THE RELEVANCE OF BUTTERFLIES

When the nanomachine reaches the brain, it causes the subject to visualize concentrated spots of light which mimic the shape and movement of butterflies. The choice of the butterfly to represent this phenomenon is artistic but hardly arbitrary.

First, the butterfly is a natural symbol of beauty, fertility, fragility, and change. Its beauty is readily apparent, its intricately-colored wings a natural source of inspiration for the man-made art found in stained glass windows. Often seen and photographed on flowers, the butterfly is closely tied with the spring season and therefore associated with fertility. Were it not for its thin, brittle wings and delicate body, the butterfly would not stand out from the rest of the insect world as a symbol of beauty; clearly its fragility is a large part of its appeal to lepidopterists. Its fourth aspect, change, is perhaps the most important. The butterfly begins its life as a (comparatively ugly) caterpillar, and then withdraws into a cocoon to metamorphose into its final form. In a very real sense, the butterfly lives two lives--one on the earth and one in the sky--and the fact that both its lives are finite and can be terminated so easily and quickly (because the butterfly is so fragile) makes the insect all the more appealing on an aesthetic level. In Japan there is the concept called mono no aware which describes the unmatched beauty found in temporary things: the briefer a good thing lasts, the more treasured and beautiful it is. Falling sakura blossoms are the most common example of mono no aware, and I see no reason why butterflies can't also be added to this category; surely, if butterflies lived hundreds of years and could not be killed as easily as they can be now, they would lose much of their aesthetic appeal.

The universal symbolic elements mentioned above apply largely to Spike and Vincent, underlining both their mortality and their sense of living different lives now than the lives they lived before ("living a dream"), but there is another level of symbolism to the butterfly specific to Japanese and Asian culture. Focusing on this dual-life aspect of the butterfly, there is a particularly relevant Buddhist folk tale where a monk falls asleep and dreams he is a butterfly; when he wakes, he ponders his dream and, upon seeing another butterfly, wonders: "Was I a man dreaming I was a butterfly? Or am I now a sleeping butterfly, dreaming I am a man?" The movie consciously references this tale when Vincent asks Spike which world is real--the world of nanomachine-induced butterflies, or the relatively plain world--the earthly, physical world--that everyone else lives in.