Imagination Versus Reality

Imagination Versus Reality

In life, people sometimes want what they can't have. Imagination can really change the perceptions of someone's reality, and that's coming from a psychological standpoint. Your mind can literally play tricks on you by changing illusions of what you think you hear and see into what seems like reality (Bergland, Psychology Today). In M.Butterfly by David Henry Hwang, Gallimard has a 20 year relationship with, who he thinks, is a female Chinese opera diva, Song. However, it later comes out that Song is actually a man, and the question that comes into play is "How does Gallimard not realize that Song is a man, especially after sexual intercourse?"

There are major differences between the play and the film. One of the main differences is that the play spans 20 years, while in the film, everything seems to happen within a short time span (even though, that's supposed to be 20 years as well). At the beginning of the film, Gallimard is seen with his wife in a bedroom-like setting, however once Song comes into the main picture, his wife is no longer mentioned, which can be a symbolism for the changing of Gallimard's perception of reality.

The way Gallimard slipped into ruination by crossing the line of healthy fantasy into a world of false conceptions got me thinking about the way we allow illusions to influence our daily lives. It is one thing to hope that something can happen, or wish for something we desire to occur, but it's an entirely different circumstance to be convinced that something will happen simply by believing in it. It's clear that illusions can lead to destructive behavior, as illustrated by the case of Gallimard. When our perception of reality is altered to such a state where we are only seeing what we want to see, instead of what is actually occurring, we begin to enter a dangerous area (Crowie, p. 37).