The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Julian Schnabel's biopic of Jean-Dominique Bauby is a risky film. It gambles its success almost entirely on the idea that it can provide an emotional effect.

This fact would not be that remarkable if we were talking about a traditional piece of cinema, shot in the conventional manner. Consider Penny Marshall's Awakenings. Or George Miller's Lorenzo's Oil. These movies are also about diseases and/or health problems, and they, too, strive to pluck the heartstrings of audience members - the latter film in particular. But the difference is that both these films are cinematically dull. They are filmed almost clinically, in a manner that is distilled of creativity. Neither film is, by any means, bad. Yet they are not really worth discussing, because their only aim is to make you feel sad or excited, and beyond this feeling there is nothing. Not even the methods these films use in their quest to emote are intriguing.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly has much more in mind than just telling a story or relating true events as they occurred. You can read a book to learn facts. Cinema isn't about that. What Schnabel wants to do, then, is to make you feel like his protagonist. There is a distinction to be made, here, between feeling an emotion while watching a movie, and feeling the emotion felt by the character on-screen. In Awakenings, as Leonard Lowe returns to his former catatonic state, we certainly feel something; perhaps a bit of pity, mixed with melancholy and - if we were really hoping his condition would improve - anger. But we can't really say we feel like Leonard, though we might feel for him. There's still a separation between our perception of the situation, and the character's perception.

It is that separation which Schnabel tries to destroy in his film. Bauby, a successful editor working for Elle magazine, suffers a stroke one day, driving along the countryside with his son. When he awakes, he is completely paralyzed, except for his left eye. This could have been the subject matter for some morose weepy. Instead, what we get, is this. A stylistic wonder, where half the scenes occur directly through the point-of-view of Bauby's left eye. We see what he sees. When he blinks, the screen turns black; when his eyes glaze over, the screen seems to turn blurry; when he moves his eyelids, the camera moves; and when he focuses his attention on a person or place, the camera likewise focuses.

It's a fairly interesting aesthetic choice, and Schnabel knows how to make good use of his visual premise. During the early scenes of the film, his protagonist is, understandably, confused, depressed, nihilistic, fatalistic, and suicidal. Bauby doesn't want to live - not like this. These first moments are filmed almost entirely through his left eye. We, the audience members, are possessed by claustrophobia, since it's not customary for a movie to restrict our understanding of the spatial dynamic of the scene. We are in tune with Bauby himself. He's not just suffering from locked-in syndrome (the name of his affliction) - he is also psychologically locked in onto himself. He is subdued by the state of things.

As the movie progresses, however, he begins to use his imagination to escape the claustrophobia of his paralysis. He begins "writing" a novel, utilizing a unique blink-based system. He begins to free himself, if at least mentally - accepting the help of his nurse, who, earlier, had expressed her disappointment at Bauby's blink-stated wish to die. As these developments occur, Schnabel begins to leave the strict confines of the protagonist's eye, showing us scenes in a more "conventional" manner, in third-person view. As the character leaves his claustrophobia, we leave ours. It's a magnificent correlation of shared moods.

The movie continually plays with this correlation - getting us to gain an intimate comprehension of the protagonist's dilemma. There's the little moments, like when a hospital worker turns off the television in Bauby's room, just when his soccer team was about to score a goal. Or the humorous aside, where he looks at the fly that has landed on his nose, and he wonders how he can manage to get rid of it, musing dryly: "Olympic sports have nothing on this." He has lost all control of his surroundings, and we are witness to the tiny ways in which this loss makes itself evident. In a way, it is minuscule details like the ones above that give us the best exemplifications of Bauby's plight - we come to realize how profound the change that has befallen his life truly is, through all the utterly stupid, inane little complications that once were not there.

Getting back to the original thesis, the film is risky, because its power rests with its capacity to lure audience members into taking the trip along with Bauby. That is, Awakenings kept people at a distance. Nobody is going to be bewildered by it. The movie goes straight for the heart, with a simple style that is nearly unnoticeable and easy to digest. But The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a more aggressive piece of film-making - it goes for the heart as well, but it does so violently. You're either in for the entire whirling ride, or you're out. You can't be an impassive spectator who occasionally peeks inside to get a taste. You have to be, almost, a participant. When you see The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, you're not watching somebody else, but learning how it is to be somebody else.