the diving bell and the butterfly book pages

Seconds later, the boy knocks on the man’s bedroom door and asks to take a shower: ‘to wash off the chlorine’, he emphasizes. Once inside, while the boy eats a sandwich, the man telephones his girlfriend to explain what is occurring and then lies back on his bed, evidently contemplating the complex situation. As they enter the front door, a female neighbour approaches, asks a question of the man, and glimpses at his youthful guest. A key sequence offers an intense engagement:Īt the end of a complicated afternoon, and maintaining that he has nowhere else to go, an adolescent boy accompanies his swimming instructor to the man’s apartment.

In 2011 Marco Berger, as director and writer, presented the film Absent, offering a provocative narrative scenario relating gay male age-different relationships.

In what has to be the most extraordinary use of literal first-person perspective in the history of cinema, the film deploys the conventionally untouchable camera body to explore the intimacy and terror of being touched (intrusions to which both patient and viewer must yield), mounting a challenge to popular cinema’s dominant gaze, and the normative body it so often assumes on behalf of viewers. This paper explores the fraught intersection of disability and gender in Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a film that adapts the memoirs of Jean-Dominique Bauby to evoke a visceral experience of ‘locked-in syndrome.’ Drawing upon Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenological conception of ‘film’s body,’ I develop a more particular account of the ways in which male bodies are embedded in social networks that grant affective intensity and political charge to the sensuous experience of touch within cinema. These gender crises arise because hegemonic expectations about masculine identity as synonymous with autonomy and dominance conflict with the normative social scripts framing disability as a state of helplessness and dependence. Historically, cinematic spectacles of acquired impairment have expended much energy negotiating the gender trouble that disability provokes in male bodies, typically infusing narratives of rehabilitation with fantasies of gender reconstruction.

The diving bell and the butterfly book pages