Rabbit Hole & The Choices We Make

The interesting thing about Rabbit Hole is not that it's about a couple struggling with the death of a child, it's the philosophy behind the movie. It's the way that the people mirror our own society and they may or may not make the same choices that we do in similar situations.

An interesting aspect of the human condition is our ability to lie to ourselves. Another interesting aspect is our ability to rationalize our circumstances. One scene that particularly stands out in Rabbit Hole is a scene where Nicole Kidman's character is attending a support group for parents who have lost a child. Nicole listens to one parent rationalize her daughter's death by saying that God needed another angel so he took their daughter. I assume this couple were telling themselves this were Christians, as Kidman's character seems to agree, and that this belief has no justification, biblical or otherwise. It's just a lie to tell themselves to deal with the pain and suffering of losing a child. Really, there might not be any good answers for such a loss, but do we need to lie to ourselves?

This scene is contrasted to another scene later on when Kidman's character makes the same mistake on a different matter. Having rejected the conventional ways to deal with grief like God and therapy, her character turns to another belief just as illogical and requires just as much faith to believe. In a conversation with the boy who accidentally killed her child, she is turned on to the idea of alternate universes and alternate realities where she exists in one of these universes and she's happy. Instead of grieving with the person responsible for the death of her child, she imagines herself making pancakes. Kidman's character makes the same mistake the christian couple makes.

But, isn't this what we do in our own lives? Do we justify certain things? Do we ignore potential contradictions? Do we rationalize?

Here's another potential rationalization in Rabbit Hole. With marriage between Kidman and Eckhart unraveling during the movie, Each partner turns to another person to meet certain needs. Kidman turns the young man responsible for the death for communication and understanding where she gets her emotional needs met. And Eckhart turns to Sandra Oh's character for a potential affair. Although Eckhart stops short of physically cheating, he has already emotionally cheated, even lying to his wife about the pot and the group meetings. Kidman's character is just a guilty of cheating displaying all the signs, waiting till her husband leaves to go and see the person she's emotionally cheating with. She sneaks around meeting in secluded public places (park benches) and fails to tell her husband about any of this.

I have to give these characters their due recognition for not following through with their deceptions. When they come to terms with how they are deceiving themselves, they realize their marriage is worth saving.

With the ending, can I make a case that they are continuing to lie to themselves by how they deal with the future? Well, I'm not going to make that case, because theres a difference between lying to yourself and just plan not knowing the truth.