full of camp and teen angst

Rating: Null/10 (16 July 2004)

Having just watched the movie and having just read the first abysmal comment left by some belicose Ebert & Roeper wannabe, I would like to contribute my own opinions to the movie Donnie Darko.
I sat down to watch the movie expecting some vapid, Hollywood teen thriller saturated with mild pornography, whiny suburban rock, and a couple of cute teen faces. Ah! how looks can deceive! Instead I found a campy, dark, sweet love story about teenage alienation and the meaning of the universe.
I should have known immediately, with an incongruent Patrick Swayze in the credits, as well as dimpled Drew Barrymore, that something was awry, and that this was no simple summer flick.
The film is rife with genre reference and kudos, Stephen King and Sam Raimi among the most blatant. The surface of the story is indeed a confused sci-fi fantasy about time-travel, highschool alienation, teenage love, and rebellion. But to leave it at that would be impertinent, it would be like reading Camus's L'Etranger and deriding it for something as simple as murder story.
Standing on a beach With a gun in my hand Staring at the sea Staring at the sand Staring down the barrel At the arab on the ground See his open mouth But hear no sound
-- The Cure, Killing an Arab
Enter Happy Camper #1, Donnie Darko. A slightly deranged though sympathetic loner who disagrees with everyone, doesn't fit in, and is plagued by dreams of death and destruction. Obviously if you don't sympathize with him, you've led a life of drab conformity! Happy Camper #2, his girlfriend, Joanie James, who's mother is a battered wife, who's step-father is homicidal, and who has to face the ritual ridicule that new schools seem designed to promote (at least in white suburban America that is). So we've got the hero and his love, a hero who is being led by a sibilant voice in the form of a nightmare bunny rabbit (Jimmy Stewart never had hallucinations like this, that's for sure) which, surprisingly, isn't that original, having been used in both "Of Mice and Men" and "Harvey", though certainly never so menacingly. Proceeding. Our morose and disgruntled protagonist ambles along the plot line, only becoming tangled with the possibility of time travel (Stephen Hawkins obviously a sh*t disturber). What if, what if? What if it were possible to change time? What if in doing so you annihilated God? What if in doing so you annihilated yourself? (Teachers be forewarned, you can lose your job over this line of thinking) and so... Enter Patrick Swayze, Happy Camper #3, who seems to have conquered all of life's dilemmas by vanquishing fear, the Almighty Fear (brought on no less by alcohol, drugs, and eeee! pre-marital sex! Does this sound like a panacea? Sure does, but our hero can see right through his polarized morality. Isn't the gamut of human emotion more than just FEAR and LOVE, can't the two sometimes combine, or even collide?
Donnie Darko is about one boy's choice to live alone, an existential duel between faith and fear. He is given no option, no saving grace, only a repetitious plague of waking nightmares that remind him of his estrangement.
If he tunes out the calling of the voice, if he shatters fate, then he knows that the universe is empty, that there is no redemption in heaven, and that he must face oblivion. However, if he continues along the path, the foreseen future, rife with its hallucinations and demons, he will never be sane, will never be normal, and will lose the only person he comes to care about. Like he says "What's the point of living if you don't have a dick?" If there is no hope, if there is no love, who cares. But what if love drives to to an even greater alienation, what if love forces you to destroy the "world" the Cosmos (in its original meaning), and so doing, destroys you. What choice is that? Well, Donnie chooses, and the world does go on... so maybe Death isn't waiting in Samara after all.
I won't uphold my writing, or the structure of this argument, because it sucks and I'm tired, but I feel that if I at least garner a response, a retort, or even sympathy for this movie, then I haven't wasted my time.