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).