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.

Bunny by War Memorial, John Miles. Image courtesy of Sarah Miles.

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…

“You must remember A Bunny Girl’s tail is her most treasured possession,” The Bunny Manual.

“Her head was almost severed,” Detective J MacFadzean.

The film was originally inspired by Bunny Image, Loss of: The Case of Bitsy S by Donald Barthelme,  the master of fragments, in which a woman is fired for loss of bunny image.[1]

Channel 4 wanted a drama documentary. As I gathered material memories of my teenage years in the seventies of interrupted joy and feeling like a failed bunny (symbol of fertility and play) began to insinuate and the fragmentary form developed.[2]

Life and Death
Kathleen, a light in the film, invited us into her home and showed us all her memorabilia while her daughter watched and my son looked a bit bored. Poignant and funny, an independent mother with a glamorous past, fluffing her tail, she told me a lot of stuff off the record…

Kathleen and her tail, John Miles. Image courtesy of Sarah Miles.

The further into the burrow I went the colder it became, until I was with another ex-bunny sharing the past experiences that haunted her, like waking up in hospital laughing with hysterical paralysis after the news of Bunny Eve’s murder. “She had long blonde hair,” she said.

My identification with this was a way of accessing buried parts of myself, and we discussed how extreme acts of violence lead to terrifying blanks and about finding a way to express grief never expressed at the time.

The lead detective on the now cold case agreed to an interview. He told me that since his retirement he had been haunted by this unsolved murder[3]. And then one day I received a hand delivered copy of the closing case report.

It was snowing on a Tuesday afternoon in March 1975. Bunny Eve was no longer an allegorical figure. She was born Eve Elizabeth Stratford on the 28 December 1953. How did someone get away with murder in broad daylight on a residential street? The jury at the inquest gave the verdict: murder by person (persons) unknown.

When what pursues you is internal there is no escape
Ten years later, I’m getting ready for the crime season, on the couch, remote in hand, when I’m contacted by a journalist who has seen A Bunny Girl’s Tale on the net: a degraded copy, wrong temperature, all content and no beauty, no truth, but enough to make me of interest. There has been a major breakthrough in the case.

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

“DNA link in murders of schoolgirl and bunny girl,” reads the headline in the Evening Standard, 25 September 2007.

“Someone out there has kept a dark secret for thirty years.”

“You think the memories are buried.”

We meet, and against my instincts, I let him make a copy of the case report.

Mens Rea
And the next thing, I get a call from the lead detective on the reopened case.

As we sat in my kitchen, I had to resist confessing to all my ‘crimes’. He wanted to know why Detective J. McFadzean had given me this report… it went against all protocol. He thought it might have been self-aggrandisement, as he had also sent me his autobiography, Life of a Policeman.

Maybe. He has since died so we cannot ask him, his death bringing the new detective to my door. But I recognised that it was his gift to me as a woman and a filmmaker – he wanted me to look, to do justice to this girl, to these girls, and in the process, to myself.  To tell stories that examine patriarchy requires agency and cultural power.

Or, in the words of James Ellroy, writer of My Dark Places, “after a while it just has to be about consciousness.”
After three fascinating hours with the DI we parted. I had to promise the report would remain in my possession.

“I hope one day the bunny girl murder will be solved,” Detective J McFadzean.

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

As for the murders, they are under investigation. My treatments are… longing…. ghostly….

One film executive said to me, “I’d give you the money for a script, but the sadist in me says ‘no.’” I left Channel 4, returned home, and watched Cold Case.

[1] Loss of Bunny Image: the case of Bitsy S, Donald Barthelme, 1974 collected in Guilty Pleasures

[2] She goes to pieces; she does not know to whom her hand belongs, or her shoulder; she has lost her ‘I’. Fragmentation has a way of suggesting the repressed. The voice of an unseen presence is trying to put the pieces together and fails, but the failure is the point. See what a world we have been given, the voice says: in pieces, some of them missing, others from the wrong set, and no instructions. Barthelme’s last essay was called Unknowing and this is where I ended not knowing.

[3] Untold tales: As a traumatised teenager, when filling out the form to become a bunny girl, I got stuck when it requested a medical history and the secret of my abortion left me feeling that my tail was soiled.

‘The ghost is the fiction in our relationship to death made concrete,’ Helene Cixous.

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