Best Reels: Cult Cuts | "Donnie Darko" and Where We Go when We Fall Asleep
Spoiler alert: this analysis touches on major plot points in the 2001 version of Donnie Darko.
The doomsday clock reads 00:00:00:00. We’re entering another portal. Today—January 19th, 2021—marks exactly 20 years since Richard Kelly’s polarizing dark horse debut, Donnie Darko, dropped on unsuspecting Sundance Film Festival audiences. The film was met with a notorious mix of skepticism and rabid excitement at its first screening in Park City. To the critical eye, it was proudly independent by definition, but its Hollywood-grade visual effects and big name stars like Drew Barrymore gave mixed signals. Later, its proper theatrical release was complicated by the September 11th attacks, but its significantly altered Director’s Cut released in 2004 catapulted it back into the public eye. The film’s cult following, of course, has practically made it synonymous with the idea of “cult” itself. This is where the film’s true lasting power has always lied, its lore appearing in everything from MySpace profiles in the aughts to fan-made MGMT music videos today.
I first came across the film in a Media Arts class in high school, probably around 2007 or 2008. The class was more a social forum than it ever was a proper film discussion, so my recollection of that screening probably got mixed up with talk of who was dating who, but what stuck with me after that day were the film’s iconic, E.T.-inspired scenes of suburban life, and its distinctly dreamlike atmosphere. You might say the entire film looked to me like an idealized, half-forgotten high school dream: softly lit, embalmed in a veneer, maybe a little surreal.
To call this film a high school coming-of-age film, however, would be missing the point entirely. While Jake Gyllenhaal’s Donnie does “learn him some lessons” by the film’s end, the implications for his having gotten to that point and his actions along the way result in consequences beyond the construction of identity. The plot of Donnie Darko is notoriously dense and abstruse, with many ideas at play — many of which are still being pondered today. Reddit discussions are still active with users trying to unravel Kelly’s script, and while Kelly would go on to release the Director’s Cut of the film in 2004 that put many debates to rest, there are still questions simmering and still those obsessed with their own fan fiction. There are also many who denounce the Director’s Cut, saying that the work it does in terms of world-building and explaining undercuts the ambiguity that makes the original version more personally resonant. These people—amongst whom I would count myself—are less concerned with a definitive answer and more content to use what clues they are given in the original version to help them form their theories. The 2001 Donnie Darko invites that sort of interaction, and that’s a beautiful thing.
To recap, the basic premise of Donnie Darko is this: Donnie is a sardonic teenager who lives with his two parents and two sisters in relative wealth and comfort, but he is angst-filled and stand-offish. One night, he is roused from his sleep by a mysterious figure in a rabbit costume (Frank) that tells him the world will end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds. When Donnie returns home, he finds that a jet engine has plummeted through his house and into his bedroom. Donnie then goes about trying to decipher Frank’s cryptic message in order to stop doomsday, while also being influenced by Frank to perform acts of vandalism and destruction. The states in which Donnie is being influenced begin to blur, as does the question of whether or not Donnie is even under an influence.
From the outset, what is made clear is that the world in Richard Kelly’s film is Donnie’s and Donnie’s alone. At no other point in the film do we adopt another character’s point of view, and only rarely is a character featured in a scene without Donnie present. Scenes are also bookended or prefaced with brief flashes of what appear to be Donnie’s dreams, visions, or premonitions. There is a verisimilitude to Donnie’s world, but there are also hints of mystique or the uncanny at every turn. The story is set in humid Middlesex, Virginia, but much of the film is awash in an icy colour palette, blue tints dulling the light of day and giving the night scenes a steely feel. In his interview with Kevin Conroy Scott, Kelly attributed these lighting choices to Francis Ford Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), which he said captured the “burnished nostalgia” he was looking for. Coppola’s film, which concerns a young woman who faints at her high school reunion and wakes up in her own past (we’ll get to the significance of this later), is emblazoned with a glittery 80s sheen, shrink-wrapped in the safe chrysalis of Peggy’s idealized memories. The world of Donnie Darko reckons with darker forces by comparison, but it too is set in a romanticized 80s, and in that yawning limbo state before the maturity following high school. And it may not spell it out for the audience, but it too takes place in some special corner of its protagonist’s mind.
