Petting the Rabbit: <i>The Favourite</i> (2018), Anti-heritage, and the Search for Lesbians in the Past

Abstract Yorgos Lanthimos's The Favourite (Ireland/UK/US, 2018) centers Queen Anne's torturous relationship with two women administrators, seeming to promise clarity about the monarch's sexual history. Instead, the film obliquely addresses British state history while the camera's gaze focuses on the queen's fictional rabbits. Gradually, these animals overwhelm the film's narrative, turning the cinematic image into an undulating, grey morass. This essay meditates on why The Favourite endlessly reproduces the rabbits’ image and expands on how searching for lesbians in the past on film can mystify historical meaning. This article argues The Favourite constitutes an anti-heritage film, a film that uses heritage film's own generic dictates to unwrite history. Bringing together the film's reception, Queen Anne's historiography, and theories of sexual/cinematic reproduction, this essay outlines how rabbit proliferation at the site of lesbian desire subverts the heritage film's impulse to render the past into historical narrative. The film deploys visual copies of woman and rabbit that enliven residual anxieties about ungovernable feminine sexuality. In doing so, it marks the limits of the archive and encourages finding present life from outside the images proposed by national history.