Donnie Darko Donnie Darko is a psychological thriller, science fiction, and somewhat of a superhero movie written and directed

by Richard Kelly in 2001. The film is 88 minutes long. The title character is a troubled teenager who may be schizophrenic, struggling with his disturbing doomsday predicting hallucinations and trying to cope with his relationships. The film follows Donnie through a series of supernatural events during several weeks of his life. Its hard to sort of quantify whats so great about this film. Part of the weird fun of watching it is that its subjective: it means different things to different people. Most people dont understand it the first time they watch it. It was made with the possibility of multiple explanations. It has its own cultish following of frantic fanaticism and sort of lore. The stuff Im talking about is purely fictional and not entirely scientific. And I must explain the plot in detail, so as to not have the paradox of entailment: in which inconsistent premises make an argument valid. Donnie Darko is about certain complexities of the human condition: fate and free will, the difference between our waking life and dreams, the search for identity, and the nature of film itself. It starts with thunder. Donnie wakes up on a mountain road, starring at the sky, laughing as if he remembers something. Hes been sleepwalking. He rides his bike back down the mountain towards home. Everyday suburban things are happening in his neighborhood: people mowing lawns, eccentric speed walkers, and a red sports car passes by. At home theres his father and his sisters. His mother is seen reading Stephen Kings It, which is about kids in a small town terrorized by a clown. At dinner theres an argument over Donnies schizophrenic medication; hes stopped taking them. After midnight Donnies sleepwalking again. Hes lured from his room to a golf course nearby where he meets a man in a creepy bunny suit who tells him the world will end in exactly a month from now, on Halloween. He walks home the next morning to find people crowded around his house, there are FAA investigators and police everywhere. A jet engine has crashed into the house, landing directly on Donnies room, seemingly fallen from nowhere. This is the catalyst for everything that follows. The family stays at a Holiday Inn. The next day, in his therapists office where theres a picture of a plane on the wall, his therapist tries hypnosis on him to get him to talk about the man in the bunny suit, but instead he fantasizes about Christina Applegate from Married with Children. Later on, Donnie and his friends, from a nearby hill, watch a senile old woman with dementia who spends her days walking back and forth to the mailbox across the street. Theyve nicknamed her Grandma Death. While watching Grandma Death they have an argument about the Smurfs and Smurfette, and Donnie concludes that Smurfs are asexual and dont even have reproductive organs under those little white pants. Donnies hallucinations worsen; he begins seeing peoples astral projections, which is a sort of ghostly body separate from your own. He sees them guiding people through their lives, and follows his own to his parents closet where he finds his fathers gun. When he looks at his own astral projection thing, he looks directly at the camera. We learn that the man in the bunny suit guiding him through the events of his life is named Frank. Hes a sort of ghost of Christmas future. Donnie has to obey him because he saved his life. He often appears in mirrors, with a blue-ish glow, sometimes from his eye. Sometimes the scene is in slow motion. Sometimes there are images of the sky. When they communicate they always look directly at the camera. Eventually Frank convinces Donnie to vandalize his private high school, breaking open a water main and flooding it. He gets away with it. If Donnie had not flooded the school, the following events would not have happened. School is cancelled the next morning and Donnie walks home a new girl named Gretchen. She talks about her essay for science class, about the most beneficial invention to mankind, and Donnie says:

