Episode 197 - Sounding the Otherworld: On Bryn Chainey's 'Rabbit Trap'

[MUSIC] Do you freak out, wasteoidsTV from SpectraVisionRadio? He's a late night collage channel featuring forgotten music history, microdose music documentaries, and fly on the wall backstage interviews. I get depressed if I don't create. Discover your next favorite band and go underground with the internet's favorite pop call, wasteoidsTV is now playing via SpectraVisionRadio Network. [MUSIC] Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel. For more episodes or to support the podcast, go to WeirdStudies.com. [MUSIC] Hi, welcome to Weird Studies, this is Phil. This week, Weird Studies returns from its annual late summer hiatus. We're kicking off the new academic year with a film that has just been released, Rabbit Drap, directed by Bryn Cheney and starring Dev Patel, Rosie McEwen, and Jade Crude. I should also mention the composer, Lucretia Dalt, and the sound designer, Graham Resnick, whose contributions to the film are at least as important as anyone else's. One of the more coked-out ideas I contribute to the following conversation is the suggestion that Rabbit Drap is a kind of weird musical. Of course, it isn't anything like Singing in the Rain or Oklahoma, except in one way. It presents us with a stream of musicalized events in which emotional intensities flock and wheel like murmurations of birds and register as modulations in sound. Director Cheney wanted to pay homage to Daphne Orham and Delia Darbyshire, electronic sound pioneers in Britain, as well as American electronic composers Susanne Chiani and Lori Spiegel. And while such an ambition might seem miles away from a story that concerns a young couple encountering the Fairfolk and Rural Wales circa 1976, there is a strangely perfect fit between Dalt's and Resnick's contemporary sound scapes and an ageless and enigmatic other world. Rabbit Drap invites us to contemplate the way sound haunts and is haunted. The spooky agency of sound, the way it possesses rather than instructs us, and the uneasy feeling we might have that sound lives a hidden life of its own that only incidentally, or even accidentally, collides with ours, in which respect a sound might be something like a fairy. What happens when it sound days? Where does it go? I think a sound is ever alive to begin with. It's a vibration of an event, the invisible shadow of an energy exchange. The sound is a memory, carved into the air. It's a ghost. It's a stone. Scared, lost, creature, desperate for someone to hide. You're funny for a moment, for a face away. When your hair is sound, you become its home. Your body is the house it owns. It's not for nothing that the composer Edgar Verrez liked to define music as the corporealization of the intelligence that is in sound. And it's also not a bad description of what Rabbit Drap is up to. The film's story concerns Daphne Davenport, a rock musician who has sought new inspiration in the quiet and loneliness of rural whales. She fashions music from field recordings that her husband Darcy makes on his rambles through the unpeopleed countryside. The sound of the Davenport's music attracts a mysterious and unnamed child who begins to hang around their house and becomes more and more intrusive and insistent. The child, like the film itself, remains ever mysterious. But we do come to understand that he or she is no child at all, but some being from the other world with an obscure agenda of its own. As the boundaries between the mundane world and the other world begin to fray, old wounds begin to open up in Darcy's psyche. And, as we discuss in what follows, there is some connection between these things. But the relationship is tenuous and never spelled out, and that's what I really love about this film. I'm allergic to fantasy that feels like it has to explain everything to its audience and reduce its fantastic happenings to metaphor. Rabbit Drap refuses to do this, the waveform of mystery never collapses. And this makes it something rare and precious in our didactic age. Before we get to our conversation, I have a couple of announcements. First, on September 18th, that's tomorrow, if you're listening to this episode on the day of its release, JF begins his five-week course of lectures and discussions on the philosophy of Henri Berkson, a machine for making gods. I've hardly seen JF in recent days. He's been in seclusion, training like Rocky, rereading the complete works of Berkson, pulling sleds through the snow, punching sides of beef, all that. He's got that eye of the tiger for this one, and you'd be a fool to miss it. For more information and to enroll, visit our sparkling, spanking new site at weirdesphere.org. Second, on October 1st at 7pm, JF will be a drawn-in quarterly books in Montreal for a conversation with Claudia Bedrick of Enchanted Lion Books and the Illustrator Matthew Forsyth. The event will be moderated by Shruti Islam, and they'll be discussing the grammar of fantasy by Italian children's author Gianni Rodari, newly translated into English by Jack Sypes. It will be a wide-ranging conversation on art, imagination, politics, childhood, and the enduring power of fantasy. It's not to be missed if you can be there. Alright, my introduction has delighted you for long enough, and it's time to get on with the show. Onwards, then. So we're back, we're back. When we release this episode, the movie we're discussing will have been out for five days. So my guess is that very few people will have watched it. Hopefully they will once they listen to this. But do you agree that we should proceed, you know, this kind of goes against our usual rule, but with a concern for spoiling, or should we not care? We should simply say, in case you're new around here, we are going to spoil the ever-living fuck out of this movie. You will leave no narrative stone unturned. Okay. As is our usual standard operating procedure, but in case you thought we were going to suspend it for this one or whatever, no. Now, so go watch the movie. Please for the love of God, go watch this movie and try to learn as little about it as possible before you do. So, you know, switch off this recording right now and go and go and watch it. Because this is a film that relies upon a kind of mac and ask delicacy of mood. Is it ever something I said in our episode on Altenon Blackwoods the Willows that if you are looking at this and thinking you're going to get a horror story, you're probably going to just find it a little boring. There is an element of fear indeed cosmic fear that is central to the willows. But the way it's developed and expressed is very subtle. It's like objects that you only glimpse from the periphery of your vision. Never anything placed really squarely in front of you. You never quite know what you're looking at. You know, the ground is never solid beneath your feet. And yet, you know, we don't have like gibbering monsters and shambling corpses and whatnot. We have largely off-stage presences. And while there are certainly on-stage presences in Rabbit Trap, the figure of the unnamed child. Nevertheless, the film works in a very similar way through indirection. Yeah. Through allusion and suggestion. Yes. And above all, through the daft creation of a mood. Of a mood, yeah. And it hangs over everything