Review and Analysis of The Brown Bunny

I find myself more and more fascinated by films that illustrate the America Other as one defined by mental illness, isolation, and repressed masculinity. The documentaries of youtube artist, trappped, the early films of Harmony Korine, and Sean Dunne’s revelatory yet one-note documentary, Oxyana; are examples of pieces that take American society’s abandonment of the youth, the abused, the economically depressed, and/or the mentally anguished as their subjects.

It is an interesting sub-genre because the films often serve a wider purpose, in effect, highlighting America’s disinterest and dismissal of clinical depression and poor, racially white US citizens. Thereby, these films confront audiences with characters who exhibit traits the viewers may not want to admit that they themselves share. Furthermore, these films assault the notions that those dealing with depression are just sad and they should get over it, and that one's poverty is symptomatic of their own laziness .

Harmony Korine’s 1997 film, Gummo, is for many high school film nerds, a significant moment in their film-watching careers. Indeed, it’s Godardian approach to narrative and its edgy rural setting captured my imagination immensely and it continues to be an influence on myself to this day. With age though, it has revealed some issues. Namely, it’s subtly exploitative nature and sometimes gawking attitude towards it eccentric subjects. To contrast this assessment, trappped’s 2014 documentary, Gothic King Cobra, provides a more concise focus on a single subject in a similar setting, dealing with similar struggles. Here though, the nature of documentary and trappped’s careful and respectful treatment of his subject convey a more in-depth and dutiful exploration of the societal abandonment of those who need it the most. However, Gothic King Cobra lacks Gummo’s fictional capacity for staging specific poetic visuals and its narrative construction.

On a whim last summer, I committed to finding a film that had eluded me for some time. Today, I view it as a film that bridges this gap between Korine’s films and trappped’s. I see it as the best film to concern itself with the American dismissal of depression and the implicit American acceptance of isolating those who do not fit in.

Vincent Gallo’s 2003 film, The Brown Bunny, is a film that many have heard of, and one that many have been warned to steer clear from. It is infamous for its slowness, for being Roger Ebert’s one-time least favorite film ever, and for containing a graphic unsimulated sex scene. No doubt, such notoriety was what drew me to the film in the first place, but as I soon discovered, Gallo’s work has immeasurable significance and a unique identity beyond these trite facts that belittle its power and artistic vision.

This essay will attempt to relay its significance as an American art film and they way it wholly succeeds at being a respectful, dutiful, as well as a poetic, visually rich and politically potent film.

The Brown Bunny begins with a telescopic view of a race track. Men on motorbikes rev their engines and speed away. They make the same loop over and over again, some gaining standing, others losing it. The sounds of their engines seem out of sync, at the loudest when the bikes seem far away, disappearing when they pass closest to the camera.

The camera soon finds Bud Clay, singling him out as protagonist. He will not win this race.

Gallo himself stars in the film as Clay, a soft spoken but alluring figure. He speaks rarely in the film, imbuing him with a mysteriousness that is disconcerting but also seductive. It is a performance that is captivating in its ability to make us fear what Clay may be capable of, despite the fact that his voice is in fact, childlike in its cadence.

After he finishes his race, Clay packs his beloved bike into a large black van and sets off on a cross country road trip, allegedly to arrive at his next race in Las Vegas. The film will follow him as he makes several stops across America, each one further painting him as a broken man.

In an early scene, before Clay even gets out of the state, he meets a young woman working at a gas station. She is inexperienced, impressionable, and fascinated when he invites her to leave the safety of her home town and join him on the road. Her name is Violet.

In asking for her company on his trip, Clay offers her the promise of adventure, of a romantic love, and of a life of exceptionalism. She agrees to leave and to abandon her safe and complacent existence as a gas station clerk.

Moment later, Clay stops the van outside her house to let her pick up her things. He kisses her passionately and pressures her to be quick. As soon as she turns and enters the house, Clay drives away, abandoning her to her normal life, rescinding his promise, and as the film will later make clear, exacting a kind of revenge on women.

