The Missing Woman

 

    In his film, Bunny Lake is Missing, Otto Preminger prompts us to examine our conventional expectations about hetero-normative relationships and the role of women in contemporary cinema/society. Released in 1965, and based on Evelyn Piper’s book of the same name, Bunny Lake tells the story of the unmarried Ann Lake whose illegitimate daughter, Bunny, disappears, shortly after their arrival in London. The small family has moved there to live with Ann’s brother Stephen, who the viewer is initially led to believe is her husband.  We watch Ann drop Bunny off at school, but when she goes back in the afternoon to collect her, there is no record that she was ever there.  Preminger takes his viewers to Ann’s new home to find that all of Bunny’s clothes and toys are missing there too! Aporia ensues. Suddenly, the question isn’t where is Bunny, but does she even exist? Rampant paranoia becomes an ontological problem. Tied to a search for the validity of one’s existence, paranoia also becomes primarily a female condition.

    As it turns out, Bunny does exist, and it is through crisis that Ann eventually gains the strength to lead us to that conclusion.  Ultimately, the mother’s hysteria is justified. She is redeemed.  Bunny had been kidnapped by her own uncle whose jealously for his sister’s attention fueled his latent insanity (as latent as his homosexuality) and drove him surreptitiously to plan the murder of his niece (initially set up in a film ambiguously as his daughter). By the time Ann finds him out —and by finding out, she ‘outs him’ — Stephen has completely regressed into the role of a child: he has become the infantilized gay man. As the movie reaches its climax, Ann distracts crazy Stephen from killing Bunny through a series of childhood games until the police arrive on the scene.  She saves her child by acting like a child herself, indulging her brother’s/husband’s psychosis.

    The film makes available a scenario which questions the role of motherhood in Western society, societal rules imposed on women by and through the family structure, and even the very notion of women’s existence defined as a relational contingency. Deeply embedded throughout the whole film is a tangle of commentaries that are almost impossible to decipher.  The combined forces of the implied incestuous relationship between Ann and Stephen, his implicit homosexuality, the alternate absence and presence of Ann’s child, and the infantilization of childless women and homosexual men expose a cacophony of social taboos, prohibitions, non-recognitions of ‘the other,’ and repressions.
    At the end of the film, when Ann is reunited with Bunny, the police superintendent wishes them both a good night, “now that you exist.”  The message is meant for both mother and daughter. Now that the daughter has been recovered, validated, she and her mother are visibly present.  Ann, like Antigone, has been defined through the “power of the mother, one whose sole task…is to produce a son” (Butler, Antigone’s Claim). Without the child, there is no mother, and, without mother, there is no child.

     At the close of the film, it is Ann – the adult woman, the single mother – that was lost and now is found.

Dahlia Schweitzer