and it's the mood rather than terrifying events that is the main thing. And because that's my favorite kind of movie, films that build a mood that you can walk around in. Or that you can take a bath in immersive moods. A kind of almost virtual reality mood. That's my whole shit. And so when I watched Rabbit Trap, which I did, I will admit in a rather dutiful spirit because it's a spectra vision. Film and Daniel had mentioned it to us. And I have enough of the cranky gen-exer in me that I'm not going to want to watch a film just for this reason. That an executive type wants me to watch it. Nevertheless, when I watched it, I was like, oh, this is my whole shit. Yeah. So anyway, sorry, I went on rather. No, no, I just want to build on what you're saying. You said a movie that you can walk in, that you can take a bath in. I think I would say that films that really rest on the creation of atmosphere need you to walk in. They need you to buy in. And this is why some horror fans don't like this sort of film because it doesn't pull you in. It opens a space and you know, it's like what mood is always multi-sensorial, mood is always ambient. Well, for something to be ambient, you need to be in it. You can't stand from outside. If you're looking into the jazz lounge from outside, you might get a sense that there's a mood in there, but you're not going to feel the mood until you're in it. So these are films and I'd say the same is true of weird fiction when it's expertly done. It can't succeed on its own. It needs your participation. You know, it's the whole representation, participation dichotomy. It needs that type of participation in the mystical sense that you need to like buy in. You need to believe in this movie. You need to kind of let yourself go into those woods in this case into the fairy woods and into the sound. Into the sound, but this is where I was going. You know, famously, I think the first words that were uttered on a Hollywood sound film where you ain't heard nothing yet. Was that it? Yeah, yeah. Al Jolson. Yeah, right. And the jazz singer. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You ain't heard nothing yet. Wait a minute. I said it. You ain't heard. Something happens when sound comes into film. And it's precisely like sound is the means by which a film jumps off of the screen. Because all the sites you see in a film, all the visual dimension, it can be like, you know, localized back to the screen to the light. But the sound fills the room and the sound draws you in, you know. And this is why surround sound is such a successful kind of technology is that when you're in a movie theater, the images are in front of you. And they can be safely kind of separated from your reality by saying they're on the screen. The sound is coming from all over. It's coming from behind from the sides. That's right. It puts you in the film. So sound and atmosphere are super, super closely connected, which is probably why sound design was so important to David Lynch. And this film similarly, this is a very rare horror film. It's a fairy horror film, probably the rarest kind. When it's set out to give us fairy horror, the director, Brynn Cheney. I think it's his first feature, but certainly very scuffle filmmaker saw that the dimension of sound would be super important. That it's through sound that the mood would be generated alongside, of course, the images. So you're totally right. And then, of course, sound has a diagetic, a kind of narrative role in the film, which is really interesting. So it gives the film a very strange medium specificity. Like the film is showing us what film does, what cinema does in a very interesting way. So so much to talk about, so many themes, everything. Like we've got fairies, we've got sound, we've got repressed trauma, EVP electronic voice phenomena. The whole idea of like you're recording, you know, sounds in nature and something comes through. So much to discuss the weird borderline between dream and reality and how those two can become strangely entangled in specific moments. So there's a lot to discuss here. And also it must be said magic and yeah, I'm always on the lookout for any film or story that I mean there's no shortage of films and stories that are about magic or in which magic is a key feature. Pretty much any fantasy you care to name, but I'm always on the lookout for fantasies where the magic has the feel of real magic. Like totally, you know, like take it from a former dabble or in magic. This is a film that gives you a very lively sense of what it is to be dealing with unknown intelligences. Unknown entities and the strange lawfulness of those exchanges, but you never know what the laws are. The sense that it's all about exchange and usually you learn too late what the nature of the exchanges. Yeah, this film has without breaking a sweat without trying particularly hard to scare us goes deep into some of the strangest regions that a human being can experience. And like you mentioned, it is rooted in a kind of narrative of trauma, which I understand I dig it. I think it grounds the film, but I think that the magic begins when you let go of that because there's a way you could psychologize this film. And I was just about to say, yeah, like there's an opening monologue. So one of the main themes of the movie is sound recording. The main character is essentially a field recordist. So he goes out and capture sounds in nature and then gives them to his wife who's a composer and who kind of mixes them and builds soundscapes out of them. The film opens with just a kind of what do you call it like an oscilloscope and the oscilloscope, right? So or or rammix, but I might or might not come back to that. Okay. So you start with that image and you hear a voice speaking and the voice is, you know, laden with static. It's obviously a recorded voice. It's filtered through it's speaking to us through technology. I should also mention that this film is set in the 70s. So all of the sound equipment you see is all very analog and of that time and has those qualities. It begins with a monologue in the voice of the child who will get to in a second. And the monologue is as follows. Your shadow has been gifted many names, goblin, demon, fairy. It is your forgotten child, but nature will not abandon her children. She gifts the music you'd only dream. I think I understood that right, but that sentence might be slightly off. She gifts the music you'd only heard in dreams. I'm not sure. You can hear this music if you wish, but you must listen beyond fear, beyond understanding, beyond shame. Listen to the soil, go down into the dark and listen. For the earth is a body and the body is where your secrets live. Which I think is a beautiful little opening, but at the same time encourages us, I think, maybe to psychologist. Another theme of the film is obviously Jung in psychoanalysis or depth psychology, I should say. In the sense that there's a character in the film called the shadow who clearly represents the repressed aspect of the main character's psyche. There's an idea that this film is a kind of shadow work, and that through the film we are being invited to listen to the soil so to speak and do our own kind of shadow work. That's a kind of ethical dimension to the film that I really dig. I think