In Defence of ‘The Brown Bunny’
A Tribute to Vincent Gallo’s Universally Reviled Masterpiece
Everyone has that one universally panned movie they will defend to the bitter end, regardless of the smear and contempt thrown their way. Even as a sea of criticism and slander threaten to drown it, we summon the courage to dive in and search for the spark of heart hidden within.
Vincent Gallo’s 2003 film The Brown Bunny is my movie.
Released in 2003, The Brown Bunny is an experimental road trip film written, directed and starring Vincent Gallo, who had recently entered the spotlight with his previous work Buffalo 66, a favourite amongst cinephiles and film buffs alike.
In contrast to the positive reviews of the latter, however, The Brown Bunny was met with an overwhelmingly negative reception upon its premiere at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, marked by walkouts and scornful jeering from the pitiful few who remained seated. Film critic Roger Ebert famously called it the worst film in the history of Cannes, which sparked a feud between him and Gallo, with such highlights as Gallo hexing Ebert’s colon out of spite and Ebert’s humorous response to comments about his weight: “It is true that I am fat, but one day I will be thin, and [Vincent Gallo] will still be the director of The Brown Bunny.” (When he did come around to giving the film’s cinematic cut a chance, he had indeed lost 86 pounds, and Vincent Gallo was indeed still the director of The Brown Bunny.)
Critics called it boring, pretentious, unfinished and, regarding its infamous third act, borderline pornographic and sleazy. Most people would mark The Brown Bunny as the end of Gallo’s career, as a final little whimper from a promising, up-and-coming director. But does the film actually deserve the dogpiling it received?
In this little tribute, I’d like to step forward to explore what sets Gallo’s film apart and to reveal the heart that so many have overlooked.
(SPOILERS AHEAD!)
All Is (Not) Right With The World
The story follows Bud Clay, a motorcycle racer played by Vincent Gallo himself, as he embarks on a journey from New Hampshire to California for his next race, all the while being haunted by the memories of his former lover, Daisy, played by Chloë Sevigny. Throughout this road trip across humble sights of Americana and expansive highways, he meets several women, including Daisy’s dementia-ridden mother, a gas station clerk named Violet (who he abandons after inviting to join him), a distressed woman named Lily at a rest stop, and a prostitute named Rose who he eats lunch with.
This relatively unremarkable description should, hopefully, paint a basic picture of what kind of movie The Brown Bunny is, and you’re likely not missing much. The film is very quiet and very, very slow, and this was one of its most prominent critiques at the Cannes premiere. From extended motorcycle sequences to over-the-shoulder shots of Clay staring down an endless stretch of road, people often interpret this as a pretentious attempt at creating deep cinematography or an awful way to pad the runtime.
However, I believe critics tend to overlook one aspect of the film that helps to underline its ethos: Gallo’s excellent eye for space and the subject.
The Brown Bunny uses a variety of shots to evoke a sense of alienation among the characters. Over-the-shoulder shots are particularly striking, utilised across many dialogue scenes, such as Bud’s initial encounter with Violet. This ensures that while one speaker’s presence is apparent, the other is reduced to a blurry smear. It almost makes us feel like we are standing in between these people, as if these conversations are themselves fragmented, introducing this overbearing, anxious presence that notches itself in between the characters.
Gallo also fancies tracking shots, first appearing in Bud’s opening race. These tracking shots are used in extended sequences, hyper-fixed on Bud’s racing and rushing past everything in the environment. This, alongside its shaky twitching, helps to create an almost awkward take on racing, where the other racers seem to bleed in and out of reality, disappearing and reappearing out of our awareness. The results of the race are, to the audience, difficult to determine — we cannot tell which racers have even crossed the finish line because we are not so much focusing on the race as we are focusing on Bud. We feel alienated from the race outside, relaying the same feeling of alienation Bud feels with the world around him.
Around the halfway mark of the film, Gallo treats us with the most aesthetic scene in the film: Bud arrives at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah and rides on his motorcycle. We are graced with a breathtaking tableau where Bud glides across the salt flats beneath a vast, cloudless azure sky, a canvas of heavenly serenity. Like a celestial being, he gradually fades into the horizon, watching as the faint rumble of his engine is slowly overtaken by the profound hush of silence enveloping the expanse. We do not know what he feels in the moment, but the landscape evokes an air of absolute peace. Bud rides on and on until he disappears into the distance, from our view and from this world, and that’s all he could ever ask for.
