But its real blood relatives are those movies in which what's "real" and what's "unreal" become inextricably intertwined - because the whole movie takes place entirely within the consciousness (and unconsciousness) of its hero. And when you think about it that way, it helps locate the entire movie in the space-time warp between Donnie's ears.Ĭritics and website fans have written loads about the generic elements of science fiction, horror, comic-book fantasy, and 1980s John Hughes teen-sex comedy that are so cleverly swirled together in "Donnie Darko," which is set in the election year of 1988. It begins with a scene that belongs at the end of the last time you watched it - a dream within a dream within a dream. This opening is essential to the movie's endlessly circular (or mobius-strip) form, and part of what draws you back again. What goes through his mind here, in these crucial first few moments? I like to think Donnie's essentially remembering the movie you saw the last time you saw the movie that bears his name, and the one you're about to see again (which won't be quite the same because you'll pick up on some other undercurrents and details this time). something: an strange idea? a memory? He then picks up his bike and rides downhill to his suburban home (to the song "The Killing Moon" by Echo and the, uh, Bunnymen - the perfect tone to set for the movie, but inexplicably it's only in the original version). At first he looks bewildered, then he stands up and breaks into a grin shaking off the thought of. The picture begins with Donnie waking up, barefoot and in a t-shirt and pajama bottoms, on a hillside road overlooking a valley at dawn. See "Donnie Darko" once and, chances are, you'll get caught in its undertow. Because the movie refuses to offer up all its implied secrets, it seems to draw people back for repeat viewings. Those who don't respond to it simply find it impenetrable, even though it's not at all. yeah, sure.īut "Donnie Darko" has become a cult movie, one that people return to again and again, because it has so many mysterious undercurrents that are left unexplained and unresolved. Maybe you thought " Donnie Darko" was a movie about time travel and alternate universes and such. And the punchline is: He's sexually fixated on his older sister and can't admit it - even to himself. You can hardly blame Donnie for feeling that his life has become a cosmic joke, and that he is the butt. And then, speaking of radar, there's this jet engine that appears out of nowhere and falls on his house, obliterating his bedroom. He yearns to be recognized as a sexual being, but as far as girls are concerned he seems to be flying beneath their sexual radar, as if he were an inanimate object - a stuffed animal, maybe, or a genital-less Smurf cartoon. The only girls who ever talk to him are little sister Samantha and his older sister Elizabeth and this one socially maladjusted fat Chinese girl named Cherita at school. Sex is on his mind constantly, but girls consider him invisible (if they consider him at all - ha!).
Meanwhile, Donnie is tormented by the usual obsessive teenage thoughts about sex and death. He's 15 years old and, boy, has he been "acting out." He's been in trouble with the law for torching an abandoned house, and now he's seeing a shrink who's put him on medication that he thinks is making him crazy, except it might just be puberty, but whatever it is he's been sleepwalking and having nightmarish visions (and "daylight hallucinations") involving a man-sized fuzzy bunny rabbit with a grotesquely contorted metallic head (bulging eyeballs, vicious teeth) named Frank who keeps reminding Donnie that the clock is ticking on the end of the world and ordering him to do destructive, semi-apocalyptic things involving fire and flood. " Head Over Heels" by Tears For Fears, the song that leads into the reading above "It was as though this plan had been with him all his life, pondered through the seasons, now in his fifteenth year crystallized with the pain of puberty." - from Graham Greene's story "The Destructors," as read by Donnie Darko's English teacher, Miss Pomeroy ( Drew Barrymore)
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