Hare-Brained Analysis Of Rossini's The Barber Of Saville

Hare-brained Analysis
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main… -John Donne, Meditation 17

In 1950 Warner Brothers released the Looney Tune short Rabbit of Saville. Chuck Jones, one of the more pioneering formulators of Bugs Bunny’s persona, directs this parody of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville. Rabbit of Saville is notable for its overlay of “high” and “low” culture, wherein the usual tropes of a Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd routine are framed inside an empty opera set, gags are rhythmically timed by a sped up adaptation of Rossini’s overture, and the characters speak in an operatic style. The campy bricolage in this particular short serves as an innovative extrapolation of Looney
Tunes’ stylistically absurd humor that distinctly flaunts its’ love of imaginative play through its deployment of narrative structure, thematic content, and the notably flexible physical laws. Bugs Bunny’s characteristic trickstering through chaotic disruptions of social narratives reveals aspects of the relationship between the unconscious social identity theories specifically because it is explicitly played off for laughs amongst the wide culture of broadcast television (Freud 163). The ubiquity of Bugs Bunny’s disruption within the ‘tooniverse’ even penetrates the ‘fourth-wall’ to challenge the very notion of the audience’s relationship to its’ entertainment, exhibited in Rabbit of Seville by Bugs’ closing address to the audience after humiliating Elmer Fudd: “…eeeyah, next.”
Clearly the laws of physics in Rabbit of Seville’s universe are not very similar to our own; instead, reality is a subsidiary function to plot. The untethered, fantastical possibilities of Loony Tune shorts are reminiscent of a dreamscape. Although a dream is charged with the esoteric meanings of an individual, while a cartoon short is charged with creating meaning for a cultural audience. Having the plot bound solely to the imagination allows for an even clearer examination of those operating ideologies which fuel Rabbit of Saville because it is allowing for the vicarious fulfilment of desire without the mediation of any ‘sense.’ We may observe, through the course and outcome of events, that the desires being fulfilled in Rabbit of Saville are those of Bugs Bunny. Bugs Bunny, like the Signifyin(g) Monkey, serves as a “vehicle for narration itself” (Gates 417) through enacting the desire to wreck psychic havoc upon an impotent man’s delusional simulation/performance as a masculine hunter. This empowerment fantasy of righteous humiliation must bear the weight of tapping into popular appeal through a cultural critique of unexamined identity. Through analyzing how these desires are enacted we may construe a reflective examination of problematic hegemonic social constructs through humor’s relation to alterity, for “[t]o dream the fantastic is to dream the dream of the Other.” (422)
Rabbit of Saville’s opening sequence frames the ensuing action through a self-aware —paralleling a key aspect of Bugs Bunny’s wile— montage of a crowd anticipating entertainment in an outdoor opera theatre concurrent to an orchestra warming up, which directly mirrors the viewer’s building tension. We now jump in medias res to gunshots flash across a mountain landscape before a desperate Bugs Bunny takes shelter upon the stage that has an audience and an orchestra, but, until now, no performers. From this point onwards Bugs Bunny controls the action. When Elmer Fudd wanders out upon the empty set, the image cuts to the flick of a wrist wielding a carrot which draws open the curtains. The first victim of Bugs Bunny’s reality warping will is the conductor who is briefly puzzled by the premature curtain rise and the confused hunter standing stage left but shrugs and begins to conduct, indicating to the audience that a signal, and not context, is all that matters. Next, Bugs Bunny appears costumed appropriately as a barber and begins to perform his dialog in an operatic style. At this point Bugs Bunny begins the game of simulating a opera around Elmer Fudd. Elmer Fudd, confused, tries to escape but is dragged into a barber’s chair by Bugs Bunny, who now has the upper hand in the situation as this new game of performance requires a flexibility of bodily possibilities which Elmer Fudd does not possess. Bugs Bunny uses his newly gained power over a lost agentless Elmer Fudd to promptly lash him with a straight razor.
