Ten years ago my (absolutely wonderful) senior English teacher in High School, Ms. Lukas, introduced my class to the book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly in such a way that she almost broke into tears. I’ve read it a few times since then and have recommended it myself to countless people. And while I don’t have it memorized I will always be humbled by the story. That anyone could intellectually and emotionally survive such a devastating injury is beyond my comprehension. And the same way that I can insert myself into a landing craft at Normandy and wonder if I would freeze or rally, I can suffer an imaginary stroke and wonder if I have a book in me, even a bad book. Such determined humanity should be a legend of a lesson for every person alive. And now the cliff notes of a film adaptation is available to supplement as well.

And the film itself is a possibly perfect adaptation and yet a unique addition to the lesson as well. I have never seen a film like it. Where as the book allows a portrait of a mind trapped inside itself, the film offers the actual experience. The director and cinematographer imagine what tears look like to an eye, what thoughts sound like to a brain, what memory feels like when it is almost all that remains of our experience. You must let letters become words become sentences become ideas and then deal with their consequences for the characters and for your emphatic reaction, all in real time, a viscerally unforgettable experience for an audience. And the patient juxtaposition of Locked-In Syndrome’s maddening claustrophobia with the sensory overwhelm of imagination leaves you quite shaken. The film is a study of human emotions, of the literal faces of emotion, and the things we believe but forget to remember, the people we leave behind or the undone things we were meant to do, the simple intimacy of innate compassion, and most of all, what is actually important when life is reduced to it’s simplest form, to a blinking keyhole between the stark beauty of existence and the complex brilliance of human consciousness.

It is what I believe I will call a “Posture Film”. One that regardless of your movie seat discomfort leaves you walking away from the cinema at the absolute peak of your height, perhaps hunting a good piece of chocolate like I was, Or paying meticulous attention to the detail of your experience… the subway rumbling below the theater, the conversations of strangers, the brisk air, all subtleties and their magnificence….

When blessed silence returns, I can listen to the butterflies that flutter inside my head. To hear them, one must be calm and pay close attention, for their wing beats are barely audible. Loud breathing is enough to drown them out. This is astonishing: my hearing does not improve, yet I hear them better and better. I must have butterfly hearing

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