Donnie is a somnambulist – a sleepwalker. When he drifts out of his regular, “full” consciousness and enters the REM cycle of rest, he gets up, asleep but also in a state of wakefulness, and he traverses great distances. And Kelly’s film suggests that it is more than just some form of parasomnia that compels Donnie. Donnie’s parents believe he is experiencing “daylight hallucinations” brought on by his schizophrenia; Donnie’s therapist attempts to treat his schizophrenia by putting Donnie in hypnotic states to access a more childlike part of his brain; and clear liquid worms protruding from people’s chests begin to reveal to Donnie what may be their predetermined paths. Lurking in the shadows of it all is Frank, the rabbit that looks like it could be an early evolution of the creatures in 2018’s Annihilation. Frank is the deliverer of Donnie’s doomsday message, and he is the one who seems to inspire Donnie’s acts of destruction throughout the story. But even considering all these factors, Donnie is far from what you would call the impressionable type. Far from the type of person who could be easily manipulated. He is firmly against the dangerous lessons espoused by his ultra-conservative health teacher and his school’s resident motivational speaker, and he is by all accounts a well-read, independently inquisitive individual. Stranger still, everything that pulls at Donnie only seems to want to help further him on his journey. For example, Donnie’s interactions with Frank lead him to become obsessed with the topic of time travel, which leads him to his science Professor, who puts him on to a book titled The Philosophy of Time Travel, which leads him to considering Middlesex’s neighbourhood crone and time travelling expert, Roberta Sparrow. Later, Sparrow will reveal the “cellar door” that guides Donnie towards fulfilling his prophecy. Every domino falls where it needs to, and Donnie is maneuvered accordingly.
Donnie seems both aware of and complicit with the strange lattice of coincidence that shapes his story, and it is this cognition that gives the impression he has some level of control over the film’s fabric. When he prods at the invisible force fields that shield Frank, he may as well be prodding at this very fabric. It seems to me that Donnie is by all accounts the architect of his world — the dreamer. Like we as audience members, he is aware of the story mechanics that make each sequence in the story necessary, and he surrenders a part of himself to make these divine mechanics turn (dreams always require a degree of surrender).
It would be reductive to watch Donnie Darko and say it was all a dream in the end, but it is clear that with the film’s nostalgia-infused tone and its nods beyond an objective reality that the majority of the narrative is taking place on some plane beyond everyday existence. In the 2004 Director’s Cut of the film, text from the fictional book The Philosophy of Time Travel (written by Kelly) explains this plane as being a “Tangent Universe” – a universe that split from the known, “Primary Universe” in which the jet engine crashed through the roof of the Darko residence in the beginning of the film. But in the original 2001 version of the film, the contents of The Philosophy of Time Travel are never really revealed to us in full. In this version, we must confront the strangeness like Donnie and any other dreamer, dropped into a snow globe world with only floating clues to interpret.
Probing further, it is evident that what manifests in this story, in addition to being in service to Donnie, is unequivocally a part of or at least a reflection of Donnie. Donnie’s clashes with the ultra-conservative Mrs. Farmer, for example, can be read as an extension of the opposition he must face at home with his conservative parents. Gretchen, played by Jena Malone, appears to Donnie at a critical juncture in his sexual maturity (Donnie expresses to his psychiatrist that all he thinks about is “fucking girls at school”). Then, Gretchen comes to mean more to Donnie than a sexual conquest, and the story progresses so as to make it clear that she is the only person with whom Donnie can truly express himself. Only in the most clichéd romances does love reveal itself to a protagonist in such providential fashion – and this film is not a romance. That being said, the love that develops here is the sort of love that can only be conjured only in one’s mind.
