The Bunny Game – A Movie Review

1.

This film starts with a girl sucking on a dick. If you are as gratified as I am to see explicit sex in ‘legitimate’ film, then this scene alone makes The Bunny Game worth seeing.

One might say that she is less sucking than being face-fucked. However, she is putting in a valiant effort, and the dynamic could be said to be a collision between two strategies: her sucking — rather enthusiastically, given her drugged-up state (as we’ll later see) — and the John with his shirt open, lazily standing there trying to face-fuck her.

There are a few interesting points to be made about this opening oral sex scene. The scene manages to capture — whether intentionally or not — the evolved ambivalence that characterizes contemporary prostitute-customer relationships. The John — even though he stands there dumbly as all men in the same position must do, with his shirt open, essentially passive — tries to convert his passivity into activity even though a blowjob by definition is something you receive. Each second he stands there in the thrall of pleasure because of something she has done — running her lips over the head of his cock — is a moment when he is frozen and she is in control.

Nonetheless, he tries to alter the act’s appearance and make it look like he is active, he is in control while his body language says the opposite.

Likewise, she is actively trying to keep up, sucking and slurping on the strangely pronounced head of the John’s smallish penis. Why? We know already — it is assumed — that she does not want to fuck and that is why she must be paid to do it. She is doing something she otherwise would not want to do. Why then convert that into an active act?

What we see in this scene is a pair of people, each totally confined within the space of his and her own head. There is no relationship between the two. But the other person defines the strategy that each must employ in order to retain personhood. In other words, the other person in the room is not another person. He/she is the negation of your own personhood. To stay a person, you must resist the efforts of the unknown, unknowable other person to rob you of your own personhood. That effort is itself just an effort to remain a person from the other person’s point of view. But still, that doesn’t matter: there’s no time to get to know that person. No desire. What the other person represents is simply the possible negation of yourself. Another will.

These two have an equivalence, an identity, but they don’t know it. They have no idea. Each pursues the same strategy as the other. Situationally, they are brought together because each wants to use the other person (the John wants to use her for sex, she wants to use him for money). But when finally confronted with each other, both the John and the prostitute are each essentially trying to stay alive, by converting what is their passive positions into something active.

2.

One might be forgiven for thinking this forms the theme for the rest of the film. But the film manages to subvert that. (More on this a bit later.)

The hooker spends a good deal of time (it feels) wandering around, getting fucked up, making the audience feel that she is fucked up. She manages to get robbed at one point, apparently because she is too high and passes out. While this is perfectly plausible, and while the circuit from hooker-passes-out to better-rob-hooker-then makes sense within this universe, one thing that stands out as implausible during the film’s first fifteen minutes is the amount of crying done by the hooker. While this may be in the film to humanize her, and even more generally to make the political point that prostitutes are human beings with real feelings, etc., all it succeeds in doing to the audience is make them think she is (maybe) an inexperienced prostitute. In the context of the film’s opening prelude showing her daily life, the crying seems oddly unjustified, oddly unsupported. In ‘real life’ what one finds with prostitutes are dead eyes, eyes that are past feeling or crying. This is especially true in ones who spend their lives in a drug-induced haze. The crying here doesn’t fit. In narrative terms (and there is one in this film regardless) she is crying but without any real basis as to why, no specific plot trigger, no basis in her presented personality or in the audience’s ‘knowledge’ brought in from outside the movie theater.

3.

Finally, the prelude ends. We see a brightly-polished, seemingly new jet black rig make a beeline straight for her.

The location chosen for what will become her abduction was very interesting. It appears that she is on the side of one of those busy roads that are technically inside city limits but perhaps attached to some industrial zone. Or between industrial zones. There’s a long chain-link fence next to her. Everybody knows these parts of town — busy, but not really inhabited. The sense is that she had to walk for quite some time on foot to get there. That means she is, symbolically speaking, in transit, suspended in a sense between departure and destination. And while she is surrounded by the hustle and bustle of people, no one takes notice of her. She is abandoned even while she is surrounded.

The rig does not hesitate in aiming right for her, as is plainly seen in the outer edges of the shot. This was a nice, subtle touch.

