Barbed Wire, Sharp Teeth, and David Lynch's Rabbits
Welcome to Nature's Corrupted, Magen Cubed's newsletter. This is a place to share writing, thoughts, observations, and personal stories at the intersection of art, fiction, and life.
When I was twenty-four, maybe twenty-five, I was standing in the shower and washing my hair one day. This would have been 2010 or 2011. I don't remember which, because the years all ran together back then, but I do remember the white shower tiles, frosted glass of the shower door, too-hot water in the too-small space. It felt a little like suffocating myself, the way many things back then did.
I worked the shampoo through my long, once blonde, now mostly brown hair and thought, “Leonard Cohen is going to die one day, and that's going to be really hard.”
What a weird thought, I. Well, I thought. Thinking about thinking. Thinking about grieving preemptively, and the stark divide between my life when Leonard Cohen was alive and when he wasn't. It was the kind of thought my wandering mind usually, uselessly, reserved for loved ones or pets. I could recognize they would be gone one day, but it didn't really arm me with knowledge or resolve. It mostly just made me sad.
Leonard Cohen died in November 2016, five or six years later. I turned 30 that year. The chasm between my 20s and now my 30s was as vast as the breadth of some rambling desert canyon. When I saw on the news that he had died of leukemia at age 82, I was devastated. It was the kind of devastation that you can't really wrap your mind around when mourning someone you never even met. I am still often devastated at least once a week when I'm washing my hair in the shower and remember, yes, Leonard Cohen is dead.
One day in the spring of 2020, as I sat watching one of David Lynch's weather reports on YouTube, I realized once again with pointless clarity: “David Lynch is going to die one day, and that's going to be really hard.”
It's 2025. David Lynch passed away in January of this year of emphysema at age 78. Alongside the grief, I felt….angry. Angry that 78 felt so young. Angry that his condition had left him homebound due to the risk of further illness in a world that didn't learn shit from COVID-19. Angry that he was unable to direct his projects despite him trying to push forward.
Angry that people online wanted to say stupid things about his work. That it wasn't “weird,” silly, because “weird” is a pejorative. No, it was just “sincere.” Sincere is nice. It's hopeful and sweet as a donut or a slice of cherry pie. Sincere is kind, and shouldn't we all try harder to be kind? Weird, however, is strange and dangerous. It's the stuff that asks things of you. Weird is what makes you sit with the discomfort you feel when you think about the world you inhabit in a slightly different light, an off-putting angle. Familiar, but jarringly, often upsettingly, alien.
And we can't have that, can we?
Instead, we must stuff words into the mouth of a dead artist before he's even been lowered into the ground. Like watching mourners climb on top of one another at the viewing to claw at the casket. A hundred people on social media tried to assure me that he was just a sweet little guy, and anything I ever felt was not discomfort, never discomfort, but whimsy.
At the end of the day, anger is a useless feeling, like preemptively grieving in the shower. These men are no less dead, their lives no less opaque to me, a stranger. I'm left only with the art and what it makes me feel, even when those feelings feel a bit pointless. Feeling about feeling, like thinking about thinking, on and on with the questions for myself, as if I'm the only one who's ever experienced such frustration or grief or malaise.
At some point, there are no riddles left to solve. Some discombobulated thoughts does not a Sphinx make.
So I've been watching Rabbits.
And I think it's time to talk about that.
I often feel like a lazy critic. Insofar that I could even call myself a critic, I guess. I am, fundamentally, just some guy with opinions and a newsletter to share them on. Some presses have published my bylines over the years, mostly about movies but often about comic books. I had an emotional write-up about 2017's Logan published by the long defunct Queership and a handful of pop culture articles on the Eisner-winning Women Write About Comics. Later I had a few articles on movies and TV shows published by WWAC spin-off press Ms En Scene.
