How John Updike invented Brat Rabbit embodied a rush towards individualism

What Rabbit does has terrible, horrifying repercussions: in consequence of his actions, his wife accidentally drowns their baby, while the mistress he takes up with and then deserts is left to organise an abortion by herself. But there is also something glorious, something exciting, something right about what Rabbit does. He is no beatnik, and he acts from no organised sense of radicalism. He is, essentially, normal. Rabbit is not exceptionally clever, hardly exceptionally brave, and neither exceptionally good nor exceptionally bad.

His defining feature, besides his propensity to flit, is that his days of being exceptional are behind him: he’s a former high-school basketball star desperately hankering for the time when everyone cheered him and he was famous throughout the county. This ordinary man’s one great gift is to have deduced the rules of the world that is about to come, and to have started living by them a little ahead of the people around him.

His flight is less a rebellion, more a rush towards the new kind of conformity, scratched out against the great dominating influence of mass-media but nonetheless shaped by it. The moment Rabbit decides to make his escape is probably when gets home to see his wife slumped in front of a children’s TV show with the host enjoining his audience to “know yourself”. Rabbit is appalled at the banality; Rabbit is inspired by the sentiment. His drive towards freedom is soundtracked by the radio.

The novel ends with him still running, this time away from his infant daughter’s funeral: “His hands lift of their own and he feels the wind on his ears even before, his heels hitting heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs.” Even with everything he has done, all the mess he has created, Updike knows there’s something magnificent about his Rabbit.

Eventually, Rabbit would run through four novels (Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest), covering not only a life but also the latter half of the 20th century. It’s a commonplace that the Fifties invented the teenager, but really the teenager was only a side-product of the decade’s greater creation: the individual in lifelong pursuit of self-realisation. An age of personal freedom, carved out against the backdrop of screens that declared how a person should be: mass media defined a mean reality, and taught its consumers how to want the things that would mark them as an individual like everybody else. Liberty through the eternal eye of the camera.

The 21st century has been the undoing of that one, singular lens. Rabbit’s predicament feels alien now partly because the things that hemmed him in are now almost exotically elusive for young people, but also because the media landscape he’s both repulsed by and defined by doesn’t exist in the same way anymore. At the very least, his disappointing wife would have been scrolling TikTok as well as watching television; Rabbit would probably have been listening to podcasts.

Actually, they’d probably have been making the content as well as absorbing it. The atomised individuals spawned by the media age have become, in turn, creators of their own atomised media in which they create perfectly consumable versions of themselves which just happen to replicate the tics and interests of every other individual in this ecosystem. Currently, two influencers are locked in a legal battle over who owns the greige, minimalist aesthetic both have made their trademark. One believes herself to be the original, and is suing the other for copyright infringement, claiming that she has been imitated right down to the level of specific camera angles.

It is, on the surface, an absurd claim: how can anyone “own” something as generic as an absence colour? Weirder still: both influencers in the case derive their income from selling the products they feature in their Instagram and TikTok posts, meaning their entire existence is predicated on being mimicked. A more likely explanation than plagiarism is that both influencers simply followed the cues of audience engagement and the algorithm until they arrived at two versions of the self that were very nearly indistinguishable from each other.

But the fact that the case exists at all suggests that even the blandest wants to believe in the myth of their individuality. “You want to feel like you have unique value that you’re giving out into this world,” commented another influencer unrelated to the case. The inevitable result of the feedback system, though, is that “you kind of middle yourself out”. Every individual is their own brand online, and every brand is a variation of a wider product category. There are as many different versions of the “Instagram clean girl” as there are kinds of cereal.

It’s a curious thing that the #sponcon influencer essentially has the same profession Rabbit was trying to escape: demonstrating consumer goods that promise to make your life better, and which will probably end up gathering dust somewhere in your cluttered, non-minimalist house. The rush to individualism that Rabbit embodied has turned everyone back into a version of him. The TV host’s message to Rabbit — “know yourself” — becomes its inverse: be knowable to the world. And by being knowable, buyable. The consumer and the consumable in one perfect whole.

Each person ends up in a duet with their own digital version, alive to themselves as much as they can imagine being recognised and consumed by others. I thought about this while I was watching Charli XCX last month on the (brilliant) Brat Tour. The setting is simple: for most of the show, Charli is on her own on the stage, performing directly to a video camera, the footage from which is then displayed on giant screens either side of the stage. She is singing to herself; we in the arena are watching the output, just as though we were consuming it on social media. She is, splendidly, herself, and we are the witnesses to it.

If you want to see it this way, the Brat Tour is the ultimate triumph of social media over mass media. Tens of thousands of people, including me, poured into arenas to experience a simulacra of watching Charli on their phones. The screen Rabbit ran away from has become the destination and the home for a collective dream of individualism. Everyone is special and different; everyone is the same in their pursuit of the self.

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Sarah Ditum is a columnist, critic and feature writer.

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