IT'S GOOD, ACTUALLY / Beyond the Blowjob: Re-examining The Brown Bunny / Eliott Klug
A long time ago, in post-9/11 America, a work-in-progress cut of Buffalo ‘66 director Vincent Gallo’s film The Brown Bunny was screened for an audience of critics and festival goers at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival. The screening was infamous for its provocation of legendary film critic Roger Ebert, who served as chief spokesman for the relentless torrent of heckles and jeers throughout the film’s screening at Cannes. This led to several back and forth jabs between Ebert and Gallo in the press, with Ebert declaring The Brown Bunny “the worst film in the history of the festival” and Gallo declaring Ebert’s colon cursed with cancer. Much of the press’ chagrin stemmed from a disdain for Gallo’s image as a braggadocious auteur, credited as the film’s director, writer, lead actor, editor, producer, and cinematographer. It’s rather notorious for featuring an unsimulated oral sex scene between Gallo and co-star Chloë Sevigny, seen by many as yet another extension of his seemingly limitless ego.
Ebert would go on to praise the final cut of the film following a screening at the Toronto Film Festival later that same year, claiming 26 minutes were chopped off the unfinished Cannes cut, completely transforming it in the process. Gallo would later dispute this, stating that due to the film being incomplete during the submission process, it was submitted to the festival with an arbitrarily declared runtime that did not accurately reflect the length of his work in progress. He stated the film had only been trimmed by about 8 minutes: “If you didn’t like the unfinished film at Cannes, you didn’t like the finished film, and vice versa.” Due to the film’s sexual content, which was not removed or altered following its debut at Cannes, it was never submitted for a rating from the MPAA. As such, the film was given an extremely limited theatrical release.
Almost nothing written about The Brown Bunny is ever about The Brown Bunny as a work unto itself, but instead an attack on Gallo’s character writ large, given his immense creative control over the film. He’s kind of an asshole, frankly. An asshole with a lot of extremely conservative opinions, one who’s more than a little obsessed with himself and his own legacy. He is, to put it lightly, not shy about making himself heard. He is also an exceptionally talented filmmaker, one willing to show intense emotional vulnerability in his work, but he’s not an easy man to defend. He is, after all, a man who sells his own sperm on his personal website. When someone puts so much of themself into a film, it’s easy to assume that film embodies the ideology and values of its creator. This is, to a degree, true. Like Clint Eastwood before him, the beauty of a conservative creative like Gallo is his immense skill in interrogating the flaws inherent to his beliefs.
The Brown Bunny follows motorcycle racer Bud Clay (Gallo) on a journey from New Hampshire to California to participate in a motorcycle race. The road trip format serves as a paper-thin framing device for a series of vignettes concerning the intimate pain and loneliness one can feel as a man. The film was shot on 16mm stock with minimal color treatment, blown up to 35mm in post to produce a distinctly grainy, naturalistic look.
Over the course of the film Bud has fleeting sexual relations with multiple women named after flowers. He’s interested in one flower in particular, Daisy (Sevigny), a woman who seems to occupy a special place in his past. He meets Daisy’s parents, who don’t remember him, and visits a place she used to live, leaving a note on the front door. On three separate occasions, he very briefly interacts with a woman he’s just met. He participates in a small activity with her, before engaging in emotionless sexual contact. After this, he abruptly leaves. It’s clear that Bud is capable of seducing these women, he may even take some joy in doing so, but he quickly moves on due to a lack of meaningful connection. Gallo does an exceptional job conveying his character’s emotional state through hesitant body language and shrill, raspy vocal tones. His performance does a lot of heavy lifting reinforcing the film’s thesis, effortlessly portraying a tortured soul barely connected to the world around him.
At around the halfway mark, Bud stops his van in 100°F weather to ride his motorcycle out on Utah’s Bonneville Speedway salt flats. As he rides out further into the flats, he disappears into refracted waves of heat. It’s an incredibly moving moment, wordlessly conveying Bud’s emotional state as a broken man, unable to verbalize his pain, looking to disappear into nothing. Some critics rightfully derided the original, unfinished version of this scene from the Cannes cut where, rather than disappear, the shot lingers until Gallo reemerges from the ether and heads back toward the camera, completely destroying the intended impact. Most issues taken with the Cannes cut specifically are like this, with the film being described as tedious, overindulgent, and boring due to the presence of a few scenes that were yet to be cut apart for the final release.
Even after these issues were corrected, a common criticism of the finished film was the supposed pointlessness of the content before the infamous blowjob scene. Ebert’s original review even went as far to say the film would’ve been vastly improved by the removal of everything but the blowjob scene. In a piece titled “Shallow Gallo”, J.R. Jones of the Chicago Reader opined that only in the last third does the film begin to tell a story, before referring to that story as an unconventional porno.
