Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a troubled teen from the 1980s who is rude to his parents, resents his medication, and shows a distinct lack of school spirit, like Ferris Bueller’s depressed cousin or something. He develops symptoms which seem rather similar to, if not actual paranoid schizophrenia, then at very least a pop culture understanding of it, like a giant rabbit called Frank who tells him to do stuff like burn down a local motivational speaker’s house. He refuses treatment and short-circuits attempt to provide him therapy by trying to pull his dick out mid-counselling.
His erratic behaviour leads to trouble after a Halloween party when he and his new girlfriend Gretchen Ross (Jena Malone) stumble across some of their school peers engaged in petty crime. A conflict results in the accidental death of Gretchen in a road accident, after which Donnie shoots the driver in a bid for revenge. Somehow this tragedy born of untreated mental illness and teenage impulsiveness ties into some time travel stuff in a frankly implausible manner, permitting Donnie to erase his own existence and taste sweet oblivion. The end.
I saw Donnie Darko when it first came out in the local indie cinema in Oxford; I was no longer a teenager, but only just, so I think I was still just about in the right age bracket to appreciate it at the time. It’s basically a David Lynch take on one of those teen coming-of-age movies that John Hughes turned out in the 1980s and which indie directors still produce from time to time to pander to the younger end of the arthouse crowd. You’ve got the artfully chosen 1980s soundtrack, the off-kilter look at suburban life, yadda yadda.
The big twist here, of course – when you set aside all the twisty turny time travel stuff – is that it’s not a coming of age story. Donnie will not come of age. He will die young, and all the time travel stuff in the movie and the desperate acts he takes at Frank’s direction is perhaps best interpreted as his last-ditch bid to make an impact on the lives of the people around him in the narrow window of time he has available. In this light, probably the most valuable thing about the movie is the way it reminds us that not everyone gets the classic school-college-work-family-old age-death life path we’ve been set up to expect, and they are no less valid for that.
The thing is, now 18 years down the line since I first watched it… I can’t revisit it any more. I just can’t stand the damn thing.
Jumbled Thoughts of a Fake Geek Boy 