This was a good month to be a renter and not a homeowner. In early December our furnace was taken off-line because of a carbon monoxide risk, and our landlord had to have a new furnace installed. Then on New Year's Eve, our oven - which never worked that well to begin with - died an ugly death. I'll never be able to finance my retirement with the sale of a home, but I was pretty happy to have someone else buy the new furnace and oven.
So last night, instead of attending the candlelight vigil for Gaza, we were waiting for our new stove to be delivered. (It never arrived.)
Instead, we watched "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly", which many of you have seen and recommended. I read the book in translation many years ago, and was very interested in the movie.
If you haven't heard of it, the movie is based on Le scaphandre et le papillon by Jean-Dominique Bauby, the former editor of French Elle magazine. Bauby, who was a bon vivant, a Paris social jet-setter, suffered a massive stroke and was in a coma for three weeks. He awoke with "locked-in syndrome". The locked-in patient is fully conscious and intelligent, but completely paralyzed.
Bauby had the use of one eye. Only that. Through blinking his eye - and with help from several dedicated, compassionate people - he wrote a book about his experience. Writing the book gave Bauby purpose and reason to live. And the book gives us a rare opportunity to share the thoughts and feelings of a person who must live locked in his own mind.
The book raises questions about what it means to be alive and how our self is formed. As someone who thinks a lot about disability, I long ago realized that our bodies are just necessary shells, and our true selves are something very separate from our physical selves. Our individual human-ness, if you will, doesn't stem from being bipedal or the ability to speak or any physical capacity. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is one of the best books I've read that explore those themes.
I thought director Julian Schnabel and scriptwriter Ronald Harwood did an excellent job of bringing the book to the screen. Perhaps the most striking thing about the movie is that it's faithful to the book's first-person narrative. Most of it is seen through Bauby's eye.
It's a beautiful movie, very sad, and, I think, very hopeful. Humans are so amazingly resilient and endlessly adaptable. It's easy to look at Bauby and think, who could live like that? The challenge is to enter into his journey - what he discovered inside himself, and the deep connections he made with other people.
One of the DVD extras was an interview with Julian Schnabel by Charlie Rose. I don't know if Canadians are familiar with Rose. He hosts a PBS show where he interviews people from all different fields, in extended one-on-one conversations or roundtable discussions. He's famous for asking questions that go on for five minutes while his guests struggle to get a word in edgewise. But he's also famous for probing discussions, not PR puff pieces, with writers, musicians, athletes, politicians, scientists and other interesting and influential people.
In his conversation with artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel, Rose characterized the movie as being "about death", as taking place in "the netherworld between life and death". I must disagree with that. To me, Jean-Dominique Bauby was very much alive, until the day his life actually expired. His body was still, but no one existing in a netherworld could have written that book.
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