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Lost Highway (c) D.R.

There are two points of access and egress to the mise en scène : a door to the immediate left of the viewer’s perspective and an opening adjoining room that retreats into the background. This background is almost consumed by the shadows which envelop the living quarters ambience, and it will later serve as one of Lynch’s staple cinematic devices : the space that engulfs its characters, the darkness that merges with their psychological mindsets (for examples of this, one only needs to watch Lost Highway or Eraserhead). By depicting an environment bathed in chiaroscuro like shadows, Lynch evokes a hostile universe in which nothing is as it appears, and also aligns it with one of his favourite genres, Film Noir, the shadows mirroring the paranoia of characters thrown into a pessimistic, bleak world. This balance of light and shadow is a master stroke employed by Lynch as it creates the feeling of a Francis Bacon or Edward Hopper painting moving on our screens. The colours that do reveal themselves within these living quarters are solemn grey-blues and pinkish reds, the overall effect producing an ambience similar in tone to Dorothy Vallens’ apartment in Blue Velvet. Lynch seems to have a penchant for creating interiors that have a dark foreboding atmosphere to them, some of these interiors can be equated with the dark troublesome exteriors of the houses depicted in many of his paintings (9). Lynch has said that “the home is a place where things can go wrong(10), and in Rabbits the anticipation for that occurrence is electric in its intensity.

  Blue Velvet (c) D.R.

From the outset of Rabbits, the viewer is presented with a protracted scene of both drudgery and banality coached in an almost unbearable silence : one Rabbit is working on her domestic chore of ironing ; continuously going over the same piece of clothing over and over again (the first indicator of a series of repetitions that will beset all three of the protagonists of this prison like domicile), whilst another is sat facing towards the viewer on a single sofa (perhaps it is a television or maybe it will be revealed in a later episode). There is a lack of communication between these two characters that made more intense by the protracted length of the scene reminiscent of Hitchcock’s Rear Window in hibernation (11). The pacing of Rabbits is slow and deliberate, a device employed to lull the viewer into a false sense of security. The audience ask the questions when will something happen and who will break the silence. The anticipation we feel is overwhelming. All the while the viewer can hear the rain outside, relentless and necessary to break the deafening silence that exists between these two characters, within this functional setting. Here we have a small area of frame to concentrate on ; but Lynch opens up the space metaphorically and illustrates the vast chasm of isolation that can occur between individuals. He is testing the endurance of an audience drip fed and weaned on synthetic, reactionary constructs of reality. On another level it could be construed that Lynch is commentating on the status of change that society has undergone since his halcyon days of the 50’s : technology in the form of television has created rifts of communication between family members.

At this early point in the series the viewer may not be aware that they are watching characters who are in fact role playing the normalcy of everyday domestic situations : families do indeed sit around for hours without communicating, it is just that we as an audience are not made to feel conscious of this fact because the television has become our surrogate guardian by stealing our dependency on intercommunication. Of course Lynch could have dissected home life from a reverse angle and depicted endless banter between these two characters, but this would go against his desire to explore moods in a slow cautious manner which is a distinct trademark of his body of work.