The DIving Bell & the Butterfly Response

The themes of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly embody some of the ideals of Arnheim's theory. The film has a lot of emphasis on aesthetics, but those aesthetics function to tell the story. In terms of the ways the film illustrates Arnheims ideals, there are many scenes that include unreal visuals.
The beginning of the film has a blurry aesthetic that represents Bauby's disorientation in his new environment. The flecks of light and cloudiness give the aesthetic an almost ethereal feeling, creating a metaphor for Bauby's version of a rebirth: waking up from a coma into a radically different version of life. A recurring scene we see shows Bauby (we assume) in a diving bell underwater. Clearly this scene is not meant to represent reality, but instead how Bauby feels—as if he is sinking and isolated in a fishbowl-like apparatus under the sea.
The cinematography also portrays Bauby's dreams, imaginations and fantasies. We see mountains, deserts, cliffs and icebergs, that arguably follow Arnheim's theory, because instead of trying to represent reality, the film tries to represent images of the imagination, of memory and fantasy—of subjective realities. The film may be more in line with Munsterberg in terms of its catering to the mind. The editing of the film, however, functions to both imitate reality and make itself evident. Because Bauby's only movement is blinking, the editing actually imitates that motion through straight cuts within one scene. These straight cuts draw attention to the editing and the created nature of the cinema and its material, but they also imitate Bauby's reality.
Essentially through both adhering to and subverting Arnheim's ideology, this film undercuts the idea of a film being able to draw attention to its materials without attempting to imitate reality. The combination of imagination sequences mixed indiscriminatingly with “reality,” however, create a powerful experience.