it's a separate theme from the ones we listed earlier. The film is also doing really interesting things with, like you said, magic, showing us how magic, fairy, weirdness, how those things manifest. In real life, as opposed to how they tend to manifest in spectacular fiction. So, to expand a little bit on the point that this film brings up the idea of, so to expand a little bit on the point that this film brings up the idea of psycho and possibly psychosexual trauma without reducing the film in a psychologizing manner. I want to expand upon that a little bit. What happens in several episodes throughout the film? One of the two, well, there's only three characters in this film. So they're all main characters, right? Darcy Davenport, Daphne Davenport, and the child who goes unnamed. In fact, it becomes quite important that the child is never named. And there are several episodes throughout the film where Darcy has a dream, or in one case, a vision, and it's always the same. In each time we get a little bit more of the vision, it runs a little bit longer. His adult self is lying in what I took to be a memory of, like, a childhood room. Not the bedroom that he shares with his wife, Daphne. And he is lying stiff in his bed, eyes wide with terror, utterly immobile. They're not utterly immobile, mostly immobile. And a shadow figure begins to loom on the other side of the room. You see the shadow of the figure, and then we see just a little bit of its body enter the frame. At first, we only feel it as a presentiment. And then as these episodes continue as we get further repetitions, we realize it is some kind of strange grotesque. It's like an ogre, human being, but like eating something with a peculiarly disgusting sound. But it's all in shadows, so you can only kind of dimly perceive these things. And this kind of filthy-looking, scaly, not quite human creature. Darcy actually begins to rise up out of bed, like in a strange stiff, almost some nambulosic way, and you see this shadow place a hand on his chest to put him back down. And there's a moment early in the film where it cuts to like the nightmare he's having to what's happening in the bedroom while he's lying there. And he's making these strangled, tiny cries of terror. He's experiencing some kind of sleep paralysis, or at least he's manifesting his nightmare. Like his wife gets up and she can see him staring off. Like he's dreaming with his eyes wide open, and he's making this sound. Yeah, he's quite as. I find quite an upsetting scene to this. I mean, which, by the way, goes to show how much work the sound design of this film is doing because so much of the mood we're talking about is created by sounds you've never heard before. I mean, how hard is that to come up with novel sensations, but the sounds here have been shaped and sculpted and molded into these kind of remarkable forms, almost like these sculptural forms. That carry with them the charge of their uniqueness, their unhallowedness. I don't know how the hell you do something like that to give people a sense of something truly otherworldly, truly from outside the frame of the given, which of course is the key note of the weird, that which comes from beyond the frame of the given. Exactly. However, they accomplished it. It's astonishing. And that sound those sounds he makes are, as you say, deeply upsetting. And Daphne records them. She grabs a recording rig and records them in the next morning. He realizes that's what she's doing. And he seems both compliant. He's like, oh, you're using that for a track. It's okay if you do, but he also seems like really pissed off about this. And there are unspoken tensions between them over this episode, just to jump to the end though. And this is where I'm completely spoiling us after all of the main drama. He's concerning the child has come and gone. And we've reached a certain point of resolution with that. He's out recording with his big microphone, this very phallic microphone. And at one point, he says, and I didn't write this down. So I'm just remembering what he said, something like, you know, I can't say this allowed. So I'm going to record myself saying this. In words, whatever it is, whatever trauma it is that has caused this, this horror that comes to him nightly, he speaks it allowed into the microphone. And then the last scene is actually very touching where Darcy and Daphne left alone now to one another to continue their lives are sitting on other side of the table. And Darcy lets Daphne hear the tape where he talks about whatever it is. And we never find out what we just see her put her hand on his is beautifully done. And it reminded me actually of something I really loved about Mackin's fragment of life, which is the feeling that you get by the end that these are two people whose relationship was perhaps a little shallow or at least, you know, not by any means a perfect relationship at the beginning of the novel because they're so utterly conventionalized. But throughout the story, there's a kind of warmth that is kindled between them as they share their extraordinary experiences. And they trust one another's experience until by the end you have the feeling of them almost walking through a gate into some kind of enchanted land. Well, they literally do. Yeah, at the end, but at least, you know, as far as we're given to think from the text and in this feeling of them coming together in that moment is actually very touching. And I feel like there's an analogy here. I absolutely. In fact, I was thinking of fragment of life a lot while watching this film, not least because of the child because and this is something of a trope in full core or weird fiction, the strange child, nameless child who maybe not be a child at all. A very similar character appears in fragment of life listeners. We did record an episode on this wonderful novella by Arthur Mackin, which you should listen to if you haven't. It's one of my favorite episodes we do. But I think you're putting your finger on something very important here, which is there's a very strong parallel. I wouldn't be surprised to learn the brain Chinese a fan of Mackin. In fact, this film is as a Mackin-esque as they get. It's set in Wales, which was Mackin's, that's where he was from and that's the place where he kept dreaming throughout his life, even though he lived in London. And it deals with fairies and it works in the oblique way that Mackin was unmatched at writing in. Mackin also works through suggestion, illusion, hints, and pre-sentiments, but never really delivers the, you know, the octopoid monsters that you'll find in love crap. But more than that, I think that what you, the form of the film, it's about a married couple. In this case, it's Darcy and Daphne. I can't remember the names of the two characters in fragment of life, but very similar. I looked at Edward and Mary Darnell. I had to look that up. Yeah, well, the Darnell, even the, the, you know, having port Darnell, Mary Mackin asked names. So what's going on here? Well, you have a couple, they love each other from the start and you kind of like them from the start and fragment of life. Yes. And same in this film. In fragment of life, the couple is very bourgeois. They live in the suburbs. Edward works in the city as a clerk of some sort, et cetera. So