Once upon a time I made a list of a bunch of movies I'd never seen before—200, to be exact—and now I'm going through them in alphabetical order.
Donnie Darko
2001
I'm going through the list of the past 50 movies that I've watched for this column, trying to see if there were any other movies that I just didn't get. Oh, there's been plenty of little moments scattered throughout this hodgepodge of films that I had a reaction of "Hmm, this is strange, I should come back to this," but I don't quite know that there's been a film yet that I've gotten to the end, and subsequently thought that way about the entire movie.
I guess the closest equivalent is Being John Malkovich, a movie that I was similarly engrossed in, and similarly confused by. But I suppose the big difference is that Being John Malkovich, at least how I saw it, was built specifically to be an enigmatic movie. That was the point. You're supposed to Rorschach the shit out of it. Whereas, I have a feeling that there really is an explanation to Donnie Darko, but I just don't have the ability to get there. And that's fucking frustrating.
But let's back up a step. Donnie Darko. Released in 2001 (infamously one month after 9/11), gradually picked up steam through word-of-mouth, now sits near the top of the "cult movie canon," if such a thing does exist. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal in his first major role. A story about... well, I guess that's where I start to get lost.
This feeling really is frustrating, because you start to doubt yourself; is the plot really this obtuse, or am I just a fucking moron? I don't like feeling like a moron (so I guess this movie is really like my experience with Broken Flowers, in a way). So before we talk about which is it, me being dumb or the movie being too smart for its own good, let's try to parse through exactly what happens. That might be helpful, if I type a full paragraph explaining what I remember as the plot, to see really how much I get or don't get. Spoilers, obviously (for real, there is very little reason to be reading entries in this blog column if you haven't seen the entry's movie).
Okay, here's Donnie. Typical kid—has a family, goes to school, kinda strung out on the whole suburban ennui thing. He has a problem with sleepwalking, and a bigger problem with hallucinating visions of a giant bunny talking to him. One night, when the bunny (named Frank) entices him to leave the house, an airplane engine crashes through his bedroom ceiling, which would've killed him had he not been out of the house. The bunny tells him that the world is going to end in 28 days. Donnie spends those 28 days doing various things like getting a girlfriend, talking back to religious-nut teachers, burning down a pedophile's house, hallucinating Frank as actually a teenage boy dressed in a bunny suit with a gunshot wound in his right eye, and trying to figure out if the old lady who lives up the street knows anything about time travel. On Mischief Night, Donnie leaves a party to try to find that old lady, and look for some answers. His girlfriend is run over by a car. The driver of the car is a teen boy named Frank, dressed up in a bunny suit. Donnie shoots him in the eye. Meanwhile, Donnie's mom and sister are on a plane, and it's about to crash. The engine falls off and gets sucked into a wormhole. Then... Donnie decides to go back in time and purposefully stay in his bedroom so that the jet engine kills him. In a sense, he is sacrificing himself to save his mom, sister, girlfriend, and Frank.
The precise moment that Donnie Darko's plot loses me is indicated by the ellipses in the preceding paragraph. From one angle, it seems like such a minor thing to get hung up on. From another angle, it seems like there is a major linchpin of this film's plot that is just fucking nonexistent. I guess I could consider the possibility that this is a Joe thing—that I am a stickler for rules in time travel fiction—but I can't possibly be the only one who thinks this, right?
How did Donnie go back in time? How did he know to go back in time? Is this a matter of alternate timelines? If the jet engine came from an alternate timeline into the real timeline, then that means that the same engine exists as a duplicate in the real timeline already, right? But so then why, when Donnie crosses over in the same way, doesn't the real-life timeline Donnie Darko exist? Or does he? Is that him getting crushed? So then how does real-timeline Donnie get the information that he needs to be killed in order to save his loved ones?
It took me like 20 minutes to write that paragraph because I kept getting caught in thought loops, trying in vain to put all the pieces together in my mind. I just can't do it. Of course, we live in the 21st Century, and so there's a pretty standard thing to do whenever my mind is stuck on something, like I was a few nights ago after finishing up Donnie Darko: I went to the internet.
To confirm—yes, I am certainly not the only person who doesn't "get" Donnie Darko's plot. If you want, there is plenty written online covering "explanations" of this movie. All of it is canon, and much of it is derived from The Philosophy of Time Travel, an in-movie book, written by Grandma Death. It doesn't exist in full in the real world—like, you can't buy this book at Barnes & Noble—but writer/director/creator Richard Kelly has at least expanded upon the ideas in this fictional book enough that you could feasibly use its content to help explain what happens in Donnie Darko.
Like many people online, I found these "explanations" to be almost more confusing than the movie, or at the very least not helpful at all. It almost feels like homework, in a way, which is not a feeling that I like to have when I'm trying to enjoy a goddamn movie.
In fact, here's something interesting—there exists a Director's Cut of Donnie Darko, released in 2004, that apparently throws a lot of these "explanations" up on screen, in an act of holding the audience's hand. I will say that the only opinion I saw online about Donnie Darko that pretty much everyone agreed with is that the Director's Cut is fucking garbage. I can imagine why. If the purpose of a movie is to confound you and interest you, then go ahead and do that (Being John Malkovich, e.g.). But in releasing his Director's Cut, Richard Kelly betrays the fact that this was not the film's intent. Kelly wants you to understand the wonky time travel bullshit, and the fact that barely anyone does turns into a failure on the movie's part.
Okay, alright, let's take another step back. Because it's time to acknowledge the real reason why everyone—including me—likes this movie. It doesn't fail because of the perplexities of the plot, but rather it succeeds despite those perplexities. When it was spreading through word of mouth, no one was espousing its plot's merits; it was spreading because Donnie Darko is a movie that feels cool, and intriguing, and mysterious, and probably hits pretty close to home to people who grew up in suburbia and felt that same apathy that Donnie feels.
About three-quarters in, I said to Pam, "I have no idea what is going on in this movie, but I can't wait to find out." Honestly, the reason I consider Donnie Darko a good movie is that we got to the end, we had not found out what it was all about, and it ended up not really mattering all that much anyway. Who needs any explanations regarding time travel when you can watch Gyllenhaal bike down a mountain road to the pulsing sound of Echo & the Bunnymen's "The Killing Moon"? Who needs anything to make sense when you get to be freaked out by a creepy dude in a giant bunny suit? Who needs to ponder about alternate timelines when you get to montage your way through all the main characters and ponder instead: what are they thinking? How are they feeling?
Donnie Darko is barely even a movie at all. It's more of a mood. It's dark, sinister, and wickedly funny. I feel like to get really into something, you need to at least understand it fully, ya know? So I can't say that I am or will ever be "really into Donnie Darko." But like the very best mysteries, this one is gonna linger for a while.
GRADE: 3.5 pukes out of 5
NEXT TIME: Like Donnie Darko, I remember a very specific night in high school during which I sat down with someone to watch Dr. Strangelove, but was then distracted by something a little more enticing. And similarly, it was with the realization that we were suddenly in a house without parental supervision that spurned us to turn the movie and go do something cooler. Except with Dr. Strangelove, it was going out to an IHOP at like two in the morning and meeting some friends. Anyways, I'm sure there are a lot of near misses on this movie list, and it's funny that two of them are right next to each other alphabetically. Kinda makes you think about alternate timelines, eh?! How would my life be different if I saw Dr. Strangelove in 2007 instead of breaking curfew?! Would I have been crushed by a jet engine if I hadn't eaten those pancakes?!?!
No comments:
Post a Comment