Donnie Darko - with spoilers!!! (Stay away you who have not seen!)

Time travel; How much is time travel in Terminator a loop, that is; Michael Beihn's (sic) character is perpetually going back to get John Conner conceived for John CXonner to send him back so JC can be conceived so he can send him back... blah blah blah (source of many arguments between me & Emma about time travel, her thinking time can loop and me thinking it is linear only very wide, and then talking about is time subjective, ie; do we each have our own loop/line, and also, if time travel is ever possible via a machine then wont it always be possible cos they'd come back and tell us?)... But in DD Donnie goes back and breaks the loop; and the question is will his mum now go to wherever for the dance thing with his sister and will they come back and will the jet engine fall and go through the wormhole and will Donnie actualyl not die in the past and yet is already dead to prevent his own death?

That is totally true, and one of the things that rung truest about the film. You cannot talk about religion in American public schools. Yet quasi-religious things like the whole motivational speaker thing are allowed to slip through without batting an eyelid. That was pointing out the hypocracy of the American separation of church and state thing.

Wasn't that loop broken as well? In Terminator 2 they prevent the dystopian future from happening, which means John Connor has no reason to send Michael Biehn back in time, which means the young John Connor should disappear at end of the film.

This is were we start talking about parallel time streams...

It was strange though, because even though I went to a Christian School, they were a lot free-er about what they could or couldn't or would or wouldn't teach or discuss when it came to philosophy and science, as well as religion. Weird, that.

Really on the placebos? (sorry, saw the video cause the DVD was out.) That changes my mind on the film. It doesn't ring true. A kid like that in the American school/mental health system would be medicated to f@ck, end of story!

Yeah, I was surprised by the scene. But between that and other scenes -- Shrink's whole "if the sky opened, that would be the end of the world, it would just be you and him" and other weird moments -- maybe it's simply that Shrink (I can't for the life of me remember her name, but it's very late here) is a very unorthodox shrink. Given Donnie's history, and his parents having money, it wouldn't be out of the question for her to be a last-ditch effort after the traditional shrinks failed to help him.

And on the subject of madness --

If we take everything literally, then nothing we see Donnie do in the movie is the result of insanity, per se. Frank, and maybe others, are guiding him (if I remember right, this is explained further in "The Philosophy of Time Travel," on the website). He really is seeing a giant bunny. The world -- for him -- really is going to end. Etc.

And yet we know he's got some kind of problem, not only because he's already in therapy, but because he mentions burning a place down, and when he sleepwalks at the beginning of the movie, this is a problem so chronic that his parents are not surprised by it and his friends ask about it. What we don't know is what his real problem is, or whether his past acts of apparent madness were also manipulations like the ones we see in the movie, etc.

That's one of the things that makes me like the movie so much, because it's never explicitly pointed out, which most Hollywood movies would do.

Partly foreshadowing, and partly she's always there looking for a letter -- the one Donnie ends up sending her. My guess is that she's intuitively hip to the time travel thing, has a clue as to certain things which are going to happen, but is so old/addled/whatever that her sense of when is fucked up.

The kids were there stealing stuff -- Donnie mentions they're known to do that, and his dad, I think, mentions that kids have stolen from her place for ages.

The cellar door thing seems to be Drew Barrymore's character being hooked up, without realizing it, in the manipulations surrounding Donnie -- like when she and Noah Wyle look at each other and just go, "Man, Donnie Darko." / "Yeah, I know!" She has her own conscious reason for giving Donnie the phrase "cellar door," but it's just an excuse -- Donnie just needs the phrase planted in his head, he needs to go to Roberta Sparrow's place at that particular time, so that Gretchen can die, so that he's motivated to undo things, etc.

... it's all twisty.

(I named my cat Gretchen, after the character.)

There's like ... a vibe. Frank is deliberately manipulating/guiding Donnie, but others are tapping into the vibe and acting accordingly -- or Frank is nudging them without their knowledge. Noah Wyle gives Donnie the book, which sets him on an important path -- Drew Barrymore basically hooks up Donnie with Gretchen, as well as the cellar door thing -- things like that.

The last scene -- well, the next to last scene, the "Mad World" montage -- everyone (except Drew, for whatever reason) is waking up, vaguely or not so vaguely remembering what happened which has now unhappened. Dig Swayze's crying, Frank touching his eye just where Donnie had shot him, Kitty Farmer's look of anguish cause she remembers -- maybe only as a dream -- that her idol is a pedophile. Cherita's the only one who doesn't look troubled -- hell, she's beaming.

