I've watched Donnie Darko over ten times. It is one of my favorite movies of all-time. I think there are several issues that happen in the movie that are worth discussing as well as some of my random thoughts that I had while watching it while trying to work on my weekly blog post about the all-star voting. For those who haven't seen the movie, this should give you a good starting point.
1) This is Seth Rogen's film deubt. I was unaware of this for the longest time. After hearing that he was in the movie, I decided to look for Seth Rogen throughout the movie. It took me two more times to realize that he was the bully's friend, Ricky Danforth (I'm not making this up, see). After realizing that it was Rogen, it's almost impossible not to realize this. The scene in which Donnie walks Gretchen home, you can hear him say "I like your boobs" and then laugh. The laugh and him saying this reminded me of Knocked Up (which is shown on the E! channel on Halloween, as it is the scariest movie they can imagine). In fact, I'm relatively sure he has said that exact phrase in another movie at some point.
2) The scene with the therapist in which they discuss sex. Donnie begins to talk about "fucking Christina Applegate" and how he enjoys watching Married with Children. The old trivia on IMDB said that was done to imitate Al Bundy who would put his hand down his pants. I always viewed this as the wrong way to look at the scene as it is pretty clearly Donnie about to masturbate. In the scene, the therapist has to end the hypnosis early and Donnie and the therapist are both embarrassed by what had just happened. That is now taken off of the IMDB trivia.
3) How does one "suck a fuck"? In the opening scene of the movie Donnie Darko asks this question and unfortunately it is never answered.
4) The relevancy of Dukakis- Elizabeth Darko states at the beginning of the movie that she is voting for Dukakis. When the engine crashes through the house, Mr. Darko is watching the political debate between George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis. The brief mention that she would vote for Dukakis must have angered Mr. Darko at least a little bit, subconsciously, to him to want to watch the debate in order to prove that his daughter is wrong.
5) Why are they so mean to Cherita Chen? Donnie's friends and others are extremely mean to Cherita, telling her to "go back to China". All the meanness and everything is supposedly taken away when Donnie promises her that one day everything is going to be better for her.
6) Time Travel, finally. This is the most interesting concept in the whole movie to me because it deals with something that I'm very interested in. Here are the central arguments that focus on time travel:
a. Time travel is not possible.
b. If you travel to the past something as small as killing as a mosquito might affect how the future is.
c. A lesser version of point b, in which any changes in the past are kept in the present (or the future).
d. Time travel would really be traveling through parallel universes.
e. Time travel is only possible to the point that there is a time machine (meaning you cannot travel back in time before the first time machine is created)
f. Time travel is in a read-only mode.
The movie Donnie Darko focuses around point d instead of the other ones. I'll discuss the other ones and what I believe is the right answer to the time travel paradox.
Point a- time travel is not possible. I do not think that this is correct. The basic idea is that if you travel faster than the speed of light then you would be able to go back in time. (Well, this is the basic concept as explained to me). If you could have a vessel that could travel faster than the speed of light then you would be able to go backwards in time. Or if you had a device that was able to travel in the fourth dimension, which is time. I think either way you're able to travel back in time.
