The Diving Bell And The Butterfly

The mysteriousness of communication is compelling. Do we really communicate everything we are thinking? What we are feeling? Or is there so much more to every one we come in contact with? Finding a common language, a blanket of trust, is to communicate experience. That is rare. That is gold. Once that is found, true and genuine communication, you are truly experiencing the mind of an artist.
Some of us may never know the feeling of being completely paralyzed from head to toe like main character Jean-Dominique Bauby, but many of us experience a similar paralysis of our mind. We are stunned by our disagreements and our fears. This sours us and keeps us distant from the people in our lives. Julian Schnabel's masterful The Diving Bell and the Butterfly allows us to better appreciate the simple pleasures in life by dramatically illustrating the trauma faced by the 43-year old editor who suffered a massive stroke that left him unable to speak or to move his head. Blinking remained his only form of communication.
Impeccably filmed with extremely innovative and unique camera angles, the film starts with Bauby's confused awakening in the hospital after three weeks in a coma. The initial images are a blur …show more content…
Let’s layout Bauby's situation: a father of two young children and editor-in-chief of French Elle, suddenly in a hospital bed, unable to speak or move his body, connected to IVs and feeding tubes, dependent on the care of others, and with no hope of recovery. Few fall so far so fast, and the spectacle of that fall is part of the phenomenon of this movie. Realizing how his life had been less than model, his stroke becomes an opportunity for restoration and prompts him to cleanse his soul. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a film of enormous power that shakes us and enables us to appreciate and dwell in the miracle of each passing