Hare-Brained Analysis Of Rossini's The Barber Of Saville

Hare-brained Analysis
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main… -John Donne, Meditation 17

In 1950 Warner Brothers released the Looney Tune short Rabbit of Saville. Chuck Jones, one of the more pioneering formulators of Bugs Bunny’s persona, directs this parody of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville. Rabbit of Saville is notable for its overlay of “high” and “low” culture, wherein the usual tropes of a Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd routine are framed inside an empty opera set, gags are rhythmically timed by a sped up adaptation of Rossini’s overture, and the characters speak in an operatic style. The campy bricolage in this particular short serves as an innovative extrapolation of Looney
Bugs Bunny changes costumes to become Elmer Fudd’s “senorita” in order to deter the inevitably violent back lash from the facial lacerations. Of primary interest is that Elmer Fudd is entirely fooled by Bugs Bunny’s parody of femininity, whose “‘perverse’ desire,” Savoy notes, “to cross-dress, [is] an impersonation from which he derives a pleasure that is always somewhat in excess of the task at hand. (196) The exaggeration enacted by Bugs Bunny in performing the feminine may appeal to Elmer Fudd’s own exaggerations in performing the masculine, but we soon come to realize that Elmer Fudd is just as ineffectual sexually as he is at hunting when he bashfully pines as Bugs Bunny dances around him. Bugs Bunny’s manipulation of Elmer Fudd’s sexual economy works perfectly as Bugs has gained power over Elmer, yet again, through simulation. It is possible that Elmer Fudd is so passive in the presence of the ‘mysterious feminine’ because of his reliance on his cathectic, phallic gun and is terrified by the unknown power at play within ‘the feminine.’ Now we find ourselves at one of Elmer Fudd’s axioms of identity, but, as Dyer makes clear, this identification with and worship of the phallus can only lead to Elmer Fudd’s pathetic posturing because "penises are only little things (even big ones) without much staying power, pretty if you can learn to see them like that, but not magical
Bugs Bunny begins by bring Elmer Fudd flowers and he graciously accepts. Next, Bugs Bunny brings Elmer Fudd chocolate and Elmer Fudd is glowing. Then Bugs Bunny arrives with a ring and proposes marriage which Elmer Fudd immediately accepts and changes costume, for the first time, into a wedding gown. Finally after a priest inexplicably appears to marry them, Elmer Fudd fully secured in his new feminized identity and after all of the gender issues and harassments he has undergone throughout this seven minute short, Bugs Bunny drags (possibly Signification) Elmer Fudd to the stage rafters and, explicitly Signifying upon the tradition of the groom carrying the bride across the threshold after marriage, makes his intentions clear by dropping the radically changed Elmer Fudd into a large wedding cake, a symbol of Elmer Fudd’s union with Bugs Bunny and security in his new transsexual