Random trivia I just remembered: the fat guy in the jogging suit who's watching Gretchen and Donnie when she won't kiss him, and who's visible later outside the Halloween party, he's one of the FAA guys, keeping tabs on Donnie cause the whole Mystery Engine thing seems so dodgy to em.

there's that bit where they're having the Halloween party and Donnie's sister remarks 'where's Frank?' or something - isnt this the first point we see that Frank is actually a real person?...he 'enters' the film as a reference as a real person rather than just Donnie's imaginary friend. is this because Donnie or whoever has set the wheels in motion and Frank is making the transition from imaginary friend to person who kills Gretchen so that Donnie is forced to go back? that confused me...it suggests that imaginary Frank WAS trying to save Donnie, only the only way for Donnie to be saved was to die in his bedroom? or have i got this wrong?

one of my fave bits in the film is the 'Vote Dukakis' shit, cracks me up - and Drew is unbelievably hot

The engine fell through a wormhole.

On 2nd October, mum was in bed.
On 31st October, mum was on plane.
Engine fell off plane on 31st October, travelled through wormhole to land on 2nd October.

The plane is in the future; the engine falls through the wormhole to the past where it lands on Donnie.

The double-feature they go see at the theatre is playing "Evil Dead" and "The Last Temptation of Christ". Now, I haven't seen the latter, but I understand the gist of it. Christ is given the opportunity to live in a world where he WASN'T crucified, to see what it's like, and has to decide -- ergo, his last temptation.

This entire movie is basically a throwback to that idea.

Donnie Darko doesn't have the ability to travel in time. That's what I thought, at first, and I tried to justify the whole movie in that frame -- that he was learning to control this ability, or something. But he didn't have any ability at all. He was just subject to fate.

I think it's best explained that a wormhole opens up on Oct 31st. The jet engine on the plane gets sucked into it and then lands in his bedroom. on Oct 2nd. At this point, he is simply given the opportunity to live the days between Oct 2nd and Oct 31st as they would happen if he cheats death and avoids the jet engine, or if he doesn't, and just dies. If he dies, nothing ever happens -- he never burns down porn-daddy's house, so he never goes to jail, so freaky jesus-lady can go on the plane, so his mother never has to, etc. His mother and his girlfriend are still alive.

The movie with all his hallucinations and angst is supposed to be him realizing the inevitability of fate.

And the great thing is that you can have exactly the same sorts of discussions about Last Temptation. The way it's presented there, it's ambiguous whether this alternate world where he gets married and meets Paul and stuff is actually happening in another time-stream or whether it's in Jesus's head.

This movie could've turned out god-awful, but thanks to the raw performances of BOTH Gyllenhaals, the utterly-hateable Dennis Quaid character, the cryptic "they seem to know something" couple played by Barrymore and Wylie, even (especially) the bully fuckers, etc, etc...it comes off not as some far-fetched time-travel + psychosis/prophetic visions "high concept" freakout, but as a dark and twisted yet extremely touching CHARACTER-film, which I think is one of the reasons it's so powerful, when the plot itself could have left us with another "oh right" sorta film.

sorry if someone already addressed this - granny wrote the book he's reading, she INVENTED time travel!!

i have a hard time making sense of the "explanation" (the contents of the book, website, etc.) - it would seem that the goal of frank and donnie is to return the jet engine to it's proper time, thus preventing the end of the world. i'm not sure exactly how they would do that, and surely they didn't (yet the world didn't end??)

See, when I first saw it (and FUCKING LOVED EVERY FUCKING FRAME - can't emphasize that enough) I thought it was playing off the Last Temptation of Christ idea as well. I mean, that's a big hint that's deliberately placed there.

Yet when I bought the DVD, listened to all the commentary and went through the features, the director explained what he was up to and it came off as a very concrete sci-fi movie. And that was less satisfying. Like, the whole point is that there's a wormhole that opened up at the start of the movie; Donnie Darko is really a superhero (and is confirmed to be not insane); he's so super that he can knock an axe into solid brass, and fly (though we don't actually see him fly into the wormhole, that's apparently how he gets there - dragging the plane with him ... ); and so these "powers" that speak through Franky the Bunny (not God, not aliens - it's not explained what they are) have to maneuver Donnie, into saving the world.

Less satisfying is that Donnie actually COULD HAVE LIVED after saving the world, but didn't get out of his bedroom in time. (The car honking that you hear at the beginning is Frank the Rabbit, honking to wake Donnie up and get him out of harm's way.) So if he could have lived anyway, then that means he did not deliberately sacrifice his life, and that makes the whole thing less ... you know. Dramatic.

I might be misremembering some details, but I just know that Richard Kelly's explanation seemed way less satisfying than the muddled, abstract Jesus metaphor that I walked out of the theater with.

