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.)