The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007)

"A text doesn't exist until it can be read."
Of the many memorable lines and images that fill Julian Schnabel's brilliant The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le scaphandre et le papillon) that's the one that for me sums up the essence of the movie. It's a story about one unimaginably arduous creation of a text. Metaphors for the writing process tend to focus on the difficulty of it. Like giving birth some have said. Faulkner compared it to being chased by demons. For all but the most gifted, writing is not only hard work it requires time and solitude (which is why original content at this blog has been sparse of late). But time and solitude were things that Jean-Dominique Bauby had plenty of. In that way, at least, he was fortunate.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly opens on a hyper-subjective note, literally in the head of its protagonist. We learn with him that he's been struck down by a massive stroke "a cerebrovascular accident" in the prime of his charmed life as editor of Elle magazine. Previously Bauby (Jean-Do to his friends) would have been DOA, but medicine has advanced, and he's slowly brought back to consciousness in a picturesque rehab hospital on the French coast. Consciousness in this case is truly a mixed blessing. Jean-Do is encased in a metaphorical diving suit called locked-in syndrome. It sounds like something out of a novel, which it is—remember de Villefort in The Count of Monte Cristo?—but it's real. Basically he's a vegetable, except that his brain, and crucial for us, left eye work just fine. The useless right eye is stitched shut by a glib doctor early on, a procedure the filmmakers force the viewer to experience by sewing a piece of latex over the camera lens creating an excruciating POV shot. Ah, what exquisite torture!

The way Schnabel and DP extraordinaire Janusz Kaminski make Bauby's subjective experience real to the viewer is, as I said before, brilliant filmmaking. I don't get to see many movies these days, so it's good to be reminded of cinema's power to surprise, to prime the pump of my ability to see the world in new ways. But back to that text. Slowly Jean-Do is drawn out of his despair largely through the dogged efforts of an attractive and idealistic speech therapist. A system is fashioned whereby Bauby can communicate using that most reflexive of actions—the blink of the eye. The tormenting memories and regrets continue to rush in unbidden, but imagination (the metaphorical butterfly) brings respite and the inspiration to give life to a text. What follows is heroic, even if the life that preceded it was not.

Given the subject matter Ronald Harwood's script and Schnabel's direction could easily have wandered into maudlin and/or depressing territory. They don't. There are some deeply sad sucker punches along the way, but I was left thankfully contemplative as Tom Waits sang over the closing credits "And if the sky falls, mark my words we'll catch mocking birds." I sit here typing at my computer. I can talk to my wife, pick up my son, scratch my ear, get up and go to the refrigerator. Amazing, really.