Rabbit Hole is a meditation on grief. On how even if material abundance is present, even if there is the complete sense of contentment and freedom from the havoc that is wrought by an outside world, it is always hanging on a gently balance. Just as violently abruptly, this balance can become broken. How then, does one readjust?
 
It doesn’t help that the mother of a child who has lost to an accident cannot tolerate a support group that finds rationalization and therapy in their own children’s deaths as part of a grand plan, a grand design, a will of God. She does not believe in a Higher Power, or perhaps does not have a need for one until it’s too late. And by that point she is so empty and dehydrated she has to cope in the only ways she can, which is in avoidance, not confrontation. Not accepting the fact of her son’s death and learning to treat things casually rather than sacramentally as if treating them formerly deteriorates her loving memory of her boy. I will not speak here on whether or not a believer in God simply arrives at this predestination – if this is even a predestination at all. But, they certifiably may reach an enjoyment in life on a much shorter circuit than someone who plausibly can be suffering in inescapable misery for the rest of their lives.
 
Is this a saving grace? Why believe in something just for a convenience? This is what is so appreciative about Rabbit Hole, as it provides another examination of this age of material abundance and the prodigality in not using its lavishness to meditate on a higher realm; on learning or creating or inventing a higher imagined conception of what is the Divine Order that rules our being. Instead, such unpleasantness which is still a reality will only be more and more of a happenstance as the irreligious struggles to find a dexterous method to explaining the meaning of his suffering. Adopting a utilitarian morality leaves one grasping when suffering is sensuously immediately felt, and no amount of wealth or trade can remove its turbulence. Just as natural splendor can lead one to religion, so too does being gulfed in the blackest of waters lead to the gentle whisper we call prayer to help end the drowning.
 
It is an inordinate effort, however. A life-long quest that can go unfulfilled: to create new values for what it means to be. Hence the economy in working within a successful religious paradigm for immediate remedy. It may not be comprehensible to swallow it whole and follow the dance steps which seem antiquated, but through effort, there is the tiny droplets of nectar that can be squeezed from an ostensibly unripened fruit. And before long, through the upward gaze of transcendence, that fruit will be sweet enough to taste without the same excruciating effort.
Rabbit Hole leaves us not with a religious advocacy, but a turning point in the absurdity of the evasiveness of the grief with a reconciliation of the tragedy. It is, of course, optimistic for the audience to believe there is a genuine turning point in the character, that overcoming one’s own flux happens linearly. It may very well exist in the future a point where the mother returns to square one. This is where even the poetry fashioned to explain how to keep alive a loving memory is not as potent a resource for grief as the foundational elements of a religion, which is the belief of an afterlife. Hand-waving of multiverses to cope by her is just a crude materialistic replacement. It’s a less outlandish new-age belief that, because of more material, easier to grasp and believe in than an Omnipresent Deity. I’m pessimistic therefore of the dismissal of this time-tested resource, but thankful Rabbit Hole helps shed light on the temporary vacuum for religious values in contemporaneity. It enables posterity to see the nihilism that accompanies decadence.