Sarah Miles, A Bunny Girl’s Tale. image courtesy of the artist.

In her 1998 film, A Bunny Girl’s Tale, Sarah Miles explored the story of the British Playboy Bunny and how the ‘Bunny Girl’ persisted in the collective imagination. The film included references to the 1975 murder of Eve Stratford. Ten years later, the cold case was reopened, and Sarah got a call from a detective…

The serial killer is nowhere and finds the objective correlative of the nowhere land.

Violent intercessions of the unconscious in arresting the conscious self.
The dead will speak, the truth will out.
The serial killer needs to annihilate the other to give relief by projecting all the badness. The act of total destruction only occurs in extreme circumstances, as the need to project unwanted parts necessitates survival.

It is this defence against the death instinct, which has primary envy at its source, that lies at the heart of all perverse activity. And primary envy is always to do with the creative potential of the other. – From Christopher Bollas.

Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep
Mac & Katie Kissoon

Where’s your momma gone
(Where’s your momma gone)
Little baby bird
(Little baby bird)
Where’s your momma gone
(Where’s your momma gone)
Far far away far far awayayay…

REFRAIN
Last night I heard my momma singing this song
Ooh wee chirpy chirpy cheep cheep
Woke up this morning and my momma was gone
Ooh wee chirpy chirpy cheep cheep
Chirpy chirpy cheep cheep chirp

From Nina in Ecstasy, the song chosen by PJ Harvey to perform in the Nightclub scenes.

Polly Jean Harvey as Pocahontas.
The name means Playful mischievous, she was a promoter of peace.

And died at 22 the same age as  Eve.

Polly did one take as Pocahontas but wanted to be a Bunny Girl,
she looked more like a little black hare.

Sarah Miles, A Bunny Girl’s Tale. Image courtesy of the artist.

On serial killers:
Christopher Bollas suggests such individuals seek to induce in others their own experience of an early total traumatic breakdown of trust in the adult world, enacting a revenge against the mother and a defence against the knowledge of the need for love from the other.

Such a person goes on living by transforming others into killed ones.

What cannot be thought about is acted out, which leads me to free association and how murder is incomprehensible and there is an inability to think about it.

The detective referred to this when he described unreliable witnesses and detective blindness.

What is endangered is that, knowing something about the world, the killer sets off a chain reaction and there is a fascination with these crimes because we have all experienced betrayal and trauma.

Perhaps the appropriate form of action against violence today is simply to contemplate to think…. – Slavoj Zizek.

Last but not least, the creative illusory space of pleasure and the feminine in the scene with PJ Harvey singing.

‘In the dark times will there also be singing
Yes in the dark times there will also be singing about
The dark times,’ Bertolt Brecht.

I lay in wait for you sweetheart
To kill me
I watched the carpet grow between my toes
The net lift
I ran from you my ears flapping in the wind
Inside I can hide
Sex sex
Is it safe?
Hungry can’t find the right food
Love I can’t find the right love
Without a body I feel like a country I can’t return to
Lost in dreams dream me kill me love me
It’s a bunny girls tale

(original lyrics for the film)
Copyright Sarah Miles

Sarah Miles is an artist filmmaker and writer based in London.