The Literary Mind

Miramax is releasing a film version of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, directed by Julian Schnabel. It has already played in some festivals and will be released commercially November 30.

The promotional copy is pretty standard movie trailer schlock: "When His Body Become His Prison . . . His Life Changed in the Blink of an Eye. . . Imagination Set Him Free." To say that Bauby is set free by imagination is a serious distortion. A more nuanced take might ask how Bauby's imagination is affected by his condition, how it helps him cope, and what its limits are. The trailer belongs to a long tradition of overstating imagination's powers, a tradition that skips right over many of the more interesting asepcts of imagination, focusing instead on an unrealistic notion that imagination can somehow obliterate material reality and therefor "free" us from it. In fact, imagination and physical reality exist in relation to each other, and their relationship is where the really interesting questions lie, I think.

But, you can't judge a film by its trailer, and even though the trailer indicates the film provides a lot of back story not included in the book, it also suggests that Schnabel is doing something interesting, experimenting with film techniques--closely cropped frames, a saturated color palette, strong lighting that bleaches out the edges of frames--to capture Bauby's mental states on film. I'm curious to see how well he pulls this off.

Here's the trailer, so you can see for yourselves.

For an image of Jean-Dominique Bauby himself, see Sarit Golub's blog for Psychology 801.