Daily Dialogue — March 11, 2012
INT. JEAN-DO’S ROOM, NAVAL HOSPITAL — DAY
OVER BLACK:
SANDRINE’S VOICE: Let’s start from the beginning.
OPEN TO:
JEAN-DO’S POV: Close on Sandrine.
SANDRINE (slowly): E-T-A-O-I (a blink) I. (two blinks) I is the first word? (a blink) OK. E-T-A-O-I-N-U-S-H-R-P-C-D-Y-W- (a blink) W. E-T-A- (a blink) A. E-T-A-O-I-N (a blink) N. E-T- (a blink) T. (two blinks)
SANDRINE (cont’d) (saying words): ‘I — want -’ (two blinks)
SANDRINE (cont’d): ‘I want’. You’re doing brilliantly, Jean-Do. What do you want? E — T — (a blink) T. (writes it down) E-T-A-O- (a blink) O. (two blinks) ‘I want to’ -E-T-A-O-I-N-U-S-H-R-P-C-D- (a blink) D. (writes it down) E-T-A-O-I- (a blink) I. (writes it down) E — (a blink) E. (she writes it down; two blinks) ‘Die’. ‘I want to die’? (outraged, unexpectedly fierce) How dare you! That’s a terrible thing to say. I’m not putting up with that. You think of something else. You do not want to die!
JEAN-DO’S VOICE: I do want to die. I really do.
— Sandrine (Emmanuelle Seigner), Jean-Do (Mathieu Amalric), The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), screenplay by Ronald Harwood, based on a book by Jean-Dominique Bauby
On December 8 1995 at 43, Jean-Dominique Bauby, inventive and charismatic editor in chief of the French magazine Elle suffered a massive stroke and his brain stem was rendered inactive, his life was changed forever. After lapsing into a coma, he awoke 20 days later to find himself the victim of locked-in syndrome — mentally alert but a prisoner inside his own body, his only means of communicating with the outside world the blinking of his left eye.
Forced to adjust to this unique perspective, Bauby created a new rich world for looking into himself to find the only two things that weren’t paralyzed, his imagination and his memory. At The Maritime Hospital in Berck-Sur-Mer, in Nord Pas de Calais France he was taught an alphabet, a code in the order of the most frequently used letters in the French alphabet. Letter by letter, painstakingly words, sentences and paragraphs tell the story of a profound adventure into the human psyche and into the battle between life and death. This alphabet unlocked the prison of Jean-Dominique’s body which he called his Diving Bell and travelled the borderless regions of freedom that he called The Butterfly.
The Daily Dialogue theme for the week is refusal of the call, suggested by Ryan Smith.
Trivia: Almost the entire opening 40 minutes of the film are taken from Bauby’s point of view.
Dialogue On Dialogue: Refusing one’s call doesn’t get much more intense than in wishing one was dead, a stark starting point for a character’s psychological journey.
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