Even with Jonathan Glazer's directorial mettle being as playful and as intermittently demented as it is, there are few entries in his filmography quite as hauntingly enigmatic as the visual accompaniment he cooked up for "Rabbit In Your Headlights". A 1998 single by electronic outfit Unkle (then comprised of founder James Lavelle and collaborator DJ Shadow), the mournful tune featured the vocals of Radiohead's Tom Yorke (who co-wrote the song with DJ Shadow) and sampled dialogue from Adrian Lyne's 1990 thriller Jacob's Ladder. The video starred French actor Denis Lavant, who'd previously worked with Glazer on the Stella Artois ad "Last Orders", featured here as a muttering, parka-clad pedestrian attempting to navigate his way through a road tunnel whilst enduring an onslaught of punishment from the incoming traffic. At once, this is a video of contradictions - the setting and the imagery have a dingy, downbeat realism, yet the tone immediately feels nightmarish and uncanny. It's also striking just how muted the song itself is, meaning that it plays less a like a promotional video for the Unkle single than a short film that happens to use said single as its soundtrack. The music becomes ambience, and the visuals and the journey of Lavant's character the components that most command our investment.
The titular metaphor of a rabbit caught up in a vehicle's headlights is a harrowing one, its implications perhaps most aptly explained by one of literature's most esteemed leporines, Bigwig from Watership Down:
"...at night the hrududil have great lights, brighter than Frith himself. They draw creatures towards them and if they shine on you, you can’t see or think which way to go. Then the hrududu is quite likely to crush you. At least, that’s what we were taught in the Owsla. I don’t intend to try it.’
To be a rabbit in a headlight suggests confusion, paralysis and the inability to get out of the path of impending calamity; the sheer force of what is coming for you has already overwhelmed you and sealed your fate before the moment of destruction has even occurred. The treatment this metaphor receives in Glazer's video is in some respects quite a literal representation, but in others runs somewhat contrary to the precise implications. We don't see any actual rabbits - it takes place in a world that, save for its human transients, seems utterly divorced from nature - but Lavant's protagonist has entered into a situation where he is in perpetual danger of becoming roadkill. Headlights are omnipresent, but are mostly shown from behind the protagonist, and he does not look at them. The repeated battering he receives upon car bonnet after car bonnet comes less as a result of his being transfixed by the vehicles than his being doggedly determined to shut them out altogether. The headlights are the force that instead appear to reanimate him after each fall; the first time he is hit, he looks to be dead, until his motionless body is bathed in the Heavenly glow of an approaching headlight and he is miraculously revived. But as the sampled dialogue from Jacob's Ladder (not audible in the video) would suggest, the distinction between the angelic and the demonic is perhaps not always clear-cut. The protagonist is revived merely to repeat the same process over and over. The landscape he inhabits is Hellish; he wanders onward in search of a light at the end of a tunnel that likely does not exist, for there is nothing to indicate the tunnel itself has an end. He seems doomed to carry out his cycle of revival and destruction ad infinitum.
We get intermittent glimpses of the occupants of each vehicle - that these cars even have drivers makes the nightmare all the more perturbing, as it indicates a pervasive indifference toward the plight of the protagonist. While some of the drivers blare their horns or swerve to avoid him, a harsh constancy emerges in that whenever he is knocked down, nobody pulls over and attempts to help. One of the drivers who hits him is seen to acknowledge him but continues on unfazed. To most, he is simply a nuisance obstructing the drivers' paths, and once eliminated as an obstruction he is afforded no more concern. The most familiar reaction he gets is when the occupants of one car (our obligatory cameo from Lavelle, seen here with future Unkle member Rich File) drive alongside him and query where he is going, and even then it's not clear if they have any intention of assisting him or regard him as a passing curiosity; either way, they eventually lose interest and drive on when he fails to engage with their questioning. The protagonist is an outcast in his society - he is out of his element on that road and distressingly vulnerable, lacking the protection and prestige offered to those who are safely contained inside their cars, but it's equally evident that he has no aspirations of joining them. We suspect that, in an incongruous way, his refusal to acknowledge the motorists, and his determination to keep treading this path, even if it means being repeatedly knocked down, offers its own form of defence against the cruelties of his world.
At the same time, the protagonist gives off the impression that he might be mentally ill, partly through his ostensible inability to understand what's going on around him, and through his frenzied and incomprehensible rantings. It is this designation that perhaps makes him so undesirable to his world, which has little tolerance, much less compassion, for those who do not conform to its standards. Mental illness is also one of the key themes of Jacob's Ladder, where the titular Jacob (Tim Robbins) is a Vietnam veteran wrestling with the traumas of both his wartime experiences and a family tragedy that occurred before the war; while we get no direct insight into what is going on inside the mind of the video's protagonist, we sense that the real battle he is waging is happening on a psychological plane, and this takes precedence over the immediate happenings inside the tunnel. What is written off as madness by detached onlookers might even conceal a deeper understanding; Lavant stated in an interview included on DVD release The work of Jonathan Glazer that the character's verbal ramblings amount to an equation he is attempting to solve. (He also shared that as he speaks no English, his dialogue was fed to him through a walkman for him to repeat.)