Anyone who has read my blog before knows that I am a sucker for expansive stretches of empty space, and The Brown Bunny absolutely delivers, with an abundance of transitional spaces, such as highways and roads, as well as residential areas covered in the fingerprints of lives and people that are never seen nor heard. The film features many, many scenes of Clay driving, with nothing but a haunting soundtrack, including evocative tracks such as Come Wander with Me, sparing us from the torturous silence of a man overcome with loneliness. These long, meditative stretches of time offer a glimpse into Bud’s inner world — a place where motion exists, but human connection remains painfully absent.
In this world, Bud is merely an observer, where reality lies outside of his windshield. As Bud approaches traffic or watches people cross the street, Bud and the camera remain inside of the van, detached from the world at large. Even when Bud manages to find some sort of comfort in other people, such as the women he encounters on his trip, he has to quickly retreat to the solitary sanctuary of his vehicle.
These quiet scenes make one thing undeniably clear: Bud Clay is a deeply lonely man. He drifts through life, all the while feeling out of rhythm in a dynamic world, so much so that he can barely feel in touch with another human being, let alone any sense of belonging. His only solace, his only means of enduring this painful existence, is the open road, standing as a metaphor for his own emotional isolation — always moving from one place to another but never finding a place that feels like home.
What makes The Brown Bunny so powerful is its ability to use the mundane to reveal something deeper about Bud. We never needed a scene where Bud delivers a monologue on his loneliness, or sings a song about wishing for love, all we ever needed to understand his state was the oppressive silence and emptiness that governs every scene, as he driving across states and sits down to eat. Gallo’s directing really sells the feeling that, even when Bud is surrounded by other life, loneliness haunts every second of the film.
Daisy, Daisy, Give Me Your Answer Do
This analysis would not be complete without discussing the controversial final act. These last thirty minutes cement this film’s infamous place in cinematic history, and what will make up a chunk of this article.
As Bud drives up to Daisy’s home, he leaves a note inviting her to his hotel room. When she eventually meets him, Bud is silent and holding back his sadness as Daisy reminisces on their past together. She then performs fellatio on Bud (completely uncensored with terribly uncomfortable close-up shots and moaning from Gallo). Upon finishing, he begins to cry and chastises her, calling her a whore and calling back to a party they went to where several men assaulted her; she chastises Bud in turn for not helping her.
Then, a bombshell is dropped: we are told that at that very same party, mere moments later, Daisy passed away. A subsequent shot reveals Bud lying on his bed completely alone.
Those who defend this movie, all five of them, often use this as a defence for why the film is worth a watch. To most of us, the twist is absolutely unexpected, after all, and to their credit, it certainly recontextualises so much and puts many of the past events into perspective. What many of them miss, I feel, is that Gallo makes a devastating discovery on the nature of love and loss.
Bud spends the entire road trip haunted by the memory of his lover, this much is already clear; for instance, some of you may have noticed that, like Daisy, all of the women he encounters on his journey have the names of flowers (Violet, Lily, Rose). This final scene, where we hear Daisy’s voice and see her from head-to-toe clearly for the first time, is set entirely in the present. She doesn’t transport him back in time through spiritual means or to a place from a distant memory; she confronts him in the hotel room — in the present moment.
I hope you don’t mind if I discuss some philosophy, but please hear me out.
I believe, without uncertainty, that we are all familiar with Alfred Tennyson’s famous quote from his poem In Memoriam. However, I believe many of us completely misunderstand it, and with it, we misunderstand the very idea of love itself.
I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
’Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
Many people interpret this to mean that the importance of love lies in experience—knowing how it feels to hold hands, kiss, have sex, and generally experience the ecstasy of having someone. This, however, reduces love to a single state, an emotion, or perhaps an attachment—in other words, a gross distortion of what love truly is. We do not love for the sake of recognising what love is but rather to be recognised ourselves.
Recognition is, at its core, a mirror we use to see ourselves through others, and is how we understand who we are. We, ultimately, desire to be recognised so that we can feel concrete in our own identity, in the same way we look at a mirror to reassure ourselves that we look the same as ever. Yet, desire continues to persevere, and its phantom haunts us; one desire hops to another — to be respected for your work ethic, admired for your looks, seen as talented and applauded for your feats.
