Donnie Darko (2001) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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I think it’s kind of funny. I think it’s kind of sad. The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I ever had.

In 2001, Donnie Darko challenged a lot of perceptions about genre filmmaking by creating a captivating sci-fi story that was not immediately accessible after watching. What once was an obtuse time travel film has become a cult favorite, looked at favorably by many.

First Impressions

This trailer shows a troubled teen named Donnie, and uses tense music to set the audience on edge. He tells his counselor he has an imaginary friend named Frank, while imagery of an ax and flames are intercut with the sequence. Interstitial titles mention “time travel” and “sacrifice” and make the film seem like a weird mix of sci-fi film with a teen melodrama. Just who, or what, is Donnie Darko?

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

High school student Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) awakens in the mountains outside his Middlesex, VA home and rides his bike back home. A tangent universe forms, separating reality. That night, October 2, 1988, Donnie sleepwalks again. A strange voice leads him to see a six-foot tall rabbit, named Frank (James Duval), who informs him that in a little over 28 days from now, the world will end. Being outside his house, Donnie avoids being killed when a jet engine crashes through the roof into his room. This exacerbates his emotional troubles within his family, especially after his older sister, Elizabeth (Maggie Gyllenhaal), informs their parents he’s off his medication.

While driving Donnie home from school, his father, Eddie (Holmes Osborne) almost hits an elderly Roberta Sparrow (Patience Cleveland) who is standing in the road. The woman, nicknamed Grandma Death by the kids in town, whispers to Donnie that every living thing dies alone. At school, Kitty Farmer (Beth Grant), the gym teacher, shows a video about “Conquering Fear” by self-help guru Jim Cunningham (Patrick Swayze). Later that night, Donnie–prompted by Frank’s voice–sleepwalks and damages a water main, flooding the school.

With school canceled, Donnie walks home with a new girl at the school Gretchen Ross (Jena Malone), and they decide to go steady. Donnie meets with his therapist Lilian Thurman (Katharine Ross) who begins to use hypnosis on him in order to get to the root of his mental problems. At school Donnie is asked to perform a task on the “Conquering Fear” lifeline. He finds the request absurd and tells Mrs. Farmer to forcibly insert the card into her anus. He is suspended from after-school activities for six-months.

After a suggestion from Frank, Donnie asks Kenneth Monnitoff (Noah Wyle) about time travel and is presented with a book entitled The Philosophy of Time Travel written by Roberta Sparrow/Grandma Death. While watching football on TV with his father, Donnie experiences a “time snake” emanating from a number of characters’ abdomens, including his. This liquid-looking vector describes a path that the character will eventually take in the near future. Donnie follows his own into his parents bedroom and finds a gun. At a Jim Cunnigham assembly at school, Donnie embarrasses Cunnigham and is removed from the auditorium.

Donnie takes Gretchen to a screening of The Evil Dead, where he sees Frank show him a portal. Removing his rabbit mask, Frank reveals a bloody right eye. While Gretchen sleeps during the film, Donnie goes to Cunningham’s house and burns it to the ground. The next day Donnie’s favorite English teacher, Karen Pomeroy (Drew Barrymore) is fired for teaching “controversial” material. The dance group Sparkle Motion, led by Kitty Farmer, and including Donnie’s younger sister Samantha (Daveigh Chase), have been selected to appear on Star Search. Jim Cunningham is arrested when firefighters discover a “kiddie porn dungeon” in his house.

With only a few days left before the world ends, Donnie’s visions continue. Under hypnosis he admits that he flooded the school and burned down Cunningham’s house, now fully under the sway of Frank’s hypnotic voice. While his parents are away, Donnie and Elizabeth host a halloween party at their house. Donnie and Gretchen have sex. He gets the urge to visit Grandma Death for further answers. Outside her house, they are attacked by two older bullies, and Gretchen is run over by a red car, driven by Frank–a teen in a bunny suit. Donnie shoots Frank in the right eye.

Donnie carries a dead Gretchen home where a vortex is forming over his house. He begins to understand what he must do. Getting a vision, he travels back in time to October 2 and gets back into his bed, laughing gleefully. When the engine falls off the jet plane, he is killed, closing the loop and preventing the destruction of the primary universe. A number of characters from the film are shown awakening in the middle of the night, somehow remembering aspects of their time in the tangent universe. The next morning, Gretchen rides her bike past the Darko house, where she finds out that a boy named Donnie, who she’s never met, has died.

“I just don’t see the point in crying over a dead rabbit, you know, who never even feared death to begin with.” – Donnie Darko

History in the Making

Any sort of synopsis of Donnie Darko does not do justice to the multiple layers of interconnected narrative and thematic structure which first time director Richard Kelly creates. It tells the story of a troubled teenager with emotional issues that is forced into a surreal nightmare of falling jet engines, mysterious humanoid rabbits, and time travel. Released a little over a month after the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001 and two years after the shootings at Columbine High School, Donnie Darko entered theaters at a time when American anxiety was at an all time high. The film actually suffered in its initial release as audiences were not drawn to a film where the central plot element was part of an airplane crashing into a house. Distributors were also concerned that the depiction of a troubled Donnie firing a gun was still too much for the bruised American psyche. Fortunately, when the film was released on home video and DVD the following year it was a much bigger success, and has become a cult favorite film ever since.

