Transcendence
Monday, November 17, 2008
Two nights ago Bill and I watched "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," the extraordinary Julian Schnabel film based on the real-life story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the bon vivant editor of French Elle who suffered a massive stroke in his early 40s. Condemned to live with locked-in syndrome, able to communicate only by blinking his left eye, Bauby nonetheless authored a memoir that tantalizes, that lives. Schnabel's film is painterly, as one would expect—deeply layered, surprising, reeling off into high color and fantasy. It is a wonder, a feat of the heart.
Films are free to do so many things that books cannot, and yet, "Diving Bell," the film, is a writerly provocation, reaffirming the power of tangents and the fantastical, of flashbacks and dream forwards, within the shell of a story that is ultimately chronological. I am interested in the seams between things, in understanding just how memory and imagination sit inside the frame of narrative. In how memory and imagination become, to some degree, narrative.
I am interested in how one thing sits beside another in a story. In placements. In transcendence. And I am awed, in the end, by this man named Bauby, who found hope and love and power and a way to speak the mind that was still his.
6 comments:
This film is on my to-see list.
This film was a piece of art! It was also really hard to watch at times.
These cool people know these cool movies.
Yes, Alea. It was often hard to watch. My mother's final three weeks were spent in the aftermath of a horrifying stroke. In some ways I couldn't watch this movie. In some ways I had to.
Wow, that's awful I'm sorry!
I'm still amazed that he wrote his book in the way he did. Have you read it? I think it would be interesting and add a whole new dimension onto what was shown in the movie.
I had been planning to read it. I stopped planning to read it. I will now read it.
Oh my gosh do I know what you mean! LOL!
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