The Search for Deeper Sources of Vitality

I recently saw a great new film at the Laemmle Theater called The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. You may have seen a preview for it, but probably you’ve never heard of it. Too bad, because it’s a great movie. TDBATB is directed by Julian Schnabel, who has limited filmmaking experience but an extensive history in the arts, and it shows. I saw another of his films, Basquiat (1996) in an art class at Fuller last year and enjoyed it, too. With a combination of pioneering film style, great performances and a remarkable story make this one of the best films of the year.

It begins with perhaps the most appropriate FADE IN from black in the history of cinema. As the audience, we awaken with the protagonist from some unknown past into a dim hospital room, the camera struggling to focus on various strangers who ask odd questions and appear not to hear a voice that emanates from the rear speakers, a voice within a mind that belongs to someone we cannot yet see. Schnabel and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (a Spielberg regular) invite us into a vicarious experience of total paralysis and muteness—the world of Jean-Dominique Bauby, a man who has suffered a sudden debilitating stroke. For a good portion of the film, we see the world only through a subjective camera which blinks and darts just like the human eye. Bauby lives behind a two-way mirror, in which he can see, think and respond to others but they cannot reciprocate. The effect is claustrophobic. We hear every little sound, from the brush of fabric to gusts of breath. Bauby’s senses and ours become heightened to his surroundings, living in a world of forced asceticism. The analogy of being trapped in a diving bell is especially pertinent. Imagine being trapped hundreds of feet below water in a large metal diving suit—the closeness of sound, the immobility and the feeling of utter helplessness—and you can imagine this film’s unique aesthetic quality.

It soon becomes apparent that Bauby’s condition trapped behind the mirror will likely be permanent. An eye is sown shut (in the film’s most cringe-worthy scene) and a couple lovely ladies are brought in to teach him to communicate. The system devised involves a person reading the alphabet to Bauby, who blinks when the person gets to the letter he wants. This continues to form words and phrases. Many of the effects on film were accomplished in the camera, without digital manipulation, and much of the dialog—or dual monologue, to be more precise—is improvised, and the film benefits from the resulting “hands-on” feel.

At first, Bauby feels so trapped and helpless in his “diving bell” that he wants to die, but the love, attention, patience and mere presence of so many people, including his friends and family, instills in him the will to stop pitying himself. This motivates a move away from the subjective camera to an objective camera, where we see a paralyzed Bauby for the first time. The other scenes that step out of the first person into the third are Bauby’s dreams, memories and imaginings. He calls memory and imagination the only parts still working in him. His memory/imagination comes to us in bits—presumably, as he recalls the events himself—and always ends abruptly, as though waking from a dream. I don’t know about you, but every one of my dreams ends the same way. This element contributes to the vicarious experience of the film and draws us further into Bauby’s interior world.

The majority of the film follows Bauby’s decision to write a book with the help of a transcriber. This is where Diving Bell diverts from a similarly themed movie, The Sea Inside (2004). Whereas Bauby decides to stop pitying himself and create something beautiful, the character played by Javier Bardem in The Sea Inside takes his self-pity to a dismal end: a glass full of poison. Bardem ends his paralyzed life alone in front of a DV camera, while Bauby ends his life surrounded by love. I recently discovered the writer Henri Nouwen (who I will surely write on at a later time), and a particular section from his book Reaching Out sparked a connection for me with this film:

What if our history does not prove to be a blind impersonal sequence of events over which we have no control, but rather reveals to us a guiding hand pointing to a personal encounter in which all our hopes and aspirations will reach their fulfillment?
Then our life would indeed be a different life because then fate becomes opportunity, wounds a warning and paralysis an invitation to search for deeper sources of vitality.

I cannot think of a better way to summarize this film. In some ways, the end of Diving Bell resembled another film about discovering deeper sources of vital after suffering paralysis, Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blue, although the paralysis in that film is more emotional than physical. Both films show us that the categories that make us human are far wider than we might imagine, and that personal encounter, or Presence is one of, if not the most valuable resource for our lives, indeed, that makes life worth living. The “butterfly” the title implies is released from Bauby’s interior world of memory/imagination and breaks into the external world of the “diving bell,” imparting beauty, meaning and hope to an otherwise painful and insufferable reality.

At the Golden Globe Awards last Sunday, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly received two awards: Best Foreign Language Film and Best Director (Julian Schnabel). If you are able, see this movie!