Richard Kelly’s 2001 film Donnie Darko was deemed controversial at its release and flopped commercially, most likely because no plot surrounding a crashed jet engine would have been received well just after the tragedies of 9/11. However, thanks to an influx of sales during its DVD release, the movie inspired critical analysis and a cult following as well as countless conspiracy theories about the film’s true meaning. Some argue that it is a blueprint for time travel and proves how time exists in non-linear fields while others believe it provides a coruscating perspective of middle-class American life in the late 1980s.
Perhaps the most intriguing, or to some, the most unsettling, aspect of the film is that the audience watches these theories come to light through the eyes of a teenage boy in the midst of a psychotic break. Themes of the polarities that exist in life and death, fate and free will, and especially reality and illusions are explored in Donnie Darko through the plotline surrounding Donnie, the protagonist, and his mental state. Building upon Jessica Raschke’s work acknowledging dreams and delusions as well as Emma Radley’s note of psychosis and agency in the film, I contend that Kelly’s Donnie Darko uses the agency of those affected by mental disorders or illnesses in order to delve into the philosophical explorations of those previously stated dichotomies in addition to themes such as the sublime, time travel, real and tangent universes, and other instances of binaries that exist in our reality. While there certainly are exploitative moments, the film is ultimately a good representation of the agency of the mentally ill. Had Donnie not been affected by mental disorders in the way that he was, the audience would not have the same perception of the themes explored. For the purpose of this paper, only Richard Kelly’s original Donnie Darko (2001) will be considered and not the director’s cut version of the film released in 2004.
In order to unpack each theme as thoroughly as the idea merits, concepts will be addressed chronologically as they occur in the film. The opening scenes of the movie show Donnie in a confused, drowsy haze. He lies in the middle of a secluded country road while an ominous sky and background boundlessly extend above him, a glaringly obvious representation of the sublime. As Kant explains in the first page of the second book on the analytic of the sublime, “the beautiful in nature is a question of the form of the object, and this consists in limitation, whereas the sublime is to be found in an object even devoid of form, so far as it immediately involves, or else by its presence provokes, a representation of limitlessness, yet with a super-added thought of its totality…Hence the delight is in this case with that of quantity.” (Kant, 75.) The mysterious forest bleeds into the seemingly endless subliminal sky as the audience watches Donnie bicycle back to his home in Middlesex, Virginia, pajama-clad with his bare feet scraping against the bike pedals.
Echo & the Bunnymen’s “The Killing Moon” plays in the background, its lyrics hinting at struggles that our protagonist will later face and proposing our first philosophical polarity to ponder. “The killing moon will come too soon. Fate, up against your will, through the thick and thin. He will wait until you give yourself to him.” The hollow song recites. As Trainer states in his work, the lyrics to the Bunnymen track are convoluted and metaphysical and in the previously stated lyric, there is an allusion to the notion of predetermined destiny. Using this particular song here is gracefully poignant, and it “has forever etched the two texts [the film and song] indelibly together, despite the cultural significance of the song before it was used in the context of the film. But not only does ‘The Killing Moon’ (a song over a decade old when the film was released) locate the action temporally in the late 1980s; it also provides–as Donnie soars through the fur trees on his racing bike, the sunlight soaking in through the thick, green foliage–an emotional bond between image and audience, conveying through the melodramatic strings and chiming guitars of the Bunnymen track, a non-diegetic insight into what our protagonist is feeling as he pedals home in the morning sunlight.” (Trainer, 140.) This is a major theme raised throughout the film; was it Donnie’s fate to become a martyr, or did he make that conscious decision in his free will?
The film then cuts to a shot of the Darko’s fridge; on it is a message board that reads: “Where is Donnie?” which inadvertently becomes the focus of the film, and we hear the family debating politics in the background. The dichotomy of the 1988 presidential election, the left-wing vs. right-wing debate, the Republican nominee George H. W. Bush against Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis, is the first pop culture binary shown in the film. The family continues dinner as another common trope of any familial experience is brought to light: a brother arguing with his sister. As their fight unfolds, we discover that Donnie’s parents send him to a psychiatrist for therapy and medication.