Foucault describes the soul as the prison of the body because the identity (soul) socially inscribed on the body represses its own style of self, (30) and in the case of Rabbit of Seville it can be seen, through Elmer Fudd’s inability to engage with Bugs Bunny in any style other than violence or fearful longing, that he is imprisoned in his performance of masculine identity. We can see in Elmer Fudd’s performance of his soul that “…coherence is desired, wished for, idealized, and that this idealization is an effect of corporeal signification.” (Butler 583) He, like Butler describes, desire to be something easily reducible, while Bugs Bunny desires to be free of being, or in other words, trying to free himself to be by, as Butler supposes Sartre would say, actively creating “a style of being,” although these styles are “never fully self-styled, for styles have a history, and those histories condition and limit the possibilities.” (585) But Bugs Bunny’s “style of being” doesn’t exclude drag.
Even when Bugs Bunny is cross dressing he still fulfills the role of Elmer Fudd’s Objet petit a.
Bugs Bunny changes costumes to become Elmer Fudd’s “senorita” in order to deter the inevitably violent back lash from the facial lacerations. Of primary interest is that Elmer Fudd is entirely fooled by Bugs Bunny’s parody of femininity, whose “‘perverse’ desire,” Savoy notes, “to cross-dress, [is] an impersonation from which he derives a pleasure that is always somewhat in excess of the task at hand. (196) The exaggeration enacted by Bugs Bunny in performing the feminine may appeal to Elmer Fudd’s own exaggerations in performing the masculine, but we soon come to realize that Elmer Fudd is just as ineffectual sexually as he is at hunting when he bashfully pines as Bugs Bunny dances around him. Bugs Bunny’s manipulation of Elmer Fudd’s sexual economy works perfectly as Bugs has gained power over Elmer, yet again, through simulation. It is possible that Elmer Fudd is so passive in the presence of the ‘mysterious feminine’ because of his reliance on his cathectic, phallic gun and is terrified by the unknown power at play within ‘the feminine.’ Now we find ourselves at one of Elmer Fudd’s axioms of identity, but, as Dyer makes clear, this identification with and worship of the phallus can only lead to Elmer Fudd’s pathetic posturing because "penises are only little things (even big ones) without much staying power, pretty if you can learn to see them like that, but not magical
or mysterious or powerful in themselves, that is, not objectively full of real power." (qtd in 197) Alternatively, Eric Savoy identifies “…the purpose of cross dressing [in Rabbit of Seville], the most important or consistently deployed strategy of trickstering, is to destabilize, to reinscribe, the site of the phallus, and thereby to demonstrate its arbitrariness, its inadequacy of signification”(204) for Elmer Fudd. Those very fears are realized when Bugs Bunny uses his sexual power to symbolically castrate Elmer Fudd through the tying of his shot gun’s barrels together and then performing a dance with scissors in which Elmer Fudd’s pants are cut loose and his boxers are exposed to the crowd, he blushes. Elmer Fudd’s blush quickly begins to steam when Bugs Bunny, on his way off stage gives the “tell-tail sign [and] flaunt[s] the rabbit tail from under the dress.”(150) Bugs Bunny’s exposure signifies a major disruption of Elmer Fudd’s binary sexual identity because he is “exposed in his masquerade through the rabbit’s own masquerade” (205) and Elmer Fudd is not equipped to handle this. While left previously unaddressed, the significance of Bugs Bunny’s Rabbit-ness becomes strikingly important during this cross dressing as “[In pre-modern cautionary tales] the rabbit was made to signify not only a predatory, insatiably perverse sexuality, but also an uncategorizable slippage between genders.” (192) Further adding to his shame, Elmer Fudd doesn’t realize that Bugs Bunny has compromised his ‘gun’ and attempts to fire it at Bugs Bunny, but only succeeds in rocketing himself back to his ideological operating table: the barber’s chair.
