Headnote
The essential question - "How should we live?" - gets a similar reformulation in two of the year's most compelling films: "Where will we drill?" Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood examines the Alberta/Halliburton reply: Plumb for black gold. The central figure's emotional paralysis finds a clinical equivalent in the "locked-in syndrome" suffered by the hero in Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly who, having spent his life flitting over glossy surfaces, now drills within himself.
From the title font on, Anderson's film is a Gothic horror about destructive ambition. Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) is the unscrupulous 1900s southern California oil baron whom two drilling accidents make a problematic father. Mer the first, he adopts the baby orphaned in a worker's death. In the second, that son, H.W. (Dillon Freasier), loses his hearing and is briefly banished to the city. When the adult H.W. (Russell Harvard) wants to start his own oil company in Mexico, Daniel feels betrayed and tells H.W. he's not his son but was adopted "for no other reason than I needed a sweet face to buy land." Daniel denies his genuine feelings for him.
Plainview's major strike is on goat-farmer Abel Sunday's sterile land. Of Abel's two sons, Paul parlays Plainview's finder's fee into his own oil career and Eli becomes a charismatic evangelist. Casting one actor (Paul Dano) as both brothers stresses the connection between the holy Eli and the secular Paul.
As the larger twinned evil, the sanctimonious Daniel pretends to openness and the oily Eli fakes selfless virtue. As the two con men jockey for power, Daniel breaks his promise to let Eli bless the first drilling on the Sundays' site. Instead he names the well after Eli's younger sister, Mary (Sydney McCallister), whom Daniel also rescues from her father's religious bullying. When Eli requests the money promised his church, Daniel beats him into the oily mud, foreshadowing the two men's greed-based conversions. Eli will force a baptism upon Daniel; then Daniel makes Eli confess he is a false prophet and God is a superstition.
In this US election year the con men reflect the Republican government's power base, especially their pretence to Family Values. Daniel claims to be a family man building a family business, then rejects H.W. for "killing my image of you as my son." Holy Eli is all image, so after God "failed to alert me to this panic in our economy" he exploits a young congregant's ambition in the other image industry, Hollywood.
Eli's religiosity matches Daniel in faith-based corruption. Daniel calling H.W. "a bastard from a basket" parodies Moses in the rushes. The film smacks of Old Testament jeremiad in its infernal oil well scenes and the biblical names. But this Daniel is rather the ravenous lion who devours the innocent, starting with Abel Sunday (David Willis). In the spirit of Cain, Daniel murders two "brothers," the vagrant Henry (Kevin J. O'Connor), who pretended to be Daniel's half-brother, and Eli, who claims brotherhood through his sister Mary's marriage to H.W. As the cons are rather equated in their greed, killing Eli is tantamount to suicide, so the film ends on Daniel's "I'm finished."
While this allegory of American capitalism draws on Upton Sinclair's novel oil, the film also advances two themes from Anderson's earlier features, Hard Eight (1996), Boogie Nights (1997), Magnolia (1999), and Punch-Drunk Love (2002) - shallow forms of manliness and how they trouble family relationships, real or surrogate. Having cut himself off from his father, brother, and sister, Daniel is torn between his love for the young H.W. and his impulse to deny his feelings. Leaving the stricken boy, he rushes off to watch the oil pour up in flames. Daniel can say "I love you, son" only when the boy can't hear it. While his real brother's diary makes Daniel cry, rejecting H.W. drains away his last hope for love. As he confides to Henry, "I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people." So Daniel drills the earth but is celibate. He proposes a ribald evening, but his disdain for Henry's pleasure makes him test the other man's claims to be his brother. To paraphrase Tacitus, Daniel has turned a physical desert into an emotional one and called it success.
He has also created a silence and declared it eloquence. As DayLewis sounds like John Huston, he evokes The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and echoes The Bible... In the Beginning ( 1966). But his baritone punctuates longer silences, starting with one of the longest wordless openings since The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927). As these scenes leave communication to the machinery, its plundered landscape and its befouled skies, they both confirm the retreat from humanity and assert an honesty missing from the words of its religious leader Eli and its civic leader Daniel.
Where Anderson's Daniel is a mythic figure, in the French film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly the American neo-Expressionist painter Julian Schnabel continues his interest in real people, specifically the restricted Outsider artist, like his graffiti hero of Basquiat (1996) and the persecuted gay Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas in Before Night Falls (2000). If success destroys Daniel Plainview, Schnabel's new hero finds fulfilment in incapacitation.
Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) was a 42-year-old editor of the Paris fashion magazine Elle when a stroke left him with "locked-in syndrome." He could hear, see, and think, but was paralyzed and unable to speak. Still, he could blink with one eye, his left, to respond to direct questions - one for Yes, two for No. Then by choosing letters he starts to spell out words, ultimately dictating the bestselling 1997 memoir on which this film is based. As we hear his thoughts and share his visions, the film represents Bauby's consciousness from when he emerges from a three-week coma, through his treatment at the Berck-sur-mer naval hospital, to his death ten days after the publication of his book. He is Schnabel's ultimate example of an artist overcoming an extreme suppression.