Donnie is clearly disturbed by this, as he yells, “Woah, Elizabeth! A little hostile there. Maybe you should be the one in therapy so Mom and Dad can pay someone $200 an hour to listen to all your thoughts, so we don’t have to.” Elizabeth quickly retorts, “Okay, you want to tell Mom and Dad why you stopped taking your medication?” This conflict is the first instance in which we see both a positive and negative note surrounding Donnie’s mental disability. On one hand, it’s positive that we see Donnie’s sister treating him as any other older sister would treat their younger brother: teasing him and giving him a hard time, not walking on eggshells around him, as some think is necessary. She’s also looking out for his safety by informing their parents he’s been skipping medication, even though Donnie doesn’t see it as helpful. Simultaneously, though, the audience sees the first real stigma against Donnie’s mental state as it shows him acting more aggressively than would usually be expected in a situation such as that. Additionally, it shows how little some think of the services with which they are provided; he in no way appreciates going to therapy at this point in the film. Just after this scene is when the audience sees a glimpse of the medicine that Donnie takes: an unknown pill whose name ends in “-pin” in a small, twenty-five milligram dosage.
The audience is finally introduced to “The Other,” the perceived source of evil, during Donnie’s second sleepwalking stint. In the middle of the night, Donnie is guided out of his house onto a golf course by a human-sized grey bunny rabbit named Frank whose head is crafted from molten metal. Both visual and audible representations of humanity versus the other are provided as Frank’s sinister voice and intimidating 6-foot-tall form tells Donnie that the world will end in exactly 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds. When Donnie arrives home after learning this frightening information, he discovers that his room had been demolished by a jet engine whose origins no one can discern. He has already been experiencing emotional problems, and this event triggers a whole new set of illusions which push Donnie to further question his reality and the power structures of society. The audience is now placed in a state of confusion, as Raschke points out in her piece, “the film translates his perceptiveness into an imbalanced mental state – or is it his unbalanced mental state that gives him his perceptiveness? Regardless, Donnie’s consciousness – where he ‘is’ in his mind – becomes central to the narrative and the film’s meaning. Donnie’s seemingly precarious mental state generates an unreliable sense of time and reality and so both Donnie and the audience can never be sure if his visions and experiences are the result of medication, madness, dreams, or lucidity.” In this same vein, the audience can only make loose assumptions at identifying which parts of Donnie’s experience are real and which are an illusion of reality, which is truly one of the most effective ways that the dichotomy of reality vs. delusion is explored. (Raschke, 116) This is emphasized even more throughout the movie as we later learn that Donnie has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. One of the major symptoms for this disorder is episodic psychosis and experiencing delusions, which creates an even more dynamic atmosphere in the film. (Petruzzelli, 171.)
Donnie is now in debt to Frank, as Frank saved his life by leading him to the golf course that night, and Donnie must do what Frank instructs in order to see the “master plan” unfold. It’s at this point the audience understands that an alternate, unstable, tangential universe has been in motion since the jet engine crash, and if not corrected within 28 days, it will collapse and destroy the primary universe. Donnie’s mission is to correct what Frank brings to light as ‘wrong’ within the universe. The opposition between left- and right-wing politics that covers the nation in the setting of Donnie Darko is also pegged onto the adults of Middlesex. The next binary is explored through the slimy character of Jim Cunningham, a self-proclaimed lifestyle guru who has amassed a cult-like following in Middlesex thanks to his self-help program called Cunningvision. Half of the town believes in Jim’s conservative reduction of the life experience to a simple choice between the emotions of fear and love while a separate half, like Donnie, can’t imagine trying to simplify all life’s complexities to these two paths. This is the first instance in which we see Donnie challenging an established binary, the binary that Cunningham has established between fear and love. Specifically, Donnie’s paranoid schizophrenia prevents him from being able to submit completely to the Cunningvision ideals; his paranoia and overthinking of each situation launches him into a tirade about how inter- and intrapersonal situations are more complex than able to be boiled down into two radicals.
“I just don’t get this. You can’t just lump things into two categories—things aren’t that simple.” Donnie tells his teacher, Mrs. Farmer.
“The lifeline is divided that way,” Mrs. Farmer responds, smiling and sounding like she’s reading from a Cunningvision script.
“Well, life isn’t that simple. I mean, who cares if Ling Ling returns the wallet and keep the money? It has nothing to do with either fear or love,” he continues.
“Fear and love are the deepest of human emotions!” Mrs. Farmer pleads.
“Okay. You’re not listening to me. There are other things that need to be taken into account here, like the whole spectrum of human emotion! You can’t just lump everything into these two categories and just deny everything else!” Donnie explodes.