Elmer Fudd’s hollow simulation of a masculine ideal deflects signification away from his absent bodily truth, “for it is as often the case that we are often in the melancholic bind of having lost our own sex in order, paradoxically, to become it… ‘[masculinity]’ is a masquerade, a mask supplementing a failure to become a [man].” (Zizek 591) Elmer Fudd’s aggressive heterosexuality may have roots in a “constitutive foreclosure to homosexuality: it is the foreclosure of the passionate attachment to Sameness (to the parent of the same sex) which has to be sacrificed if the subject is to enter the space of the socio-symbolic Order and acquire an identity in it.” (589) A Freudian foreclosure to “Sameness” would jumpstart a process of misrecognizing bodily identity that is greatly exaggerated in Elmer Fudd for comic effect. So, Bugs Bunny’s own impeccable ability to ‘read’ and manipulate others misrecognition and also navigate his own chaotic being so well indicates that the Rabbit of Saville is playing upon the tension between the id (exaggerated in Bugs Bunny) and the Ego (exaggerated in Elmer Fudd). Elmer Fudd’s misrecognition plays a further role in the enmity between the two as during the process of adapting to a foreclosure upon homosexuality, “in a gesture of reflexive reversal proper, this ‘hate to love’ turns around into ‘love to hate’ –one ‘loves to hate’ those who remind one of the primordially lost objects of love (gays)…” (589) which sheds light on to Elmer Fudd’s particularly virulent reaction to discovering that a male ‘rabbit’ was the object of his sexual desire. Elmer Fudd, in an attempt to prove his own heterosexuality, is compelled to hunt ‘rabbits,’ and now that he has found his violent designs subsumed into lust, is turned by a violent rage, just as Bugs Bunny knew and planned. Again Bugs Bunny has a passive Elmer Fudd with which he may do whatever he pleases, and in this instance he messages his head and then makes a fruit salad upon it. The entire scene is choreographed to Stalling’s breakneck Rossini adaptation and seems to have a surreal nonsensical quality to it, although the sequence is not meaningless slapstick played for yucks because it does highlight another prominent aspect of Bugs Bunny’s behavior: Signifyin(g). While Bugs Bunny plays piano on Elmer Fudd’s head he Signifies upon Elmer through the utilization of his person as an instrument. Bugs Bunny is an incredibly good Signifier because “whereas signification depends for order and coherence on the exclusion of unconscious associations which any given word yields at ay given time, Signification luxuriates in the inclusion of the free play of these associative rhetorical and semantic relations.” (Gates 414) The fruit salad itself is Signifyin(g) on Elmer Fudd’s most open sore, his sexuality. By creating a fruit salad on Elmer Fudd’s head and then showing him in a mirror, Bugs Bunny is giving Elmer Fudd a coded message that his head (consciousness) is fruity (homosexual) and even the salad can be interpreted as a jab at Elmer Fudd’s not so considerable intelligence. Traditionally Signification refers to a “play of doubles at work in the black appropriation of the English-language term that denotes relations of meaning, the Signifying Monkey and his language of Signifin(g) are extraordinary conventions, with Signification standing as the term for black rhetoric, the obscuring of apparent meaning,” (417) and in the case of Bugs Bunny it does emphasize “the obscuring of apparent meaning” and “relations of meaning,” but Bugs Bunny does not use Signification at all in the black tradition. Instead of using Signification in a tradition of black rhetoric, “… the signifying rabbit deflects and defuses the violence of hegemonic masculine culture by manipulating heterosexual male desire; such trickstering requires not only the parodie, performative subversion of gender categories and sign-systems, but also the troubling of the adversary 's gendered ‘identity.’” (Savoy 207) Bugs Bunny’s most brilliant “troubling of the adversary’s gendered ‘identity’” in Rabbit of Saville is in his third and final treatment of Elmer Fudd in the barber’s chair. In Bugs Bunny’s third go at Elmer Fudd, he gives him rudimentary regimes of feminization but mocks Elmer Fudd’s very notion of hyper masculinity by transforming all of these beauty products into absurd industrial versions of the original. The first of such Significations is an application of nail polish done across the entirety of Elmer Fudd’s foot, his shoe cut open for access, with a paint brush. The second Signification is shaving Elmer Fudd’s face with a miniature lawn mower, and Bugs Bunny even needs to grow the hair on Elmer Fudd’s face first. The third Signification is a beautifying face mask, called beauty clay, which Bugs Bunny shapes into a brick like mason and then chisels off Elmer Fudd’s face. The final, and most egregious, treatment which Elmer Fudd undergoes is the application of a Figaro Fertilizer (this in and of itself is another Signification upon The Barber of Saville) which causes Elmer Fudd to grow excited believing that his hair is growing back only to have them, at the last minute, sprout into flowers as Bugs Bunny holds a mirror up to Elmer Fudd’s face. This last episode sets the action in motion to violence once again and instigates a literal arms race (a possible Signification on the emerging global cold war) as Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd chase each other back and forth across the screen with weapons of increasing magnitude.
