To some extent, the plague was a period during which we all had too much time to do too much of everything. One of the things that I spent way more time on than I usually do was reading. It didn’t seem that the number of really good articles was any more than it usually was, so it wasn’t long until I started clicking on the Random Article on longform.org and I started reading all sorts of stuff that caught my attention.
One of those articles was an old interview about this movie Donnie Darko, about how it was made, how it was one of the first movies to hook into the 1980s nostalgia (DD was made in 2001), and why it was such a favorite for so many people at the time. I saw it back in the days, but in all honesty I don’t remember that much of it beyond this notion that it was pretty good.
I remember the guy in the rabbit suit and that it was kind of lame, but most of all that the story felt visceral to an extent that’s hard to put into words. It was ‘what it was like’ and by that I mean that whole teenage-angst-what’s-out-there-sort-of-thing-and-no-one-understands-it. It also had the 90s written all over it, with a soundtrack that was sideways inspired by a sort of mix between Nirvana and Radiohead.
Then the rewatch
Back in the day I had it on dvd, but it must have gotten lost somewhere along the way. So I googled for a site to watch it for free. What I was after was to get an idea of what it was exactly that I had felt back then, to figure out why the story worked and where it fell short.
What I expected before sitting down was a certain energy, but also a good deal of loose ends. I expected some ideas to be there, but without the ‘heft’ to really get it across (if that makes sense).
I can tell you this much: the bunny is still lame and it still doesn’t add anything to the story. The characters don’t seem overly fleshed out, but that’s also besides the point, because as a teen you don’t really have an eye for the big picture anyway (you are too busy with yourself). The fictional work of non-fiction on time-travel is over-reaching, and it ultimately doesn’t state or add anything to the story, because it doesn’t clarify much. It just makes the whole notion of time-travel even more vague and ‘out there’.
But at the same time: it’s still a great movie.
When I was in my late teens it really felt like it was an iteration of ‘everything’, and at the risk of over-intellectualizing: it’s not just that this movie works because it maintained that fine balance between what’s said and left unsaid, or that it works mostly on a visceral level. It’s that, but it’s also something more: it’s anti-dystopian, even though a plane engine crashes through the main character’s house and he dies at the end.
Those two tragic events are both over the top, but they hook into one of the main projects of our teen years: finding a way to accept that ultimate fate that life will end at some point in time, mixed with a notion of the possibility of an after-life.
At heart it’s all about teenage-angst and how you really don’t know what you really want out of life, while there’s basically one big shit-storm going on around you. And this is exactly where this story becomes anti-dystopian, because at that age it feels like the world will never end (even though you might be into groom, grunge and darkness). And in that whole ‘notion’ there’s this idea in some weird and twisted way that everything will work out in ‘some way’, even though we have zero idea of what and how and all that.
Now the big question is: do we ever really know that? Do we ever really know anything? Or is just believing enough? The kind of belief of some bright or gloomy far off future that must be somewhere over the horizon, or at least at the far end of the night.
Anyway, the movie didn’t suck as bad as I thought it would on a second viewing. You should check it out if you never had the pleasure, or when it has been a good while.
Key points
- Donnie Darko is both 1980s nostalgia and teenage-angst incorporated.
- 25 is a time of understanding jack-shit, and a time of loose ends.
- Donnie Darko works because it’s anti-dystopian, because it’s ultimately a story of hope in that ‘everything works out in the end’.
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