it's a very kind of conventional arrangement. Whereas in this case, Daphne is an artist, you know, as Darcy tells the child at one point, she's not famous, but she's influential. So she's an artist who releases albums and does work and he helps her. So it's a very different type of couple. But in exactly the same way, you start with a couple that they love each other, but they exist at the level of what, you know, Henry Bergson would call the social self, the superficial me, the you that's basically constructed by society. What Jung would call the persona. He's a sound recordist and the husband, she's the artist and the wife. They don't have children yet. And that's a thing because, you know, a couple should have children. And you know, they're living in that kind of social constructed self. The same is true in fragment of life, but the story is about essentially is how this deeper self, in the case of both characters, this deeper self rises to the surface and makes a decision, a free decision that is not constrained by social expectation or convention. But really, and then so it's a story of becoming oneself, right? It's a story in which at the end, they are still together and they're threatened through in both stories. There are moments where you can see the marriage could break apart, but they come through it. And at the end, they are no longer the people they were at the beginning. That's right. The selves are different, you know. And so at the level of form, there are really striking parallels between rabbit trap and fragment of life. And to circle back to something you were saying before, here one might be tempted to psychologist film and say, aha, all this business of being abducted into ferry or having ferry abducted into you. It's very ambiguous. We'll talk more about that later. I'm sure all of this supernatural stuff is really just a metaphor for, you know, dealing with buried traumas, allowing them to come to the light of full awareness and to be expressed. Thereby proceeding beyond shame. And I would encourage. I would encourage our listeners to avoid such a reductive way of looking at it because I mean, it doesn't have to be reductive, but it almost always ends up being reductive this way of thinking because you say, oh, I see it was all metaphor for psychological development. Oh, that makes sense of the stuff that otherwise might be challenging to my assumption of what's possible in this world. But no, the fact that these are two stories that proceed somewhat in parallel and they're intertwined is a little bit of again realism about magic. Yeah, a different kind of magical realism, which is that the boundary between the mundane world and the other world, and this has been so widely attested in so many places for so long across so many traditions, I don't even feel like I need to provide the receipts here. That boundary is eroded and torn by psychosexual trauma. Or just trauma generally, it doesn't have to be of the psychosexual variety, but nevertheless, for example, one thing that's been found quite regularly in investigations of poltergeist cases has been the presence of an adolescent child, usually an adolescent girl. Because, you know, going through adolescence, it's just this psychosexual tumult of unfamiliar and scary emotions, you know, adolescence is itself a kind of interiorization of horror. And it would seem that there are a lot of psychical manifestations that are the externalization of that interior. So it is entirely possible. And this is how I read the film that all of the supernatural goings on or, you know, otherworldly goings on in this film and Darcy's trauma, whatever it is again, we never exactly find out what it is. They exist in the same world, and they do bear an important interdependence. But that interdependence is not a causal, you know, the one doesn't cause the other or moreover, the one doesn't explain the other, which actually allows a certain kind of mystery to remain suspended in the film. They form of mystery does not collapse. Yeah, I mean, I think that the resort to kind of saying, oh, it's all just a metaphor for, I mean, I've often heard that with the shining, for example, oh, it's all in Jack Torrance's head, or it's all a metaphor for this or that, the other thing. It's like saying, well, you know, heart surgery is just a metaphor for getting healthy. It's silly. If experiences of the type depicted in this film happen to people. The weird thing that people who've experienced such things say is that it was somehow not like the usual events that you can kind of look at from the outside. That when you experience the paranormal, it's always as you that you experience it and it always has something to do with you. I remember when I saw the UFO with his busload of kids. I had been looking for UFOs that night, like that's what I did all the time as a kid when we drove at night. I was looking for UFOs. I was a huge fan of unsolved mysteries and mysteries of the unknown, not sort of thing. I was always looking at the sky and that night one showed up. Well, so immediately when I say that, people are like, oh, do you think you manifested it? Do you think it has some? No, I didn't. If I did, then I wouldn't I'd be a freaking sorcerer first of all. But I do think there's a connection, right? So it's an interdependence that's not causal. In other words, it's synchronicity. I think that that's the spirit in which this film invites us to interpret that dimension of the character's trauma and how that manifests through the paranormal events that happen. It doesn't the very sophisticated way, which is probably why some people won't get it because it's a film that's very enigmatic. It's not dealing in the usual categories. It breaks them from the start. Well, we could say it's a participation representation thing, which is to say that the relationship between trauma and the fairy other world, those two narratives in this film, it's not one of representation, which is to say the one represents the other. The fairy stuff is about is psychosexual trauma. The one represents the other. Fairy stuff is a way of figuring, a very mundane and not at all weird phenomenon. We're all familiar with, right, trauma. Although actually, trauma is very weird indeed, but I don't want to get into that. But no, we're talking about how these two things participate in one another. They're consubstantial. They're of the same essence. And this brings us back, perhaps, to sound because that's the thing about sound. It has been said many, many times that music is an extraordinary art form because there's a weird degree of sympathy, or the philosopher Vladimir Yankelevich called it Charm. A kind of sympathy, like the way, you know, a snake charmer's song, supposedly, I don't know if this ever actually happened, would cause a cobra to, you know, rise up out of its basket sort of in source, and do the snake charmer's wishes, a relationship, not just of representation, like I'm going to show you something, you're going to cognize that and you're going to make a decision on how to act based on your cognition of the thing represented to you. No, it's more like there's a vibration, and you vibrate in sympathy with it. And as the vibration changes, so too do you. You're not really separate from the vibration, you're