Rabbits seem on one level to be an examination and exploitation of audience’s expectations in relation to the sitcom genre, but this is just one facet of a multileveled experimentation in pressing psychological buttons. For instance there are moments that contain external canned laughter on the soundtrack, which arrive at the most inopportune moments, at periods of time when nothing has been said to elicit such a response from the fictional audience, and this is where Lynch piles on the layers of irony – not only are we watching a situation in which the characters are placed within the very confines and positions we the audience restrict ourselves to whilst watching TV, but the characters within Lynch’s control are in fact mirroring us. At one point in Episode 2, Jane says “I only wish they would go somewhere”, this statement brings the question to mind just who is watching whom ? And who is the fictional audience between ourselves the real audience and the Rabbits themselves ? All these sorts of questions encourage us to address such philosophical issues as existentialism and identity . These concepts are referred to time and time again within Lynch’s catalogue of work and as a result form part of the bigger picture in life which good art will always make us think about.

At the heart of all David Lynch’s movies, the cosmological meets the mundane, usually in the form of a vision, apparition, or manifestation viewed or perceived by the central character of one of his films, a prime example being in Twin Peaks when a Giant appears before Agent Cooper in his bedroom of The Great Northern Hotel. In Rabbits, that epiphany occurs in episode 2 when a frightening and visually arresting figure called the Red Rabbit (14) bursts into the proceedings. His entrance is accompanied by Suzi carrying a configuration of candles from the adjoining back room at a moment when all light has been extinguished from this theatrical stage. The Red Rabbit makes his appearance in the upper left hand corner of the room and communicates in a loud incoherent language. We are initially shocked and surprised by his intrusion, but we should not be because he potentially represents a figure that has been prevalent throughout all of Lynch’s œuvre, namely the Controller.

The Controller can be regarded as a pseudo stand-in for Lynch himself who has appeared in many of his previous works. It is a metaphor for the man behind the curtain in Lynch’s beloved and much referenced The Wizard Of Oz, which is about dreams, aspirations and the way in which we delude ourselves. In the final stages of the movie, when Dorothy and her travelling companions meet their anticipated giver of dreams the Wizard, he turns out not to be a wizard at all, but a man hiding behind a curtain (a favourite Lynch’s motif for concealment), controlling events through materialistic technology. This engineering of events is much like the work of a film director, who can also be looked upon as a magician of sorts creating and manipulating reality beyond the action and events on screen we are witnessing. We have seen evidence of the Controller in various guises in Lynch’s canon of work : Eraserhead’s The Man in The Planet, The Good Fairy of Wild at Heart, the denizens of Twin Peaks’ Black Lodge, and the bum behind Winkies in Mulholland Drive (2001). It is within this last movie that Lynch performs what could be construed as the ultimate conjuring trick by having his surrogate take the form of an onstage magician (Richard Green) in the mesmerizing Club Silencio’s sequence. This is displayed when the character of Betty (Naomi Watts) accompanied by Rita (Laura Elena Harring) is given a rude awaking when the prestidigitator demonstrates that all is an illusion within that self contained world, nothing exists outside of the movie and by extension projects a solipsistic overview on the nature of reality not only for the central characters on screen but to us as an audience. As a parallel to the stage magician of Mulholland Drive, the Red Rabbit conceivably performs the function of a controlling agent : his very entrance appears to contribute to or affect the nature of time, and in that regard it can be equated with a God which of course is what a director of a film is beyond the confines of the movie. By introducing a character that is a vicarious stand-in for the director, Lynch is provoking questions like what can we rely on, what is real or unreal and how do we determine the nature of truth. All of these conundrums lie at the heart of a David Lynch’s movie.