Rubber Johnny

Did You Know?

• The film took three and a half years of weekends to complete, after filming began in 2002.
• Some effects were created in Cunningham's own kitchen instead of relying on CGI.

Plot

The entire short film is shot in infrared. It opens with a blurry close-up of Johnny, played by Chris Cunningham, making unintelligible sounds while an off-screen man interviews him. Johnny twice mutters "ma-ma," prompting the man to ask if he wants his mother brought in. This sends Johnny into erratic, uncontrolled breathing, and the man calms him with a sedative injection. The scene then cuts to a fluorescent light switching on, a mouse crawling across a sticker-based credits list, and the title "Rubber Johnny" appearing on a condom being pulled off a penis, shown in reverse. Johnny is slumped in his wheelchair, his oversized head dangling backward. He begins dancing to Aphex Twin's "Afx237 v.7" as his chihuahua watches, performing balancing tricks with the wheelchair and deflecting light beams with his hands. An aggressive male voice interrupts him from an open door; Johnny is now sitting upright. The voice yells indistinctly, a slap is implied, and the door slams shut. Johnny snorts a large line of cocaine, screams in the dark, and hides behind a door to avoid white beams of light. His face repeatedly smashes into a glass surface, with chunks of it articulating the song's vocals. The voice interrupts a second time, and Johnny reclines back in his wheelchair, babbling at his chihuahua. The credits roll over a night scene of a distant train passing.

Reception

Pascal Wyse of The Guardian referred to it as "virtuosic grossness", stating, "there is more fleeting shock than real haunting. Perhaps, in all the synaptic mayhem, there is just no room for the viewer to contact their own demons." Treble.com listed the film in its "10 Terrifying Music Videos", calling it "both hilarious and terrifying." Writing for The Telegraph, Chris Campion asserted that the video was "like a Looney Tunes short for a generation raised on video nasties and rave music." S. McKeating of Stylus Magazine awarded Rubber Johnny a 'B+' rating, lauding it as an "exceptionally entertaining odd short film" but only for viewers "with the right frame of mind." He additionally demanded that Cunningham "take it one step further and give us an hour and a half of warped material." Founder of fact-checking website Snopes David Mikkelson noted the circulation of claims that the film was a documentation of real events. He noted that the "film itself is difficult to describe in ordinary terms."