Rabbits

The single camera is fixed on a wide shot of a sparsely-furnished, eerily-lit apartment, a subdued den of deco and menace. Yes, a glance confirms, Mr. Lynch is caretaker here.

For five minutes, as Badalamenti's synths sigh over distant fog horns and muted thunder, we watch the rabbit people--actors in cheap rabbit suits worn under drab human clothing. Their day is winding down. They work at an ironing board, sit on the art deco sofa, rise, sit down again, exit, return, sing some verses about "dark, smiling teeth," and trade dark, smiling dialogue. The rabbit people play to an unseen studio audience, which greets their entrances with on-cue applause and their oblique lines with canned laughter. Minutes pass. . . Then: a superimposed mouth begins a demonic incantation. A huge match burns. The camera blurs out of focus, and then--you'd better believe it!--refocuses.

That's it. The result is weird, beautiful, unnerving, and, frankly, never far from being boring.

Here, we get a David Lynch-ized sitcom set and our three characters, dressed in Rabbit suits. The "mystery" is knawing at these characters although what they say is often incomprehensable. On top of this, the piece is supported with a laugh track. I know what you're thinking. It's an absurdist film, right? No.

I don't know how they did it with these elements that would seem laughable from afar, but you know what? You turn off the lights in your room and you watch all eight parts to this, and you'll have nightmares for a week. David Lynch can make anything terrifying. A complete surprise in mood. You won't forget it.

The rabbits are us in the way we live our entire lives separated from death only by our domestic routines of normalcy and our denial. Rabbits are bred for the slaughter; they live their entire lives in their little cage, surrounded by, and fed by, the very same people who will someday unthinkingly break their necks.

They're traumatized by the collective memory of past relatives being snatched from their cages while the characters themselves were still too young to fully comprehend the severity and reality of what was happening. The horrors they witnessed so long ago are now just an underlying feeling that something is wrong. They, and we, live their entire lives among death, ignorantly and purposely oblivious of it, until the one day when they are able to ignore it no more, until the day it is their turn.

That's what sense I made out of it anyway.

Everyone who has seen David Lynch's Inland Empire will be familiar with the rabbits of this short film (screened in some places broken down into episodes). Personally I struggled to work out if Inland Empire was brilliant or rubbish and ultimately I concluded that it was both but that it was worth seeing because of what an unnerving and unusual experience it was. The rabbit snippets are all part of it as they meant very little to be but yet managed to actually make me feel uncomfortable and uneasy while watching them. As a result I decided to check out the full Rabbits film.

In an interviewer about Lynch's website project, someone did describe Rabbits as one for the hard-core Lynch fans and this description is bang on the money because it does deliver everything that he does well while also failing (or rather, not trying) to deliver in other, usual areas. Where the snippets hit home for me is in their sheer menacing stiffness. "Normal" things such as the apartment and the idea of a sitcom are all presented in a twisted and perverted way that Lynch viewers will be used to. Just like in Twin Peaks (where backwards characters talk in a red velvet room) the movement is strange, the lighting is eerie, the dialogue is confusing and the whole thing is delivered under a brooding score that suggests an impending destruction or evil.

In this regard the film is quite brilliant and it is very disturbing to watch it in a dark room n a quiet night. But this is also the problem with the film because there is nothing more to it and ultimately the novelty value of it wears off long before the 45 minute mark. After a while I did want more but the film just continued to deliver what it had done at the very start. Die-hard fans of Lynch will love it and take pleasure in trying to pick the meaning out of it but for me it was more a matter of hanging on until the conclusion. It is a shame because in small sections Rabbits is really well done and fascinating. Lynch's creativity is powerful and works across the board – many have neglected to mention the physical actors in the film (not the famous voices) but their work is important, with a stillness and deliberate movements being key in the delivery.

Overall then a very strong film for those that love Lynch's creepy work but it is hard to ignore the fact that the running time is too long to sustain the long pauses and very slow pace. As a result it never works as well as it does in its limited use within Inland Empire. Fans should still watch it for what it does well but for the majority of viewers the running time will be far too long and boredom may take away from the uneasy and creepy delivery.