The film immediately declares its focus on the interior. The opening credits appear over X-rays reminiscent of Wim Delvoye's art. The first shot is Bauby's blurry vision as he "wakes up" from his coma. Throughout the film we are given his physical perspective, relieved only by scenes from his memory or imagination and the odd brief establishing shot. A blurred lens denotes his crying. Bauby's first blinked phrase is "I. Myself."
For the viewer to identify with the character Schnabel negotiates between two strategies. In Lady in the Lake (1946) Robert Montgomery shot the whole film from the physical perspective of his hero, Raymond Chandler's Marlow. That felt gimmicky, so in The 400 Blows (1959) François Truffaut preferred the psychological perspective - focusing on his young hero's face to forge identification. Schnabel punctuates powerful subjective shots with brief views of Bauby. For example, we endure his grisly perspective when his right eye is sewn shut (to prevent infection), then a quick shot shows the sealed eye. The warm, caring close-ups of the therapists - credit to the actresses' conviction - maintain our identification with their patient. And we feel his rue at the waste of their erotic charm.
Ronald Harwood's script and Janusz Kaminski's photography convey the vitality of the broken hero's inner life. Keeping us in Bauby's perspective establishes the helplessness and solitude - a.k.a. The Human Condition - that make us need to express ourselves. (Indeed as an allegory for the purpose and power of art this film trumps even Brad Bird's animated Ratatouille, but that's another exegesis.) The diving bell of the title refers to the sunken hero's sensory deprivation; the butterfly, the heights to which his memory, imagination, and spirit enable him to soar. After a glossy life Bauby finds his humanity in his incapacitation.
The film avoids mawkishness by clinging to Bauby's physical reality and maintaining his mordant humour. The "vegetable" - "But what kind?" he asks, "A carrot? A pickle?" - blossoms into a mental greenhouse. His memory revives his sensual pleasures, and his imagination allows unlimited alternatives to his experience. He imagines sex scenes because his carrot is in a pickle. Unable to swallow, he imagines an erotic seafood feast with his beautiful recorder Claude (Anne Consigny). Doubling as a real priest and a recalled Lourdes souvenir vendor, the old nouvelle vague swinger Jean-Pierre Cassel - in his own valedictory performance - exercises the playboy's religious scepticism. Bauby celebrates Father's Day with his three children for the first time and in two scenes embraces his 92-year-old father (the poignant Max von Sydow), who rues the world's lost sense of values and feels similarly immobile.
The Berck hospital staff surpass the usual kindness of strangers. His speech therapist Henriette (Marie-Josée Croze) indignantly snaps Bauby out of the self-pity of his first blinked sentence, "I want to die." "There are people who love you," she scolds. "I hardly know you and already you mean a lot to me." His predicament educes his associates' generosity as well as his new strength. As his memory frees him from time and his paralysis from triviality, Bauby lives a richer love story now than the one he enjoyed as a playboy in Paris - and in Lourdes, where a Madonna statue thwarts his "dirty weekend" and ends a relationship.
His carefree old life Bauby now sees as "a series of near-misses." The friend to whom he gave his airplane seat consequently spent four years as a hostage in Beirut. Bauby contracted to write a feminist update of The Count of Monte Cristo - "Vengeance will still be the driving force" - but his stroke made him Noirtier. Bauby instead records his new sense of our vulnerability and the minute preciousness of life.
Lest we start yawning about "the triumph of the human spirit" and justifying God's ways to man (which surely must bore Him stiff), Bauby's most telling scene may be with Céline (Emmanuelle Seigner), the longtime partner who bore his children and whom he had left for another woman. Despite his betrayals, Céline serves him faithfully, only occasionally reminding him that her successor Inès (Agathe de la Fontaine) has not corne to see him. (In Salon, 24 January 2008, Beth Arnold reports that this is among Schnabel's poetic liberties; in fact Bauby's new lover and not his ex-wife was his faithful attendant.)
In a climactic test Céline has to translate his blinks when Inès finally phones. To her "Do you want me to come?" the Ex faithfully conveys Bauby's reply: "Each day I wait for you." Later Bauby will imagine Inès saying "I was always there. You know that." But in the film she wasn't; Céline was. Perhaps Bauby's fantasy does confirm that her love was so great she could not bear to see him now, and his so great she didn't have to. Or perhaps that fantasy is as unreal as his visions of Nijinsky dancing in the hall or his boisterous oysters with Claude.
Either mag, that phone call captures the bittersweet we live, down to the irresolvable conflicts in our emotions. His reply to Inès is loving but cruel. Denying her could have both eased Inès' guilt and respected his devoted Céline. Instead he hurts them both. But hey, he's only human, however vegetable his state and carnal his desires. Perhaps a life so reduced and an expression so encumbered can allow for only the truth. In such elemental existence - unlike the fashion mags - style and stratagems have no place. Bauby's candour, however cruel and painful, is part of the freedom he has plumbed himself to salvage. No, finally to achieve.
AuthorAffiliation
MAURICE YACOWAR is Professor Emeritus of English and Film Studies at the University of Calgary. His The Sopranos: Season Seven, a supplement to The Sopranos on the Couch (Continuum, 2002, 2007), can be downloaded at www.lulu.com. His biography of the British artist John Bratby, The Great Bratby, will be published by Middlesex University Press in July.
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