One might assume that the girl dressed in the costume of a Playboy Bunny, and misplaced in a countryside setting is a ubiquitous Bunny Girl, finding her way back to nature.
Yet with overly large ears, this is no Bunny Girl but an errant Hare Girl setting a completely new and transgressive reading of this iconic image. For Hare Girl is direct and playful, aggressive and vulnerable. She faces the camera and silently mouths words of desire and rejection, before finally being knocked down while crossing the road. The insistency of her direct address to the camera suggests that the film viewer is the object of this mute desire; and Hare Girl's violent end implies the devastation that can be caused when her desire not reciprocated.
This one minute film introduces the theme of love in Miles' work and establishes the re-occurring image and mutable character of Hare Girl, who is present in some shape or form in both I Love You and Damsel Jam. This image/cipher can be read as an incarnation of Miles' presence within her films. Hare Girl acts as a guide, confident and mischievous sprite who remains outside the films' dominant narratives. She provides a conduit for the 'forgotten material' in need of articulation or visualization; fragmented and contradictory material that represents the memory of past desires and events, and is both seductive and terrifying. Simultaneously omnipresent and fleeting, she is clearly identified as Hare Girl in films such as Damsel Jam, whereas in A Bunny Girls Tale, and 2001: A Family Odyssey, she shifts to become decidedly Bunny. Her mutable character allows a multiplicity of readings and meanings, and her fleeting appearance at the home of an older Bunny Girl at the end of the film, for example, amplifies the 'difference' of the iconic image of femininity then and now.