The dialogue sampled from Jacob's Ladder in the Unkle track is spoken by Danny Aiello's character, in reference to the German Catholic philosopher Meister Eckhart: "If you're frightened of dying and you're holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. But if you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth." On that same note, there are different ways we might look at the video's scenario - is it a rueful condemnation of a society that discards those it views as inferior, leaving them trapped in a cycle of relentless cruelty and indifference, or as a testament to the endurance of those who have been discarded by their society but who have the tenacity to go on existing? What eventually makes the difference for Lavant's protagonist is that he decides to shed his parka and leave it on the roadside. This is a paradoxical move, one that leaves him more exposed but seems to bare his survivor status all the more starkly, so that we see the muscular form underneath, and the various scars from the previous hits he has weathered. Finally, the protagonist stops walking, ceases his ranting, and stands in the middle of the road with his arms outstretched, as if anticipating and embracing the next impact surely coming his way. Another vehicle slams into him at full speed - on this occasion, however, the protagonist withstands the impact, while the car crumples behind him as though it hit a brick wall.
It is a tremendously cathartic ending, yet the getting there naturally proved too intense for some sensibilities. Lavant laments that the video was censored in his home country, while James Lavelle (also interviewed on Glazer's DVD compilation) talks about it being denied a spot in MTV's daytime line-up, less because of the violence per se than because the protagonist was "too realistically fucked". A grungy realism pervades the film, keeping its more fantastical elements swathed in a sense of desolation. The protagonist is uncomfortably reminiscent of the kind of mumbling derelict we might find wandering along the roadside in real life and would probably sooner drive past than get acquainted with. The hardship he's subjected to is brutal and bleak, no matter how persistently he gets back on his feet. We might question if that desolation has really been conquered at the end, in spite of the catharsis it throws us. After all, we never do find our way out of that tunnel. We don't discover if there is any light at the end or a better world beyond it. But then we never actually saw the protagonist enter into the tunnel from anywhere else. For the purposes of this video; that tunnel is the only world that exists and he's always been traversing it.
Lavelle and Lavant each offer different interpretations of the ending. According to Lavelle, "You can get beat down, but you know, if you fight through it then you're gonna win." Lavant's view is that the character has finally solved the equation, which doesn't make him invincible, but enables him to break the cycle and attain an ending. Meaning what? That he'll awaken from the nightmare? Or that he'll finally die and stay dead? The video's final arrangement certainly seems to offer us incongruous imagery - the character's outstretched arms as he is hit make him into a none-too-subtle Christ figure, indicating transcendence, yet he is ultimately engulfed by the dust, which seems evocative of death ("ashes to ashes and dust to dust") and implies that he and the car have shared the same fate. There is an apocalyptic finality to that closing image, as if the order of the tunnel has been subverted and the entire structure must now come down in smoke (which, if the tunnel is all there is of this world, means The End). Pitchfork, who named the video the 8th best of the 1990s, felt that the spectre of death pervaded it all over, observing that the setting recalled the Pont de l'Alma tunnel where Princess Diana had been killed a year prior, and that, "any tunnel is metaphorically a riff on walking toward the light at the end of one's life." (Without going into the ending of Jacob's Ladder, yep, that's a pertinent theme there too.) Is the protagonist's journey a matter of coming to terms with his own mortality, an act that paradoxically makes him empowered? Is it through freeing himself of his lingering baggage, in the form of that parka, that he finds his peace and accepts what is inevitable? Is the video conveying a broader message about the necessity of letting go of pain and regret? Is the protagonist required to endure as many hits as he does in order to attain that super-human level of strength, or is it specifically the act of forcing himself to keep going along his futile path that reaps such self-destructive consequences?
We might think back to the question Lavelle had previously put to the protagonist, which he had no interest in answering: "Where are you going?" The question the protagonist might have put to him, had he so cared, is where Lavelle and his mates were going. Where is there to get to in a world that consists of nothing more than an endless tunnel? The implication is that the motorists share a delusion that they are on their way to something beyond, when in reality they are caught up in the exact same entrapment. The enlightenment the protagonist achieves at the end enables a simple turning of the tables. He stops still, having realised that the journey is in vain, and becomes an onlooker to the world falling to pieces around him.
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