As director Richard Kelly’s first film, it stands as an impressive release. The film has multiple intertwined narratives and themes which present themselves in a non-traditional way. His idea of time travel and alternate universes was different from the majority of films on the subject. Repeated motifs and narrative connections between the various characters shows a craftsman-like quality to Kelly’s approach to the script and the direction of the film. He also didn’t try to simplify the complex narrative for audiences, which is one reason that the film still resonates with viewers. The biggest complaint of the film, especially in the original theatrical cut, is that the story is difficult to crack. Indeed, a number of the plot elements are only clearer after repeated viewings, having meaning nestled deeply within one or two spoken lines, or possibly a background element. But some of the narrative elements are completely obscured and become difficult to understand without additional footage or explanation.

That’s why in 2004 Richard Kelly released the Director’s Cut of Donnie Darko. It added twenty minutes of excised footage to flesh out the story, as well as interstitial excerpts from The Philosophy of Time Travel, the in-universe book that explains what Donnie is experiencing. These additional moments, specifically the texts from Roberta Sparrow’s book, add much clarity to a film that was already dense. Viewing the original version after understanding the plot from the Director’s Cut does make for a more streamlined, but still confusing version. It’s obvious that Kelly had a number of explicitly direct themes he wanted to address in the film, including teen anxiety, fear versus love, sacrifice, fate versus free will, and the corruption of political correctness. Of his handful of films, Donnie Darko still stands as his strongest movie. One that captures both a sense of nostalgia even as it looks forward into the future.

Genre-fication

Perhaps the question I think about the most regarding the film doesn’t have to do with its overly complex narrative and time travel plot. It’s the question of why the movie is set in October 1988. For a film released in 2001, what reason did it have to look back 13 years? Primarily it seems to be about a sense of nostalgia. Kelly reportedly graduated high school in 1993 (in suburban Virginia) which would make 1988 a time in his early teenage years. This helps explain the music video-like feel that film has in various moments, with pop songs playing behind silent imagery. The year 1988 also represents a turning point in America at the end of the Reagan years, prior to the Gulf War and the various scandals and culture changes that would occur in the 90s. Some of Kelley’s liberal leanings are evident in the film as Elizabeth needles her father, a staunch George Bush supporter, about wanting to vote for Michael Dukakis. Perhaps, it was Kelley’s own personal time travel as he revisits a period of his life in which he felt disconnected as much as the main character.

Speaking of time travel, Donnie Darko is the most unconventional time travel film of its time, and would be for another couple years until Shane Carruth’s ultra-low-budget Primer was released in 2004. As an inherently confusing subgenre of sci-fi to begin with, time travel films usually contained some kind of Rosetta Stone within the film in order to explain elements to the audience. Think of Herbert Wells explaining the way that time works in the original The Time Machine, or Kyle Reese explaining the complex timeline of The Terminator. In Donnie Darko, Professor Monnitoff mentions an Einstein-Rosen wormhole to Donnie and the need for a vessel and a portal. That’s really the extent of any explanation. But unlike other films with obvious vessels (ie time machines) the metal vessel going into a portal appears to be the jet engine. As explained in the website for the film, the DVD extras, and the Director’s Cut, Donnie enters into an unstable tangent universe–which seems to be a pocket universe–at some point prior to the jet engine crashing into his empty room. He then becomes something called a living receiver whose purpose within a lunar month is to return the artifact to the primary universe or risk the destruction of the tangent and primary universes, and everything within them. There are many websites and videos available to explain the specific timeline of the film, since the movie is ambiguous on a number of its elements about time travel.

Donnie Darko also borrows from, and is influenced by, a number of other films. Some of them are genre films, like Back to the Future, which Donnie calls out explicitly by referencing that a time machine can be a DeLorean. Another homage is available only in the Director’s Cut which includes numerous close-ups of Donnie’s eyeball, much like Stanley Kubrick used in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film also crosses over into the horror genre as well with references to The Evil Dead, which is the film that Donnie and Gretchen go to see, and An American Werewolf in London which ties into the movie theater sequence by having Frank, a deceased character, visit Donnie in the cinema much like Jack visits David. But there’s also a lot of inference to other films of the 80s including films by John Hughes and Steven Spielberg.

Societal Commentary

For an audience member with no preconceived notions about this film, or any foreknowledge, Donnie Darko may seem to be a film about a troubled youth. Donnie appears like many other tales of disaffected teenagers: withdrawn, isolated from his peers, and potentially driven towards violence. Without the elements of time travel, it’s a story of a boy that is, as his therapist describes him, a paranoid schizophrenic. As opposed to other students in the school who are overtly violent, like Seth (Alex Greenwald), and Ricky (Seth Rogan), there is a dark potential just under the surface with the character of Donnie. This same potential is also there with other characters, specifically Jim Cunnigham.