Were any of these articles any good? Today, I would say no. They were briskly written on the day's pop culture topics with my then fairly stunted critical muscle. In 2017, 2018, 2019, and maybe for a bit in the early 2020s, I think they served a purpose. They were training wheels for a terminally Twitter-brained writer with limited critical engagement beyond college literature classes. Back then, art felt like puzzles to solve. I believed that I should be able to describe, explain, and rate a piece of art if I wanted to be any good at talking about it.
Come to think of it, I even had a short-lived weekly pop culture podcast that functioned the same way. It was called Comics Squared with Magen Cubed. Embarrassing stuff.
Obviously this was a very frustrating way to look at art. The emptiness of my own criticism left me feeling very hollow, even as this kind of writing was encouraged and rewarded by attention and kind words. It all made me feel a little…shallow, I guess? A little too preoccupied by internet discourses? This kind of writing always had me in a defensive position, I think, as if I had something to prove to the MRA chuds who dominated these discussions by screaming louder than anyone else.
Rather than try to get better at the craft, I would let my periodic dissatisfaction and insecurities push me to abandon my endeavors and focus on fiction. This was a greater failure than any earnest yet deeply flawed article on fandom culture or superhero movies. But I got better.
If you're sitting on your phone or tablet reading this essay, then I think I've demonstrated that. Writing about art and my relationship to the art that I engage with makes up most of my writing these days. I enjoy writing about art and my experiences with it. It excites me. It's like a flame. The act of writing about a comic I've read or a film I've seen is as exciting as the time I spend with the art itself. Perhaps moreso.
To quote journalist and writer Joan Didion's essay Why I Write, as people often do when it comes to writing:
I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
As well-worn as the sentiment is by now, I find it's wholly true. Writing about art is how I know what I think and why I think it. Sometimes it even surprises me because I didn't know what I thought until I sat down to write. Sometimes I'm wrong, or I disagree with myself, and so I have to write it again until I feel confident in the truth. It reveals more about me than maybe I like admitting, but it always, always, brings me to that truth.
In establishing her creative process, Didion asserts that writing is a violent act. It's aggressive, even hostile. She writes:
[S]etting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.
I get the sentiment. When I was writing my thin little essays, I would have likely agreed. But I've since abandoned the desire to dominate or demonstrate power. (This isn't a Joan Didion call-out post. I am, after all, just some guy with a newsletter.) For me, writing about art is how I'm able to fully experience it. Until I've taken the time to process, think, and feel through the art in my own words, whether in lines on a page or with characters on a screen, I've only given it half of myself.
Half of what the art deserves.
It's a conversation. I will tell you about the work, a summary of its material components. Then I will tell you what I think of it, and it means to me. I invite you to follow along as I walk through my experiences, my perspective, the things that led me to feel the way I do. In writing, I work very hard not to produce a singular interpretation; instead, it's important that I leave the door open to my own different, sometimes contradicting reads. I may not always get them all teased out, but I give them some room and light to grow. The conversation is with myself, ultimately, while you listen in and try to glean some meaning from my fevered ramblings. At least, I hope that you can, while understanding that this is primarily a selfish endeavor on my part.
I fail to impose myself upon the work, and in doing so, I solve nothing. I provide no closure, no sense of mastery over the text. Which, you know, duh. But there's a part of me, a little wriggling worm feeling around the contents of my brain, that thinks this is still a misstep. I no longer feel like a shallow reader offering basic observations, but a perpetual fence-rider, unable to make my mind either way. Every door remains open. Every possibility is still on the table.
Without a conclusion, a singular meaning to stake out as my own, I still feel like I'm failing the text in some way. I'm not trying hard enough. Not reading deeply enough. In settling for my own impressionistic view, I remain in a discursive loop with myself, going round and round but achieving nothing.
But that's the point, isn't it?
The conversation doesn't end. I won't stop thinking about thinking, feeling about feeling, until I'm dead and gone. Writing is how I make sense of that fact.
I think that's why I've been so fascinated by Rabbits.
