If we've done the passing, is the rite any use to us?

Rating: Null/10 (23 February 2011)

It's said that the most difficult word to translate from Spanish is 'duende'. In dictionaries it shows up as 'elf' or 'magic', however in actual practice the word doesn't mean the woodland spirit, but another kind of magic, the one that stirs the emotions.
I'm coming really late to this teenage cult flick, I've done the passing so the rite itself is useless to me now, but the translation of the movie's duende is an interesting problem. Do we accept Donnie Darko's magic as an earnest expression of angst or do we bemoan how unsophisticated it is, perhaps the angst itself, that a young man gets to stand up and lecture the grownups?
On one hand, it's the charming combination, the esoteric preamble into an apocalypse of the mind, the perverse parody of a white picket fence society, the youthful rhapsody for understanding and love. To the degree that Richard Kelly is trying to emulate the David Lynch film, I'm left at a distance, amused but not terribly interested by these easy contrasts and the stretch for eccentricity, by the perversion of the moral right or authority.
What I appreciate here, like in Gummo or earlier in Godard's Breathless, is the youthful expression, that a young director gets to make a film to tell us what it means to be young, that these feelings are not addressed after the fact. As with the Harmony Korine film, I find the nihilism to be as much a fashion statement as a political expression of disenchantment, and when Richard Kelly speaks of life and death, it's coming from the pretentious point of view of adolescence. Trivial problems overblown, magnified, ruminations from the safe distance of youth. But it's exactly that distance that makes them possible, even gives them a bit of charm.
But I also sense a yearning for the presence of a god, plan or meaning in the macrocosm, airheaded perhaps but genuine. I think the tolerance or affection an adult viewer can foster for a film like Donnie Darko, or Gummo indeed, boils down to whether or not we recognize that the young can ask the same questions even from a naive viewpoint, whether or not they can attempt to feel the spectrum of emotion within their limited experience of the world.