Adam Cadre ([info]adamcadre) wrote,
@ 2009-06-02 00:00:00
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[info]arctangent
2009-06-03 08:28 pm UTC (link)
I enjoyed the "companion book" (it isn't really a book, it's a website, so it has the advantage of being free and not taking all *that* long to click through) but I honestly think I liked the movie better before I read it. Or, rather, that I like the book's take on What Really Happened but I consider it just one take out of many and far from the most interesting one.

I'd far rather think of the film as a weird, slightly incoherent modern take on the core theme of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge than actually try to come up with a sci-fi explanation for the whole thing.

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(Anonymous)
2009-06-04 02:30 am UTC (link)
I quite enjoyed Donnie Darko and I've always been confused by people who said it didn't make sense, since to me it's always been a movie about the uncertainty of the universe. Living in our familiar environment on earth, we're lulled into thinking the world is stable and predictable but really, we have a blinkered view of the universe and what's out there, how things really work is weird and unknowable and if Donnie doesn't understand it, or the viewer doesn't understand it, it's because it's not meant to be understood and if we're lucky we'll catch a glimpse of it before we're crushed by a jet engine or a guy in a bunny suit runs over your girlfriend, and to demonstrate this the movie develops a bunch of sympathetic characters and kills them all. That's what I got out of it, at least.

I find the opinion that the movie's a pretentious turd to be more understandable, though personally I think that's more a problem with certain fans because I don't remember the movie itself being particularly pretentious.

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[info]arctangent
2009-06-04 04:39 pm UTC (link)
Adam has repeatedly said he doesn't like works of fiction where the point is that "My story doesn't make sense because REAL LIFE doesn't make sense", and I can respect that even if I disagree.

I would put forward that part of what makes Donnie Darko compelling is that it would be trite to just have Donnie be an everyman, an ordinary person, who finds the world to be a confusing nightmare in a way that, frankly, most of us ordinary people actually don't unless we're having a really bad day. (See Adam's old review of The Matrix where he was unmoved by the whole "reality is a simulation" mindfuck because the world presented by the film never much felt like "reality" in the first place.)

Instead the film gives us someone a lot of us well-adjusted moviegoers would be hard put to identify with -- not just a disaffected low-achieving high school loner but one with serious mental problems who can barely express himself without stuttering out a weird disorienting word salad of incoherence. And then it shows us the world from his perspective and makes it look like something beautiful, compelling, something that might make sense if we could stick with him long enough -- but we can't, the dream-logic of his own narrative, the one that makes him special and interesting and lovable in the first place, is also what pushes him inexorably toward his own end.

Part of the point here is that all of the other tragedies of the film -- the deaths of Frank, of Gretchen, of Donnie's mom and sister -- are all undone by Donnie's own death. There's a vague-yet-compelling point here about the way deeply psychologically disturbed people view the world, the reasons for their martyr complex -- the strange sense that they and the world are *incompatible*. That Donnie's bizarre "suicide" is his gift to us, that his discomfiting and painful presence was making it impossible for the world to proceed about its business as usual -- that we martyr the mentally ill, the disturbed, the Too Different because it's the only way we can maintain the illusion that the sane rational consensus about how life works is a universal objective truth.

Etc. Of course, again, there's a lot of difference in how much people would be willing to tolerate the somewhat overdone and pointless argument that "Maybe schizophrenic people are the sane ones!", and it's not an argument that would hold up if it were made directly rather than in the sort of indirect, imagistic way the movie does (and here again I think we run into Adam's distaste for dream-logic and purely imagistic storytelling vs. straightforward narrative).

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[info]arctangent
2009-06-04 04:55 pm UTC (link)
I'm one of the ones who agrees, btw, that even though the movie's subject matter and storytelling techniques and whatnot make it incredibly vulnerable to the "pretentious" label, I didn't think it was all that pretentious when watching it, and I'm usually pretty sensitive to that kind of thing.

In a weird way this is metatextual; the movie, despite its self-aware weirdness and occasional stridency and intense self-absorption, isn't pretentious in the same way that Donnie the character isn't pretentious. Donnie isn't actually aware of the standards people have for what makes someone cool and interesting and smart vs. off-putting and creepy and weird, and he doesn't much care. He thinks what he has to say is very, very important, yes, but he cares more about *saying* it than how you react to it. (Whereas a pretentious person is likely to *say* that he cares more about saying it than how you react to it, but that's only to engender a more favorable reaction, if you take my meaning.)