Trying to describe David Lynch's 2002 Rabbits feels like you've already missed the point. The series tagline is a good enough place to start: “In a nameless city deluged by a continuous rain... three rabbits live with a fearful mystery.” Beginning as an eight-episode sitcom released on Lynch's website, it was later edited into a four-episode version and released on DVD with other films. Some footage was reused and recontextualized in the 2006 film Inland Empire, along with the set. Today, the series exists on Lynch's YouTube channel and other various compilations and reedits uploaded across the platform.
You can say Rabbits is a sitcom. You can say it's a horror parody of the sitcom format. You can say it's a series. You can say it's a short film. None of that explains what it is or what it does. How Rabbits functions. How it feels.
It takes place in a green living room with brown mid-century everything. The family who inhabits the home are rabbits: the suit-wearing Jack (played by Scott Coffey), Jane in a pink dress (played by Laura Elena Harring and Rebekah Del Rio respectively), and Suzie in her loose pink dressing gown (played by Naomi Watts). They are human-shaped with rabbit heads, their tall ears casting shadows across moodily lit walls. We can infer that they are a family based on their dress and actions. Jack would make sense as the patriarch who comes home from work, Suzie the stay-at-home wife who irons quietly in the corner. Jane is a sister, friend, or maybe a young adult niece. We are given no evidence to confirm or dispute that, drawing conclusions from our knowledge of the sitcom formula.
The characters enter and exit the room. They stand, sit down, leave, come back. Their gestures don't sync up with what they're saying. Sometimes they appear to recite jagged lines of poetry to the audience. Barbed wire. Sharp teeth. Running on swollen blue feet. Tearing, scraping. Blood. Burn. They speak in wooden, disjointed dialogue, prerecorded pieces of conversations awkwardly laid over the scene. Each character speaks past the other, never quite addressing the other characters, never quite responding to their questions. Acts of violence are alluded to distantly through vague gestures toward crimes and their perpetrators somewhere in the city. Things witnessed, perhaps experienced. Perhaps perpetrated. The rabbits are always speaking about a secret, it seems, one held by Jack which Jane suspects him of. But even that feels like another guess or leap of intuition.
A steady rainstorm churns outside. Thunder rumbles softly as the wind, perhaps a passing train, blows over the ominous drone of Angelo Badalamenti's score. The grainy film quality and smeared digital artifacts obfuscate the scene in uneasy ways, making shapes hard to determine, the masked faces impossible to read. Our perspective as the audience sits at about the height and position of a television set. Raucous canned laughter pipes into the room at different intervals, whether to signal the entrance of a character or to punctuate what we are to infer is a joke. All the more distressing, the rabbits can hear the laughter. It appears to mock them in their fearful rituals, forced to wait for the audience to stop its clapping and hollering. They live in fear from attack and rain and outside forces, and yet they are laughed at.
That, for me, is more unsettling than the masks or the allusions to death.
For roughly an hour of runtime, this is what Rabbits is. Characters come and go. They have strange half-conversations. They worry about a man in a green suit. They worry about the phone ringing and the news it will bring from the outside. They play their roles in hushed tones. Jack enters, sits, stands. Jane sits on the couch and questions, prodding at the truth from her rooted spot in the right of the frame. Suzie moves timidly through the room and conversation, relegated to the corner to tend to her ironing, as if spoken about but never to. A demonic rabbit face enters the scene twice to cast it in red light and speak in a garbled voice. The phone rings and the front door opens on its own to let in a scream.
There is a mystery that the rabbits know about but the laughing audience doesn't. The rabbits are helpless, and they know this. And that's the thing about Rabbits: their mystery isn't designed to be solved.
You can rearrange the clipped dialogue into more natural progression but it doesn't yield a complete picture. For every loaded statement, there's an offhand mention of the rain, the time, a misplaced object. The rabbits themselves don't appear to want answers, not really. There are two…conclusions, I guess one could say, in the series. Twice when the conversation veers toward some kind of truthful resolution, Suzie sits down on the couch between Jack and Jane. They huddle around her closely, comforting her and she them. Huddling together brings them the catharsis that the story doesn't bring to the audience.
