Postmodern Double Cross

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 emergence of a postmodern, postgender, and subjectivity. In Terminal Identity, for example, Scott Bukatman reads Cronenberg's cinema in relation to coming out of a new information/space age.' According to Bukatman, Cronenberg's films stage a terminal identity, which refers to a articulation: end of subject and a new constructed at computer station or television screen.' All protagonists in Cronenberg's films, according to Bukatman, signify a in human definition: the loss of power over form of human, visible sign of our being, combines with absence of moral certainties that once guided that power.' What is not sufficiently addressed in Bukatman's analysis is fact that double articulation of subjectivity in Cronenberg's films, which refers to both end of subject and construction of a new postmodern mode of subjectivity, is not a postgender or posthuman phenomenon but is deeply grounded in gender. In Cronenberg's cinema, it is specifically male subject whose unified, coherent, and central status is disturbed and disarticulated. new, decentered, and fluid mode of which signifies a slippage in human definition is also unmistakably male. As Michael O'Pray puts it, The Cronenberg mise-enscene of techno-phantasy upon which his reputation rests-the parasites, growths, visceral invasions of body-is male through and through.' Cronenberg's 1993 film M. Butterfly occupies a particularly interesting place in director's cinema, because for first time he articulates crisis of male subject not only in terms of questions of gender and crisis of modernity but also in terms of questions of race, ethnicity, and imperialism. Unlike some well-known Cronenberg films such as Videodrome (1985), Fly (1986), Dead Ringers (1988), or Naked Lunch (1991), M. Butterfly cannot be categorized within confines of horror and/or science fiction genres. Instead, M. Butterfly

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• Terminal Identity

  Open Access•Scott Bukatman•Terminal Identity•1993

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