CONTAINS SPOILERS
Do you all remember the video where Michael Stipe sings the splendid Everybody Hurts?
Everybody suffers. Singers, guitarists and drummers, children, vamp women and policemen, white, black and Hispanic people, truck drivers, fathers and sons, young and old. They are all stuck along life's course, inside their cars.
Then they exit from their sheets of metal and everything changes.
“It’s an illusion”, Bill Hicks once said, “all matters are merely energy condensed in a slow vibration that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves.” We are all one.
And if this was the point in Donnie Darko?
I'm not sure I've solved the enigma of this film.
If I had watched it and written about it twenty years ago, when the film was released and I was a mostly angry teenager with the world, I would have spoken differently. But a lot of water has passed under the bridge and, in the meantime, other points of view have overlapped in my mind. I have no certainties. Maybe it's better this way, according to someone every certainty destroys a truth, while doubt feeds it, so… how many stimuli does this film offer.
PLOT
On the night of October 2, the engine of a plane crashes into the bedroom of an American teenager named Donnie Darko...
CHARACTERS AND SETTING
The context is stuffed with American society's fetishes (or at least those fetishes that American society peddles through the media), seen in a critical light. Initially, watching Donnie Darko, I saw American Beauty again.
The protagonist is Donnie, a young High School student, high IQ, suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and sleepwalking, a “strange” one. Around him revolves the fauna that surrounds any American high school student; the contrast between negative characters and characters… that “save themselves” is clear.
They seem like caricatures of caricatures (at least I hope so) of characters already seen. On one side there's the principal, the gym teacher, the motivational guru who is (we later find out) a pedophile, the two bullies and the chilling little dancer girls: vacant, victims of appearances, sanctimonious. On the other side, life is embraced with curiosity in all its range of impulses: and here is the beautiful and engaging literature teacher, the physics teacher and the relativity of time, the "lady death", perhaps, Donnie's family.
Places and events are the same as every American teenage film: the school, the house with the garden and the cinema, the lessons, the performance in the auditorium, and the Halloween party. Déjà vu, one might say. It could be, but the context might just be an expedient to talk about something else.
It's not irony or satire as it might seem: the setting is realistic, but the gaze is sci-fi: The point, the starting points are primarily two others.
The first one concerns the consequences of the theory of relativity and the theory of time travel: I will try to explain what I understood first and then thought, as simply as possible. In the theory of special relativity, it's hypothesized that the speed of light remains the same for both observers inside and outside of a closed system in motion (like the hold of a boat). If the speed of light remains constant for all observers, then the clocks inside a moving boat, compared to ours outside, tick more slowly. This is because, moving relative to us, they will travel a longer path and therefore take more time to cover it.
Now imagine having to make a journey into space. According to your clock, a certain amount of time passes to travel from departure to arrival, but, for someone observing you from outside, a longer time will pass. Therefore, in a purely hypothetical line, if a rocket could travel at a speed surpassing the speed of light and this speed was, as hypothesized, the same for all observers, for the man inside the spacecraft, time would go backward, and he would be traveling through time.
Here, in this film, maybe, someone might have found a way to move through time. In this case, for him, before and after, beginning and end, can mix and coincide. In the film, an event repeats twice: an airplane turbine crashes into Donnie's room, each time with different consequences. And if someone had changed the order of events?
No, it's still not enough.
There's a second idea that makes the first one its own and completes it; it concerns memory and the replacement of memories: "Imagine if you could go back in time, take all the dark and painful moments and replace them with something better", says Gretchen, Donnie's girlfriend.
And if the entire story unfolded in someone's memory? If the entire story were an illusion. All the characters, all the actions would be in a single flow of one consciousness and subjectivity would be only apparent. Remember Bill's words? If everyone were within the consciousness or modified memories of someone, even time, life, would be an illusion… in the final flashback, the differences between characters, positive and negative, annul themselves in someone's mind.
But there's more in this film, oh yes, there's more. There's Frank, and there's Gretchen, there are floods and there are fires. Before or after, in reality or in the dream, facts and characters get confused. In any case, whether you see it one way or another, there's always a good reason to rewatch this film after twenty years, because it's well-made and also has some beautiful music.
So, press play and watch it. Bye.
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Other reviews
By dark schneider
This film offers us one of the most intriguing and disturbing adolescent experiences that cinema has ever proposed.
A film I strongly recommend everyone to watch... The masterpieces.
By Jimmie Dimmick
This is a clever, cunning film... a commercial product, nothing more.
The transcendental metaphysical speeches... have the depth of a puddle.