From Venice with Loathing: How Jude Law and Jason Bateman’s Black Rabbit Became the World’s Most Expensive Metaphor
Jude Law, Jason Bateman, and the Black Rabbit: A Global Morality Play in Four Movements
By the time the Black Rabbit cocktail bar opened its unmarked door beneath a crumbling palazzo in Venice last month, the world had already decided what it was. A money-laundering front? An A-list fever dream? Another casualty of the streaming wars? The truth, like everything else in 2024, is both more boring and more sinister.
The partnership between Jude Law—Britain’s export-grade rake with cheekbones sharp enough to slice prosciutto—and Jason Bateman—America’s favorite emotionally constipated everyman—would be odd enough in a Wes Anderson fever dream. But here they are, co-financing a speakeasy that serves £42 negronis to hedge-fund ghosts and TikTok royalty, while the Adriatic inches ever closer to swallowing the city whole. Somewhere, an Italian grandmother is rolling her eyes so hard the Dolomites just shifted six millimeters.
The venture’s name, “Black Rabbit,” is ostensibly a nod to the velvet-clad hare in The Matrix that beckons Neo toward truth. In practice, it’s the perfect metaphor for late-stage capitalism: cute, slightly ominous, and absolutely riddled with fleas. The bar’s logo—a stylized silhouette of a rabbit with one eye replaced by a Venetian mask—now appears on artisanal tote bags in Brooklyn, NFTs in Seoul, and, inexplicably, on the side of a tuk-tuk in Bangkok. Globalization, baby. Catch the fever.
From Singapore to São Paulo, the Black Rabbit has become a Rorschach test for our collective anxieties. Europeans see it as yet another Anglo-American land grab, the culinary equivalent of buying a Tuscan villa and installing an air fryer. Americans, meanwhile, treat it as proof that Europe is still classy, never mind that the bar’s ice is carved by a former Goldman Sachs intern who lists “existential mixology” on LinkedIn. The Japanese have already replicated it in Shibuya, minus the flooding risks but plus robot bartenders that bow every time you overtip.
The menu is where the real geopolitics happen. The “Brexit Breaker” is a Scotch-based punch served with a side of passive-aggressive notes about tariffs. The “Silicon Banker” arrives in a glass shaped like a crashed crypto wallet. Order the “Kyoto Sunset” and a percentage of proceeds allegedly offsets carbon credits—though the receipt is printed on non-recyclable vellum, because irony is the only renewable resource left.
Behind the scenes, the partnership is less “bromance” and more “mutually assured distraction.” Law gets to launder his tax-exile reputation; Bateman gets to shed the “dad from Ozark” stigma in favor of something vaguely European and therefore cultured. Their investors include a Qatari sheikh who’s never been to Venice, a Swiss conglomerate that owns three-quarters of the city’s souvenir stands, and, whisper it, a Russian oligarch whose yacht is currently docked outside under a Maltese flag. If the bar sinks into the lagoon tomorrow, everyone will still turn a profit. The only losers will be the bartenders, who were promised equity in lieu of rent money and now spend their nights Googling “how to monetize despair.”
And yet—here’s the kicker—the place is packed. Every night, a line of influencers snakes around the calle, their ring lights reflecting off the rising tide like bioluminescent plankton. They come for the clout, stay for the free oysters, and leave with content that will be obsolete before the hangover hits. Meanwhile, Venice’s actual residents—those who haven’t been priced out to Mestre—watch from behind shutters, calculating how many more tourist seasons before the city becomes a fully branded theme park. Spoiler: three, maybe four if the EU finally remembers it exists.
So what does the Black Rabbit tell us about the state of the world? That we’ll pay premium prices to cosplay decadence while the planet cooks. That celebrity capitalism now moves faster than rising seas. That somewhere, in a boardroom lined with Murano glass, someone is already pitching the IPO: “Black Rabbit Global—bringing curated nihilism to a sinking city near you.”
Bottom line? The rabbit isn’t black. It’s just covered in oil. And we’re all following it straight down the hole, one overpriced cocktail at a time.
