Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story shares both similarities and differences with the film M. Butterfly. Super Sad True Love Story features a middle-aged white man in a quest for true love to satisfy his seemingly deteriorating life. M. Butterfly features a middle-aged white man who falls in love with the lead performer in a play. The play is about a young Oriental woman who falls in love with a white westerner who leaves her, and she is completely overwhelmed by her love for him that she kills herself.
SSTLS and M. Butterfly also portray conflicts of identities. Both Lenny and Rene have reached points in their lives where they are not content with their relationship status. Lenny seems to be aging quickly in a society that praises youth and the window of opportunity to meet a girl seems to be passing by until he finally meets Eunice. He glorifies this young girl and describes her as this perfect human. At one point Lenny talks about how he needs this steady relationship with Eunice in an attempt to keep him young and deny who he really is. Rene, although he is already married, becomes fascinated by Song and sees her as an escape from his old life. He describes her as his butterfly, a perfect woman whom he needs to have. He spends twenty years with this girl and never even realizes that she is actually a man. He is so destroyed by this realization and the love that he had for her that he kills himself at the end after declaring that he was both Renee Gallimard and Madame Butterfly, an obvious clash of identities.
The societies portrayed in both of these works are incredibly different. In SSTLS, a near-future America is portrayed where sexuality has become such an open issue. People can access others’ sexual ratings at any point in time, and the thing most people are concerned with is sex. When Noah is streaming video of Lenny talking about Eunice, he says that he is losing ratings and that the people just want to know if he has had sex with her yet or not. In M. Butterfly, sexuality seems to be very closed and personal. Rene and Song had been together for twenty years before he finally found out that she was a man, which means that they were never overly sexual. Song claimed that Rene never saw him naked, so he never could have known. Even though both societies seem to be facing great turmoil, they are completely different when it comes to socialization.
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