Wikipedia’s word salad description of Donnie Darko as a ‘science fiction psychological thriller’ is emblematic of the difficulty in categorising this singular film released in 2001. Written and directed by a then 26 year old Richard Kelly, it is now safe enough to ascribe the category of ‘classic’ to Donnie Darko. As a debut feature by Kelly, it may still be his greatest achievement 22 years later. The film defies any single interpretation and is purposely written to be scrutinised, analysed and dissected. This may well be the challenge of writing about such a film in that countless thousands of words have already been put to paper poring over the film’s many hidden meanings and idiosyncrasies. Well, here it goes.
We are introduced to the titular character waking up at dawn, barefoot and lying in the middle of a remote mountain road with his push-bike abandoned on the grassy verge. He is disorientated but smiles deeply to himself. His descent back down the mountain road to the sound of Echo and the Bunnymen’s classic Killing Moon establishes a tone that is off-kilter and unsettled. The film is all about tone. Kelly’s forensic attention to framing, performance and soundtrack serve to keep the audience on edge or at the very least, second-guessing themselves. The lyrics of Killing Moon seem to foreshadow significant ideas in the film itself. Lines like, ‘The Killing time/unwillingly mine' and ‘Fate/Up against your will/through the thick and thin’ establish two of the most prominent themes in the film: time and fate.
The classic American suburban idyll is presented at the beginning of the film with Donnie cycling through his home town, aloof and distant from the environment he travels through. The manicured lawns and white-picket fences evoke the America of Norman Rockwell except we are in Middlesex, Virginia - the year is 1988 in the weeks leading up to the Bush-Dukakis presidential election. Donnie’s father and daughter are also introduced in the opening sequence with Killing Moon slowly fading out. The father’s playful interaction with his daughter, pointing a leaf-blower in her face as she approaches him in their garden, sends her off in a huff with the father smiling to himself afterwards, clearly revelling in his own childishness. Holmes Osborne’s turn as the father Eddie Darko is a beautifully realised performance which manages to ground the film with the character’s affability and humanity. He has his own personality quirks but seems to share his son’s caustic sense of humour.
We are immediately immersed into Donnie’s world of psychological horror and psychosis. The chilling sonically augmented opening words of ‘Wake up!’ from his alter-ego Frank (a giant 6 foot tall bunny rabbit) coincides with a shot of Donnie’s bedroom light being switched on around midnight. He seems to be in a trance or a kind of catatonic state being led by the words and orders of Frank. Kelly must have been inspired by the classic film Harvey (1950) starring Jimmy Stewart, in which the main character also communicates with an invisible 6 foot tall rabbit much to the dismay of his family and friends. Both films play with the audience’s perception of what is truly real or imaginary, neither providing easy answers. Donnie’s rabbit is more sinister than Harvey’s rabbit however, ordering him to commit criminal acts in the middle of the night.
One of these acts was to flood the high school which Donnie attends. Another was to burn down the house of a local self-help guru played brilliantly by the late Patrick Swayze, adding to the strong current of 80s nostalgia in the film. These acts of vandalism are linked to the short story ‘The Destructors’ by Graham Greene, the text being studied in Donnie’s English class. In the story, a group of teenagers calling themselves ‘The Wormsley Common Gang’ devise a plan to destroy a two-hundred year old house that survived The Blitz. They flood the house while the owner is away. They find a large sum of money in his mattress but decide to burn it anyway. The house is then torn asunder by a lorry tied to the outer structure. The short story acts as a sort of narrative frame for the film, even the axe placed in the head of the school mascot statue is similar to a scene in The Destructors.
The idea of destruction acting as a form of creation is prevalent in both the short story and the film. The burning of the house reveals the self-help guru’s predilection for child porn to the authorities and the flooding of the school leads to his meeting Gretchen Ross. Positive consequences can come from destructive acts and negative ones from creative acts. This ambiguous and somewhat chaotic view of the world flies in the face of social norms and orthodoxy - particularly Reagan-era America. The latter is probably best epitomised by the character of Kitty Farmer, an uptight and anally retentive teacher who believes it is her job to uphold the moral purity of the children in her care. Ms. Farmer attempts to ban the short story the students are reading believing that it has directly influenced the recent spate of vandalism perpetrated by Donnie.
Eighties America saw a virulent strain of puritanism seep into the culture at the hands of Evangelical Christian conservatives. Great efforts were made (some successful) to ban certain types of music like Heavy Metal and books that were deemed problematic all in the name of shielding children from moral corruption. Unfortunately this sense of moral panic has returned to America and parts of Europe, this time emanating from the opposite end of the political spectrum. The film paints this sort of crippling censorious hysteria in a suitably idiotic manner. Little did Kelly know that this aspect of cultural history would repeat itself over 20 years later albeit wearing new ideological clothing.
One of the most perfect cinematic marriages of sound and vision comes in the form of the steady-cam high-school sequence. Various facets of daily high-school life are depicted with brilliantly manoeuvred camera work utilising a slower camera speed interspersed with sections that are at double-speed. The Tears for Fears track Head over Heels playing over this sequence seems to encapsulate all the glory, dishonour, fear and mundanity of high-school. But there is a celebration of the ordinary here also. The sequence performs the magic trick of acting as both a searing critique but also a glorification of its subject matter. Again, the lyrics of the song directly comment on the plot of the film. The fourth verse of the song goes: ‘I made a fire/and watching it burn/Thought of your future/with one foot in the past.’ Again the lyrics foreshadow events coming later in the film. The directorial virtuosity of Richard Kelly is highly evident here and it remains one of the most iconic sequences ever committed to celluloid.
Indeed, the education system itself is depicted as a stifling and smothering influence on the students in Donnie Darko. The American high-school here is a place of bullies, drugs and trauma with little room for individuality aside from the odd English lesson. Two glimmers of light exist however in the form of Donnie’s English teacher Ms. Pomeroy and her colleague Prof. Monnitoff who discusses portals through space-time with Donnie. The teachers are a couple. There is a knowingness between these characters peppered throughout the film, like they are privy to something the audience is not - the opposite of dramatic irony. They both seem enamoured with Donnie - this is revealed not only in their classroom interactions but in a very short static shot of the two sitting beside each other in the staffroom. Monnitoff smiles and looks at Pomeroy and simply says, ‘Donnie Darko.’ Pomeroy responds with a smile, a shake of her head and an ambiguous ‘‘I know.'
It would not be contentious to argue that the film is in fact a superhero movie - a very dark one. In one scene, Gretchen Ross, the new girl in town, poses the question ‘Donnie Darko? What the hell kind of name is that? Sounds like some sort of superhero…’ He replies enigmatically with, ‘What makes you think I’m not?’ His ultimate act of self-sacrifice and time-travel to save Gretchen meets two of the criteria for entry into the world of Marvel or DC. However to label it a superhero movie is to gloss over the inherent peculiarity and darkness that characterises the film.
Donnie Darko exists in its own universe, spinning slightly off axis through space and time. It will always defy any neat interpretation or reductive analysis. This is the brilliance of the film. Never has there been a more auspicious full feature debut than this one by Richard Kelly. The film closes with another classic Tears for Fears song Mad World. The following lyrics sum up the shifting tonal character of the film quite accurately: ‘I find it kind of funny/I find it kind of sad/ The dreams in which I’m dying/ are the best I’ve ever had.’ Donnie Darko straddles the dark and the light. It was fearless in its depiction of a disintegrating teenage mind. It also offered up the redemptive power of love and sacrifice in the name of love. In the words of Gretchen Ross, ‘Some people are just born with tragedy in their blood.’