"I Want to Do Something New With It": Homoeroticism in Cronenberg's M. Butterfly

In M. Butterfly, David Henry Hwang (1957-), a Chinese-American tries to deconstruct the clear-cut distinction between the West as colonizer and the East as the colonized, and the masculine West contrasting to the feminine East. M. Butterfly also tries to reveal the fact that there is no closed, fixed, true and essential self of the Orient or Occident and Man or Woman. In this respect, M. Butterfly can be considered to reawaken the new possibility that the East can be like the West, and that woman can be like man. That is, Hwang’s M. Butterfly suggests the possibility of new histories of ‘the center’ and ‘outer circle’ that may be more mutually constituted. Adapting Hwang's play, David Cronenberg also raises the question of fixed, coherent and unitary subjectivity, especially the Western male subjectivity. However, in Cronenberg’s film these political elements or themes clearly displayed in Hwang’s text are to some extent attenuated because it is the desire and capacity for the physical and mental transformation and homoeroticism or psychology of the two men that Cronenberg finds most interesting at the heart of Hwang’s play, and he considers this as a more subtle medium of representing political issues in his own artistic way. Of course, it goes without saying that Cronenberg’s artistic independence, which makes new interpretations of Hwang’s M. Butterfly possible, deserves to be praised by viewers. Yet, Cronenbeg’s film can be said to have the danger of being remembered as a work that lacks a voice for the Other and a power of expanding viewers’ perspectives or knowledge about ‘the shifting power structure.’