consubstantial with it. Music has the strange intimacy of effect where, you know, I might be in a perfectly cheerful mood. And then I listen to a Chopin nocturn or something and suddenly I'm melancholy. Nothing happened to precipitate that change of mood. The mood changed because I wandered into an environment with a nocturnal mood, the Chopin, and it penetrated me. I became consubstantial with it. I became one with it. There's a way of figuring this, the very first thing you see after that kind of weird monologue that you quoted at the beginning of the show where what we see immediately is Darcy out in the field with his big microphone recording a murmuration of, I guess, swallows, you know, those kind of clouds of birds that seem to wheel about and move as a kind of intelligent hyper organism. It's a way of figuring an intelligence that's not imminent to any particular bird, but to the massive bird. Exactly. And so that alone is giving us a sense of a challenge to subject an object like murmurations or the kinds of things that challenge our normal idea of agency anyway. And might prompt us to ask what are the human equivalents of murmurations things where we come together socially and there's a kind of emergent intelligence from our collective doings that no one of us is responsible for or even perceives. But in any event Darcy is recording the sound of this and it cuts between him and Daphne back at home taking and you know that the sounds are cut together so it's like what we hear as a field recording. She is somehow at the same time taking that recording and turning it into music and as the base kind of comes in and it starts turning into music the power goes out and she's like oh balls. There's a lot of mysterious problems in the house. Yeah. It's a small country house in Wales. Yeah. It tells us something about the relationship he goes out in the field and captures these sounds she takes these sounds and turns them into music in so doing it is as if she is transducing the movements of those murmurations or whatever energetic activities are the source of the sound. She's transducing those into music. The music itself is not just representing those things it is made of those things it's consubstantial with them right participate right right and it is in fact that music that calls the child the very child into their lives. Again music having a not a representational force but a participatory force. Yeah beautifully put and on the other stratum on the psychological stratum there's a there's a kind of beauty to that first scene because we were just told in the monologue by the voice of the child listen to the soil go down and then we get a character looking up at the sky and pointing up. Yes so he's not doing the thing he needs to do right. Oh smart yeah so so it works again on both levels and murmurations of starlings or swallows has it's been used a lot recently in film it's used in true detective in much more aesthetic touch kind of way or in this I think it has a kind of narrative charge right from the start. It's funny that you brought it up because when I saw that scene I wrote in my notebook I wrote qualitative multiplicity because that's what Bergs it's a perfect example of a qualitative multiplicity. The thing about these murmurations is that I mean they can't actually pinpoint the bird that gets one particular movement going it seems to be perfectly simultaneous they seem to be acting together as one. That is a very very difficult thing to explain on a kind of modern cognitive theory level yeah if you were Henry Bergsson you could speak about sympathy instinct instinct as an expression of a kind of deeper emergent not intelligence but intuition and nature a kind of telepathy really. And so right from the start we're given an image from nature that nobody can say a murmuration is just a metaphor for something because it actually exists and yet it already manifests all of the qualities of the type of realism that the film wants to exemplify so it's really an interesting image to begin with. And I love your idea of her transducing the sounds from nature into music almost like the music and the sounds of nature continue one another they're not standing oppose in this kind of music noise opposition but simply participate with one another and consubstantial with one another it's really interesting. Well this is from Hazarat and I at cons the mysticism of sound and music and con was a sufi musician and mystic who I mean there's a whole lot to be said about him very interesting life and career this book is an expression of sufi mysticism for which sound and vibration has a fundamental importance now. The idea that sound lies at the root of the universe is not unique to sufi mysticism you know in siddhartha which we talked about a few shows ago much is made of the om as the foundational sound of the universe the thing from which everything emerges and back into which everything returns the universe understood as the unfolding of an infinite vibration. Yeah which is implicit in the words of john in the beginning was the word yeah right and con is sort of thinking about vibration both as something that's a little bit mundane but also as something cosmic and he talks about the way sound communicates in a way deeper than just words. And he says one might ask how it is done we can see the answer in certain scientific experiments special plates are made and by speaking near such a plate marks are made upon the plate with sound and vibrations those marks make either harmonious or in harmonious forms. By the way this is a visual motif that comes back again and again in rabbit trap is the forms that sounds make on like still surfaces of water right the forms that sounds make on membranes. If that is true continues con then every person from morning till evening is making invisible forms in space by what he says is creating invisible vibrations around him and so he is producing the atmosphere therefore it is that one person may come into the house and before he speaks you are tired of him you wish to get rid of him before he has said or done anything you were finished with him you would like him to go away for in his atmosphere he is creating a sound. A sound is going on which is disagreeable there is another person with whom you feel sympathy to whom you feel drawn whose friendship you value his presence you long for harmony is continually created through him that is sound too. And then he goes on to say that if this is true in this relatively mundane sense it's true in a kind of more expansive one if that is true it is not only the external signs but also the inner condition which is audible invisible though not visible to the eyes and not audible to the ears yet is audible and visible in the soul we say I feel his vibrations I feel the person's presence I feel sympathy or antipathy toward that person. And jumping ahead he begins to think in more cosmic terms about how human beings have both a finite and infinite dimension and the sounds we make the trace of our actions in sound can be understood in both a kind of mundane and super mundane way. So he goes on to talk about what a mystics idea of knowledge is and he says for a mystic knowledge isn't the kind of conventional things we might ask like you know am I wrong