Point b and c-basically what happens in the past would have to affect the present and future. This is true to a certain degree. However, if you believe in this idea then you're faced with a problem that I call the Hitler problem. The Hitler problem is this. Imagine a situation in which you are able to travel back in time. One of the immediate things you would do would be to kill Hitler to circumvent the pain and suffering of millions of individuals. However, everyday we are faced with the idea that Hitler rose to power and committed suicide. We cannot live in a world where both Hitler was able to kill millions of people and was not able to kill millions of people. The Hitler problem creates some different situations and points about time travel. These new situations are that: a) there is an infinite regress of people going back in time preserving the past, b)we have a distorted reality where things both did and did not happen, c) you are unable to interact with the past if you time travel, d) you cannot travel back in time past the point where the time machine did not exist, or e) changing the past does not change the immediate present or future. I'm ruling out possibility a, because at any point there will be a chance that somebody would not be able to undo something that happened in the past and we would live in a distorted reality. Possibility b ties into a central argument about time travel and that is you would be unable to interact with the past. I think there is something to this point of view. In traveling faster than the speed of light you would be able to see the past unfolding in terms of what you are actually seeing. However, this does not entail that you are able to interact in the past. I'm afraid that this possibility might actually be correct but I think you should be able to interact in the past because of the vessel. The vessel would have to be in the past, thus it interacts, thus it stands to reason that you would be able to interact in the past similar to the vessel. Possibility d is a suggestion my friend Red had stated to me before. I confess that I haven't really thought of this idea before. My initial gut reaction to this is that this argument is based on the fact that changing the past changes the immediate present/future which I do not believe is the case.
The idea about time travel that I think is correct and the one that Donnie Darko endorses is the idea of traveling either through wormholes or parallel universes. The idea of parallel universes is that each universe exists in such a way that they rarely interact and when they do there creates the phenomenon known as deja vu. A parallel universe is created each time a decision is made, there are an infinite numbers of universes. Each time you say yes instead of no, there creates a parallel universe where you said no. Traveling in time only requires that you are able to travel through these parallel universes. Back to the Hitler problem, I could go back in time and kill Hitler, I would then exist in a parallel universe where Hitler was dead. The rest of the world would still exist in both a universe where Hitler did not get killed and where he did, just as they had for thousands of years. This line of belief requires a rather large leap of faith that there are infinite versions of yourself out there only colliding with you when you experience deja vu. However, the other possibilities that are out there for time travel are not possible.
7) the ending/crazy Donnie- there's another possibility for how the movie can be interpreted. The idea here is that Donnie Darko is a schizophrenic. Like paranoid schizophrenics, Donnie has both auditory and visual hallucinations, he also feels persecuted, has a messianic complex, and regularly sees a therapist. There are several hints throughout the movie that suggest this. Some paranoid schizophrenics also find that some numbers have specific meanings. In the movie, the number 8 is very prominent (thanks to IMDB for pointing this out to me), I'll quote from their trivia section here "The movie takes place in 1988. Frank tells Donnie the world will end in 28 days, 06 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds. If you add these numbers, the sum is 88. When Samantha asks when she can have kids, Donnie says: "Not until 8th grade." Donnie mentions to his therapist that his dog Callie died when he was eight." Also, According to the television reporter, the fire at Jim Cunningham's house was extinguished "sometime after 8:00 last night." The flight number has to deal with the original time that he is told the world will end, as well, so there is mention from the director to pay attention to the numbers. There is a scene in the movie when the therapist alludes to the fact that Donnie has schizophrenic tendencies. The scene in which Noah Wyle's character asks Drew Barrymore's character, what about Donnie Darko and they both start laughing, it's a very disturbing scene. More proof of this idea is that Roberta Sparrow only talks to Donnie. It's an opinion that Donnie's mental state is exacerbated by his use of alcohol in the movie. Further, he has occasional emotional outbursts for seemingly no reason. Finally, at the end Donnie is laughing while the engine comes crashing in and it's possible that he thought of this crazy situation to help to try and explain why he was going to die. The very end of Donnie's mom waves at Gretchen even though supposedly Gretchen was new and had not really met any of the characters if we are to believe the time travel scenario. There are two conclusions, one Donnie's mom is a friendly person who felt like waving to a stranger. Or two, Gretchen had previously met Donnie's mom because she had dated Donnie and the part of the delusion that was not true was her in fact dying. If we are to accept that Donnie is in fact a schizophrenic, then the movie for the most part is a delusion created by Donnie to explain why he is going to die.
This idea is hopelessly depressing, I choose the time travel idea.
8) For whatever reason, I have found Maggie Gyllenhaal ridiculously attractive, I don't know if it's because of this movie or what.
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