User Reviews

Butterfly Wings is a heavily symbolic film that focuses on one family as representative of the society in which they live. The film opens with a hospital scene in which a clearly frustrated grandfather receives the news that he has a new granddaughter, not a grandson. His daughter in law has yet again been unable to provide his son with an heir, reflecting the favoring of boys in the society in Spain at the time of the film. This scene sets up the stage for the rest of the film, which presents a picture of the home life of one family, which is influenced by their society. The movie is an exploration of a patriarchal society through female central characters.

The daughter born at the beginning of the film is Amy, a little girl with dark hair and startling blue eyes who is neglected by her mother, Carmen, who seems to want an heir for her husband even more than he does. Carmen eventually gets pregnant again, and is upset because she is afraid that she will have another girl. It is significant here that the grandfather was introduced as the one who is strictly following the traditions of the patriarchal society in which they live, and then the mother continues this strictness even more than the father does. Indeed, the father plays a fairly minor role in the film, if only because he is so complacent about the gender of his children. Rather than being desperate to have the more socially acceptable male child, he accepts whatever gender they get as a blessing, as God's will.

(spoilers) When the mother has the next child, however, it is a boy, and this is where all the real trouble starts. Amy's mother is so elated that she has had a boy that she gives him all of her attention, not even paying any attention to Amy even when she is literally bleeding from her head. This is the major turning point in the film, where the damage has been done to Amy by her mother, and her consciousness takes a turn for the worst, which is most clearly evident in a comparison between the butterflies that she drew and made up to this point in the film and those that she makes for the rest of the movie.

There is a great dream sequence soon after the son is born where Carmen dreams that Amy picks the baby up out of the crib and drops him out the window to his death far below. There is soon a situation where Carmen finds the baby gone, Amy is out on the balcony that she dropped the baby off of in the dream, and Carmen freaks out thinking that it has come true. She starts beating Amy, who takes it silently, and then Gabriel, the father, walks in the room carrying the baby and asks what's going on.

Carmen's fate is pretty much sealed at the point where Amy smothers the baby, imitating something she saw on TV, if I remember correctly. This is the point where parents should really pay attention, because Carmen's rough parenting style combined with the oppressive patriarchal society in which the family lived led to the rejection of Amy as a member of the family, her desire to escape into television, and her ultimate effort to get rid of the new baby so that she can be noticed again. Amy smothers her little brother, and Carmen begins to go insane.

It is significant that the only time that we ever see Amy smile as a young girl is when her little brother squeezes her finger, right before she smothers him. She did not do this maliciously out of anger or hatred for her brother, she was too young for that, she didn't realize the gravity of what she was doing. All she knew was that this was something that her mother loved more than her, and it caused her to be ignored. She probably felt that if she got rid of it, her mother would be mad at her for a while and then things would go back to the way they were before.

Amy's life is packed with tragedy from the moment we meet her, as an unwanted little girl. She has an abusive mother, was born into a society that looks down on females, she unknowingly murders her baby brother, frequently attempts suicide when she gets old enough to realize what kind of life she is stuck in, has to care for both her father (who has been rendered paralyzed and silent) and her mother, who is completely insane by the end of the movie. Not only that, but she has been forced into this motherly role, which is forced on women anyway in the society that she lives in, but she doesn't even have any children or even companionship of her own. She is stuck caring for her debilitated parents, and even the fact that she is pregnant, which is the only thing that symbolizes any hope for the future, is not a very bright point because she is pregnant with the baby of a rapist.

But the important thing is that Amy is presented as a strong character, or at least a resourceful one. She attempts suicide several times, noted by the numerous scars on her forearms, and she manages to fail at killing herself, but she steals food when she goes grocery shopping so that she can save up the grocery money to escape the house where she was raised. Unfortunately, she took over caring for her parents before she gets a chance to leave (or, rather, right when she DOES get a chance to leave, which she decides not to do simply because her mother calls her `daughter,' quite possibly for the first time in her life).

Given the fact that Amy failed to commit suicide (which is a failure at a dishonorable task), she ironically gains our respect by stealing to save money to better her own life. The mark of the intelligent mind is the ability to hold conflicting opinions about the same person or subject and still be able to function, which is something that has also been done in recent films like Insomnia and, more importantly, Monster's Ball. This film does that in several different ways as described above, particularly in the character of Amy, whose life is a picture of the oppression of the patriarchal society that she was born into.