Here exists a struggle between the left and the right, a conflict between tradition and innovation, modernity, in their town. As Radley points out in her work, “Middlesex, as its name suggests, is very much in between, caught in the interstices between seismic shifts in social and cultural upheaval and transformation. Middlesex, a microcosm of contemporary America, is caught between poles: tradition and modernity, conservatism and liberalism, fear and love, imaginary and symbolic.” (Radley, 395.) Soon after this, Frank visits Donnie in a dream and tells him to flood the school. He also reveals that Cunningham is a pedophile and encourages Donnie to break into his house and burn it, which eventually reveals to the public that Cunningham is in fact involved with what the newspapers call “kiddie pornography rings.”
As Donnie continues throughout the film, Frank encourages him to learn more about the concept of time travel. He consults a science teacher and learns that a local legend, Grandma Death, wrote an entire book about the science behind time travel. He begins to piece together that Frank wanted him to learn this and he continues to try to unravel his master plan. On the day that Elizabeth gets her Harvard acceptance letter, Elizabeth and Donnie plan a Halloween party to celebrate. Donnie and Gretchen, his love interest, sneak away to visit Grandma Death’s house in hopes of finding more information on time travel. They run into school bullies on her property, and Gretchen is knocked out while Donnie is pinned to the ground by one of the bullies. A car is barreling up the road with no intentions of stopping, and the bullies flee in fear that Donnie called the police. Before she can move, Gretchen is pummeled by the Trans Am, her body left bloody and broken in the road. The driver of the car gets out with the camera situated on his feet; the audience sees a fuzzy pair of pant legs and an eerily familiar rabbit mask. The driver is Frank, both literally and figuratively, as Frank has been living an odd double existence since the creation of the tangent universe. As Dodd explains in his work, “On the one hand, he is dating Donnie’s sister, Elizabeth, talking to her on the phone, designing and making an amazing rabbit costume for Halloween, driving his red Trans Am around town, going to parties. On the other hand, he is appearing to Donnie in strange visions, in the Halloween costume he has yet to make, telling him to flood his school, investigate time travel, and burn down Jim Cunningham’s house. He is, in this latter manifestation, the manipulated dead Frank.” (Dodd, 11.) Donnie pulls out his father’s gun that he stole from his house and shoots Frank in the eye, which in turn becomes the manipulated dead Frank that has been visiting Donnie in his delusions.
At this point, Donnie realizes that Frank’s master plan is for Donnie to time travel and sacrifice himself to the jet engine in order to save certain lives in the future, including the real Frank. The idea of time as a narrative construct is one common to academia; time markers are one of the essential aspects to any narrative. In the case of the narrative in Donnie Darko, it is quintessential, and the time markers are precise and pronounced. Frank’s disembodied, synthesized voice states the countdown with each time change in the film, and a cut scene of the date flashes across the screen. Without these markers, an audience would find themselves almost completely lost in such a complex narrative, especially when Donnie travels back through time and stays in his room the night that he originally sleepwalked onto the golf course. Donnie’s death is a cathartic moment as the engine crashes into his room in slow motion. A cover of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World” plays in the background, the lyrics once again mirroring the moment. “The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had,” the audience hears as we watch Donnie’s existence cease.
The end of the movie shows Gretchen, who has subsequently never met Donnie, riding her bike past the Darko’s house and observing the aftermath of the accident. Though not all of the events that were changed as a result of Donnie’s sacrifice were shown as Gretchen’s situation was, the audience can assume that there was a ripple effect of consequences. This convolutes the concepts of time and narrative for the audience and forces them to piece together the changed narrative in the new timeline, as Booth discusses in his piece, “If narrative becomes the way we organize our conception of time, then the narrativized events themselves would create the order of our perceived time, although the interpretation of that order cannot be undertaken by either the narrative or the events. It must be the persons (re)- interpreting the events in the text that creates the narrative structure. Time, in other words, is a mutable concept in narrative, because the specific order in the retelling of the events causes a change in the interpretation of those events in a temporal sequence.”
Donnie Darko is a complex piece of cinematic literature that, through the agency of a teenager in the middle of many mental breakdowns, explores common dualities of our reality and delves into concepts slightly beyond our reality. It is precisely this breakdown that allows the audience to explore the themes in the movie, and while it does not leave the audience with a grandiose statement about any one of these themes, the film opens the door and leaves it open for further discussions on the topics it presents.