In remembrance of David Lynch, Oliver O’Sullivan celebrates the filmmaker’s dark sense of humor through the haunted sitcom world of Rabbits
“Did I dream you dreamed about me? Were you hare when I was fox? —Tim Buckley, “Song to the Siren”
“Sometimes jokes are welcome.” —The Log Lady
A lonesome foghorn blows in David Lynch’s stopgap series Rabbits. Set in an apartment in Nowheresville, USA, where it’s always raining and the ennui is suffocating, the only sign of life outside this purgatorial flat is an eerie faraway whistle from a train cutting through the city. In a vaguely midcentury hovel, a (incomplete) nuclear family of humanoid hares — Jack (Scott Coffey), Jane (Laura Elena Harding), and Suzie (Naomi Watts) — grind out their daily lives in anonymity and unabating anxiety. They speak to each other — of the time, the dreary weather, a man in a green coat, and of something coming — in short declarative deadpan statements. They pose terse rhetorical questions tinged with insinuation; they seem miserable and trapped, incapable of communicating with each other and locked in unspoken conflict, harboring secrets, shame, and private paranoia. Every so often, Suzie breaks up the monotony by summoning a portal to hell. Illuminated by flares, the living turns deep red and a demonic Oz-like visage appears in the corner uttering evil Latin-gibberish. In case it isn’t already obvious, Rabbits is a comedy. What’s more, it’s the zaniest brand of them all: a sitcom!
David Lynch shuffled off this mortal coil at age 78. As the preeminent pop-surrealist of our time, he mined the depths of our collective unconscious while grazing mainstream notoriety. In his zigzagging career, Lynch cut a formidable swathe in cinema pop-culture over the last half-century. His whole Jimmy Stewart from Mars vibe, as Mel Brooks once succinctly described him, got a lot of mileage. Many a memorial has celebrated his patented strangeness — inside and outside his films. The weather reports, the Lynch-brand coffee, the perfectly designed notes to multiplex projectors, his tearing up at It’s a Wonderful Life, his woodshop projects in What’s David Working on Today, friends and collaborators doing impressions of his adenoidal honk of a voice, and on and on — it’s all gold. But amidst the readymade eulogies — with predictable refrains of weird and dreamlike — I can’t help but focus more on the gallows humor at this moment, the not-so-secret silver lining of his bleak, oneiric, and sometimes draining films.
Lynch’s murky sense of humor is all over his filmography. If anything, it’s his knack for discomfiting amusement that provides a gateway into his worlds and complicates the churning emotions within. How else to read the animatronic robin at the end of Blue Velvet? Or the bungled hit job in Mulholland Drive? Or the gloopy soap opera emoting in Twin Peaks? Or whatever Harry Dean Stanton is up to in Inland Empire? Or Lynch titling his debut solo album Crazy Clown Time (2011)? And not for nothing, Lynch saw the devilish allure of Nicolas Cage’s unbridled mania (“the jazz musician of American acting,” he said) before almost everyone. The facetiousness is one of the things that makes his film’s rather magical, subversive, and even a bit taboo. He intertwined guileless humor and brutality in a way that really no one else does, with crack comic timing, a dose of self-deprecation, and an uncanny ability to warp the mundane. From this unholy union comes one of the chief pleasures of the Lynch experience: He’s consistently skirting camp and there’s always a palpable sense that the projects could collapse in on themselves at any moment. Detractors would argue that some of his more outlandish misadventures do in fact buckle under the weight of pretension.
Exhibit A: Rabbits, released on his personal website as an eight-episode web series in 2002. Lynch was spoofing TV as far back as his uncredited skit Fictitious Anacin Commercial in 1967. And there’s more than a little Monty Python in Lynch’s early shorts like The Alphabet (1968) and The Grandmother (1970). But Rabbits updates and retrofits his fascination with the boob tube for the 21st century. You can see the chip on his shoulder from the unfulfilled forays in network television in the ’90s, when Twin Peaks was commandeered and On the Air died on the vine after one season. Rabbits parodies a recognizable yet antiquated form of sitcom — three-camera setup filmed in front of a live studio audience — that remains wildly popular despite, or perhaps because of, it being creatively bankrupt. Consequently, Rabbits calls into question both halves of the sitcom portmanteau. There are no coherent situations to speak of, just three faceless characters in one room of apartment #47 reciting rearranged dialog and pantomiming repetitive motions. And the comedy is so specific to Lynch’s own tastes so as to be non-existent — an inside joke that only resonates between his ears and no further.
