Maybe I've got some psyche issues I have yet to realize or treat or something or the other, but while The Bunny was a cutesy story with a "happy" ending, I couldn't help but feel sad. To me, the bunny getting in the oven was a suicide. I saw in The Bunny what I saw many years ago in a Br'er Rabbit story. No, it's not because they're both rabbits, what I actually drew the parallel with was Br'er Fox. In the story Br'er Fox is preparing for his wife when he remembers something Br'er Rabbit told him the other day (some of this I'm sure is inaccurate but br'er with me), which was that the new fashion was to take off your head with an axe before you go to sleep at night. Br'er Fox and his wife argue a little bit about this before she agree to help him do it and she chops his head off and of course dies, but for some reason she doesn't realize this till the morning when she can't reattach his head or can't wake him or something inane and very frightening and scary to a child sitting in a Qdoba reading this across from his father. Anyway, the moral was don't follows fashions because they're almost always fads. At this point you may be wondering why I connect that with The Bunny.
What I saw in the Bunny was a suicide. The bunny finally gave over to senility she had been fighting for years and climbed into the oven and died. In the morning the mail man will come by and wonder why old bunny Janice isn't out front with the cake she promised him and he'll knock and knock and call the bunny police and they'll go into an oven turned on with a rabbit stew halfway done. This is not fantastical or transformative to me. It's sad and depressing. Someone please explain The Bunny in a way I understand because for the life of me, that's sad.
I think the oven-portal came because the moth was the husband rabbit's spirit. He came to take her with him. She died in her chair. As her soul was removed the world shook, and she followed the light. The transformation from rodent to insect, and the reflection of two sets of wings in the photo giving the illusion of angels, led me to this conclusion. Hope that helps.
ReplyDeleteTherein lies the danger of symbolism/allegory: the execution can produce mixed result. I hadn't thought about it before, but now I agree that having her willingly crawl into a running oven doesn't look good. We were supposed to focus on her dying peacefully and being reunited with her husband, but it was awkward the way they portrayed it.
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