While the director is often tied up with body horror, the great themes of espionage fiction are present in nearly all his work.
David Cronenberg is that rare filmmaker who is a genre unto himself, such that his name has become an adjective. Yet, when his name is invoked, it’s usually as shorthand for body horror. Certainly, and in spite of his objections, this is to be expected: more than any other director, Cronenberg has examined, in detail both coldly clinical and gleefully perverse, the ways in which psychosexual desire, trauma, and society’s increasing dependency on technology manifest in the gruesome evolution and/or evisceration of the human body.
Indeed, we see a fresh example of this in the promotion and reception of his latest film—his first in eight years—Crimes of the Future (available on VOD today), despite the fact, for as horrific as many of the images and ideas within it are, it’s not really a horror movie. That said, the last thing I want to do is make another tired argument over what counts as a horror movie. Rather, I want to make the case that Cronenberg deserves to be equally synonymous with a different genre, one that he’s spent as much time exploring as body horror.
That genre is espionage.
M. Butterfly. Based on David Henry Hwang’s stage play (itself loosely based a true story), the film sees an French diplomat (Jeremy Irons) engage in a passionate affair with a female Beijing opera singer (John Lone) who he discovers is not only actually a man, but a spy for the Chinese government sent to seduce him into revealing classified information
One of Cronenberg’s most underseen and underrated works, M. Butterfly holds up exceptionally well today, not necessarily as a trans drama (although it certainly approaches its subject matter with more sensitivity and sympathy than other, similarly-themed films from the same time) but as a damning indictment of white, Western orientalist fantasies and naivety.
Read more at Crime Reads