If he dies, nothing ever happens -- he never burns down porn-daddy's house, so he never goes to jail, so freaky jesus-lady can go on the plane, so his mother never has to, etc. His mother and his girlfriend are still alive.

Exactly. "Donnie, you could have lived but by dying, you make the world a better place." That's way cooler. And him getting to date Jena Malone is like a "thank you" gift. The near-the-end narration about enjoying the few happy moments in life or whatever certainly ties into that.

Yet I still love every fucking frame of it.

They were originally in talks with Jason Schwartzmann of Rushmore - I'm glad it went to Jake instead.

I enjoyed this film.

On the website it explains (and I still haven't quite got my head round this) that it isnt Donnie who can time travel or do all the things he does, but that he is what is called a "manipulated living" (in fact one of the lovely pieces on the soundtrack is called just that). Gretchen and Frank are "manipulated dead", and There are these powers/beings/whatevers (thats what I didn't quite get) that are deliberately putting everyone into situations that will lead to the desired end result. So Donnie sees Frank as a vision telling him to flood the school, thus leading to meeting Gretchen, who has a whole readymade tale of how she suddenly came to exist (name change etc). And so on and so on.

Donnie isnt mad, he is being manipulated by other forces to a certain end.

Think of the use of Echo and the Bunnymen's "Killing Moon" at the films start:

"Fate, up against your will
Through the thick and thin
He will wait until
You give yourself to him"

Now I may be stretching a small point, but to me the line "fate up against your will" is the film in a nutshell. How much of what happens is Donnies own will, and how much is some other force?

this is the only message/feeling i really walked away with.

some of the insight on this thread is brilliant (chris v. kate..--thanks guys)

I disagree, it''s a shame they couldn't get the rights. "Never Tear Us Apart" is a great, great song. It would have also served the film's smarty-pants sensibility more so than the Killing Moon. That opening sequence introduces Donnie's world; his dad spraying his mom with the hose. It would have been WTF but in real good way.

The idea of how much control there is exerted over Donnie by external forces is an interesting one, fate vs choice. Donnie obviously thinks he has no choice, and is guided steadily towards that conclusion by the synchronicities around him (Grandma Death awaiting the letter and having written the time travel book, Frank's assertions & the results of his Frank-guided actions, the 'Cellar Door' thing, etcetera [had Frank not died and come back to Donnie somehow to tell him to flood the school he'd never walk Gretchen home; had Donnie not burnt down Swayze's house the Christian gym teacher would never have stayed home and possibly {chaos theory alert} the plane engine would never have landed on Donnie's room in the past]; each of the events in the film is reliant on both past and future events to come together). I'm fascinated by this idea of choice; is there a way in which Donnie and Gretchen could have been happy together and both lived, and also Frank too? This is Nietzsche's question about the superman (and don't forget Donnie tells Gretchen "what if I am a superhero?") 'if you could live your life over again exactly as it has been with the same mistakes and pain as well as joys, would you?', and if you say 'yes' you are a superman; Donnie gets actual chance to do this during his life after experiencing the ultimate pain; the loss of his potential soul-mate who could have prevented him from 'dying alone'; at possibly the worst, most unbearable point too; cos they have no past together, they just have two weeks, they've barely started BUT they've had a taste of the potential happiness and joy that they can achieve together; had she died later Donnie might have been able to cope because at least he'd have memories, but know it's like someone's given them a whiff of a delicious appetiser and said "no, you cannot eat this meal, you can either eat shit or eat nothing" and Donnie chose 'eat nothing' (ie; die) because he either a; couldn't see the possibility of altering the path of the future through his own actions ('the future's not set; there's no fate but what you make' but Donnie cannot see that), or b; he has a profound understanding of the minutely increased happiness of the good people around him if he dies {chaos theory alert again} and thus chooses death in an act of ultimate altruism and selflessness. In which case the future isn't set, and he can make his own fate, he just chooses to help other people's be better rather than continue his own for whatever reason (because he can't stand the idiocy and hypocrisy of the world? Because he knows he couldn't continue his relationship with Gretchen in the new time-line with the foreknowledge and vision of her death that he now has; ie; seeing her die, even if he can then avert that death, is too much of a pain to live with).

My brane's gone now.

But pretty much -everyone- I know who likes the same ... what, slightly offbeat ... movies that I do, liked Magnolia. So I keep thinking I goofed on that.

