Diving the Bell and the Butterfly

“A text doesn’t exist until it can be read.”

“ through the frayed curtain, a wan glow heralds the break of day day. My heels ache, my head weighs a ton, my whole body is encased in a kind of diving suit. My task now notes from a castaway on the shores of loneliness.”

The French movie has its romantic and deeply drawing feeling of passion, sympathy, a mixture of pain and joy. Personally, I find it hard to explain the experience I have been going through when I was watching the movie. It would be fair to begin sharing with the very sentences from the movie itself because I have any other words to write anything on this movie. The utterances register the credit for the pent up feeling created in the minds of the audiences.

“ I may write about my experience here. I could also call it “ The Eye” or “ The Diving Bell.” You already know the plot and the setting. A hospital room in which Mr. L. , a family man in the prime of life, is learning to live with locked-in syndrome brought  on by a serious cerebrovascular accident. Ambitious, somewhat cynical, heretofore a stranger to failure, Mr. L. takes his first steps into distress. We could follow this slow transformation via a narrator who reproduces Mr. L.’s unspoken inner monologue. I already have the last scene. It’s night; suddenly Mr. L., inert since the curtain rose, flings off his bedclothes, jumps from the bed, and walks around the   eerily-lit stage. Then it grows dark again, and you hear Mr. L.’s inner voice one last time, “shit! It was only a dream!”

This is the sum of the whole story. But there are many other circumstances that make us drop tears. Diving Bell and the Butterfly makes us think about our life.

“Today, my life feels like a string of near-misses. Women I was unable to love, opportunities I failed to seize, and moments of happiness I let drift away. A race whose result I knew beforehand but failed to pick the winner. Had I been blind and deaf, or did the harsh light of disaster make me find my true nature?”  I find it more close to our life too because the things are almost same that we gain and miss.

We are gifted with our eyes to see the colors and the beautiful life around us. Though we can see, many of us are blind through their negligence towards the chances and the virtue of life. But Jean-Do is different, he says:

“ I have decided to stop pitying myself. Other than my eye, two things aren’t paralyzed. My imagination and my memory. They’re the only two ways I can escape from my diving bell. I can imagine anything, anybody, and anywhere. Lazing in the waves of Martinique, being with the woman I love… bowing to Ozymandias, king of kings… I can imagine anything I wand.” I watch this movie again and again for its capacity to make me move from my depression and the feeling of being deprived- I can stand and walk by myself but somewhere I am paralyzed. It is here Jean-Do comes to me as my life.

And it says everything,  “like a sailor seeing the shore disappear, I watch my past recede, reduced to the ashes of memory.”