only you and your memories
Salon's got another good article today, this one picking Donnie Darko apart. It's a well-written, accurate and thorough article. Unfortunately, it exposes an uncomfortable fact: Donnie Darko's director and writer, Richard Kelly, is dumber than his movie. Spoilers follow.
I first saw Donnie Darko at the UVA film festival with Scott. It may, in fact, be the only film festival movie I ever attended at UVA. I immediately had a strong affinity for it. A messy, rambling sequence of events with a dreary view of free will, disposed to ponder then avoid uncomfortable philosophical questions, a tendency to take itself too seriously, and a Northern Virginia setting? Yeah, that sounds sort of familiar.
Unfortunately, it appears that Kelly didn't actually figure out how his movie's plot worked before filming it. After the fact he seems to have invented some DVD bonus features/ fake primary source documents that provide a rather lame sci-fi justification for the events of the film. Although he initially seems to have done this on a whim, presenting it as a tentative and non-authoritative explanation, his website and the new director's cut DVD imply that this account is now canon.
I think that's too bad. Donnie Darko is a confusing movie with more than its share of plot holes. But after enough viewings, I concluded that really, it was a story about god taking Donnie aside for a bit in order to show him that although he was to die in an arbitrary way, his death would not be meaningless; and that although his fate was predetermined, that didn't mean that the choice wasn't authentically his.
At least, that's what I thought. Apparently it was actually about some bullshit with wormholes. Oh well.
Comments
I'm not going to follow that link because I liked the movie and reached pretty much the same conclusion you did. I don't want it ruined for me.
Worm holes, those T1000-looking things that came from people's chests, whatever -- the whole point was that we (people) couldn't make perfectly logical sense of it all. And regardless, for whatever reason, Donnie was shown why his death actually spared those he loved, which was why he smiled when he chose to stay in his bed after the second time the jet engine landed on him.
Yeah, that sounds really lame now that I've just typed it out, but the movie was, as you put it, strangely affirming in a way because it showed Donnie making sense of all the shit surrounding his life. Or maybe it was just that song at the end that made the whole movie seem good.
I read it in the AM and all day kept thinking, no, no, that's NOT necessary. Ambiguity can be a good thing. I love that film for so many reasons...but mostly because you could read into it what you wanted to. Some folks thought he was descending into madness, others that there was some time traveling going on. Do we need definitive explanations like this? Way to ruin a good thing...
I need to watch it again. I guess we should have stayed and listened to the director talk when we had the chance.
yeah, that would've been fun -- maybe. now I'm thinking it could have ruined the movie, too. all in all, you probably made the right decision (to go whip some poor suckers at water polo, as I recall).
would anybody be interested in seeing this at a movie theater? I'm with you all about the suckiness of the black hole tangent universe rules set forth by the crazy old lady, but i dont think this elaboration is necessarily exclusive of the more interesting co-existing predestination/free will theory, I guess really I just want to hear Echo & the Bunnymen or Depeche Mode out of those big moviehouse speakers.
I'd probably go again, although my understanding is that the director's cut stuff was pretty much all already present as DVD bonus stuff.
Post A Comment