Um... But aside from technical things like that (I mean, I hate Scorcese and he does all these things very well), what draws me into Magnolia is PTA's gift for character (cert. in that film, and BN too, though I've not seen Hard 8 or the Sandler movie yet). There's fuck-all plot to Magnolia, really, so it ends up being based on character. I love films with fuck-all plot, because I can't follow plots very well, my mind isn't linear enough, I love having to keep asking "what's the point?" but not being narked by there being no point, because I can just enjoy the twists and synchronicities and characters and so on. All the characters in Magnolia are so hateful and pathetic that you can see them as real people. Plus the way everything intertwines, unlike DD, is so vague and random and chaotic; I get the sense with DD that it's much more structured and deliberate, a definite story and plot concept to get across, whereas Magnolia is like a randnom selection of people who have some links and ties broguth together to say something about the human condition but not via a particular plot device or conept (ie; time travel / fate). They're all fucked-up by their fathers, etcetera... I dunno. I just really liked it, all the biblical stuff and the oddness of the ending. I can't really go into it now cos my brane's still on Donnie! But def. try Magnolia again.

I go with the Last Temptations Of Christ interpretation as well, and that is to an extent consistent with the above statement. If you follow this line, Frank is showing Donnie what will happen if he doesn't die, and giving him the ultimate choice between love and fear, which he argues with his teacher doesn't exist in such black and white terms.

The problem is the ambiguity of Frank himself - if he does escape from the falling engine, it doesn't necessarily follow that he will then burn down Jim's house etc. In fact, he only does so because he is told to by Frank... unless you take the view that once Donnie succumbs to one temptation he succumbs to more and falls into this downward spiral that eventually results in Gretchen's death, but this is far from inevitable.

I'm uncertain as to the relationship between Frank the devil bunny thing and Frank the dude who Donnie shoots in the head at the end of the film. I've only seen it once and I reckon I need to see it again to work all this out in my head.

1) It is not Donnie who is traveling in time, it's the jet engine. Things can't unwind just because a single individual (Donnie) in the past world where the jet engine has fallen, decides to act soe way or the other

2) For a short moment, there are two Donnies present at once, namely just before the jet engine crashes. He is sitting on the hilltop, watching the wormhole open. And he is crawling to bed with a smile on his face.

This, in my book, disqualifies Chris's and others' otherwise brilliant theories. And as I think that they are on the money regarding the way the film is intended to be seen, doesn't it also disqualify the film, then???

This REALLY annoys me, as I 'like' the film. I think ...

Isn't it more "there is one Donnie at two presents"? For a subjective moment, maybe, Donnie is both on the hilltop at the end of the month, and crawling to bed, but at neither of those times is there a second Donnie.

Oh, and Jay K, no matter how much you can disqualify a film in theory, it can never be disqualified if you still like it.

Not just how films leave their mark on an audience, apart from games or puzzles to be solved, but also what goes into conceiving and making a film is an important consideration ignored in thinking about it as a perfectly made, 100% purposeful piece of work. Especially not something like "Darko," which is notable for its combination of high and low art. It doesn't matter if the time travel plot line doesn't exactly make sense, its a bit of a riff on Zemeckis and the our awareness of time travel as a plot device in other films.

True. If people seem to be having fun working through their own concrete theories of the film's ambigously rendered events then this is definitely an aspect of the film's apparent popularity. People enjoyed doing the same thing with Mulholland Drive, and I thought they were missing the point in that case as well.

I think the problem, or the trap, or whatever, is in taking all of that too seriously -- ultimately, it's a game, not much different from what Dan is doing on that other thread with skipping words and letters in a phrase to make new sentences. Some movies, some sentences, lend themselves better to that than others (Zemeckis' Back to the Future vs. Donnie Darko is a good example ... you can try to fill in plotholes and things with BTTF, and in jr high a lot of my friends would devote hours to this, but somehow it doesn't feel as justified. With DD, there's more of a sense of at least some things being left deliberately unsaid to invite that effort.)

And we're not talking sloppy action movie plotholes here, they're in there for a reason. They're simply too big and remarkable. Whether that reason is to provoke us, to leave the interpretation open or to hint us of some way or the other to read the movie, is another matter.

But please don't disregard the efforts of trying to work this movie out on the logical/cause-and-effect level before we settle for simply enjoying its otherworldliness and social critique.

