Andrew Cook
Richard Kelly’s debut film Donnie Darko premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 29th, 2001. Kelly’s road to Sundance was rocky. He wrote the screenplay at just 23 years old, and while it wowed everyone who read it, the piece was deemed largely unfilmable. It was too surreal, too unconventional, too cryptic. Kelly bounced around from Hollywood office to Hollywood office for some time, meeting to get the film produced and coming up short when he demanded the right to direct the film as well. His stubborn insistence both on directing the film and making it as his feature debut, turning down an offer to direct the slasher film Valentine as a test, was likely seen as hubris, immature folly. Actor Jason Schwartzmann, fresh off the success of Rushmore and an early supporter of Kelly’s screenplay, facilitated a meeting between Kelly and Drew Barrymore, and in her he finally found someone willing to support his vision.
The film went into production with a $4.5 million budget and was eventually accepted into the Utah film festival, but the premiere did not go over well. Darko failed to notch a distributor at first before finally landing with Newmarket films after a deal engineered with the cooperation of Christopher Nolan whose film Memento was the talk of the town the year before. Darko’s brief theatrical run proved just as ill-fated. It ran for just a few weeks in New York and Los Angeles before unceremoniously leaving theaters and coming out on DVD. It’s only here that the story of Donnie Darko truly begins. Though few saw the film, many loved it, finding it beguiling and transfixing. It began to run in long-term midnight repertory screenings, attracting an ever-larger audience entirely through word of mouth. This naturally led to high DVD sales, and the cult of Donnie Darko was born.
Just as Donnie Darko beat the odds and survived its tumultuous path to release so too has it beaten the odds and endured for the last 25 years. It continues to capture the imagination, a film as narratively mysterious as it is emotionally forthright, as seductive as it is unnerving.
Donnie Darko explores the life of its title character, a Virginia teenager (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) with a history of emotional problems who becomes convinced that a six-foot-tall bunny rabbit named Frank, or more accurately an unknown being in a rabbit suit, has informed him of the exact moment at which the world will end. Nobody else can see Frank, though as he lures Donnie out of his home at night to inform him of the coming apocalypse he in fact saves Donnie’s life, as a jet engine from an airliner authorities cannot identify falls on the Darko home, landing directly in Donnie’s bedroom.
The Darko family has to come to terms with the accident which severely damaged their home. Donnie’s parents Eddie and Rose (Holmes Osborne and Mary McDonnell) must deal with insurance and the FAA while his older sister Elizabeth (Maggie Gyllenhaal) prepares for college, his younger sister Samantha (Daveigh Chase) puts the stress aside to focus on her dance troupe Sparkle Motion, while Donnie finds himself preoccupied both with escalating visions of Frank and a new girl at school named Gretchen, played by Jena Malone.
Donnie’s visions intensify and he becomes convinced Frank has been sent from the future to inform him he’s the chosen one, destined to prevent a great calamity. To do so Donnie must harness esoteric knowledge to gain power over space and time, but he must also continue his mundane teenage existence while enduring his private tribulation, railing against a reactionary assault on progressive elements within his school (teachers played by Noah Wyle and Drew Barrymore) led by his gym teacher Mrs. Farmer (Beth Grant) and a charismatic self-help guru named Jim Cunningham, played by Patrick Swayze.
Donnie Darko is an experiential film rather than being strictly plot-driven. It is a pure aesthetic experience flitting in and out among all these people in Donnie’s community, painting a picture about that community as a whole. The film is not strictly about Donnie Darko, it’s about how Donnie perceives his community and how the community perceives him.
Donnie Darko is a film about the 1980s, and not just in the aesthetic sense. This is a film about the rise of the moral majority, the irrepressible waves of reactionary hysteria which have dominated much of America in the last half-century. It explores how reactionaries tend to rally around slick talkers with a gaudy sense of style, someone who speaks in confident platitudes but usually has something to hide underneath, something unsavory, like for instance child sexual abuse.
Kelly understands this dark hypocrisy as something definitive for the era. In an early scene Donnie’s father watches George H.W. Bush bemoan Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, despite the fact that Noriega was a longtime CIA asset, including when Bush himself was Director of Central Intelligence. The punchline to this opening section comes a few scenes later in a showstopping speed-ramped sequence which introduces us to the bulk of the dramatis personae in one fell swoop, depicting two high-school bullies (Alex Greenwald and Seth Rogen) openly snorting cocaine at their locker.
Kelly understands this hypocrisy as the beginning of the unraveling of the social contract, a loss of community which has festered since the 1980s. The idea we can’t resolve our differences amicably and in good faith, that we need to start witch hunts to deal with ideas which make us uncomfortable, to begin labeling subversives even at a scale as small as a single suburban high school, that slogans and platitudes are all we need to get through life instead of a deeper sense of intellectual curiosity. An important part of his satire is the cosmic framing of this unraveling, of taking what it’s like to be on the cusp of adulthood and notice the world only seems to be getting worse and expressing it as apocalyptic.
