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beautiful. In the following weeks, he cannot help but imagine
Madame Butterfly behind Song’s feline eyes. She stimulates his
asinine arousal even further, one night declaring: “The Orien-
tal woman has always held a certain fascination for you Cau-
casian men.” Lone purrs with singsong intonation, and angles
his face downward and away from the light. In the shadows, he
is simultaneously concealed while simulating an intimate
seduction. He refashions himself into a human riddle.
However, to those unin-
volved in the delusion,
Song’s manhood is indis-
putably on conspicuous
display. Although John
Lone plucked his eyebrows
and removed the hairs on
his hands in preparation for
the role, the shadow of his
Adam’s apple curves along
the neck, and stubble can
be seen across his upper lip.
He conceals his lower tone
of voice with a creeping
nasal drawl (much like in
the female roles played by
men in the Peking Opera,
though René Gallimard is
not one to know this). It
is, however, not a botched
attempt at an authentic
Asian femininity, but a con-
scious mimicry of the arti-
ficial object of René’s
desire, as synthetic as the
computer-generated jade
coins and paper umbrellas
that float about in the film’s
opening sequence. Clutch-
ing her silk gown whenever
René demands she undress,
Song explains, “Modesty is so important to the Chinese.” He
relents. René so voraciously feeds upon these aphoristic assertions
about Chinese customs that he never questions Song’s reticence.
The two have sex only while clothed, Lone tensing his jaw as Song
distances herself from proclaiming pleasure.
In his afterword to M. Butterfly, Hwang describes his initial
idea for the play, which would consist of a reversal of power:
René Gallimard would “[realize] that it is he who has been But-
terfly, in that [he] has been duped by love.” But Lone’s reinter-
pretation of Song is not nearly as resistant to the lie. Even when
René is away, Song remains in costume. “Why do you have to act
this way when he is not even here?” a guard asks, while Song,
firm shoulders narrowed, intently studies a photograph of Anna
May Wong, another Eastern entertainer of Western dreams. To
avoid being discovered, Song rebuffs René’s sexual advances by
claiming to be pregnant. She then requests a baby from the Chi-
nese government. It is necessary for the state, she argues, pursing
her lips while the guard considers the idea. The plain implication
of the demand, of course, is that she’d like to prolong the affair.And why else, except that her heart has turned tender toward the
Frenchman who refers to himself as Butterfly’s master?
The extent of Song’s attachment to René only emerges when the
French embassy finally discovers René’s wrongdoings and summons
Song to testify in court. Until then, Song evades honesty beneath
Butterfly’s exaggerations. The camera dollies into the doorway as
Song enters the room in a fitted suit, his hair cropped short. Here,
Lone replaces his usual arrogance with stiff fatigue, shyly turning to
look into René’s eyes. Cro-
nenberg cuts to a repulsed
René, glaring. When asked
whether René knew he was a
man, the spy responds: “I
never asked.” The collar
of his shirt tightens against
his tense neck. But he only
removes his masculine garb
in private, when a van
escorts the two away from
the court. Confined to a
caged section of the car,
Song strips. In the play, this
is an act of cruel provoca-
tion, wherein Song mocks
René—how could you not
know? But Lone’s exposure is
instead an invitation, asking,
would you like to know?
Lone unclenches his jaw and
softens his stare. He kneels
before the white man and
kisses his pallid hand. Song
can still play the game, if
only René wishes. In Lone’s
voluntary vulnerability, we
witness the crossing of the
self-orientalist line between
self-protection and self-
destruction. Song’s faith that
the white man might love him, even as an ordinary Chinese male
opera performer, is a futile effort. “You’re nothing,” René says,
reeling at the sight of him. This is the only moment at which
René sees Song for who he is—free from the fetish, fluid, a being
as pure yet slippery as the shadowy figure of Lone himself.
Because to be nothing is to be neither Butterfly nor Song Lil-
ing, the remark delivers a blow of devastation. Hunching over,
Song digs his fingers into his naked flesh, which René had always
wished to see, as if to tear it apart. But something—a flash of
consciousness, perhaps—stops him from piercing through. And
so unlike the disemboweled, imploding stomachs elsewhere in
the Cronenbergian oeuvre, Lone’s vessel remains tightly sealed.
Song returns to China; he weeps on the plane, inhibited by
attachment but forced to leave love. But separation for Song is
liberation for Lone. He exits our field of vision with his mask
still on, holding onto the “nothing” of his true self. Kelley Dongis a Toronto-based writer. Her work has been fea-
tured in The Village Voice, Reverse Shot, and MUBI Notebook.July-August 2019|FILMCOMMENT| 19“The Oriental woman has always held a certain fascination for you Caucasian men,” John Lone purrs with
singsong intonation, and angles his face downward and away from the light. In the shadows, he is simultane-
ously concealed while simulating an intimate seduction. He refashions himself into a human riddle.