What would you do, say, and believe for love, and most importantly, what would you ignore for the sake of love? Such standardized questions seem to permeate the fabric of the operatic world from time immemorial to the present, and the well is not showing signs of running dry anytime soon. But we must ask a second and more important question: How does one willfully neglect the truth for a momentary illusion? The answer to this has yet to be adequately fulfilled.
As Friedrich Nietzsche starkly noted in “Beyond Good and Evil” (1886), “What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.” Funny enough, the Italian composer Giacomo Puccini, for whom the play and film adaptation of “Madame Butterfly” owe their artistic credit, is recorded as having been incredibly libertine with his amorous pursuits, and as the maestro put himself, “I am a mighty hunter of wild fowl, operatic librettos and attractive women.” Thus, most of the composer’s operas revolve around the tribulations induced by Cupid, her beguiling exploits, and the often unnerving consequences of the tantalizing feeling on its victims.
But in David Cronenberg’s 1993 film tersely titled “M. Butterfly”—which itself is a screen-adaptation of David Henry Hwang’s 1988 play—Nietzschean cynicism towards love’s completely sublime nature is coated around a thick gloss of romanticized surreality which is not wholly unreliable due to its appeal to standardized conceptions of Orientalism, the fanciful creations of the Far-Eastern and Asiatic worlds, and essentialist conceptions of what the people (especially women) behaved like. The film also deals heavily with the contentious topic of racial fetishism, just one sub-parameter of Orientalism, and the portentous effects of decoupling oneself from reality and rational thinking as a result.