Antiseptics; sanitation and soap changed everything. A man in an orange jogging suit watches from a distance, spying. A few days later they begin dating and present a science project they worked on together. They came up with what Donnie calls Infant Memory Generators. Their idea is that: You buy these glasses for an infant and they wear them at night when they sleep, but inside the glasses are these slide photographs of something peaceful or beautiful, whatever the parents want, because no one remembers their infancy, it may develop memory early in life. But the Science teacher says: Did you stop and think that maybe infants need darkness? That maybe darkness is part of their natural development. Donnie begins having philosophical discussions after class with the Science teacher, who is diabetic and is always seen eating candy. They talk about the concept of pre-determined time, fate, and that if someone could see into the future, which Donnie can, that person could choose differently, which would make pre-determined time come to an end. He talks about a Stephen Hawkings book about timetravel, and tells Donnie that: All you need is a wormhole with an Einstein-Rosen Bridge which is theoretically a wormhole in space controlled by man, and that a metal craft of any kind could go through. Like a DeLorean! Donnie says, referring to Back to the Future. He gives Donnie a book: The Philosophy of Time-Travel. Written by Roberta Sparrow, who we learn is Grandma Death. In English class they are reading a short story by Graham Greene, titled The Destructors, in which a group of kids destroy an old mansion from the inside out. Donnie contributes to the class discussion stating that: Destruction is a form of creation. They just want to see what happens when they tear the world apart. They want to change things. Because of the school flooding, some of the conservative faculty bans the book. A conservative is someone who doesnt like big changes. The English teacher is blamed for it, and fired. The Health teacher, who leads the conservative protest, teaches Donnies class about a local selfhelp guru named Jim Cunningham who shes obsessed with. Both the Health teacher and Cunningham keep telling Donnie hes consumed with fear. At one point Donnie calls Cunningham the Anti-Christ, and calls him a C.H.U.D., referring to a film called C.H.U.D. The acronym stands for Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dweller. It has some significance later on. Theres a talent show in which a girl gets booed as she performs a dance dressed up as a swan. This is interesting in contrast to Franks bunny suit. That same night Donnie and Gretchen skip out on the talent show to go see a horror movie, as its nearing Halloween. The theatre they go to is called the Aero Theatre. Aero is the ancient Greek prefix of airplane. A sign shows the theatres playing Evil Dead and The Last Temptation of Christ. They watch Evil Dead. Its the late night showing, so theyre the only ones there. Gretchen falls asleep. Frank shows up sitting beside Donnie in his custom bunny suit and blue-ish 4th dimensional glow. Frank takes off the head of the bunny suit, revealing a grotesque eye wound. They have a pretty cool dialogue here. Donnie asks Frank: Why do you wear that stupid bunny suit? and Frank says: Why do you wear that stupid man suit? Donnie asks why his name is Frank, and he says: It was the name of my father and his father before me. This suggests that maybe hes done this before. Maybe its been going on for a while. Frank directs his attention to the movie screen, where a scene from Evil Dead is playing, and a sort of portal appears on the screen revealing Cunninghams house. Frank tells him to burn it to the ground. And Donnie has to obey again, leaving Gretchen asleep in the theatre in the meantime. He gets away with another act of vandalism. The next day Donnies watching the news: Cunningham is arrested after firefighters find child pornography in his house, referred to in the news headline as a kiddie-porn dungeon. Cunningham gets dragged off yelling at the police that they are consumed with fear. If Donnie had not burned down the house, that would not have happened.