The escalation in forcefulness only ends when Bugs Bunny, once again, subsumes Elmer Fudd’s violence for him into a gendered encounter.
Bugs Bunny begins by bring Elmer Fudd flowers and he graciously accepts. Next, Bugs Bunny brings Elmer Fudd chocolate and Elmer Fudd is glowing. Then Bugs Bunny arrives with a ring and proposes marriage which Elmer Fudd immediately accepts and changes costume, for the first time, into a wedding gown. Finally after a priest inexplicably appears to marry them, Elmer Fudd fully secured in his new feminized identity and after all of the gender issues and harassments he has undergone throughout this seven minute short, Bugs Bunny drags (possibly Signification) Elmer Fudd to the stage rafters and, explicitly Signifying upon the tradition of the groom carrying the bride across the threshold after marriage, makes his intentions clear by dropping the radically changed Elmer Fudd into a large wedding cake, a symbol of Elmer Fudd’s union with Bugs Bunny and security in his new transsexual
identity.
Throughout Rabbit of Seville, Bugs Bunny acts as a paragon of chaos and social disruption. His force derives from the unknowable drives of the Id, which is also present in the process of Signification through play and transgression. In a time period of increasing globalization, Bugs serves as an inspiring ideological force for disorder. Chaotic upheaval is a necessary and rejuvenative force that helps to keep the dialectical mechanism of social functioning continually striving to experiences itself anew. Bugs Bunny’s manipulative simulations of hegemonic order dissimulate chaos, but his dominance in the ‘tooniverse’ and, for that matter, chaotic reign over existence –signified through instances of meta-comedy and breakage of the fourth wall– perform the function of an on-demand Saturnalia for those who are impatient and weary of the hierarchical grind.

Works Cited
Butler, Judith. "From Interiority to Gender Performatives." Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. N.p.: Routledge. 1990. N. pag. Rpt. in Global Literary Theory. Ed. Richard J. Lane. New York: Routledge, 2013. 582-87. Print.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, Trans. Alan Sheridan. N.P.: New York, 1979.
Freud, Sigmund. "The Mechanism of Pleasure and the Psychogenesis of Jokes." Trans. James Strachey. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. By Freud. Trans. James Strachey. N.p.: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989. 143-70. Print.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "The Signifying Monkey and the Language of Signifyin(g)." The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. N.p.: Oxford University Press, 1988. N. pag. Rpt. in Global Literary Theory. Ed. Richard J. Lane. New York: Routledge, 2013. 410-23. Print.
Jones, Charles M., dir. Rabbit of Seville. Screenplay by Michael Maltese. Perf. Mel Blanc and Arthur Q. Bryan. Composed by Carl Stalling. Warner Bros. Cartoon, 1950. Film.
Savoy, Eric. "The Signifying Rabbit." Narrative 3.2 (1995): 188-209. Print.
Zizek, Slavoj. "The Melancholic Double Bind." Global Literary Theory. Ed. Richard J. Lane. New York: Routledge, 2013. 589-91. Print.