For class this week I watched the French film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) by Julian Schnabel. Based on the memoirs of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the film chronicles the life of a man who suffers a massive stroke and is then left paralyzed, unable to move anything except his left eye. In the film, Jean-Do (as he is called by friends and doctors alike) suffers from “Locked-In Syndrome,” meaning that his mind remains conscious and fully functional but that his body is unable to respond to the external world. Blinking is his only form of communication.
In my previous post, I briefly mentioned that screenwriters lack access to the interior when crafting a narrative, and must learn to externalize a story for film. How then does a writer go about the task of telling the story of someone whose entire world is interior?