Watching David Lynch’s ‘Rabbits’ got me thinking.
What is so… whatever this is, about whatever this is,
is that I am left with a sense of an enclosed system in which conscious beings exist.
This is a system structured and governed by possibly incoherent rules (why would rabbits be so humanlike in their evolution to intelligence?), yet also rules that these rabbits – these beings – cannot escape. They may wish to escape, but they cannot. They may not wish to escape; anyway, they cannot.
And yet, as well as a possibly incoherent world, this world is not a necessary world. It is obviously not necessary: there is no world like it. It is even obvious that a picture or representation of this world is not necessary. Until Lynch created this show, there had been no representation of it. And now it is created, it does seem like he might have made something else. He didn’t need to make this. He doesn’t need to even keep it, now it’s met. It’s very likely, before I posted about it, you didn’t know about it. And if he deleted all digital copies of it, destroyed the raw material of its construction, and scrubbed all reference to it, it would both cease to exist and be forgotten. Arguably, at that moment, the rest of the world is barely changed.
But for the rabbits, this world is necessary. The rabbits cannot exist in another world. Not these rabbits.
There is something to it that I cannot fully articulate about this. I do, however, understand enough or have enough of a sense of it that I can articulate something. I grasp something about it. I feel something, something clear and disquieting.
This necessity-for-its-denizens of a brute-contingent world: in it,
We see rabbits living like people.
We are not rabbits.
In the pits of our stomach,
We see a mirror
Distorted
But we do not want to admit: It is distorted
only in ways that do not matter
Sean Enda Power 