Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Bunny Lake Is Missing
1965 · Otto Preminger · Bunny Lake Is Missing on Sightlines
Preminger puts Ann Lake in a room full of broken dolls.
A doll hospital: shelves of maimed and dismembered toys waiting to be mended, limbs off, faces gone. The camera doesn't push in on her to tell us how to feel. It stays wide, and holds, and lets her stand among the wreckage of manufactured children while she hunts for proof of a real one. It's the film's most resonant image and its frankest confession of method. Everywhere Ann goes she finds a substitute for her daughter, and every substitute is damaged or missing a part.
The story states flatly. An American woman, newly arrived in London, reports her four-year-old missing from a nursery school, and no one can confirm the child was ever there. The register shows no enrollment. The flat holds no toys. The people who might have seen Bunny have gone away or can't remember. The question isn't who took her. It's whether there was a her to take.
Deleuze is useful here for a reason that has nothing to do with prestige: he has exact names for what this film removes. His term for ordinary narrative cinema is the movement-image. Someone perceives a situation and acts to change it; the action resolves it; the cutting serves that chain. It's a contract, and nearly every thriller honors it. Bunny Lake voids it early. Ann perceives an absence, and you cannot act on an absence. Deleuze called this the crisis of the action-image: characters who can no longer respond adequately to what they see. He located it in postwar Europe, in people adrift in situations too vacant to be acted on. Preminger finds it inside a functioning London police procedural, which is stranger, because the procedure keeps running. Superintendent Newhouse keeps asking his courteous questions. There is simply nothing at the end of them.
Detective films, in Deleuze's scheme, use the small form: you don't begin with the big situation, you begin with clues and work back toward a situation still hidden. He calls such a clue an index, and the sharpest variety the index of lack, a clue that signifies by what isn't in it. A film normally gets one, the button missing from a coat. Preminger builds a feature out of them. Empty register, toyless flat, a nursery school with only the cook rattling around an empty building. Absence of evidence as the evidence: that shouldn't be able to power ninety minutes, and it does.
Each index is also doubled, which Deleuze has a name for too, the index of equivocity: one act that could belong to two different situations. Carol Lynley's performance is engineered for exactly that, sympathetic enough to hold your belief and unstable enough to license doubt, so the same footage serves both stories without adjustment.
None of it would hold without the camera, and the camera is Preminger's specific invention here. Denys Coop, who had shot the kitchen-sink realism of This Sporting Life and Billy Liar, works in long mobile takes that follow people through rooms, corridors and stairwells rather than cutting in to dramatize a reaction. Deleuze's word for an image in which we watch someone watching, and feel the camera's own perception as a second frame, is the dicisign. Here that second perception is a policeman's. The camera regards Ann as coolly as the investigation does and declines to underline whether she's reliable.
Bazin built an ethics on this kind of shooting: the long take and staging in depth preserve the ambiguity of the real and leave the judging to us, instead of a montage that thinks on our behalf. Preminger was one of his exhibits, and Laura had already proved he could run an investigation around an absent, possibly unreal woman without editorializing. Bunny Lake takes that ethic and turns it cold. The neutrality Bazin admired as respect for the world becomes a machine for doubting a woman. Nobody in the film is cruel to Ann. The style is.
The rooms cooperate. Shooting anamorphic widescreen in black and white in 1965 was a choice against the grain, since the wide frame by then belonged to colour spectacle, and it gives Preminger interiors too large and too empty for the people inside them. Deleuze calls such a space an any-space-whatever: a space that has stopped being a setting for action and become a pure feeling, usually emptiness. These rooms aren't where the search happens. They're what the search keeps finding. Meanwhile the Zombies play on a pub television, swinging London carrying on cheerfully a few feet from a woman losing her child and possibly her mind.
Then there's the other film underneath. Deleuze's impulse-image describes a world of raw drives beneath the social surface, where a concrete milieu turns out to be the skin of an originary world of appetite and degradation, and its signs are fetishes: part-objects torn loose and charged with compulsion. Bunny Lake is thick with them. The dolls. The retired schoolmistress upstairs who collects tape recordings of children's nightmares, childhood filed as sound. The landlord's rooms of masks and riding crops. Childhood distorted, archived and mutilated, ringing the search for one actual child. And Keir Dullea's brother Steven, all smooth protective solicitude, whom the ending recodes from top to bottom into a study of pathological attachment.
Cinema's oldest working assumption is that the image doesn't lie: what you were shown, happened. This film attacks that from the blind side. It never shows you a false image. It shows you nothing, and asks whether nothing counts. For two acts it holds conspiracy and delusion as co-true, which is Deleuze's powers of the false working as a creative principle rather than a gimmick. Then it decides. People have argued about that ending ever since, and the honest way to put it is that the movement-image comes to collect. Preminger opens a hole in a genre picture and finally fills it with a chase.
The debts are visible and worth naming. The Lady Vanishes supplies the engine, a person vanishing while officials insist she never existed. Gaslight supplies the mechanics, a woman's confidence in her own perception eroded on purpose. So Long at the Fair had already emptied a hotel of every trace of a missing sibling. Les Diaboliques showed how far monochrome dread stretches when you withhold confirmation to the last reel. Vertigo paired Saul Bass titles with a contested identity, and Bass is on this one too. What Preminger seeded is a form still running: the post-Psycho monochrome psychological thriller, and more durably the did-she-imagine-it picture, every later film that makes a woman's credibility the mystery rather than the crime.
Watch it again for what the camera refuses. Count the moments where an ordinary thriller would cut to Ann's face for reassurance and this one stays where it is, at the far end of the room, waiting. The question the film leaves open isn't whether Bunny exists. It's why a style invented to be fair turns out to be the most frightening thing in the building.
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — Ann reports the child missing and every channel of response — police, school register, the flat — returns nothing she can act on; the procedural keeps running (Newhouse's courteous questioning) with no situation available to change.
- index-of-lack — The nursery school register with no enrollment, the flat with no toys, witnesses vanished or forgetful: the film stages 'an investigation in which the absence of evidence is the evidence.'
- index-of-equivocity — Carol Lynley's performance is calibrated to be 'sympathetic enough to hold our belief yet unstable enough to license doubt' — the same behaviour reads coherently into two incompatible situations, victim of a scheme or delusional mother.
- dicisign — Denys Coop's mobile, patient camera in sustained takes that 'watch Ann as coolly as the police do, refusing to underline whether she is reliable' — we perceive a perceiver, with the camera's own investigative perception felt as a second frame.
- any-space-whatever (emptiness) — Anamorphic widescreen monochrome composed to isolate Ann in 'large, under-populated interiors' — the nursery school with only the cook alone in the empty building, deep sparsely furnished rooms that withhold evidence of the child.
- fetish (part-object) — The doll hospital full of maimed and dismembered toys; the retired schoolmistress's hobby archive of tape-recorded children's nightmares; the landlord's rooms cluttered with masks and riding crops.
- originary world — The derived milieu of procedural London — police, nursery school, rented flat — is revealed as the surface of a savage world of childhood 'distorted, archived, and mutilated,' resolving into the film's study of pathological attachment in Steven.
- powers of the false — For most of its length the film sustains conspiracy and delusion as mutually exclusive yet co-true readings, withholding confirmation of its own premise — then abandons the undecidability for a classical reveal, the gamble critics still debate.