that gets preoccupied with knowledge. We have a “false knowledge of gender, sexuality, etc.” It is the abuse of knowledge that sets us behind in a quest for equality. I have provided the final scene of the movie that was brilliantly done and shows the intensity of their love they had in their relationship. But I highly encourage everyone to either read or see the movie!