I recently discovered David Lynch's 2002 video series Rabbits—notable for being both an early web-series (dating from a time when that must have seemed a very novel idea) and one of the director's more compact exercises in the art of the disjointed, the incoherent, and the surreal. Here, the great student of the uncanny—the same man who brought you such indelibly unsettling creations as the chipmunk lady who lives in the radiator—now gives us eight short episodes starring three anthropomorphic rabbits (played by live-action actors wearing fur suits and creepy animal masks).
Nothing much happens in these episodes, which take place on a sitcom-style set with chiaroscuro lighting (casting tall bunny-ear shadows) and scored with a repetitive musical thrum and train whistle that augment the feeling of the uncanny. The three characters utter various incoherent non sequiturs and walk on and off the set, occasionally descending to the footlights to serenade us with disjointed hums and rambling associative lyrics. Beats occur that would signal—in an ordinary sitcom—some shift in the plot, such as footsteps approaching outside or the ringing of a telephone, but they lead nowhere. A character answers the door, steps out into the hall, then comes right back in again, or else there's no one on the line.
The series has elements of parody throughout. The characters' meaningless and inconsequential lines are followed at irregular intervals by canned laughter. Each time a character enters through the set's main door, an invisible audience applauds at length, stranding the actor and forcing them to wait there awkwardly until it subsides. The first few times this door is used, the sound effect for it opening and shutting is just slightly miscued to the visual. And as the series progresses (if that's the right word), this problem becomes more extreme, until eventually the entire auditory sequence—the opening, shutting, then cheering sound effects—happens before any of the relevant visual cues occur onscreen to match it.
In 2002, when it came out, the series no doubt illustrated well the pointlessness and artificiality of the American sitcom formula (then still a dominant one on TV)—the canned laughter that tries to railroad the audience into finding a "joke" where there may never have been one, the wooden premise that beggars the audience's willingness to suspend disbelief. Viewing it conveys something of the same unsettling effect as watching footage from Friends, say, that has been edited to remove the studio audience laughter. One suddenly realizes how unconvincing it all is—the actors pause and wait unnaturally, or utter lines we'd never recognize as "funny" without a braying audience helping us to that conclusion.
Watching the series in 2023, however, the series has different associations. These days, all the old-fashioned sitcoms have gone off the air. The live-action set with studio audience has long since been replaced with the mockumentary format and other innovations in comedy, few of which employ laugh tracks or the other crasser devices of the genre as it existed in the '90s and early 2000s (well, I guess Big Bang Theory lasted until 2019, but I'm not sure how anyone could still stand to watch it by the end). The obnoxious canned-laughter sitcom no longer seems like the dominant TV formula that needs to be satirized.
Instead, Rabbits reminds one these days of a very different artwork that recently appeared on the cultural scene: the AI-generated series Nothing, Forever.* The rabbits, after all, deliver their lines in a robotic monotone that sounds artificially constructed. They utter non sequiturs that occasionally have the tone and cadence of jokes, cuing the laugh track, even though they convey no meaning. The AI series—which was set up to auto-generate infinite, self-replicating content with Seinfeld-esque characters delivering an endless series of meaningless non-jokes—has much the same vibe.
There is something infinitely gruesome about Nothing, Forever—something far more unsettling and eerie than anything David Lynch could invent even while he was deliberately aiming at the effect. In this AI series, after all, humankind has invented something that can prolong itself for all time, whether we are still around to watch it and interact with it or not. Even if all life on planet Earth were eliminated, but we managed to aim a beam of Nothing, Forever into space before we went, there would still be an infinite number of new episodes, full of original yet equally inane dialogue, spewed forth from computer-generated Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer lookalikes, spreading absurdist non sequiturs into the farthest reaches of the empty universe.
The show is of course called Nothing, Forever in a nod to the Seinfeld creators' famous description of the series as a "show about nothing." But the name conjures the disturbing image as well of the infinite and endless void, and thereby calls attention to the absurdism and existential vacuum it serves to illustrate. One is reminded of Philip Larkin's line from "High Windows"—the one about "the deep blue air, that shows/ Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless." That is all Nothing, Forever shows too. And all that Rabbits shows. And all that may be left of us, if we do not find a way to use our human technological capacity for creative rather than destructive ends.
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*I learned only after writing this that the Nothing, Forever series was in fact self-consciously inspired by David Lynch's Rabbits—no wonder the two share the same vibe!
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