There's a technical term with which you must be familiar in order to begin to appreciate what David Lynch has created with this remarkable web series. That term is Diegesis which essentially means that the voices or sounds are in fact part of the world and moment which we are witnessing on screen. In the case of Rabbits it's a very intentionally open question as to just when and where and from whom is originating the spoken dialog, reinforced by the fact that we aren't able to see anyone's mouth. Perhaps the actors prerecorded their lines which are being played back as a soundtrack as they pantomime their roles? Or maybe the voices were overdubbed after the drama was videotaped? Do the words we are hearing even have anything at all to do with what we are watching? Are the words intentionally misleading so as to throw us off the trail of the real story? Is the dialog intentionally fractured & scrambled so as to disrupt any possible linear, literal comprehension? Was the dialog lifted from another source altogether?!

More questions: Are the characters, in fact, aware of each other? Maybe they are figments of each other's imagination? Maybe they are reminiscing about their pasts, recalling individual episodes of personal experiences which hold meaning only to themselves? Do these characters live together, or maybe they each individually lived in the grim apartment consecutively? Is the male rabbit a visitor? Why does the unseen, possibly imaginary audience applaud excessively when he enters the room and stands oddly at the door, almost as though uncomfortable with the warm reception? Why does the mysterious audience laugh at seemingly random moments, which I at first believed occurred only in response to any mention of time or time related concepts, but this theory soon proved unsustainable? Are the rabbits related? Is one of the female rabbits the mother and the other the wife? And just who or what the hell is that bizarre mouth like orifice that occasionally appears and drones incomprehensibly while one rabbit conducts what might be a ceremonial ritual with flashlights? And what of the intermittently igniting match that burns into the upper right corner of the screen as though signaling a moment of particular import, and which sort of resembles those odd circular dots in older films that alerted the projectionist to an imminent reel change?

Rabbits is anything but definite; it's so thoroughly, utterly indeterminate, uncommitted, tenebrous. Is it a simple Post Modern theatrical production being staged on successive nights - nine brief episodes totaling 50 minutes? Or is it a piece of Off Broadway Absurdist Theater intended as an homage to a time when commercial theater tolerated more daring, more experimental forms of drama? Is it an Off Off Broadway production still in rehearsals? Is it a security cam recording of a bit of extra curricular thespian activities? Or maybe it's even some bizarre theatrical cult that nightly conducts pagan rituals to appease the fickle and malevolent Drama Gods? Is it taking place in a theater, or on a Hollywood sound stage, or on the set of a show that David was perhaps hoping to convince some unusually brave or foolish TV executive to televise? Is it just a video record of shenanigans with some of Lynch's friends, made for their own amusement? Are they aware of what they are involved in? The possibilities are limitless as well as the questions, and that seems to be the point. Well, not the point, but the method; the method of Lynch's inspired, outrageous, ridiculous, sublime madness.

What it seems to be is a purposely abstract, incoherent, ineffable expression of pure creativity. It defies all possible labels, genres and names, and seems to relish the precarious position it occupies in my baffled, bewildered, frantically deducing mind. It exudes such a sinister, almost macabre atmosphere, and yet it dares you to assume that there's anything suspicious occurring. Theater of the Absurd came into fashion in the late 50s, but the decor on stage is late 20s or early 30s Art Deco, so it may be that the furnishings have occupied this "room" for decades. Film Noir - Lynch's preferred form of cinematic expression - also came into fashion in the 50s, and the genre thrived in the same moody ominous atmosphere that this video piece exudes, thanks to Angelo Badalamenti's signature musical score which is particularly muted and subdued. The doleful, mournful wail of a distant train whistle is nearly comical and yet so poignantly evocative, as is the omnipresent gentle storm which drenches the proceedings in a corny, maudlin, overstated gloom. The stage set might bring to mind the bleak, stark TV set apartment that Jackie Gleason's Honeymooners occupied, which only adds yet another preposterously comical layer of meaning to the mix. And yet it all adds up to something indescribably eerie and treacherous.

These furry, large eared characters might be indiscriminate, random creatures functioning as placeholders, as stand ins for real actors who may one day actually perform the piece. It seems to be suggesting that characters in drama are better seen as unreal, non human entities more appropriate and consistent with the artifice and unreality of the theatrical form. Lynch may be implying that a dramatic persona is best understood as a manifestation of a more fanciful non reality, a product of imagination & fantasy, and isn't that, after all, the essence of childhood play? But then why is it all so damn taunting and threatening?! The cumulative effect - as all the dark, dreary, heavy atmosphere might dictate - however, is not at all depressing. No, on the contrary, it's very compelling and disturbing and thrilling and wonderful. And that might be the most confounding part, just how profoundly pleasant an experience is David Lynch's Rabbits.