Gallo had some choice words for the plethora of contemporary critics who derided the two thirds before the blowjob. Writing in an open letter for American Man in 2018, he told the story of the only family vacation he ever went on, a trip from Buffalo, New York up to Canada when he was five years old. He writes vividly of his memories of the trip, specifically of his impatience to arrive at his destination, viewing the journey there as a tedious interlude. He then recounts a trip to California he undertook as a young adult, describing it as a transformative experience full of excitement stemming from subtle details throughout that left a great impression on him as a person. He then delivers the killing blow, “The critics who say nothing happens in The Brown Bunny while my character drives across the country, those critics have the intellect of children. Children need to be constantly entertained and amused.”
I’m inclined to agree with Gallo’s characterization. The film’s first two thirds, and the numerous small character moments held within, do a great deal to flesh out who Bud is as a person, and how he processes the world around him. The vaguely picaresque narrative that takes up the majority of the film’s runtime does not do so simply to fill space; it is essential to understanding its narrative climax.
The film’s touching final act begins with Bud checking into a Los Angeles hotel, in which Daisy suddenly appears. She goes to the bathroom to smoke crack, twice, and suggests she and Bud go out for a drink, which Bud refuses, stating he no longer drinks after what happened the last time they saw each other. They briefly argue over Daisy’s proclivity for kissing other men, something that evidently makes Bud feel inadequate, before she begins to undress and perform oral sex on him. As she does, Bud asks her, repeatedly, if she likes sucking his cock, and if she ever liked sucking cocks other than his. He pleads with her not to fuck anyone else, calling her a whore, begging her to promise. He tells her he doesn’t love her anymore, while she tells him she still does and she’s sorry. Bud asks why she was smoking and drinking while pregnant and talking to strange men at a party. Flashbacks are then superimposed over footage of the blowjob, as she says those men raped her and Bud tells her he was paralyzed by fear. He says he didn’t know what to do, so he left the party, something he feels considerably guilty for doing. When he came back, an ambulance was present at the scene. Daisy, still sucking Bud off, tells him she died. She died choking on her own vomit, and their baby died with her. All Bud can manage to muster through his tears is, “no.” When the flashback ends, Daisy is gone. She was never there to begin with.
For as much as Ebert managed to miss the point the first time around, he did offer measured praise of this scene, white knighting Sevigny and declaring her to be above the film, just as he did with Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet, another film he initially bungled his interpretation of. Ebert got a lot of things wrong over the course of his career, especially when it came to the exploitation of feminine sexuality. This time, however, he gave himself a chance to correct course.
In his long-winded backtrack of a re-review, Ebert opined, “Gallo takes the materials of pornography and repurposes them into a scene about control and need, fantasy and perhaps even madness.” I think that’s a great summation of the scene’s power, made all the more potent by the now firmly contextualized moments of longing leading up to it. Unable to cope with his grief, Bud keeps it close to his chest, attempting to suppress it through the emotional manipulation of other women in the hopes of gaining some semblance of control, bailing as soon as it seems like there might be attachment. When we finally get to the root of his pain, all he can do is lash out in misogynistic anger that lays bare his inability to make peace with what happened.
Gallo finds that very real, very intimate pain impossible to properly verbalize. The Brown Bunny’s final scene depicts Bud driving away in contemplative silence. There’s no need for him to say anything, it’s not something he’s capable of expressing. The essence of film is to capture something beyond words, something that can only be expressed in a tightly controlled visual medium. This is something the film’s rainy, wistful road shots, awkward interactions, and climactic emotional breakdown all capture beautifully. No closure is reached, no grand conclusion, just the resolution of our look into one man’s expression of pain, alone with his own thoughts and closed off from the world around him. That critics mistook the extreme vulnerability required to make a film like this as an act of narcissistic wish fulfilment is beyond childish. Gallo, a man currently selling t-shirts emblazoned with such wonderful phrases as “Whites freed the blacks” and “Fuck Black Lives Matter”, is beyond redemption, but his film isn’t. It is a heartbreaking depiction of the private pain a man can feel in a society that has taught him to suppress it, and how irreconcilable he can be as a result.
The Brown Bunny is a pitch perfect elegy of one man’s incredibly flawed, conservative worldview. If you can view the film on its own terms, it’s soul crushing, nothing short of a masterpiece. It’s criminal that critics couldn’t look past its creator or its unconventional storytelling structure to see it for what it truly is. I first watched the film with some friends. Most of them were too disappointed it wasn’t a repeat of Buffalo ‘66, too impatient to get to Sevigny giving Prince Vince some sloppy toppy, for the film’s unique pace and narrative structure to have its intended impact. Do not make this mistake. It’s its own film, and one more than deserving of your time.
Eliott Klug is a freelance writer and aspiring screenwriter from Vancouver, WA. They have no regrets.