How do we subvert and escape this endless labyrinth of sorrow? By desiring desire itself.
Strangers passing in the street
By chance, two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me.- ‘Echoes’ by Pink Floyd (1971)
Love, which I refer to in its many forms, between human beings is a mutual commitment — an utter surrender to another, almost as if you are one and the same. It is the love of another that gives us self-esteem, makes us feel welcome in a community, validates and structures entire conceptions of our lives, and inspires us to become better people. Every waking moment, we strive for free and mutual love and to see one another as an object of desire — to be worthy of affection and praise. In essence, as you see one as a human, you humanise yourself in turn.
The Brown Bunny delves into a poignant question: What happens to our reality when someone we cherish is no longer present? We witness this reality as we observe Bud’s racing from a distance, experiencing his awkwardness in conversations with women he cannot connect with, and as he passes individuals and towns with rich lives and histories that remain forever hidden. Reality seems to become muddled, even confusing.
When people leave us, whether they may have been our friends, family or lovers, it feels almost as if our entire lives have ended, and we feel like a husk of ourselves. To paraphrase Dostoevsky, we feel only the desire to sit underneath a house on the verge of collapse, closing our eyes and waiting for whatever will happen. Either someone will pull us away and embrace us, or the house will give, and we shall cease to be.
The revelation that Daisy is merely a spectre plaguing Bud’s mind is, therefore, much more than a cheap tug at our heartstrings or a superficial attempt to win awards; the twist is a disclosure of the nature of our past loves — they linger in our present because they have helped structure it. She exists as a ghost, her influence felt in the names of others, in the places he traverses, and in the silence that descends when sadness envelops him, but her presence remains unseen.
The end of the film, after the final reveal, is unremarkable: Bud continues to drive and cries in his van. It’s a rinse-and-repeat of what we have seen a dozen times, but therein lies an uncomfortable truth: your past loves will never truly disappear, even after reckoning with the fact. They will continue to persist no matter what, for they have helped mould you into who you are today. You are a mosaic of all you have ever loved and all who have ever loved you.
Is this a depressing message? Potentially, if you are willing to take it that way. Personally, I do not believe Bud will be miserable forever and never get over Daisy, but I think I have indulged in enough philosophy for this piece. Perhaps I will explore this idea deeper another time, as any possible “solution” to this dilemma goes beyond this film.
As one final point, there are two versions of the film, with many critics decrying the initial cut for feeling incomplete, as the extended shots of silence were far longer and were cut down in the cinematic releases, and much debate has been had regarding whether or not these edits had any significant effect on the final product. Still, though it may not have been intended to be difficult to tolerate, this feeling of incompletion is only further vindicated as we reach the end of the film. With its hauntingly sombre soundtrack, quiet scenic shots and timid dialogue, the movie creates this solemn feeling of absence that many of us, even its critics, yearn to fill, like a life without that someone we love. Yet, there is something beautiful about the very fact we notice that hole is there.
People may come and go, and they may leave craters in our hearts for a moment, but there is solace in the fact that we can still feel them when they are gone and that they mean so much to us even when our feelings for them pass.
’Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.
C’est Fini
The Brown Bunny is not a movie that pretends to be something it is not. It does not pretend to be cool, reassuring, or incredibly complex. It seeks only to portray the loss of another in its most naked form, without glamour or spectacle. It might not be perfect, and it is understandable why many do not like it, but neither is love.
Gallo invites you on his very own road trip—a trip through a world without loved ones to travel with and to live in a world that you feel you cannot find yourself in. It is a poignant and beautiful tale of love and heartbreak, and why we should cherish those with whom we have formed these bonds, even if they are no longer with us for one reason or another.
As controversial as Vincent Gallo is (and he certainly is a controversial fellow), I absolutely do not believe that The Brown Bunny, even with all its flaws, deserved the slander it received or should have warranted Gallo's downfall, especially in a world where critical reception can mean life or death. God knows what Gallo could be doing today had the film succeeded, though I think it’s almost poetic how a film about a man’s emptiness upon losing his love led to its director practically losing his career.
The Brown Bunny defies easy categorisation. It is not a pleasant watch; it seeks to confront uncomfortable truths and find meaning within them. It certainly is not a film for everyone, but to those willing to embrace its raw honesty, it offers a singular, haunting experience unlike anything else.