The self-help guru, much like any other number of self-prescribed moralists, has a dark secret. Part of Donnie’s time in the tangent universe is to expose the hypocrisy in the adults around him, primarily Cunningham and his teachings. Much is made about the argument between fear and love in the film. Kitty, the number one fan of Cunningham, attempts to insert his principles into the school curriculum at every turn. Whether that’s teaching his “Conquering Fear” course during the PE class, or getting Cunningham to come speak to the students at an assembly. She is so eager to follow his lead, that she cannot believe that the criminal charges against him are true. She admonishes Donnie for following the path of fear, yet she is the most scared of all, afraid of Cunningham being exposed as a fraud, and people seeing that she has no moral standing of her own. In the end, Donnie is the one that follows the path of love. His realization about what is going on puts him on a path to be able to save everyone. Not just the people that he interacts with, but everyone in the whole world. He makes a sacrifice for them after seeing that he is uniquely destined to be able to save them.

And that brings the discussion to the notion of fate versus free will, a talking point for any time travel movie. Unlike more upbeat time travel films that give some sense that the characters have a choice in their destiny, Donnie Darko lands firmly on the proposition of a fated universe. Donnie speaks later with Monnitoff about being able to see the time arrows coming out of others chests, including his own. This indicates a predestined universe where conscious choice is removed from people. But Monnitoff tells Donnie that he is contradicting himself. That if one could see the path laid out in front of you, you would have the ability to choose not to take it. Donnie indicates that he might be living in God’s channel; a predestined pathway of the creator. And even if Donnie has free will, living within some other path or channel might nullify his choices. It’s an interesting thought that leads, like many elements of the film, into further discussion.

The Science in The Fiction

As a science-fiction film, Donnie Darko leans a lot more into the philosophical aspects of the genre than science. Unsurprising really due to the fact that the “bible” on time travel that Donnie is presented with is called The Philosophy of Time Travel. The choice to make the decision to deal with the philosophy of time travel rather than the science is interesting, but not unexpected. In discussing any other time travel film, there is often a lot of discussion about the meanings and motives of the journey, not just the scientific applications. Donnie Darko is much less about the implications of being able to do over a decision (like in Back to the Future) and more about the connections Donnie is able to create. The time travel of Frank after his death to become a guide for Donnie doesn’t push the boy to alter the future so that Frank doesn’t get killed. It’s about grounding Donnie with a human relationship, and routing out evil in the town, making for a better world. Without Frank convincing Donnie to flood the school, he would have never met Gretchen and been able to spend time with her. This human connection he shares is the primary reason he is able to make the decision to sacrifice himself.

While the film may appear paradoxical, with the understanding that a tangent universe was created, the death of Donnie at the end would occur only once in the primary universe. The events of the film are not a loop like some time travel stories. Twenty eight days and change exist in the world of the film, which are nullified as Donnie travels backwards in time (or perhaps collapses the pocket universe) when he sends the “artifact” (the jet engine) back to where it came from. Had he failed in his mission, both the tangent universe and his primary one would have been destroyed, so these events exist as a one-time shot to make things right. Hence, the guidance from the “manipulated dead,” as Sparrow’s book refers to characters like Frank and Gretchen.

The Final Frontier

There are so many other aspects of this film that make it rewatchable. Drew Barrymore’s compassion as a teacher unjustly ground up and fired by the system. Beth Grant’s nasty Kitty Farmer who probably doesn’t realize what a horrible person she is. But the thing that ties it all together is Jake Gyllenhall’s amazing performance. He had worked on several other films previously (such as October Sky), but this was his breakthrough performance, for which he became known for. Without a weight of previous performances under his belt, he was able to make the part truly his own.

The music is another thing that a lot of people remember from the film. Bands like Tears for Fears, Duran Duran, and Echo and the Bunnymen make for some great and memorable scenes. However the acoustic version of “Mad World” by Gary Jules that accompanies the final moments of the film is truly haunting and melancholy. It’s a sequence that becomes indelibly linked into audiences minds. This ending sequence shows characters awakening on October 2, 1988 once Donnie has closed the pocket universe. They all experience moments of regret, sorrow, or longing for the 28 days that their doppelgangers or spiritual selves spent in interaction with Donnie. Linking this particular piece of music as an acoustic with its haunting lyrics, “all around me are familiar places, worn out faces,” gives a sense of sad, yet still hopeful, closure to the film.

A sequel to the film, S. Darko, which Kelly was not involved with, was released in 2009 to poor reviews. Kelly has discussed creating a sequel at various times, but to date nothing has come of this. His follow up film, Southland Tales (2006), features similar themes and time travel, but in a  much more opulent and satirical package. It was not as well received. Even though Donnie Darko is a 20-year old film, which is set over a decade prior to that, it deals with the real human themes of connection and belonging. It is a film that touches an audience emotionally, even if logically they cannot make sense of what’s going on.

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