The Diving Bell and the Butterfly – movie about finding butterflies

Even a person who is imprisoned in the diving bell, can get out and fly away like a butterfly. Each person can get out from the worst situations; each person is able to overcome all kinds of limitations. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Julian Schnabel, 2007) it is a beautiful movie about life. It shows the strength of each human being, how impossible might become possible, how people can change and find the energy and motivation to fight, to achieve something. This movie is very touching, showing us the tragedy of men, life and death, letting viewers reflect on their own lives, but most importantly it brings a lot of hope.

It is a movie about finding butterflies. The main character Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) has a very rare disease – lock-in syndrome. He is totally palsied, he cannot move, cannot eat, cannot speak; besides his brain there is only one eye which works. He is like in the diving bell: closed, unable to move, torpid and powerless. But he is as well like the larva, which is imprisoned in the cocoon and through metamorphosis transforms into something beautiful – the butterfly. Like the larva can become a butterfly, people can fight their cocoons and find their butterflies – find happiness, passion and the meaning of life.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly shows us the story about Jean-Do, chief redactor of ELLE, father of three children, and a successful person. We get to know him when he wakes up in the hospital. We see everything very fuzzily - doctors coming and leaving, green walls of the room he stays, flowers someone brought for him. We see the world with his eye. One of the most famous Polish cinematographer Janusz Kamiński, the director of cinematography in this movie, created very authentic images of the world seen with eyes of a paralyzed person, who doesn’t have contact with the world. He uses shallow focus and racking focus or going out of focus to show how weak is his eyesight. Because of that we can not see very clearly what happen on the screen, sometimes we have problems seeing clearly the face of someone or even reading the name tag of the doctor who examine Jean-Do. We have also the problem, to see all the people who are in the room. Camera is static like the patient’s body, no moves are possible. Because of that, the space we are able to see is very limited, especially when the objects are close to the camera. The use of the counted low angle changes the perception as well. This is how Jean-Do has seen the world from his hospital bed. People were not clear, he saw only part of his faces or even only the chest of the doctor or breast of the nurse, and he didn’t have control of anything.

Through the cinematography in this movie we can fully understand Jean-Do’s feelings; as viewers we want to have control on this what is happening, understand it, know more than the character, but it is impossible. We discover what happened together with him. The edition doesn’t help us as well. There is lack of establishing shots; we don’t even know what our hero, in whose body we are now, looks like. He doesn’t know either. We discover it together, step by step. Firstly, when he for the first time tries his wheelchair, he sees himself for a second in the window reflection, secondly when he tries to exercise him mouth and tongue, he sees this part of him body in the mirror. We cannot see his face because he cannot either.

What we can do is we can feel the same pain and fear as he feels. Especially in the scene when Jean-Do is learning that his eye is already dry and doctors wants to sew it up. He speaks but nobody can hear it. Then we just see the big needle which moves around the screen, and the eyelid which become closed forever. Even more expressive is the scene when Jean-Do cries. The picture becomes less and less sharp, the camera looses the focus, and we can really see the tears on the screen.

Although during the first 35 minutes of the movie we can just see the tragedy, pain, fear, and loss of humanity, it is not what the movie is about. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly shows us three different worlds: the world seen with the eye of Jean-Do, the world where Jean-Do lives and is part of, and the world of his memories and imagination. Our main character changes himself and even through he is paralyzed he finds his own world. He realized that “memory and imagination let him get out of his diving bell”. He creates his own world, in which he finally can feel happy. Even the flashbacks are not realistic, are improved, colorized, more beautiful. Like, his memories from the day of the accident, when he is driving through Paris. Everything looks like fairytale. Camera shows the pictures from Paris once from extremely high angle, then tracks on extremely low angle, in the mean time camera moves in all possible way – pan, tilt, shows Paris in the various of counted angles. In the background we can hear the title track from The 400 Blows (Francois Truffaut, 1959). Everything looks beautiful, magical and happy like his whole life should look like.

Jean-Do’s imagination shows us the authentic man’s desire. He dreams about all of those things he really wants and he cannot have. When the doctor comes and gives him a drip, which replaces food, he closes his eye and moves to the restaurant, where he sits in his pajama in front of the table full of extraordinary food. He sees also Claude (Anne Consigny), who flirts with him. He invites her to the table, feeds her, they start kissing. It shows how much he need passion, closeness, and other people like every other human being. He dreams very often about freedom – he sits on his wheelchair on the small podium on the sea. His face is turned into the direction of the horizon. Other times he just imagines nature – forests, grass-lands, ice-bergs, he dreams about himself skiing on the hill-side, on which nobody was skiing before. The nature in this case expresses freedom, which was taken from Jean-Do and never would be given back. Finally he remembers his family – his father of whom he used to take care; a person who is very close to his heart.