But the climax of the film results in the shattering of Donnie’s dream – the death of Gretchen. This does not come as the devastating blow to Donnie that we expect, though. This is because every domino falls where it needs to. Donnie understands that the gears must turn and the dream must perpetuate itself, and so Gretchen’s death becomes another “cellar door,” just like the ones laid out for him by Ms. Pomeroy (Drew Barrymore) and Roberta Sparrow. Another portal, just like the one revealed to him by Frank at the movie theatre during the screening of Evil Dead (which leads Donnie to burn down Jim Cunningham’s house and expose the man as a collector of child pornography). But this time, Donnie is confronted with 00:00:00:00. The world is coming to an end. Donnie’s world. Donnie’s life. Through trauma, Donnie is routed back to the beginning of the story, to the “Primary Universe”—October 2nd, 1988—when the jet engine crashes through the roof of the Darko household. This time, Donnie is in his bed.
Trauma is what brings Donnie’s dream to a close, and to me, it is also what plunges Donnie into his dream world to begin with. The looping nature of the story suggests the errant jet engine at the film’s beginning was always meant for Donnie – so, it was Donnie’s mission to defy Frank, claim his destined place in bed, and in doing so let the engine claim his life. This results in Donnie balancing out a natural order in the universe. To help him accept this role, he dreams his dream. He concocts a larger role, in a world where his every act of destruction is a form of creation; where every person he interacts with bears some key in uncovering his quest; where he fights the good fight and finds love. This world exists within a realm of one’s consciousness in which a noble scenario of self-sacrifice has been fabricated in order to help one come to terms with their death. Everything falls into place because everything must – it must all aid Donnie in finding acceptance. Think a life flashing before one’s eyes in their final moments, except the life that flashes here is being invented in those moments. Think Peggy Sue fainting at her high school reunion and as a result being able to re-evaluate her marriage before a critical, life-altering moment.
The Director’s Cut of Kelly’s film attempts to explain all this via parallel universes, time travel, and “manipulated” agents, turning Donnie Darko into much more of a sci-fi story than anything. But the original cut is more psychological, more cerebral. The original is also more spiritual, with allusions to an afterlife (see: the imagery recurring imagery of blue skies and fluffy white clouds), angels (the character of Cherita Chen), and God. Kelly’s first cut balances these concepts out with the scientific concepts brought to the table by Professor Monnitoff, but in his Director’s Cut, Kelly seems more intent on complicating the work the two fields have already done by adding in his own half-baked mythology.
In a 2004 interview with Salon.com concerning his choices in the Director’s Cut, Kelly famously said that what he added was written “as an exercise in interpretation.” In other words, much of what is seen in the Director’s Cut is Kelly just trying to decipher his own story with the clues he left himself in 2001 — just as I have in my writing. Just as fans and critics and film theorists before me have. If there’s anything I’ve learned while writing this, it’s that we’re never content to leave well enough alone. There is always another world to invent. There is always another “exercise in interpretation” to take on. This, maybe, is how I come to appreciate the Director’s Cut after all: for its daring to go down that rabbit hole, just like anyone vexed and enchanted by a story that has touched them, no matter what the repercussions might be.
It is this same urge that makes Donnie’s dream-traipsing so endearing — this willingness to move confidently into the unknown that compels him, compelling us as a result. Dreams, after all, are the mind taking survey of the contents of one’s subconscious and re-ordering them or re-contextualizing them. Rewriting them. We must be open to rewrites and new presentations of the familiar because even though they may re-tread old ideas, they still present new insights to be gleaned, or, old ideas to be filtered through the lens of new knowledge, new time periods, and new appreciation. Donnie’s rewrite occurs at his life’s tragic end, but it is in those moments before his demise that he finds a never-before-felt connection with his world and its inhabitants. Even if he doesn’t rewrite history itself, save a tangent universe, or time travel, it is in those moments that he saves his world. His very, very mad world.