SOURCE: “Postmodern Double Cross: Reading David Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly as a Horror Story,” in Cinema Journal, Vol. 37, No. 2, Winter, 1998, pp. 49–64.

In the following essay, Suner writes that the foundation of Cronenberg's film M. Butterfly is based upon the conflict between the colonizer and the colonized, between West and East, between male and female. Suner also argues that the film addresses the male search for identity through the use of an inwardly fragile male protagonist.

David Cronenberg’s cinema has received considerable critical attention in recent years not only from film scholars but also from scholars working on contemporary cultural theory, particularly theories of postmodernism. For that latter group of scholars, Cronenberg’s films testify to the emergence of a “postmodern,” “postgender,” and “posthuman” subjectivity. In Terminal Identity, for example, Scott Bukatman reads Cronenberg’s cinema in relation to the coming out of a new “information/space age...