The Diving Bell and the Butterfly….

Trapped in your own body, trying to offer the world a vague sense of your state is literally backbreaking. In the movie The Diving Bell and the Butterfly we’ll have the chance to get familiarized with the story of the late Editor of ELLE magazine, Jean-Dominique Bauby. In 1995 the famous socialite suffered a severe stroke also called a ’locked’ syndrome. Leaving his body completely paralzed and his mind working miraculously precise, was indeed one of the greatest dramas a man can ever face. The movie directd by Julian Schnabel and starring Mathieu Amarlic is a modern day masterpiece. 

The audience hears the thoughts of Bauby and has the opportunity to share the most delicate moments with this person imprisoned in his diving bell. Soon it turns out that this story is more than just a biographical production. The universal story of pople who are stuck in a pretty hopeless situation and they have only one super-thin string that ties them to this world. Memories and imagiantion are the only values that keep us humans as the movie suggests, and we hear the words of Bauby in our ears…..

„Whereupon a strange euphoria came over me. Not only was I exiled, paralyzed, mute, half deaf, deprived of all pleasures, and reduced to the existence of a jellyfish, but I was also horrible to behold. There comes a time when the heaping up of calamities brings on uncontrollable nervous laughter - when, after a final blow from fate, we decide to treat it all as a joke.”

It seems humor is indeed a solution to everythings and can free us from the huge loads of stress accumulated through the years of low periods…..Give yourself a break and see how hard it is to stay sane in a world that practically drives you crazy, while you’ll left completely motionles and impotent…..