Its Halloween; the day of Franks professed doomsday. Donnie writes a letter to Grandma Death asking for help, because she may have gone through the same circumstances. Donnies father is out of town on business, his mother and little sister are on a red-eye flight returning the next morning, and because his older sister got accepted to Harvard, they decide to celebrate. They have a costume party. The same man in an orange jogging suit is watching from the distance with a flashlight; maybe he s a disguised spy from the FAA. Later that night Donnie has another Hallucination that makes him decide to go to Grandma Deaths house, convinced she might help him. He takes Gretchen and his friends. This is where the climax of the film takes place. When they get there they enter into her house directly through the cellar door and are attacked by two local kids who were robbing the house. Gretchen is thrown dazed into the street where she is run over by a red sports car. Donnie is pinned down with a knife to his throat, he says: Deus ex machina! Thats a Latin phrase Ill explain later. Out of the car steps a man in a clown suit, referencing Stephen Kings It again, and a man in a bunny suit. They were on their way to the costume party. Donnie shoots the man in the bunny suit in the eye with his father s gun. Grandma Death checks the mailbox. Now its the time when the worlds supposed to end. Donnie drives into the hills above town, to the same mountain road from the beginning. Theres a sort of giant vortex or wormhole forming over the town, the epicenter at Donnies house. The camera is above, where Donnies looking into the wormhole; hes looking directly into the camera. Theres an airplane caught flying through the turbulence, some birds fly in too. The airplane is the red-eye flight his mother and little sister are returning on. One of the jet-engines breaks off and falls into the wormhole. Anagnorisis is a term used in old plays; its the moment when a character makes a critical discovery. Donnie realizes he must go through the wormhole. The whole film recapitulates in reverse, as we hear Donnie recite a line from his letter to Grandma Death: I can only hope that my life is not a work of fiction. Its the beginning of October; hes traveled back in time. Donnie lies in bed laughing maniacally, euphoric. The jet engine falls directly on him, killing him. In some ways he becomes a martyr, saving Gretchen, his mother, his little sister, the English teacher from being fired, Frank from killing and being killed, Donnie becoming a killer himself, and basically saving all the characters from their degradations. Throughout town we see people who were close to him awaken disturbed as if they remember something, including Frank who wakes up tentatively touching his eye. At the house there are police, ambulances, the FAA, and the Darko family outside. Gretchen watches from behind the yellow-tape, she and Donnies mother, now strangers, wave to each other as if they knew each other. The last line in the film we overhear from a police radio: All units should be back on base frequency. So what just happened? One theory is that Donnies universe is stuck in an infinitely recursive time-loop, which was started by a random phenomenon corrupting and causing the end of the world. Donnies world ends in a black hole over and over again until Donnie gets it right and fixes it. There s a word thats similar to this, called ekpyrosis; its a stoic belief in the periodic deconstruction and reconstruction of the universe in cycles. Its interesting that Frank once says he had predecessors, and that Donnie wakes up laughing as if he had done this before at the start of the movie, among other examples. The month of October had been going on for a while before this, and the movie marks Donnie s first successful attempt at fixing it, creating stasis. Its interesting to note that Donnies infinitely replayable world is not unlike being in a movie. The structure of the plot itself follows whats called a Fibonacci spiral; a thing that spirals endlessly inward. The infinity motif is all over it. The number eight, also the infinity symbol, keeps popping up: Donnies dog died when he was eight, the self-help guru is arrested at exactly 8:00, it takes place during the presidential election of 1988, and oddly in Back to the Future,

which Donnie references, the DeLorean had to reach a speed of 88mph to travel back in time, and so on, cutting stuff out because this is a long essay. One idea is that Donnie really is schizophrenic and is just going through an episode of his illness, although this is not a well-liked theory. Another motif is presented during Donnies English class about Graham Greenes The Destructors. Its called cataclysm. Its the idea that destruction is the ultimate form of creation, bringing about fundamental change, which a black hole does, as the ultimate destructor. During the films climax, when Donnie has a knife to his throat, he says: Deus ex machina! A deus ex machina is a term from Greek and Roman drama, when a god lowered by stage machinery resolves a situation and untangles a plot. Donnie is referring to Frank when he says this, because thats what Frank is. A butterfly effect is when any difference in a system, no matter how small, has an effect on everything else in the system, as if something would not happen if something else had not happened, and everything else before that. The butterfly effect is one of the ways the plot and characters work. Everything moves around like chess pieces. The overall moral questions of this film have to do with existence itself. What do we do if its all getting swallowed up in a wormhole anyway? How are we to live? After class, on her last day, the English teacher writes the words cellar door on the blackboard. Donnie asks her about it, she answers: A linguist once said that of all the phrases of the English language, of all the endless combinations of words in all of history that cellar door is the most beautiful. This scene plays an important role, prompting Donnie to go into Grandma Deaths house directly through her cellar door, where the climax takes place. The phrase itself is cited by scholars purely for its phonoaesthetic resonance: the way it sounds. In fact, the phrase is historically misunderstood. The correct term is celador.c-e-l-a-d-o-r. Celador is Spanish, and literally translates to watchman: one who watches.