"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" -- Part One of Two

Editor's note. Please send your comments to Dave Andrusko at daveandrusko@hotmail.com.

Like a lot of husbands, my first impulse is not to race to any film with subtitles. But I've learned that my wife has exquisite taste and even better instincts, so off we went last weekend to see, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Unlike Juno, the movie that we discussed last Monday, The Diving Bell is only now hitting many theatres. But like Juno, the film about a remarkable young girl and her unplanned pregnancy, The Diving Bell has benefited from almost universally positive reviews. (Alas, although nominated in several categories, Juno  won no Golden Globe awards last night.)

Filmmaker Julian Schnabel's extraordinary adaptation of Jean-Dominique Bauby's 1997 memoir is a veritable gold mine for pro-lifers but is no less rich a vein for anyone who marvels at enormous personal courage and can be stunned by a level of devotion that is breathtaking.  

 Unlike me, some of you probably know the basic outline of the story told in Bauby's memoir--an international best-seller which has been brilliantly brought to the screen. To Americans, Bauby is almost a caricature of the free-wheeling Frenchman, a 43-year-old whose ego is matched only by his zest for beautiful women and his almost complete self-absorption. The editor in chief of Elle-France, Bauby had long since left life's fastlanes in the dust.

But then in one of those moments that reminds us how fragile life can be, Bauby (played by Mathieu Almaric) suffers a massive stroke. He wakes up three weeks later wondering why the idiotic medical staff doesn't respond to his questions and his own answers to their inquiries.

They don't "hear" him because Bauby's stroke has left him paralyzed from head to toe, rendering him in what doctors diagnose as a "locked-in" condition. His speech is, literally, all in his head.

His mind is sharp as ever but the only way he can communicate is by blinking his one good eye. At this point, there is a question that would strike anyone: how in the world can you make a film about such an incredible tragedy, given these built-in limitations? I won't spoil it by telling you, but Schnabel's answer is ingenious. (Hint: the scene where they sew his infected right eye shut is one you will never forget, but not for reasons you'd think.)

As would anyone, Bauby struggles not to give in to despair and depression. He staves them off with a sardonic sense of humor and a steely will. But even that resolve would have faltered over time had it not been for the many people who rally behind him. Bauby is no saint, but there are people who come into his life--or stay in his life, in spite of his abysmal treatment of them-- who surely qualify.

For example, there is his speech therapist who teaches him the blinking technique that enables him to communicate. (She reads the entire French alphabet and he blinks when she hits the correct letter.) He masters this painfully slow technique enough to communicate his first words: "I want death."  

She is devastated and reacts tearfully and in anger. She reminds him that there are many people who care about him, including her, although she has known him only a short time. She leaves the room but then comes back to apologize. Soon they are back working. She is not about to passively sit by.

The woman who is the mother of his three children and whom he had recently discarded is as generous and forgiving as Bauby has been tunnel-visioned and narcissistic. Unwilling to allow his children to come see him in his condition (he says he looks "like something in a jar of formaldehyde"), Bauby gradually comes to realize how much he misses them all and how much they care about him even in his stricken condition.

When the family is out together on the beach, although no less physically paralyzed, Bauby's moral imagination begins to soar. When he son tenderly kisses him, it brings to mind a scene just prior to his stroke when Bauby had done likewise for his own 92-year-old father whose failing health has rendered him "locked-in" in his own apartment.

A key turning point comes early in the film. In an astonishingly insensitive (but all-too-human a moment), a friend comes to the hospital and repeats the latest gossip: "Have you heard? Jean-Dominique is a vegetable."  

Without a hint of self-pity, Bauby puckishly thinks to himself, "What kind of vegetable? A carrot? A pickle?"

Bauby has been visited by another friend who had swapped places on a plane with Bauby and wound up spending ''several years in a darkened Beirut dungeon'' as a hostage of Hezbollah. In a brief but powerful scene, he encourages Bauby to hold fast to what is human inside him, which is what made it possible for him to survive his own imprisonment and torture.

By retaining his humanity and--thanks largely to the faithfulness of those around him--expanding it, Bauby overcomes what would have utterly destroyed a lesser man.   

Bauby decides to fulfill a book contract he had signed prior to his stroke with the aid of an assistant (another saint-in-the-making) who is sent by his editor to take dictation. The title of the book and movie comes from Bauby's realization that it is as though his body  is locked in an old-fashioned diving bell while his mind remains free to fly away.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was published on March 6, 1997, to rave reviews. Two days later Bauby died of heart failure.  

You might conclude from all of this that going to the film is too depressing. Please don't, it isn't. As one observer commented, "This picture isn't about the limits of life, but of its wholeness."

Newsday's Jan Stuart did credit to the film's integrity with a tremendous paragraph that also captures the film's tenderness.

"It is Bauby's relationship with his father (portrayed with heartbreaking beauty by Max Von Sydow) that conveys the film's most resonant thematic core of mortality and familial yearning," Stuart writes. "A flashback scene shows a once-vibrant Bauby shaving his father; the amplified sound of the razor scratching across Sydow's neck creates an almost unbearable awareness of the aging man's vulnerability. In a telling juxtaposition, we are then shown the wheelchair-bound Bauby being nurtured by his own children, a piercing reminder of how abruptly and unceremoniously the tables can turn."

No one, certainly not me, would ever wish such a catastrophe on anyone. But it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the man who passed away so soon after the publication of his slim volume of memoirs and reflections was a far more decent, compassionate, and humane individual than the man who casually discarded the mother of his three children and assorted mistresses.  

And although he remained a "free-thinker and anti-cleric" until the very end, we can see that Bauby had been redeemed. Locked-in by his own pleasures and sensibilities, ironically the rich bon vivant had been liberated by a physical disaster.

If you have any comments, please send them to Dave Andrusko at daveandrusko@hotmail.com.  

Part Two