I write this post while watching Rabbits, a work of exceptional mystery but unexceptional tension. Lynch casts two regulars—Laura Harring and Naomi Watts—opposite one newbie—Scott Coffey—as man-sized rabbits in what appears to be the Blue Velvet apartment set. These short films, available on YouTube, trip over several of Lynch’s signature aspects: characters sing haunting songs; mundane life is treated as a social experiment; and Angelo Baldametti’s synthesizers underscore everything. Rabbits insists that we examine our own tastes and be comfortable with those answers (and inevitably unanswered questions).
Though it offers no plot or characters that could create tension in a conventional story structure, Rabbits is seriously intriguing, and hints at larger, unobserved meanings. This intrigue is not uncommon; in fact, my theory of late has been that Lynch understands that his viewers feel the hints and the suggestions at something grander, his films all metaphysical McGuffins. In his films, characters do not look at one another—they see, in flashy close-ups, the uncertain eyes of the other. Leading women are never conventionally pretty—they are fantastically upbeat and implausibly platinum, hysterical results of Hollywood insecure appeal to men’s wallets. Cars do not traverse from point to point—headlights sprint over dark, twisting roadways. These are cinematic clichés, style that heightens substance when it is used eagerly and genuinely.
But there is nothing substantive about Rabbits: Lynch’s mastery over cinematic cliché is taken to the brink, and over. In many Lynch films since Blue Velvet, characters utter non-sequiters in total deadpan; but in Rabbits, they utter nothing but non-sequiters, with no story to speak of! This Baldametti score then adds style to substanceless grunts, sounds English speakers will recognize as words but not as meaningful sentences. And with some serious hilarity, Lynch adds a sitcom applause over the entrances of each character into this one-room apartment and laughtracks after sentences like “It is 7pm” and “I almost forgot.” These outbursts, audio cues to at-home viewers that Important or Funny happenings are taking place, mock TV shows like the Big Bang Theory, whose live audiences treat academic jargon and references to comic books as the basis for side-splitting guffaws.
The distance between the intelligibility of plot in Rabbits and the connotations of its audio cues emphasize the contingency of language and the ability of convention to invent meaning from nothing. It is indisputable that Baldametti’s score is ominous, alerting viewers that Something Is Happening, or that audience laughter is comedic, alerting viewers that a Joke Is Occurring. But simply because a connotation is indisputable does not make it true. None would dispute the scores ominousness or the audiences laughter because the years of TV and film that we have watch have taught us to connect certain sounds to certain moments. The work starts with children’s tales, where morality is stark and the audio cues used to reinforce a grand, unified message. By grounding these otherwise unintelligible cues in extra-cinematic morality or realistic emotions, we learn to couple low, industrial sounds with alertness, and human laughter with comedy. Rabbits attempts to elicit those emotions by only employing the signifier, while ditching the plot points signified.
Perhaps one can argue that the words which immediately precede and follow the Persona-like interpolated dream sequences are Important, but I am not convinced. I propose that Rabbits is David Lynch toying with us. He wants to know if he can make pure entertainment, works without useful or familiar stories, but which nonetheless strap us into rollercoasters of joy, despair, nostalgia, and humor. In his other works, this plays out seamlessly. I (the viewer) achingly try to pin down the plot, and then the meaning of the narrative he created. This process feels possible, but always out-of-reach in his other works, which ditch the rabbit heads and opt for sequences of dialog that I recognize as events and narrative momentum. But in Rabbits, the dissonance between signifier and signified makes the effect clear. In Rabbits, the laughter and music become parodic, pointing at the fact that in all language, cinematic or otherwise, our grunts are intelligible for no reasons other than Pavolvian repitition and the magic fizz of neurons. Language is contingent, subject to chance mutation and adoption, and not subject to deep structures or extra-personal validity.