He so loved this foray into the briar that he folded the series into his 2006 magnum opus, making Rabbits a lynchpin component of Inland Empire. This faux TV show fits comfortably within that unstable, haunted world, taking its rightful place in a lineage of cracked-mirror metatexts alongside Invitation to Love in Twin Peaks, the noir movie Jeffrey’s mom watches in Blue Velvet, The Sylvia North Story in Mulholland Drive, the Lady in the Radiator in Eraserhead, and the laughably titled On High in Blue Tomorrows, also in Inland Empire. Rabbits may have started as a lark but, as the Lost Girl watches with tears streaming down her face, it surfaces on the other side as an escapist tragicomic fantasy. Like those other facsimiles of art imitating life imitating grotesque art, this sitcom is stiff and ridiculous and reflects the false fiction we’re already invested in. No matter how loopy and frivolous these brief interludes are, they remain a unifying force in Lynchland: We’re all watching something to kill time and make sense of this twisted world.
Rabbits is the most fleshed out of all Lynch’s human-animal abominations. For a brief, blissful moment he realized a fraction of the aborted bovine project he’d dreamed up for Marlon Brando, which he described as “a really bad, stupid, and repulsing comedy.” In this late period of his career, nearing his final act, Lynch was keenly aware that the artful and the asinine could and probably should collapse together. It’s basically what Slavoj Žižek identified in Lost Highway as the “ridiculous sublime,” but cranked up and tilting out of balance. Lynch was chasing his most harebrained impulses in the pursuit of transcendence. You can see him taking the mantle back from Richard Kelly after the suspiciously Lynchian presence of Frank in Donnie Darko (2001). You can draw a parallel with the troubling, booze-addled hallucinations of Harvey (Henry Koster, 1950) — yet another connection to his abiding love for Jimmy Stewart. If you squint, you can even see the campy monster movie incompetence of Night of the Lepus (William F. Claxton, 1972) — for what it’s worth, originally titled Rabbits. But more than all that, Lynch is riffing on his own past while clearing the road for a new artistic future.
Legend has it the baby in Eraserhead was made from a skinned rabbit carcass, so Rabbits can’t help but recall that bit of macabre lore. Of course, rabbits are best known for their promiscuity and exponential reproduction, and their polygynandry is most certainly a big part of the joke here, too. For a connoisseur of high art, there’s something to Lynch’s lowbrow tastes. Lynch elicits indecent involuntary reactions to unpredictable imagery out of cosmic curiosity, not as an emotional trap. We can find Frank Booth and Mr. Eddy repellent but also derive perverse vicarious pleasure from their depravity. As critic Adam Nayman points out, like contemporaries Paul Verhoeven and Brian De Palma, Lynch doesn’t pretend that he’s not getting off on his lusty, salacious tangents right along with us. The seedy, dimly lit squalor and forced perspective of Rabbits puts us right back in the peepshow closet of Blue Velvet with Jeffrey Beaumont.
On the surface, the farce of Rabbits makes little sense, but it actually represents Lynch at his most winkingly literal. He’s knowingly inviting you to tumble down the rabbit hole with him. He’s blatantly referencing Lewis Carroll while keeping a straight face — the White Rabbit is obsessed with timeliness and so too are Lynch’s family of leporids. The connection to Czech surrealist master Jan Švankmajer’s Alice feels especially strong. He’s pulling in hypnagogic imagery from “Song of the Siren” — Lynch famously wanted to use This Mortal Coil’s version of the Tim Buckley song in Blue Velvet but couldn’t secure the rights. And with this family of domesticated animals, isn’t he bluntly questioning our own capacity for keeping our basest urges in check while locked in the cage of modernity?