or right am I good or bad how old am I etc but a subtler aspect of being. And he says it's upon the knowledge of that being that the fulfillment of life depends and can continues one might ask how can one draw closer to it. The way that has been found by those who searched after truth those who sought God those who wish to analyze themselves those who wish to sympathize with life is one way and that is the way of vibrations it is the same way as of old by the help of sound they prepared themselves they made these physical atoms which in time had become dead and live again with the help of sound they worked with the power of sound is Zebun Nisa says say continually that sacred name which will make the sacred the Hindus have called it mantra yoga the Sufis have turned it wazifa. It is the power of the word which works upon each atom of the body making it sonorous making it a medium of communication between the external life and the inner life. It's funny that you read that because I'm reading the Selma Rillian which I never read tokens famous backstory for Lord of the Rings I guess although he didn't he he wrote it before Lord of the Rings for the most part and the creation story of Middle Earth is entirely focused on sound and music. So at the beginning you have Eru I think it says one of his names God surrounded by the angelic hosts of the Valar they are singing together and through their sound they make the world. And so this is tokens way of aligning the most ancient creation stories with the most modern scientific ideas right that vibrations create the world. And so I don't know I was just struck by that as you were reading there's also something here going back to what I was saying in the beginning about how the addition of sound to cinema breaks the kind of closed circuit of the screen opens the film into the world allows the film to bleed into the world to jump off the screen so to speak. Which is why 3D cinema such a nonsensical idea it's already it's already a thousand D you know with sound in there and the interesting thing that happens after the second world war and film. And those talks about this in the second volume of his two books on cinema the birth of what did those calls the time image and film and this happens precisely when sound and image are dislocated suddenly whereas before the war most filmmaking assumed that sound and image needed to be locked together in an action sequence of cause and effect. After the war suddenly see a proliferation of films where sound is freed from the image where suddenly you'll have a character talking will cut to something that's completely unrelated and that sort of thing this is what the neorealism of the Italians and then all the other movements that kind of come from that what they do is they dislocate the two and what this allows film to do it allows film to depict not just the actual. But also the virtual which is the non material the non actual yet real aspects of reality the parts of reality that you can't measure with scientific instruments and sound although we can measure sound sound seems by its nature and this is I think. The distinction of what we mean when we say music is that sound does more than itself it evokes more than what it contains to say that sound is just a vibration is to fall short of what it is because sound by its nature is generative creative it creates images it creates form it brings the new into being and I think that that idea the power of sound the mystery of sound is at the very heart of rabbit trap. [Music] [Music] [Music] Once I saw it I was like this is the weirdest musical ever that's a good put that in your intro weirdest musical ever yeah because I mean you know that's how musicals end for that matter opera works is I like to say it's like a imagine the narrative thread for. The narrative thread from beginning to end of a musical film is being like a band thread and at certain points that band thickens it thickens emotionally it thickens in terms of like what's consequential in the film and those moments of emotional thickening go with moments of musical thickening where the eventfulness of sound. It comes a bit more lively right and I'm putting it very abstractly so that I can account for similarities between something like the bandwagon which we talked about in our legendary bandwagon episode right where we have musical numbers that appear at moments like for instance when Fred Astaire and Sid Sheree's characters go into Central Park and go for a stroll and then they end up dancing together and the moment of their dance represents the coming together of these two souls in Emotional thickening oh yeah a murmuration nice approach to the musical yeah right yeah a murmuration of emotion I love that that goes with the swelling of music on the soundtrack and the sudden energetic appearance of that music in the bodies of dancers. So something similar happens throughout rabbit trap is a kind of that kind of thinning and thickening except the sounds are so unearthly the music they make is so unearthly and reside so much at a boundary between what we might conventionally call music and what we might just call sound design or you know environmental sound or noise whatever yeah that we might be at not to notice that in its most basic expressive form in the most basic expressive movement of the film it's doing something a little bit what all musically enhanced genres whether musical film or opera do yeah you know giving you these moments of intensity that I just love how you analogize those to those murmurations because that's in a way I can't even quite intellectualize absolutely perfect well what is a musical it's a story in which characters will suddenly enter into a murmuration with one another suddenly you know the janitor's broom becomes a musical instrument in the background yes and everything coalesces into this sudden expression of order on a whole new level yes absolutely but in this in this musical if we were to call rabbit trap a musical which I think is brilliant the music is a strange music it's a music that's not human very music this is that's what we're told in the monologue at the beginning she gives the music you'd only hear in dreams so let's talk about the story so we've been dancing around it we've been talking about you know Darcy's trauma whatever that is and the way it progressively reveals itself and become something that has to be dealt with by the end but we haven't talked so much about what's really the central story which is the appearance of this weird child so at one point Darcy in his field rambles finds a very circle and he steps in it which of course you're not supposed to do the very first thing that happens is that puddle of water where he records the sound first listening because I don't remember no I don't remember but he sees but he sees this sort of trembling on the surface of a puddle that is well it's a little bit like you know that famous moment in Jurassic Park where you see the surface of a cup of water yes beginning to tremble and of course it's registering the footsteps of this tyrannosaurus that stalking them yes he yes so he notices this and then he kind of whimsically points his microphone his boom at this puddle and then he's the strangest sound he's ever heard yeah and if he takes