Donnie Darko



Alienation is a universal experience. A good amount of art deals with this theme: the one thing we all have in common is that we don't relate to each other as intensely as we do to ourselves.

Our problems are uniquely similar.

Donnie Darko is a blending of two genres: teen angst melodrama and gothic science fiction.

Donnie has the usual teenage problems: emerging libido, emotional alienation, trouble at school, visions of a spectral rabbit telling him the world will end in less than a month. You know, the usual.

But, when a jet engine crashes into his house on the ONE NIGHT he happened to spend sleepwalking on a golf course, well, that's when his trouble REALLY starts.

One of the points of writing science fiction is to bring some aspect of the human condition into sharp relief.

Gender has great meaning to humans, and that meaning becomes clear by contrast in Ursula Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness, in which the characters' genders are subject to seasonal change.

Our experience of time is uniform and stable, because we're not orbiting a black hole at light speed. Einstein posed many thought experiments about what it would be like to orbit a black hole at light speed, but Gene Roddenberry showed us what it would be like to orbit a black hole at light speed while making love to a green woman.

After the accident, strange things begin unfolding. The rabbit appear to Donnie again, makes predictions, gives commands and things get stranger and stranger.

On one level, you can just chalk it up to Donnie's mental/emotional problems. We see much of the film through his eyes, and he is an unreliable perceiver.

But that's selling the story short. There is an underlying logic having to do with time travel (an explicit theme of the story.) Time travel may be a framework for Donnie's delusions, but it also appears to be a literal event in the movie.

That idea, that an underlying physical, spiritual or existential truth can generate a madness, and that that madness can actually be the intended, correct response is echoed in The Last Temptation of Christ (which appears in the film double-billed with Evil Dead)

Christ complains in that film that it feels as though God is pushing over the edge of a cliff...and that is what's happening...and it does drive him insane...and that insanity is part of the plan.

Unlike typical science fiction, which embeds humans within a scientific concept (like gender or time), this film embeds a scientific concept (time travel) within a human experience. There is some exposition on the mechanisms involved, but only enough to carry the story along. We spend a great deal of time with Donnie, trapped in his head, trying to deal with the usual array of teenage problems while the universe (literally) closes in around him.

And Donnie articulates three of the great lessons we should all learn before age 18:

1) Just because you'you don't have answers doesn't mean that some well-groomed asshole DOES

2) Nothing is black and white and reducing complex experiences to polar extremes is a bad idea

3) Smurfs don't fuck

What a world it would be if we all voted based on these principles.

Four stars. Jason Bob sez check it out or maybe you're not as commited to Sparkle Motion as you think you are.