Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
2007 · Julian Schnabel · The Diving Bell and the Butterfly on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice the picture blacking out every time he blinks. (camera)
Janusz Kaminski makes the frame Bauby's one working eye. It swims, smears, flares, loses focus at the wrong moment and irises down. The eyelid sewing shut early on was done in camera with glass, not software.
Payoff: A camera has no lid and never tires of a face. Kaminski gives it every weakness an eye has instead of the strengths a lens has. In the reading: dicisign. The reading calls this a dicisign: perception set solid inside the frame, so you feel the frame rather than looking through it.
Listen to his voice while nobody in the room hears it. (sound)
The voice-over is quick, funny, vain and entirely intact. The world outside it arrives muffled and slightly wrong. Everyone leaning over the bed is hearing silence.
Payoff: The gap between a full inner voice and the silence others get is the film's cruelest effect, and it is made entirely in the mix. In the reading: audiovisual disjunction. The reading calls this audiovisual disjunction: the voice comes loose from the visible mouth and stands on its own.
Watch how close people put their faces to his. (staging)
He cannot turn his head, so the world has to come to him. Doctors, therapists and visitors crowd into a narrow cone of sight, lean in and talk at a face that cannot answer.
Payoff: The same geometry produces tenderness and violation. Nobody can approach him without also trapping him.
Count how long a single blink is allowed to take. (cutting)
Juliette Welfling holds the locked-in passages past comfort, letting the labor of one small movement fill real screen time. Nothing advances during those stretches and nothing is meant to.
Payoff: Duration is the only way to make you feel what a minute costs him. Her cutting was Oscar nominated for exactly this. In the reading: temps mort. The reading calls these stretches dead time: the everyday held open with nothing moving the story along, and the emptiness carrying the meaning.
Watch what Amalric does with one eyelid. (performance)
His face is slack and fixed for most of the film. What is left is an eye and a voice-over, and he gets wit, panic, appetite and grief out of both without any of the usual tools.
Payoff: Screen acting is normally built on a moving face. This performance is built on subtraction.
Once you have seen it
Watch the alphabet scenes and try to spell along. (cutting)
A therapist recites the French alphabet ordered by letter frequency and he blinks on the one he wants. Welfling cuts this for suspense, which should be impossible and is not.
Payoff: The film teaches you to read a new smallest unit of meaning. A falling lid becomes a letter and the letters become a book.
Notice when the camera finally leaves his eye. (camera)
Kaminski releases the point of view into third-person shots of the bed and into saturated, warm, mobile sequences. Beaches, snow, a woman's hair, a huge meal, historical reverie.
Payoff: He lies still and the world starts traveling instead. The film's freedom is all in the contrast with the socket it escaped.
Watch von Sydow on the telephone. (performance)
Bauby's father, housebound himself, calls a son who cannot speak back, and weeps into a receiver with no answer coming. It is a few minutes long and critics singled it out as the film's peak.
Payoff: One scene puts the film's whole condition into a phone line. Someone is speaking and no reply can arrive.
Track how much of the film is the book being made. (structure)
There is no recovery plot and no antagonist. Ronald Harwood's screenplay organizes the film as a consciousness moving between the hospital, memory and invention, with the memoir's completion as the climax.
Payoff: The story is the writing. A film about a man who cannot act still holds together, which is quietly the point.
Carry this in: Watch the first twenty minutes and count how many times you try to turn your head.