Donnie Darko is a film all about embracing the beauty of ambiguity and discovery. A film about embracing the beauty of the world as a place where we create and explore and love with abandon instead of retreating away from that into a world defined only by hype and appearance and thought-terminating cliché.
At the school talent show we see a beautiful interpretive dance put on by Cherita Chen (Jolene Purdy), a Chinese American student. She’s a quiet girl, bullied over her weight and harboring a secret crush on Donnie, and she bears her soul here, expressing herself and her culture in what should have been (but only a few actually recognized as) the event of the night. Instead she’s largely swept aside in favor of Samantha Darko’s dance troupe Sparkle Motion, who perform a dance sequence set to the song “Notorious” by Duran Duran. The sequence purposefully straddles the line between the adorably innocent and the questionably gaudy, where the earnest enthusiasm of the girls is undermined by their choreographer Mrs. Farmer and the interest of Cunningham. It’s a brilliant way to explore a certain crassness which had begun setting into American culture, and like so much of what we see in the film has only intensified since.
Kelly also explores the concept of mental illness in the film. Donnie’s bizarre visions and beliefs are reminiscent of the kind of messianic thinking often associated with diagnoses of bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. Donnie’s parents are aware something is different about their son, and they’ve been trying their best to help and support him despite feeling kept at arms’ length, unsure how to reach him. This comes to the fore in what may be my favorite scene of the entire film, where Eddie and Rose speak with Donnie’s psychiatrist Dr. Thurman (Katharine Ross) about what exactly he’s been experiencing, how serious it is, and the Doctor’s plan for treating the issue.
While these themes are present, and prescient, in either cut of the film, I find them to be more fully developed in the film’s Director’s Cut, which was released in 2004. It’s about 20 minutes longer and adds significant context with the larger ensemble, rounding them out and more deeply exploring how Donnie fits in with the world around him. As we juxtapose what he’s going through with his travels in the wider community it further underscores Kelly’s exploration of alienation and isolation in the context of a society beginning to crumble under the weight of an increasingly decadent time.
Much is made of the intense complexity of Kelly’s narratives. Every single film Kelly has made thus far is extremely dense, with several layers of narrative creating a whirlwind which can seem impenetrable after a single viewing. This complexity is expressly highlighted for the audience as Donnie watches a video of Jim Cunningham’s at school, with Frank exhorting him to “pay close attention. You could miss something.” Something less remarked upon is how all of Kelly’s narrative complexity is essentially satirical. Donnie Darko isn’t just a satire of the reactionary politics of the 1980s, it also satirizes the teenage experience.
We’ve all at some point known a teenager like Donnie. Someone with fierce intelligence at a young age, and with that intelligence a complete lack of humility, a cocksure belief that of all people in all the universe this particular 17-year-old has the world all figured out. Maybe you didn’t just know a kid like that, maybe it was you. Kelly’s satirical coup de grace is how he creates a notoriously complex plot involving tears in the fourth dimension and beings able to communicate across time and manipulate both the living (and the dead) of the past toward a desired end which can only be truly understood by a random suburban teenager, that the know-it-all kid might actually be able to know it all.
On a formal level, Donnie Darko announces the arrival of a serious new talent. Richard Kelly arrives fully formed. His sensibilities are endlessly creative and formally inventive, able to conjure a world which feels both boundless and considered down to the smallest detail, reminiscent of David Lynch’s Eraserhead or George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Kelly’s use of music as a core stylistic element immediately becomes clear. For Kelly, music is a shared cultural touchstone, something which roots us to time and place, something which unites us and grounds our understanding of the world. He has a very strong sense for composition and precise camera movement, and editor Sam Bauer pairs this with strong use of montage and cross cutting to create a truly iconic visual tapestry. Kelly’s bold use of color lends the film a graphic novel sensibility, something further reflected in the narrative itself. Donnie Darko as a name calls back to characters like Peter Parker or Scott Summers, and what happens to him could be considered a deconstructed superhero story.
All Richard Kelly’s feature films as director were released in the 2000s, and he stands as one of the definitive filmmakers of the decade. The 2000s presented a heyday of sorts for a particular style of densely layered American storytelling. The 2000s gave us David Lynch’s late period masterpieces Mulholland Drive and INLAND EMPIRE, two of the definitive television shows of the era were Damon Lindelof’s LOST and Ronald D. Moore’s re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica, and we also had similar cult classics emerge such as Shane Carruth’s Primer and Brooke Burgess’ motion comic Broken Saints. There was just something in the water during that time.
Kelly’s films exemplify that wave, designed to serve as an aesthetically powerful experience which overwhelms the senses, becoming a confounding spell you’re compelled to immerse yourself within again and again. They’re designed to reward you over time, to grow with you as you revisit, allowing you to find new details for the rest of your life. This is why the film has proven so resilient. We know, no matter how long it’s been, in the darkest corners of Donnie Darko new treasures still await.
