As the time moves on, or ironically appears to stand still in this initial set-up, the viewer may feel uncomfortable, confused and bewildered as to the point of this. But what I feel Lynch is actually doing is playing with the form and content of sitcoms that are endlessly regurgitated in their jaded and predictable narratives on mainstream television. Lynch creates a diametrically opposed variation to the sitcom format. In the standardised formulaic versions of network television, the mode of direction would be to instantly create an interchange of frenetic dialogue between central characters shot with quick intercuts that creates the illusion of kinetic frission within the frame. As a direct contrast to these forms, Lynch leaves his camera in a static head on position and dialogue is slow, deliberate and stilted. In some ways these moments of wound down precision can be affiliated with the Pop Artist Andy Warhol who frequently played with the concept of realism and his audiences reaction to it in underground movies like Sleep, Trash and The Chelsea Girls. Of course Lynch has always enjoyed playing with his audience’s tolerance and expectations with scenes like the old Bellhop in the second season opener of his popular cult series Twin Peaks, in which the octogenarian painfully travels the breadth of Dale Cooper’s hotel room to deliver a glass of warm milk, a journey that seems interminable. He also created a similar sort of chaos in the final episode of Twin Peaks that contrasted with the usually fast paced build ups of season finales : he again used the in-joke of having an old-timer struggle to negotiate the flooring of a bank vault in which a bomb was primed to go off. Instead of speeding proceedings up, Lynch toyed with the audiences expectations and turned the formula on its head. Time is of the essence to David Lynch, who once said to a critic regarding ABC producers expectations of its market audience : “They want things to move fast, but it’s like water-skiing : when you go fast, you stay on top - you never get below the surface.” (12)

After this prologue of interminable quietude, the status quo is finally interrupted both visually and aurally by the entrance of Jack, who enters the living quarters via a door at the left hand side of the screen. His entrance is accompanied by the rapturous applause of an unseen audience on the soundtrack. This comes as a surprise to the real audience watching Rabbits, because we had no idea that the events occurring before our eyes would have an intermediate barrier, a device used on situation comedies to paradoxically give its audience a sense of connection and the real. Viewers may feel disorientated because of the lack of signs and signifiers : we are unaware which genre Rabbits fits into because of the ever-changing flux of the situation presented on screen. To an incidental viewer who is unfamiliar with Lynch’s peculiar brand of satire, he or she may ask if it is a horror, a comedy or a tragedy. The answers are not clear because the signposts are at this moment undefined, unless we look to the accompanying poster tagline which describes Rabbits in terms of a “fearful mystery”. Of course knowing Lynch as we do, we should have fully expected him to adhere and maintain his penchant for enigmatic narrative. Here in Rabbits, Lynch has reversed the standardised traditions of mainstream television by making the every day seem alien and detached through silence and isolation, not the hallmarks of traditional presentation. The irony of the situation is that his depiction of domesticity is closer to the everyday lifestyles we all lead, as opposed to the synthetic safe realism portrayed daily in the countless procession of homogenised sitcoms spewed out by the networks : The Cosby Show, Friends, Frasier et al being prime examples paraded weekly on our screens and disrupted by the intrusion of a canned audience.

As in the majority of his work, David Lynch is playing with form and content in an ambiguous and abstract manner : Jack actually waits until the audience’s clamorous appreciation has died down before he closes the door. This device has drawn our attention to the artificiality of the set up we are watching, and also made us aware of an external reality beyond the frame. On the other hand this occurrence also indicates the fragility of our own existence by indicating that our every day lives and stability can be disrupted by the forces of chaos.