January 22, 2010
Watching Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) situates the viewer in author/subject Jean-Dominque Bauby's often excruciating, ultimately exhilarating, present. Opening to the sights and sounds of a hospital room, Schnabel's camera immediately puts the viewer in Bauby's uncomfortable skin. His eye becomes the frame through which we view experience. Initially confined to the terms of Bauby's condition of "locked-in syndrome" (an active mind within a paralyzed body), we see exactly and only as he does. His helpless immobility is graphically brought home in a scene reminiscent of Buñuel: Bauby's right eye is shown close-up as the camera's lens (his "eye") is gradually sewn shut causing the screen to go black.
The claustrophobia of Bauby's condition is relieved by the introduction of two therapists who prove crucial to his resurgence. Through the determination of Henriette, a speech therapist armed with a technique for isolating the most frequently used letters in French, Bauby learns he can communicate in the blink of an eye. With painstaking effort and concentration, Bauby is able to prise open a window of his physical prison, eventually dictating the text that becomes the basis of his memoir. In his confinement, Bauby suffers an acute loss of liberty and agency in his own life. He is cared for and completely dependent on others. In summoning his imagination and powers of recall, he accesses the freedom his temporal existence denies him.
Freedom from the body's restrictions and mortal functions has long been an abiding goal of religious faith, east and west. Techniques for transcending ordinary physical responses to sensory stimuli — mostly associated with pain — have been practised and recorded by mystics of many faiths. The attainment of trance-like, visionary states of consciousness — whereby the physical body is transcended and rendered almost immaterial — have also been well documented. The urge to escape the confines of our physical selves — bound by limitations of time and space, to say nothing of race, culture, class, ability, and more — has held an enduring fascination. It is a need all too familiar to policing authorities and social workers dealing with the trade and usage of narcotics worldwide.
The overwhelming urge fuelling this common drive to overcome corporeal restrictions is the experience of suffering and mortality. Suffering and misery are the trope against which mysticism and hallucinogens arise. Involuntary confinement — echoed in the title of Assigné au Residence, Jean-Jacques Beineix's record of the real Bauby in hospital — becomes Bauby's defining experience. In his position of suspended animation, he is both sufferer and hero. Like the fictional counterpart he aspired to revisit, the Count of Montecristo, enforced confinement prompts Bauby to examine his life and outlook. His refusal to succumb to despair — not however without recourse to moments of defeat and self-pity — appears to follow an established arc of incarceration or privation narratives: physical captivity or deprivation opening up soaring imaginative possibilities.
In many respects, Schnabel's film falls into and delivers a standard triumph-of-the-human-spirit storyline. It fulfills the uplift promised by the genre's true-life origins. On second viewing, it also provides a surprising glimpse at devotion, secular-style. Deprived of the capacity to sin, Bauby exists in a quasi state of grace. His bodily confinement and prominence in popular intellectual circles combine to transform him into something of a secular sacred object: a hero whose suffering becomes a focus of prayerful petition. After initial resistance, Bauby acquiesces to the hospital's mission, cooperating with his devoted therapists and adapting to the institution's routines. While his conscious self experiences the indignity of requiring help with basic bodily functions, his corporal body comes to be regarded as something of a living relic: a precious object through which petitioners are able to reach the remote spirit associated with it. Bauby's interactions with his therapists partake of this spirit. When Marie the physical therapist demonstrates actions with her tongue for him to practice in order to swallow, Bauby reacts with understandable erotic frustration. Marie's suggestive action is innocent sacrilege: at once urging animation of the spirit trapped within while simultaneously underlining its carnal denial. Later, following up on the disclosure of her religious devotion, Marie takes Bauby to mass where the priest also treats him as something of a venerate presence. Bauby's connection to relics is explicitly depicted in flashback: a weekend tryst with a mistress at the unlikely lovers destination of Lourdes. To his suprise, Bauby's paramour insists her lover accompany her to visit the Madonna. A highlight of their unlikely pilgrimage is Bauby's purchase of a Madonna figure, whose relentless, battery-powered radiance assists in the couple's dissolution.
For his part, Bauby responds to his celebrity freak status with equanimity, recounting the seemingly worldwide campaign of prayers on his behalf. His mockery of the marginal role he occupies in the lives of colleagues and loved ones is in contrast to scenes with his children where his inner thoughts reveal remorse and helpless chagrin. In one particularly devastating scene, he is "visited" by the single individual he has sought the most: his lover, Inès. Not daring to appear in the flesh, she enters Bauby's hospital room by phone during a visit from Céline, his children's mother. The awkwardness of this unhappy triangle is complicated by Inès immediate insistence on privacy against the practical requirement for an interpreter. The camera records Bauby's painful inertia as he listens to his lover confess her tearful grief. Fed up being the unwilling go-between, Céline hangs up on Inès. The lover's absence and her narcissism are contrasted against Céline's insistent presence.
None of this is in Bauby's memoir, at least not explicitly. In a 2008 television interview with David Frost leading up to that year's Academy Awards, screenwriter Ronald Harwood describes how he went about adapting the book. The breakthrough came with his decision to tell the story literally from Bauby's cramped perspective, forcing the camera to be its subject's eye. Finding a structure for conveying both the harsh austerity of Bauby's condition and his butterfly mind seems to have given Schnabel license to also find visual equivalents for Bauby's roving inner eye. It's no surprise —given Bauby's professional and personal history — that Harwood's screenplay celebrates women. From the neglected Céline — anonymous in the memoir — to the tirelessly devoted Claude Mendibil, to the mistresses, therapists and colleagues, women appear as constants: unassuming angels, fugitive apparitions, fleeting partners in love, even the Blessed Virgin. Unlike Bauby's sutured right eye, The Diving Bell & the Butterfly illuminates the feat of his wilfull assertion of intellect and imagination against paralysing inertia through gorgeous, often lyrical images that in turn speak eloquently of inadvertent devotion.
(See Luke Davies' Eyewitness account for another account and comparison.)