For me, that's why we're here. We're meant to watch and feel, not deduce. If there was ever a work that demanded to be solved, it's Rabbits. Its strength lies in its resistance to that impulse. I've read different takes, of course. Some have argued that it's about the mundane horrors of domesticity, others that the characters are trapped in spiritual limbo. Every time I watch it, I attach myself to a different statement, a different gesture, imbuing it with newly discovered meaning. I think, “Oh wait, that's what this means.” Then in the very next moment, I feel unsure about my own intuition.
Instead of throwing my hands in the air and saying that Rabbits simply resists interpretation, I want to say that I do think it means something. The meaning I take from it is probably wrong, or at the very least incomplete, but it's the truth that I find within Rabbits. It's what it means to me. And it's the reason I decided to write this essay at all, this thing you're reading on your phone or tablet.
I think, or rather feel, that Suzie is the beating heart of Rabbits. Timid, quiet, busy with domestic work, she seems inconsequential compared to Jack and Jane. Jack gets applause as the family patriarch whenever he enters the room, while Jane delivers some of the most impactful lines. Yet Suzie is the most dynamic character. Her leaving the room ushers in the demonic presence, the ritual of exiting and entering summoning it to cast the home in red light. The monstrous red rabbit is attached to Suzie in some way, speaking backwards to obfuscate its meaning from the rabbits. When the door opens in the final minutes to let in a woman's scream, it's Suzie who closes the door and sits between Jack and Jane in a tight hug.
What happened to Suzie and when and why doesn't matter. Something happened. Something terrible happened. Suzie is one of Lynch's women in trouble, like Laura Palmer, Nikki Grace, or Renee Madison. Jack asking “Were you blonde? Suzie?” places her in the same category of woman, those who have doppelgangers or doubles, who have dreamed and been lost inside of dreams.
Jack and Jane are at odds about it the way helpless people are at odds about things they want to fix but can't. The very real and mundane horrors penetrate the home through Suzie as the red rabbit and the scream. But it's Suzie who closes the door and holds her family. There are no answers. There is no mystery to solve because these terrible things are rarely ever mysterious. The man in the green suit and the person on the phone and whatever happened at the harbor, it doesn't matter.
Every time Suzie quietly closes the door, I find myself so profoundly moved. It isn't the scream that catches me off-guard but the slow, careful way she moves. Her acceptance of this terror and reluctant steps to push the door shut always makes my stomach drop. Lynch and Watts realize this pain so beautifully with these small steps. It made it so real, so palpable, in a way that feels revelatory.
Life is full of horrors. The depth and breadth of human suffering is impossible to fully understand. Knowing so many people in my own life who've experienced abuse or assault has at times made me overly sensitive to these things. Lately, regrettably, I find the ubiquity of suffering has moved such instances beyond a matter of grief and acknowledgement to a place of shrugging acceptance. Suffering all day every day, on the television, the phone, and in person. The contents of our lives begin to feel inconsequential, whether it's my life or that of someone whose pain I see on a screen.
We all start to feel like…rabbits. Huddling together in the dark. Barbed wire. Sharp teeth. Running on swollen blue feet.
So I've been watching Rabbits. It shakes loose my capacity to empathize and makes those little horrors real again. It makes them matter again, in a way that other movies or books fail to in their plainly stated objective facts. The layers of abstraction, from unreadable faces to inscrutable dialogue, reveal a truth that direct images can't reach. I feel so strongly because my ability to feel has been sharpened again for having spent time with this film.
I grieve for a million hurts, my own included, not because Lynch is gone but for what he left behind and everything contained within it. And I'm so grateful for everything contained within it, and the connection to that part of myself that the art brought back.
I have never heard of Rabbits until now! I really need to watch it.