This scene is crucial to the audience’s understanding that this will not be your average road movie. This film will not argue for the significance found in travel. Clay will not be “finding himself” along the road. Instead, The Brown Bunny posits a view of America as an unforgiving, isolating, and boring place. One in which the never-ending roads are not seductive, but commonplace. This is an America where valleys and mountains do not reveal the beauty in ourselves, but tease us with visions of beauty that we humans can never achieve.

Bud Clay continues his road trip with his first stop being a suburban house next door to where he grew up. He circles the neighborhood before committing to stopping in front of the house. Inside, he has a short interview with an old woman. The mother of his childhood sweetheart, Daisy. The dialogue is cryptic, the old woman doesn’t seem to remember Clay at all or know where Daisy is. We get the sense that Clay is searching for this estranged lover who may be living in Los Angeles, California.

It is in this scene where we first meet a brown bunny. Daisy’s pet bunny. An animal whose meekness conveys inherent innocence and an obliviousness to the concerns of man. And whose association with Daisy signifies exactly what Clay desires his estranged lover to be.

Clay continues his trip along the highways leading west. At a rest stop, he silently approaches a lone woman named Lilly. Middle aged and visually beat down by the sun, but whose figure and soulful eyes convey a similar seductive quality to that of Gallo’s/Clay’s. Upon meeting for the first time at the rest stop, they simply ask each other if they are ok before passionately kissing. Clay, however, breaks down in tears and leaves her as quietly as he met her, continuing his journey and search for Daisy alone. We understand that there are other broken people out there. Others who are just as lonely as Clay, just as isolated.

Much farther west, Clay arrives at an area of expansive Salt Flats where he removes his motorcycle from the van and ritualistically rides across the flats. His bike flies into the distance where even the exaggerated zoom of the lens cannot keep up with him. The reflection of the sky on the hot flats creates the illusion that he and his bike lift off and suddenly fly into the horizon. It is a strikingly beautiful image but the action itself is treated with such routine nonchalance that it seems as if Clay has done this before and no longer gets the same joy out of it.

In Las Vegas, Clay drives a circle around a city block where a prostitute has hailed him. Instead of engaging physically with her however, he buys her MacDonald’s, abruptly asks her to leave, pays her, and drives off. Her name was Rose.

Through these three encounters with strange, floral-named women, we learn that Clay needs love but not from just anyone, he needs intimacy but not from just anyone, and he needs companionship but not from just anyone. Additionally, the mysterious nature of Daisy, coupled with Clay’s obsession with her, relays how high on a pedestal Daisy is. She is more of an intangible ideal at this point, than an actual person.

After dropping his bike off at the race track, Clay drives to Los Angeles where he finds Daisy’s house and knocks on her door. After getting no answer, he leaves her a note.

The last half hour of the film takes place in Clay’s Los Angeles motel room. Daisy, apparently having found his note, meets him there. We meet her for the first time, played by Chloe Sevigny.

She treats him with familiarity, as if she was expecting him the whole time. Oddly, in between discussions of the viability of their relationship after her apparent infidelities, she steals away to the bathroom to smoke crack cocaine. Clay, despite his long search for her, is critical of her, acts coldly towards her, and is altogether unexcited at having finally found her.

After one more trip to the bathroom, Daisy returns and begs Clay to take her back and awkwardly admonishes herself for not looking prettier for him. Her pleading becomes sexual and her advances become physical. Clay, although he verbally denies wanting to even touch her, succumbs to kissing her passionately.

The infamous scene plays out in a somewhat disturbing and arresting manner. Daisy performs oral sex on Clay as he hisses insults at her under his breath, criticizing her for cheating on him. Un-simulated, the scene takes on a grotesque character, they’re not faking it.

Upon reaching climax, Clay removes himself from Daisy’s mouth and immediately cries, “I hate you, I hate you”, before crawling into a fetal position on the bed.

What follows is the complete breakdown of the protagonist. Our hero and conduit in the story, an American Individual who is handsome, talented, and who could get any woman he wants, breaks down into a childlike state of anguish. Gallo, already performing in his soft-spoken cadence, takes on an absolutely juvenile manner of speaking and sobbing as he and Daisy recount what led to their estrangement.

