Saving the Universe Darkly

by Art Livingston

 

Donnie Darko (2001)

Written and Directed by Richard Kelly

Rated R (for language, some drug use, and violence)

 

Sometimes an artist, if he possesses enough artistic integrity, can create something more true than his conscious beliefs could anticipate. Oscar Wilde made a habit of writing morality fables completely contradicting his decadent aestheticism. Donnie Darko is a prime example of profound theological vision lurking beneath surface confusion. Director Richard Kelly's audio track on the CD version actually trivializes his own creation, and he seems oblivious. One hopes it stems from modesty, but I can't detect it. Most curious.

The tale is as complex and as simple as a Charles Williams novel, which this story remarkably resembles. A viewer could (just) possibly interpret it as the psychotic delusions of a teenaged paranoid schizophrenic, one who sees visions of a six-foot rabbit who tells him to perform such acts as destroying his school's water pipes and planting an ax into the skull of the school mascot's statue, while writing on the ground, "They made me do it." Frankly, if I were Donnie, I would like the credit myself. Well, could be just a story about a nutty kid. But nowhere as interesting as the alternative interpretation, internally consistent, that a highly disturbed young man has become the genuine conduit for saving the universe.

This reading of the action so enriches the meaning that, after my fourth viewing of the movie, it continues to reveal new insights. But one must accept the plot on its own terms by not coming to it with preconceived notions of how a time travel story usually plays out. This requires a little information so as to get oriented: an airline engine inexplicably falls on Donnie's bedroom and he wakes on a golf course, where he begins having visions of Frank (the bunny rabbit from Hell). What unfolds is that somehow an unstable tangent universe has been created, and Donnie gains access to understanding what is happening and realizes that, unless someone (Donnie himself) can permit a portal for the disappearance of that world, our universe will be destroyed. Oh, we even get an explanation for Frank that is plausible in the context of the story.

What we have then is a profound understanding of a basic Christian concept, to which St. Paul refers when calling the Church "the Body of Christ," and Charles Williams extends to all creation in his concept of Coinherence--all being interrelated and interlocking as each part depends on all the other parts. I cannot see how Kelly could have put it there by accident.

Throughout the movie, the audience continues to be drawn to this incarnation of the idea of the contingency of all being. All the characters and all the subplots find themselves drawn into an interdependence which begins cracking under the strain of the breaking tangent universe. Without revealing more, let me just say that God put into the very fabric of creation the presence of vicarious suffering, or substitution. Every time a person takes up the burden of another and helps him through his suffering, it is an act of substitution. The belief is that with mutual agreement, suffering can actually be transferred from one person to another. St. James' admonition for us to bear one another's burdens then becomes precisely literal.

Of Williams' many characters who perform acts of substitution, Donnie most closely resembles Chloe in Many Dimensions, she who allows the Stone of Sulieman to restore itself by using her as a channel of grace. Although the film lacks a talisman, it provides a key to make literal sense of the plot in the form of a book of theoretical physics on time travel. (Donnie has twenty-eight-plus days to accomplish his goal and get us back to the time when the engine fell on his room.) His physics teacher presents him the book, but oddly in the light of its theistic implications, the teacher refuses to pursue the subject beyond a certain point because, "I could lose my job." This movie even comments on political correctness in high school teaching! No God in school, even if the facts point to Him--a most telling detail.

Be sure when you rent Donnie Darko that you get the "Director's Cut." Only this version contains written passages from the book, The Philosophy of Time Travel, which makes it far easier to understand the unraveling of the action. Without it, as in the original release version, we have needless obscurity. The first edit of the film ran 165 minutes. The director's cut is very close to the version that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2001.

Even with the director's framework restored, the film demands close attention. But I forgot about...I need to see it a fifth time to understand THAT. If it grabs you, you may consider purchase as it reveals more and more on repeated screenings.

Donnie Darko became a cult favorite from the release version and may go a long way toward explaining its popularity with the Rocky Horror Picture Show crowd. The audience had no notion of what they were looking at. The real question is whether or not Kelly did. Can something like this be created by accident? Personally, I think Kelly is playing dumb, much Like J.R.R. Tolkien did when he said he just "made up" everything in The Lord of the Rings.