She gets in, and for a moment, we get to experience what we think (or hope) might be a moment of communion. The eucharist that gets shared between smokers or drug users whenever somebody shares a cigarette, or when you do lines at the same time… that moment of sharing from time immemorial makes you think that there might be some kind of buried kindness in this world, even if unconscious.

But then the hanky with the ether comes out, and our girl is down for the count. She struggles, she resists. She is anesthetized.

4.

What happens next occupies the better course of the film. Our girl gets the Guantanamo treatment.

It’s interesting watching the primarily mental torture that follows. On one level, it is meant to convey a terrible, visceral horror that most have never experienced, but some, who in trying to account for the state of things in the world, must deduce exists.

This, by the way, is the main function of the film. Whatever quasi-political claim the filmmakers may or may not make regarding the ‘purpose’ of the film, the film does not take a ‘pro-‘ or ‘con-‘ stance toward the type of violence and situation it presents. The filmmakers may hold personal views. But the film does not. If the *film* were to condemn the violence, what we would get is a traditional bad-guys-punished ending. But this film does not hold a political opinion. It is purely evocative. It (re)creates, very successfully, the feelings that the viewer might have if he/she were in that type of horrible situation.

Nevertheless, the mind does work while the heart and the guts ache over the cruelty. And what does the mind say? We do this ourselves now at Guantanamo. (And countless other secret locations.) This is torture. What this film depicts is what we now advocate. If some films — even a single film — took a genuine negative stance on today’s American torture, and showed it with this level of fidelity, you might see a sudden backlash against wanton cruelty by the Great Unwashed. (But don’t hold your breath.)

This film for the greater part of an hour shows a relentless and perfectly executed (film-wise) stream of taunts, tortures, and awfulness perpetrated against the prostitute. We also see interspersed what is apparently film footage from other assaults, giving us the fairly certain knowledge early on that she isn’t going to make it out alive.

Here the acting of both Rodleen Getsic and Jeff Renfro cannot be complimented enough. Getsic channels all the way down to the subtlest muscle response the true horror and struggle bound to be felt by someone in her situation. As for Renfro, taking one look at him, one might expect a kind of lazy Jeff Bridges performance satisfied with some minimalist strokes suggesting bigger personality — instead he completely manages to inhabit the role, which is in some ways the tougher role to play. The crazed humor on his face while he is tormenting and torturing the prostitute demonstrates that he and Getsic have gone “all in” on their roles. Nothing in them secretly balks, no lingering resistance remains to sabotage the film’s artistic statement.

Contrast Getsic’s heartbreakingly and mindnumbingly pathetic anguished cries and almost hiccups of delight as she runs across the deserted area thinking she is set free — with the sentimental banality of a presentation like Schindler’s List, which depicts similar cruelty and torture. The performance is uncannily, unthinkably good. And she won’t get any kudos for it because of what is being performed.

5.

What actually is happening during all this torture?

The first thing to note is that, interestingly, the torture is not physical. There is a physical component, to be sure: she is chained up, unable to move, smacked and slapped. But even with all the marking that the trucker does on her flesh with the back of his knife, the flat side of his knife — she is never cut. He cuts off her clothes (with prostitutes always more of a costume). But he does not cut her.

She is branded — at least twice — with a very thin branding-iron which bears some odd symbol. Naturally, this is also physical. She is also starved and deprived of water — also physical.

But where is the stabbing, the slashing, the cutting? Where are all the various feats of objectification that one might see in a Hostel, a Saw, or a Human Centipede? They are not there. This film, for ambiguous reasons, decides to stick with what is primarily psychological torture (again drawing a parallel with Guantanamo).

The prostitute has her head shaved. She is stripped bare naked. Paradoxically, this has a humanizing effect. For one, it occurs at the climax of her suffering. But second, because of the slight context and backstory we’ve been given leading up to her abduction, this stripping down seems to reduce her down to something that she perhaps had been unable to get down to before: she is reduced to a human being. Her makeup mostly gone, her hair gone, her costume torn off, all the disguises available to her are gone. Because of her suffering, all of the mental defenses are also gone.