We learn through narrated flashbacks that the last time they were together was at a party where Daisy had agreed to go into the bathroom and smoke pot with several other men. However, what she though was pot, was something else, most likely cocaine. She overdoses and passes out in the upstairs bedroom. The men who had been so generous to her take turns raping her. We learn that Clay walks into the room and sees the assault taking place, but with Daisy’s face obscured by one of the men, he thinks its consensual and conscious. He backs out of the doorway, leaving Daisy to her fate.

We learn that Daisy was pregnant at the time, drinking and doing drugs anyway.

In the motel room, we see Clay weeping like a child, begging Daisy to give up drugs, confusedly asking her how she could do that to their unborn child. She calmly replies that she’s an addict.

We learn that she chokes on her vomit and has died, revealing that the Daisy in the motel room is but a figment of Clay’s imagination. We see Clay run to her lifeless body being lifted into the ambulance. He kisses her one last time.

Presently, he lies in his motel room bed completely alone.

The last shot is of Clay driving to the race track, just hours remain until his eventual reenactment of exactly how the film started. The film ends on a freeze frame suggesting entrapment. The fluid nature of the film, the many times Clay drove in cyclical patterns and general feeling that he has done this all before, heavily suggests everything he has done within the film will be repeated again and again until he dies.

The character of Clay is stuck in a cycle of grief and self-hatred and there is no one to help him. His guilt, resentment, sadness, and anger are burdens that he has chosen to bear alone. They are feelings that he feels he cannot express to others, save for the ghosts of his past.

The sprawling American landscape and the very nature of the road movie assign the film a wider context. Clay’s intersections with other women, who appear just as lonely as him, hints at the fact that his case is not unique. While others are trapped in their home towns, he is trapped on the road, resigned to the impossible task of searching for a dead woman in the bodies of those he meets.

Through the repeated references to cycles and Clay’s often blank, emotionless stare, the film suggests that Clay has fully accepted his role as this wandering madman who has nothing left to perform in life except for this ritualistic cross-country road trip. Herein lies the crux of the film: as a man who is handsome, talented, confident, and goal-oriented, Clay is socially expected to take on the heroic qualities of self-reliance, strength, and emotionally capability. Therefore, he has implicitly agreed to a point of view that states that he does need help from others because such assistance would signify his own weakness.

The ending effect is that he is not saddened when confronted with his burden-bearing fate. He does not view it as an injustice. He silently resigns himself to loneliness and suffering because that is what a man does when he feels a certain degree of responsibility for the death of his lover.

The Brown Bunny does not gawk at Clay, but works to foster empathy towards a man who seems misogynistic in nature. The film is quiet and meditative. It’s details are what tells it’s story. The film is also shot beautifully on 16mm and the expressive camera conveys romantic images and landscapes that seem at odds with all the internal ugliness.

Additionally, the film is edited using some disconcerting techniques. As mentioned before, the strange sound sync during the opening race, as well as jumps cuts during the motel scene that convey a dreamlike unreality, work to characterize the film as poetically conceived and one that takes advantage of the possibilities afforded to narrative filmmaking. These qualities elevate the film’s form to be as fascinating as it's content.

In the end, I can readily admit to having fallen in love with The Brown Bunny and I include it among my favorite films. Its commitment to articulating very complex emotions and psychological processes of assigning guilt is something that resonates heavily with me, but I believe its narrative specificity and cinematic prowess allows this film to be appreciated beyond what personal significance it may have on each viewer. It is a monument among films that subvert American exceptionalism and it successfully challenges the very idea of an American hero.

Most significantly, it confronts the dismissal of such a character as being evil. It supposes that we may find this man evil to begin with, because he reminds us of our own worst qualities. It reminds us that we often hate the ones we love and that sex can share similarities with violence. It presents a world where the lack of black and white truths mandates that truth itself be ascertained through discourse. By creating this dialogue between text and audience, the film does more good than most films can ever hope to do.