I get the feeling that Richard Kelly, the auteur of Donnie Darko, is like that in real life. The film is thus a colossal mishmash of stuff that he likes and that he really wants to see in a film, and that's done with a kind of authenticity that would be missing if he had sat down and gone through the Pretentious Indie Film Checklist of stuff to impress the audience with. If anything the hamfistedness of some of the dialogue helps with this. Fight Club, another movie I love, *does* verge into pretentiousness precisely because some of the monologues are so on-the-nose, so cleverly written, so intentionally designed to evoke a specific reaction from the audience and to be an easy cite for a film studies major talking about the themes of the film.

Donnie Darko fails to do this, and it fails to do this in an interesting way. Donnie's rant as to why Jim Cunningham is the "fucking Antichrist" doesn't make much sense (Is the filmmaker *actually* in favor of telling fat people to get off their ass and exercise? Is he *actually* telling us that maybe you should go take some boxing lessons and punch the bully back?) but it feels right, it takes this inchoate "wrongness" of Cunningham's smarmy guru lectures and pits someone against them who's got a lot of heart if not that much brain. That scene has a lot more resonance for me precisely because Donnie can't articulate exactly what's wrong with Cunningham the way a pretentious antihero like Tyler Durden would.

Jake Gyllenhaal said he actually based Donnie's mumbling, meandering mode of speech on Richard Kelly himself -- something that's quite audible if you listen to the director commentaries on the DVD -- and I think the film as a whole is endearing for that same reason, that as David Foster Wallace would say it "rang cherries" for me despite its incoherence, despite the weird veering from one style and tone to another from scene to scene, or maybe because of it -- we're supposed to be looking into the mind of a deeply troubled person trying to make sense of their alienation from the world and the film itself reflects that kind of chaos and inconsistency. (And it does so in a way that, again, doesn't have that pretentious indie-film way of grabbing us by the lapels and screaming "REALITY IS A LIE" in our face. Drew Barrymore said she bankrolled this film because of her fascination with how the script makes it sound like the movie should be a grand guignol of psychosexual torment a la Mulholland Drive and yet Kelly's mise en scene is so gentle, so calm, so peaceful. Donnie is "tormented", yes, but he's at peace with *himself*, his inner life is a life of peace -- it's the world that bothers him.)

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[info]miconazole
2009-06-05 03:15 am UTC (link)
That's an interesting interpretation I hadn't considered. My wanderings down the "maybe Donnie is nuts" path mostly ended with "but he really does get crushed by a jet engine, so nah", so my view of the movie is pretty literal. But the way you describe it, it does work as a metaphor. Hmm.

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[info]arctangent
2009-06-05 04:37 pm UTC (link)
The way I choose to interpret the jet engine is -- I'm struggling to find another reference that parallels it, so maybe like one of those old cartoons where we see someone going off on a ludicrous rant about impossible adventures they have and then in the last five seconds you see some physical evidence of the thing's real existence appear in the real world. You know what I'm talking about -- this is how Kristin Wiig's "Penelope" sketches on SNL tend to end. It's Donnie getting the gift of having his craziness intrude into the real world, become realized, become inarguably true, and for him to pay the price for this gift by having it also end his life.

That's my hyper-abstract interpretation, anyway. This is how I read The Philosophy of Time Travel, too -- as an actual science-fiction explanation of the events of the story it's really annoyingly convoluted and unnecessary, but as a sort of twisted metaphorical take on why, perhaps, real schizophrenic people develop suicidal tendencies, it makes sense -- the "Tangent Universe" is Donnie's own fucked-up crazy take on the world, the "Primary Universe" is the real world, the two can't coexist, the "Artifact" is the one heroic act that Donnie can take to acknowledge this dichotomy, assert power over it, and by doing so become its master rather than its victim (suicide).

Taken in that light and as a hyperliteral thing it becomes an actual exhortation to alienated mentally ill teens to slash their wrists in the bathtub, which is why I don't try to take it too literally, and why the surrealistic mechanism of having it be Donnie's own madness literally killing him (something appearing from nowhere above his head) is so much better than having Donnie actually shoot himself or something.

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