Through his dreams we can learn that he is still a normal person, that his brain is functioning like the brain of anybody else, that he has the same needs and desires like all of us. Through he is handicapped he is still a normal person who can love, care, have dreams. But it was not like that from the very beginning. It cost Jean-Do a lot of effort and internal strength to achieve it. He had to make one of the most important steps – accepting his situation and finding the will to live. We can see this acceptance, when the camera for the first time gets out from his head, from his perspective, and we can see paralyzed Jean-Do as he really is, on the wheelchair, with sewed up eye and deformed face. We are able to see it, because he is able to do it.

One more example of how strong he was is the process of learning the new way of communication. Through this he frees his butterfly. Firstly when the new language is introduced to him, he doesn't want to cooperate. His first words are “I want to die”. But with the time he realized that he has something to live for and he can learn how to get out from his cocoon. He realized that communication with other people is what he really needs. It would make him not feel lonely.

Jean-Do is somehow like a foreigner in a country, where he didn’t speak the language. What he needs the most is a way of communication. It can be done without words. All that is needed is a message created in a head of one person, which is codified, then transmitted to the second person and decodified, which means understood. Foreigners probably would use the body language and hands to transmit their message. Jean-Do used his eye. Together with logopediste Henriette (Marie-Josée Croze) they create the unique way of communication – one person reads the alphabet, where characters are classified to their use frequency, and Jean-Do blink each time when the letter he needs is pronounced. From that letters he builds words, from words sentences. This lets him communicate with others, talk on phone with those who are not able to visit him, and this let him even write a book.
In The Diving Bell and the Butterfly cinematography, edition and sound express how Jean-Do's delivers his message. The camera replaces the eye and ear, registers the pictures and sounds, and copies Jean-Do’s impression, cutted, deformated, shaking. Sometimes we can hear voices but don’t see the person; sometimes we don’t hear anything; sometimes we can hear the enjoyable sound of TV when the program ended. Everything exactly like Jean-Do might feel. Cinematography shows his thoughts, everything that is in his head and nobody else has access to; like our thoughts and dreams we never share with others. Edition is the code with which he transmits his message. We can notice that every cut is one blink. When he blinks for less the one second appears the brown-purple screen, what gives us impression that we see his closed eye. As Jean-Do, we were introduced to this code and without any further help we can encode the message and understand it. We have learnt this language together with our character.

This movie shows how communication is important; it proves that there are so many ways to express ourselves. We can communicate not only via language, via speaking, but as well via artistic expression. It can be music, it can be painting, it can be a book, and it can be a movie. Jean-Do wrote a book, which lets us understand his emotions and his situation. Based on the book the movie was created. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a brilliant example of the way of communication. Firstly through this fill still Jean-Do is sending us a message, secondly director Julian Schnabel, as well as his cinematographer Janusz Kamiński, editor Juliette Welfling, and the rest of film authors tell us how amazing a tool of communication film could be, and how many things they can express through film.

Film it is not the simple story presented step by step, which shows us only what happened. In each movie we can find plenty of meaning, emotions, reflections, but in the same way as the language, we have to learn how to understand the movie. Let’s look for example on nondiegetic inserts, which shows diving bell deep in the water. Those are parts which let viewers reflect, think about the meaning, or even try to understand the characters’ emotions. When we see the diving bell, it might make us feel like Jean-Do, it helps us understand the lock-in syndrome, and imagine how difficult the situation is. The same with the nondiegetic insert with the ice-berg. As viewers we can see the scene where the ice-berg falls apart. But linking it with the whole movie and the place in the movie when this scene is presented, we can understand it. This scene is placed just before Jean-Do accepts himself, decides to write a book and uses the rest of the life as much as he can. The collapse of the iceberg symbolizes something important: change and freedom.

This scene might have one more meaning. Even if something falls apart, and it looks like it is impossible to fix, it is never too late. Like ice-berg which firstly collapsed, but in the last scene we can see how everything moves back, become normal, how it was before. Like Jean-Do, who after the accident, lost his all hope. But he realized in the end that through what happened his life became meaningful, he got closer to his family, he discovered what is important in life, and he left behind him something lasting – the book.

This movie is so special, because brings hope and a lot of positive feelings. Although says about person who goes through tragedy, is very positive and in many moments even amusing. As it is shown in the opening scene, through the series of the roentgen photos, we live very close to the things about which we never think about. We would never think about our bones, until something starts hurt. Maybe The Diving Bell and the Butterfly suggest us right now to look around, think what we have, and start enjoying it…