Rabbits

This is one of the more bizarre films featuring humans in fluffy bunny suits.

David Lynch juxtaposes Sartrean existentialism and American sitcom with an eerie, industrial-noir soundtrack to create a compelling, hellish universe like only he can.

Also, this is maybe one of the greatest uses of bunnies in storytelling, since Lewis Carroll (with the exception of Hugh Hefner).

With the recent influx of rabbit suits in other indie films, like Gummo and Donnie Darko, one can only expect this trend to grow and explode on the catwalks of Milan and Paris.

The easy verdict - it is a David Lynch ! This explains all and offers some comfort to viewer.

In fact, it is a Ionesco play. Or a sitcom reduced to its essence. Three rabbits in a room. Their words, without sense, prepairing the audience for a presumed revelation of a secret. But, except the entries of father/ husband, the laughts from public and the rolling words saying just nothing, in fact, but offering powerful images , maybe , nothing.

So, easy to see another show. But fascination / curiosity just works well in this case, the rabbit heads - and their shadows - , like the creepe voice in dark are good points and you have the privilege to craft the coherent story, from the recipe of The Others bz Alejandro Amenabar to Who s afraid of Virginia Wolf ? Or. Waiting for Godot .

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.

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.

A slow, stylish, eerie and extremely interesting story set "in a city deluged by constant rain where three rabbits live with a constant mystery". Mr Lynch has a great talent for establishing atmosphere and this series is soaked with his trademark (weird) mood. When I watched the first episode I was not sure whether to laugh or be baffled at what I was seeing. 3 Rabbits talk out of sequence, an unseen audience claps whenever one of them enters the room and laughs (not because something funny is said, but at the misery of the rabbits), a candle burns in the corner, a demon face chants something undecipherable (reminds me of the litanies of Satan, the camera seems to be disturbed in the beginning of the 7 out of 8 episodes by something I can only guess to be a spirit. We hear footsteps, the door sometimes opens and the phone even rings. All to the frustration of the rabbits. I noticed a lot of people have tried to figure out what Rabbits is about and my take on it is pretty simple. Firstly, this wasn't the first time I have seen something like this, though this is definitely very well made. I read a book a very long time ago whose title I cannot remember about 2 kids who were put in a scenario similar to this rabbit house and were observed everyday by their captures. The 2 children (I only remember one child called Mavis) were unaware they were being watched and as far as they knew, they had a normal life (went out, watched TV etc) except they didn't in real life. Everything was in their mind. This seems similar to this story. The rabbits could be 'prisoners' who are being observed or kept by someone (the man in the green suit). There is however how they react to the audience (whenever they enter the room and the audience claps, they wait until the applause is finished and continue to sit down) so they are aware they are being watched. According to their dialogue, it seems to me they were once human, "Jane- were you blond?" but it does seem like they remember or who they were. They refer to each other by human names, but they seem confused or disturbed by their situation, "I wish they'd go away", probably referring to the unseen audience. The last episode offers a good climax but not a conclusion. Or is it? Are the rabbits unable to figure out a way out of their misery...or is this their reality as it always has been? Like the book I read, the children never did escape their house, but they did figure out they were not living a 'normal' life. Lynch has never been one to offer a comfortable conclusion to his work- so I would not be surprised if this is the end for his rabbits.