You can't "miss the point" though; the point of a movie is for people to watch it and enjoy it (in whatever way; emotional catharsis, light-hearted laughter, pumping adrenaline, etcetera) and get something from it, even if it's only distraction. If people are enjoying DD (or Mulholland Drive for that matter) by debating the plotholes and devices and discussing the idea of time travel than that's fine. That's more than fine! That's brilliant! There is no 'point' to get per se; certainly not one universal, objective point. Sure, the director may have a had a definite scheme of readership interpretation in mind; but unless he/she gets the 'perfect' reader, that's not gonna happen (my mate Billy's PhD thesis is about the construction of the perfect reader in the fiction of Jose Lezama Lima; in the particular book Billy's working on, the main character slowly becomes aware that he's a character and that his actions are being directed by the author and tries to wrestle control back [I think, from what Billy's said - I've not read the book]; Billy's thought is that the perfect reader would have to be constructed by the author as a fiction; guided from birth/creation through life in order to reach a level of understanding that would enable him/her to glean as much as possible and in the right direction from the text; hence the perfect reader does not exist irl). Therefore, irl, whatever interpretation we each come up with is fine; the 'point' is to have one at all. Sure, there may be holes in DD that the director etcetera didn't spot or else just couldn't be bothered to plug for whatever reason; it doesn't matter what was intended or not, or even what is; only what is perceived by the audience. And, of course, through discussion and exchange and discourse, we can all come to a more unified (but still not universal) understanding and interpretation, simply by playing off and accepting and thinking about each others ideas.

(I didn't just make a Smiley, did I??? Uuuuurgh!!)

Anthony, that's an enormous reduction that really doesn't come down to much more than "I didn't like this movie." So don't like the movie. Why on earth would it bother you enough to make a big deal out of?

I did mention -- was it here or on the other thread? the other thread, I think -- really liking the two Tears for Fears scenes, the way they were shot very much like music videos. I think what I like best about Kelly as a director, as opposed to a screenwriter, is his visual style -- it's not TOO in-your-face indie, there aren't constant touches of "look at my camera tricks," but when he does pull them out, they work. The time-going-backwards sequence at the end could have been shorter, but that might be one of those things where once you've done it, you don't have the money to change it.

Some movies invite minutiae-analyzing more than others, consciously or not. David Lynch has actually said he hates it when people do it, but at the same time he continues to make movies where it almost seems like you have to in order to talk about them. Some of the complaints you have about DD, I have about Mulholland Drive -- I like it for the most part, but not as much as his others, and it feels like exactly what it is: a TV pilot that wasn't picked up, and so never had its loose ends developed in later episodes, with some things added in to make it more of a "wow, wouldn't this be weird?" thing. I don't think many other directors would've gotten away with that, much less earned praise for it.

There's a danger of Kelly developing that habit, but he has a definite sense of what the movie means, and seems to think that -- at least with the supplemental material on the website -- it's clear-cut. I don't think he made a deliberately ambiguous movie so much as he simply didn't lay out his view of "what happens" as clearly as he could. That's something he'll presumably get better at ... and the irony of course is that the accidental ambiguity -- not the puzzle aspect, the "let's put these clues together and figure it out," but the fact that you can put the "clues" together to support entirely different theories -- is something so many fans of the movie love.

But the score. I never hear anyone talk about it the way I always feel like talking about it.

The first thing me and a friend did after we saw the movie was mull over Mike Andrew's reworking of "Mad World", the next was to look for his score (still cant locate it easily though). It is a truly moving, wonderful use of music as mood, and coupled with the visuals, the setting (1988 was my last year of high school) and the overall concepts, I was left deeply moved. Picking the plot apart, while enjoyable, is just another layer to my enjoyment of this movie, and not at all why it is the most affected I think I have ever been by a film (apart from Pi, and it was enhanced greatly by its score also).

I would recommend anyone who liked the film hunt down the soundtrack. Not a scrap of Tears for Fears or Joy Div resides within, and Mike Andrews is a fucking genius.

And where did ILFilm suddenly spring from!? Nice idea, Nordic :)

It's a piece called "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Steve Baker and Carmen Daye and I found a link to an MP3 here:

http://www.stainlesssteelrat.net/dd.htm

Incidentally, that link goes to a DD site that says some rather interesting things about the film. Such as this:

Q. Did Donnie need to die?

No. Richard Kelly has stated in the commentary (with Jake Gyllenhal) that Donnie did not need to die. He states that Donnie dies for one of two reasons:

1. That he felt the whole experience had been a dream, and was therefore laughing with happiness that he had woken up from this.

2. That the journey through the Tangent Universe had solved Donnie's problem of dying alone through achieving enlightenment, and subsequently he knew he was going to "something better" (from his letter to Roberta Sparrow). He was therefore laughing through sheer joy and anticipation.

The second answer I had concluded - the first (that he thought he woke up from a dream and that's why he laughed) had totally escaped my conclusions til now. How could I miss that possibility?

I think I'm way too obsessed with this film.

I can't believe I hadn't noticed that before.

Well, there you have it folks.