What are we left with? We are left with a woman who, for perhaps the first time in the film, looks beautiful. We see ample, life-giving hips. We see frailty. We see a form that stands courageously out against the void in total weakness. The prostitute is like a throbbing nerve at this point, a human distress signal. She has been reduced to a pure pleading, a delirious one-note wail. And yet, she is utterly recognizable and totally familiar for that reason. All of us would be her in that situation.

It isn’t too much to say that buried in the angry, gritty context of this film and its attitude — and organically disguised by the absolutely effective soundtrack — Getsic’s performance of the character in these moments — especially during that moment of running from the trailer — is one of the most beautiful ever caught on film.

6.

What is the relationship of the ‘bunny game’ to the rest of the film?

The ‘game’, which it comes as a sort of almost laughable climax, ultimately has no real purpose other than gratuitous self-fulfillment. It gives the film some remarkable, memorable imagery. It gives the film a title, and the two main characters (code)names — as we discover in the credits. But it is very easy to resist reading any kind of symbolism into the game since there is very little. What it symbolizes more than anything else is just the self-referential in-your-face stance taken by the film itself. Like punk music, where the attitude and the music are consumed side-by-side, the inclusion of the ‘bunny game’ motif in the film is sort of the film’s statement on itself, conveying its own attitude and asking you to share it. Only this isn’t necessary. The game works well enough inside the film on the film’s own terms. But as regards the story of the prostitute (whom we are invited by the credits to call ‘Bunny’) it is inconsequential.

7.

The ending.

The ending is ambiguous. We are given every reason to believe that the prostitute is dead. We are led to believe that the final blow — the suggestion that she could be free, that should could win her freedom by picking the right-sized matchstick — killed her. She was too weak from lack of food, sleep, water, and all the constant torture.

However, we are never really shown this. Consider what we know: the trucker chains her up, psychologically tortures her, and has evidently done this sort of thing before. He videotapes it. The videotape footage, cruelly shown to her on the one hand to mock her, but also to try to get her to engage in an illicit voyeurism of her own experience — never shows anyone dying. We see choking, we even see apparent suffocation by plastic. But we never see anything conclusive.

Is the trucker’s goal simply to videotape utmost terror? Is this perhaps even his job?

The various CB dispatches are made by the semi-delirious trucker to ‘Jonas’. This begins long before the prostitute is ‘dead’. On the one hand, we might think that Jonas is the one who comes and disposes of the body. On the other, might it mean that Jonas disposes of some living body? If there is some network and people paying money for this torture porn, these snuff films that stop just at the verge of death — might it be possible that it is part of their modus operandi to take women, psychologically torture them, film it, then set them loose?

Had the trucker been simply doing it for himself, it would be inconceivable that she might still live. But enter Jonas with a nice, new white van: two means a network. And where there’s a network, there are different rules.

‘Bunny’ might still be alive. She might be released back into the wild where the cops would never believe her story (whatever the branding). She might be in transit in the van to a whole other torture scenario, this time in a house or a mansion or in a sewer.

8.

The relationship.

Earlier it was implied that the film would somehow subvert the logic of the Prostitute/John relationship. That relationship as presented is one in which two people in a way never have any contact, using each other and experiencing each other only as threats to their own personhood.

The Bunny/Hog relationship, in a way, is the negation of that Prostitute/John non-relationship. If anything, it could be argued that the Bunny/Hog relationship is the only human relationship in the film. As Hog sits there on the ground, exhausted, while the weeping Bunny stares up at the sky, contemplating, one gets the sense that Hog somehow has been a facilitator. In a way, he’s been a midwife. Through the awful violence of torture, and of being reduced to essentials, Bunny has been returned to herself. She is now firmly in herself as a human being. Meanwhile, Hog has never cut her, never raped her.

Bunny on the cross (laying on it, not strapped or nailed) seems to suggest that she has undergone a transformation. Just as Christ is said to have transformed into a Redeemer by being on the cross, Bunny has transformed into a human being (the one she always was).

9.

Verdict:

A good date flick. If they make a sequel, I want to be the guy getting the blowjob in the next one.