The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Review

Jean-Dominique Bauby would have been the envy of many. In his early 40’s, he was the chief editor of the fashion magazine Elle, living the high life in Paris. His kids lived with their mother in the country, and he embodied the “fast cars and fast women” lifestyle in the city with a vengeance. The world was indeed his oyster.

Then came December 8, 1995. At the age of 42, he experienced a massive stroke that left him completely paralyzed, what the professionals call “locked-in syndrome. “ Left only with the use of his eyes, he was quickly further restricted when his right eye had to be sewn shut. Now, he was confined to a hospital bed, dependent on full-time care for his every need, with the use of only one eye. All of this, while his mind was completely intact.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly begins as Bauby opens his eyes for the first time, waking up from a 3-week coma. He learns what happens to him, and we learn of the great dissonance as we hear his thoughts but realize he cannot communicate them. Literally trapped by his body, his therapist comes to his rescue as she teaches him how to communicate through blinking. It is a slow cumbersome process, but is the only way he is able to communicate.

Before his accident, Bauby had negotiated a book contract. As he learns his communication style, his therapist contacts his publisher and announces the surprise that he intends to keep his contract. Over the course of the next 18 months, he works with an assistant to write his book. As he puts it, “I decided to stop pitying myself. Other than my eye, two things aren't paralyzed, my imagination and my memory.”

The history of this story is profound enough that it would seem the film could add very little. But the great success of this as a film is the way it invites us to experience Bauby’s world, the thought life that was his means of keeping his sanity in the midst of this extraordinary challenge. The director makes wise us of his camera, spending the bulk of the film looking at the world through Bauby’s eyes. We are invited to experience his entrapment. Through this great struggle the former playboy has to wrestle with the meaning of his existence, his misplaced values, and the sense of regret over the ways in which he failed in life. At one point, he reflects that his life has been a series of missed opportunities, and only now in this trapped existence can he see how he might have lived.

One Christian reviewer I respect put this film on his “10 Most Redemptive Films of 2007”, and indeed there is much here to chew on from a spiritual perspective. In the Christian world, much is being written about the need to see the reality of the “Kingdom of God” in the present world, a calling to Christians to engage in social action, and in transformative activity at every level of culture. The challenge to have a “realized eschatology” is a Biblical one, but the history of the Christian church is to fall into two extremes. The first is an “underrealized eschatology,” where Christians show no concern for the problems of this world, and withdraw to wait for their reward “in the sweet by and by.” The other is an “overrealized eschatology” where Christians so look for the reality of the kingdom of God in the present that they equate the gospel of Christ itself with social and political activity and with “good works.” Both extremes distort the Christian message in fundamental ways. Both are extremes that Christians in general and evangelicals in particular have shown affinities to run to.

The Diving Bell is an exceptional reminder of the tension that Christians must live in. On the one hand, we witness people engage Bauby as a human being with real value, and work to allow him to express himself. Through this redemptive work, he does more of a service for humanity than any would have thought possible in his condition. It is a celebration of the value of life that speaks with power to the “quality of life” discussions that go on in medical circles.

At the same time, we see in this film the limits of our redemptive work in this life. Bauby’s imagination, his “butterfly”, helps him keep his sanity, and gives him a sense of purpose. But it is a “butterfly” that allows him to escape his “diving bell,” his body that has failed him so deeply. Even as people expose him to their own faiths, his agnosticism fails to keep him from searching for deeper meanings. He wants something more, and as he is left with only his imagination and his memory, he recognizes that it is not enough. His body has failed. This world has failed to deliver the deepest needs of his soul.

The film leaves us with a certain ambivalence because this challenge remained unresolved in Bauby’s life. Even as we seek to recognize the redemptive reality of God’s kingdom in this world, The Diving Bell is a powerful reminder that the gospel points to something deeper still. At its best, the ways in which God’s kingdom is seen in this world are but a pale reflection of the world that is to come, where the limitations that we feel, and which this film vividly calls us to experience, will be gone, and “real life” can be truly experienced. Even as Christians yearn to see the gospel made manifest now, we should never leave behind the deeper yearning for the “far country,” the true home that we are heading to.