his headphones off he can't hear it he can only hear it through technological media exactly which is kind of absurd considering that technology is using but ex that's the whole point right so he's hearing this music that he can only hear with his headphones he records it shows it to his wife she immediately falls in love with the sound it's the it is a beautifully crafted soundscape it sounds like people like a crowd I was really struck by it because it reminded me of when I did my fairytale course like last year I read Robert Kirk's famous 17th century book at the secret Commonwealth of Elves Fonds and fairies with the introduction the original introduction written by the folkloris Andrew Lang when I think he was the first person to publish this old or book much older book by Robert Kirk in the late 19th century and he wrote this wonderful introduction where he were no longer doing the plot now sorry this is what happens the secret Commonwealth is basically a book about Scottish beliefs and fairies but Robert Kirk who wrote the book was a believer himself so he approaches it in a very kind of strangely proto-scientific ways talking about what fairies are made of an empirical mode yeah in his introduction Andrew Lang notes all the parallels between what Kirk reveals to us about the fairies and how they're depicted in fairytales and in culture but also in paranormal or psychical research as it was called at the time and one of the things he says is that very often the denizens of the other world will express themselves with sound much like we do but their voices are different than ours he says their voices sound like a whistling both Kirk and Lang say this a chittering a twittering of birds almost the sound that they created when Dev Patel's character Darcy points his boom at the puddle to me really into mates what I imagine fairies would sound like in like in a very folklorically accurate way or even in a paranormal accurate way it's like this weird kind of throng of voices and you can hear there are voices in there but they're also almost mechanical or insect like sounds like chittering it's a really interesting soundscape anyways he shows it to his wife she really digs it she puts it on she starts building something with it right away and then they go into a kind of psychedelic trip where the sound seems to affect their consciousness and they you know they have sacks and they're talking and they go into this kind of wonderland in their little Welsh cottage and that is when the child shows up exactly and it's like the head east of this recorded sound and sacks that seems to penetrate the barrier between this world and the other world and through that tear in the membrane walks this strange little child by the way before we leave the point about how extraordinary the sound is that David Patel's character chords I was saying before that this film is true to some esoteric things that form part of my experience here's one of them this is the moment that they're trapped right the title of the film rabbit trap refers to a moment where the child who was shortly going to explain leads Darcy to a place where he traps where the child is actually played by a female actor but they refer to the child as he throughout the film so I'll just use that pronoun he takes Darcy to a place where he said a trap for rabbit and he explains that what you do to trap a rabbit is wait till the rabbits hungry and you find this thing that they most want to eat and this is an interesting detail says you have to offer it as a gift and you have to mean it. And you realize by the end of the film that that is what this child who is some kind of fairy has done has set a trap and baited it and the bait for Darcy and Daphne is sound and this is how their trap is after he finds the puddle he sweeps the landscape with his microphone finds out where the source gets stronger and it leads him to a ferry ring right and he steps inside it and immediately passes out on conscious and what I wanted to say is the moment that he steps inside the ferry ring there's this sound and a flash of orange on the screen a kind of auditory and visual moment you really can't even think audio and visual that kind of go together and it creates the strange synesthetic quality that reminds me do you remember that story that I've told in the past about the eldritch flute yes I thought of that story while watching this yeah where I had this experience of an anti sound where everything went sideways we're going to have to put in the show notes what episode that is where I told that story is I'm not going to then but without actually being perceptually similar to that experienced moment of mine that moment where Darcy steps inside the ferry ring and where at least in my interpretation the trap snapshot at that point they've opened up this gate for this ferry child to enter that to me is astonishingly true to the experience I had with that weird impossible anti sound yeah great story so we will put it in the show notes and you should listen to this listeners if you haven't yeah and so then so this child shows up we never learn the child's name we never get a sense that the child lives nearby that's what we assume that's what Darcy and definitely assume it's a local kid who's taken an interest and and the child starts showing up constantly and that won't go away yeah it won't go away and you know when I was a kid there were kids in the neighborhood who would do that they would just like start showing up at your house constantly and then never go away but this child is not a child it becomes clear eventually that this is not a child but rather one of these entities a ferry who has dawned the rayments of childhood in order to you know continue its baiting because this couple is childless and there's a suggestion at one point that this is something that troubles a Daphne that they don't have children the child shows up and the child begins to hang out with Darcy and the child wants to learn how to record sound and wants to know all kinds of things about Darcy's world and asks all kinds of strange questions and same with Daphne and soon they become very kind of you know fond of this child but then there's that inevitable moment where the welcome is overstayed and things start getting a little strange yeah and so the story gets to that point and then the child becomes much more antagonistic and lures them into ferry there's this wonderful sequence where they're lured into another world where they go through these already wonderful woods these ancient you know old growth woods and whales and and then the child lures them down into a cave and when they emerge from the cave they're in an even more resplendent forest but this one you can tell is no they're no longer in the field as Lord Denseini would say they're no longer in the fields we know you know and and at that point things get very strange the last act is almost a kind of dream sequence I don't see I don't know if we should go through all the beads I think that's essential shape of it is there we can believe it mysterious yeah it never compromises on this idea of conveying to us just the deep strangeness of ferry and this is something that I really appreciate it the relationship between the child and the Davin ports is interesting if this