In the world of Lynch, TV taps into something primal, something compulsive and universal that is pacifying and exploitable. He wanted to test the limits of TV’s Pavlovian schematic; we were never meant to know who killed Laura Palmer, after all, but instead bask in the ever-sprawling mysteries, secrets, romantic entanglements, and backwoods mythology. And his string of TV ads is a funky adventure — including spots for Georgia canned coffee, Barilla pasta, Adidas, Clear Blue at-home pregnancy tests, Parisienne cigarettes, Playstation 2, and more — a precarious mix of high art and commerce. With no network mandates or guardrails to curtail his curiosity, Lynch is free to leech nearly all the entertainment value out of the sitcom format in Rabbits, distilling it down to its material elements, beyond recognition. And yet, the dark themes that lurk in so much TV content remains: the desperate obsession with sex, scandal, secrets, and crimes of passion.
The Rabbits too are quite probably watching TV just like we are, the couch facing both us and the hypothetical television — a cathode-ray tube set with “rabbit ears,” no doubt. At the same time that Lynch was parodying the tried-and-true sitcom arrangement, he’s also clearly gesturing toward a new era of TV in the Internet Age, to the wave of web series and their promise of unfettered immediacy. Lynch built the set for Rabbits — an oversized diorama for living marionettes — in his backyard, much to the chagrin of his neighbors in the Hollywood Hills, and enlisted some of his closest collaborators. Rather than constant motion, and mounting kinetic energy, there is wide open space and mechanical blocking. The personal stakes and dogged commitment to this ludicrous concept elevates a highdea to something legitimately avant garde. Stage-bound and melodramatic, every line in Rabbits is foreboding and portentous, with no obvious conversational meaning, promising revelations that will never arrive. Angelo Badalamenti, at his most minimal and mournful, provides a bed of dark ambient loops.1 At odd intervals, the laugh track reminds us that this is indeed a comedy — even if it’s of the Divine variety.
One of the beautiful paradoxes of Mulholland Drive was that its crystalline beauty and puzzle-box structure — of postmodern imagery and ill-fitting genre shards — beckoned you to look closer, to sink into the surreality, and manifest connections that may not exist. Rabbits arrived in the wake of this second pinnacle — the twin peak after Twin Peaks — of his mainstream fame and acclaim, when Lynch suddenly courted rejection. Rabbits was the genesis of this alienation offensive. The temptation is always there to try to suss out what any of this quote-unquote means. But sometimes the sensation is everything. At this point, Lynch’s stance on emerging technology was in flux. Once an adherent of film as an analog physical format, he rapidly evolved into one of digital video’s most vocal proponents, and basked in the freedom consumer-grade gear afforded. His output of short films exploded into a prolific period of crude mini-dream factory experiments.
All this culminated in his final feature, and Inland Empire is nothing if not one of the most audacious and garish digital sculptures of this century, with Lynch reveling in the most abject and desaturated version of standard definition digital video. In keeping with the Mobius motif that shapes so many of his films, Lynch circled back to the very beginning of his career, from the pupa of his Francis Bacon-inspired shorts to the midnight madness of Eraserhead. Before his persona and style was embraced en masse, his artistic vision was laced with frightful transgression. And in this last phase of his career, pulled through the looking glass of his formidable body of work, he was creating broken mosaics beyond repair. He was once again challenging the mind’s information processing when it is overwhelmed and viscerally repulsed. And hasn’t that always been the surrealists’ core objective? Rabbits, and everything else orbiting the supernova of Inland Empire, represents a sad and silly new surrealism for a desolate new millennium.
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- Lynch’s 2007 exhibition soundtrack, The Air Is on Fire, created with composer Dean Hurley, is an affectionate companion piece to the dark ambient soundscape Badalamenti established in Rabbits, expanding on its oppressive atmosphere and recycling its sullen horn blares. ↩︎
