The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

I recently watched the film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly both in its original language, French, and in English. The movie starts entirely from the perspective of the main character, Jean-Dominique Bauby, who has suffered a stroke and now finds himself disoriented and unable to move, but mentally as sharp as before. The camera captures the hospital surroundings as seen by a person with low/blurry vision, unable to move. There are extreme close-ups of the eyes and other physical parts of the onlookers as they occasionally come into his line of sight. This perspective creates the feeling of being locked in the body, separated from the world, unable to move or control the field of vision.

There is a recurring motif of eyes, eyesight, and dream-like visions. Later in the movie, he starts to communicate with the world, the only way he can communicate, as he discovers, by blinking an eye.

Bauby’s internal monologue adds psychological realism. Viewers can understand and feel compassion for his paralyzed state through the non-diegetic sound of his inner voice. Only viewers can hear his internal dialogue; other characters cannot. The heavy sounds of breathing that the main character makes create the illusion that you are very close to him.

Although Jean-Dominique Bauby is trapped in his body (as if in a diving bell), he is free to imagine and replay images from the past (his imagination is like a butterfly, hence the name of the movie). There is a sharp contrast between the immobility of the main character’s body and the liveliness of his mind that knows no constraints. The movie is extremely sad and, at the same time, liberating and powerful because it shows that even a person who can only use his imagination can still find a purpose in life as he dictates his memoir, one letter at a time, by blinking.