was an ordinary horror film the relationship would be entirely antagonistic and we would think that the child wanted simply to destroy the Davin ports or enslave them or do something terrible to them do something in other words that we would find horrifying if it was done to us yeah that's not really what's going on it becomes evident that what this child wants is family wants a place to belong I think it wants it wants incarnation it wants what the the black lodge enemies want in twin peaks it wants to taste through their mouth I think I think it wants I think that's good yeah yeah yeah and at one point when Darcy tries to bodily throw the child out you know at this point the child has like presumed on their hospitality quite a bit and the child points out it's like you went with me like you know the child led them into ferry they willingly went along you go with me you fed me you bathed me give me a name anything you want and I'll be yours and you realize like we never find the child's name child has no name and you get the sense that the lawfulness of exchange is such that they have unwittingly provided three of four conditions yeah for this manifestation and the last one is a name and they won't do that and they won't do that and the child returns what's so astonishing about the Davenport's abduction into ferry is that it's not actually like the earlier thing where they follow the child into ferry where you go somewhere the child destroys this kind of barrier of protection that has grown up the Davenport's knowledge around their house and so ferry comes to the house the house is overtaken by this new reality in which the child is their child yes and in fact has always been their child yeah and we see them together as a loving family and yet somehow within this you can tell there's some stirring of awareness in them that they're not really at home right that they're dreaming yeah yeah that there's something like pets yeah that this ferry is keeping and somehow within the bafflement this magical and sourciling of their cottage of their lives they somehow manage to find the Ariadne's thread that leads them out and at that point we see the resolution of the other arc the business around Darcy's trauma exactly beautifully done but you know this by the way tees up something I thought which is just sort of like the relationship between the others and ourselves we don't understand what they are and there's a lot of writing in weird nonfiction where people conjecture for example what's the relationship between ourselves and the others that come down in UFOs right yeah this was a question that exercise John Keel who liked to quote Charles Ford saying we're livestock like our relationship to the others is as you know cows are to the cattleman I feel like that's not exactly the case here I think it really is more like a relationship that I might have to my cat you know that the child I believe in my interpretation actually is genuinely fond of the Daven ports but you know there's a certain horror in that to imagine yourself in the situation of a domestic animal and only dimly aware of what the real nature of your relationship with this creature is there's a funny meme that appeared in the weird studies discord I don't know where this first appeared some internet user called line covered in jellyfish who wrote I am some sort of fake creature and my cat is the human who I have arbitrarily decided is my favorite human and then a series of bullet point substantiating this idea I live to him an unfathomably long life I have access to powers and locations that he cannot access independently he needs my help to navigate the world I've brought him to I simply found him outside and abducted him one day there are many cats in the world but this one is the best in my most favorite why because he was available to abduct that morning and for very little other reason I have a much greater understanding of this world than him but he has unshakeable confidence in his ability to figure it out and I find that really cute the power dynamic is fundamentally unbalanced but I let him have a little audacity a little combativeness and sass is a treat some humans are needlessly cruel to cats or take them in for a short time before neglecting or abandoning them but I have chosen to love and guard this one with my life because I think he's neat he is very well treated and has pretty much everything he could possibly want or need but he is my prisoner that's a beautiful description of the pet owner relation very honest so there's this kind of higher article or for lack of a better term political imagination of the relationship between us and the others there's also what kind of in the folklore and you see this in Kirk they need something from us they want something from us if they imitate us there's this great moment to wear a Kirk in the secret commonwealth is describing how the fairy women can spin and weave in and die and make all these beautiful clothes but he's like as to whether these clothes are real clothes are simply just made of images I leave that to your conjecture and essentially it's like they are immature he also notes that they always manifest in the fashion of the place where they appear so in whales they look like their dress like like Welsh people in Ireland their dress like Irish people in Germany etc and so they adapt to the local culture but these are all ways of baiting because they need something from us now do they need something from us in the same way that a farmer needs like the milk of the cow or do they need something from us that they simply can't get something that we have that they don't have I think if I were to lean into my Catholic side I would say that what they lack is incarnation they're half there and they want to be fully here and I think that that's what you see in Twin Peaks that's essentially what the the fairies for lack of a better term in Twin Peaks want is that if they feed off of traumas because trauma gives them a way into this world then it gives them a way into us so that they can become fully enflashed there's different ways of interpreting this of course and the film is brilliantly ambiguous on this point it's like the child says in the monologue at the beginning you need to listen beyond fear beyond understanding beyond shame beyond understanding meaning your intellect won't be able to make any sense of it you simply have to accept that a reality that is in a way super rational is being presented to you and accepting it is the whole point not trying to boil it down either to representation or to one or this particular theory on as to what the fairies are but that there's something essentially mysterious about these types of paranormal encounters which this film kind of depicts so beautifully and that there's no piercing this mystery in any definite way if you enjoyed this podcast consider subscribing to Weird Studies on your favorite podcasting platform you can also follow us on Twitter visit the Weird Studies subreddit and of course support us on Patreon music for the podcast is composed and performed by Pierre-Eve Martel and the show is made with the assistance of Meredith Michael thank you for listening to the Weird Studies subreddit and of course support us on Patreon and on Patreon. Thank you.