britown

Creative-Type Impersonator

🌸请别在工作死🌸


I sometimes like working on never-to-be-finished video game projects


Right now I'm making a game called Chronicles.


Wanna make a game? Here is a list of great C++ libraries to use.


I maintain a Letterboxd in much the way that I assume people maintain bonsai trees.


This is Owen:
Owen
And this is Molly:
Molly
Furthermore, this is Max:
Molly

🚨 This review contains spoilers 🚨

M. Butterfly Review

I try not to get into plot interpretations when I decide to write more complex thoughts here but it probably will help to get to what bothered me about this thing.

So in the end it is actually Jeremy Irons who is Butterfly and his Pinkerton is China.

I don't honestly know how much credit to give to Cronenberg or the original playwright here but if I'm being charitable I would say that the film does a lot to ridicule and condemn orientalism. Irons isn't so much in love with Lone as he is in the magic of the East. Lone tells him how the Butterfly opera is inherently Western and how much less "beautiful" the story would be if the nationalities were reversed. The final scene is dramatic and strange and feels a bit forced or unrealistic and that's the point!

Where it all had trouble landing for me, however, is when René's orientalism is then juxtaposed against a "real" China a la the Cultural Revolution.

American depictions of 20th century China are hard to watch. We just love to hand-wring over extremely treacherous periods of foreign history while conveniently omitting mention of any imperial machinations that may have influenced them. It all just feels a little exploitative and hypocritical to me.

If the West fetishizing Eastern culture is bad, is a Western narrative beard-stroking over a troubled period of Chinese history not also.... bad?

This brings us to the gender angle where the movie and source-material tread on fairly thin ice. The ultimate illustration of René's orientalism is that the woman who is the keystone of his obsession and delusion is actually a MAN sent by the COMMUNISTS to TRAP him.

This would be a crude bit of fiction to sell the thesis on but you can go read about the real French diplomat! Still, we're working from a movie based on a play based on a mixture of true accounts and media frenzy. While possible that there was a nuanced love in the experience of the original people, that has been lost here. All that is left is dramatic irony and a metaphor that prevents either character from ever feeling like a real person.

Anyway this was weird and interesting and uncomfortable and I do really like that. I like being challenged and sometimes I like feeling annoyed at the end because now it's 5am and I just finished writing all this about a movie I didn't really like.


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