ARTicles vol. 6 i.1c: Filling in the Holes

When the film Donnie Darkowas first released in theatres, few people could have guessed that it would become one of the cult hits of the twenty-first century. Opening in October of 2001 after a lackluster marketing campaign, Donnie Darkoappeared briefly in theatres around the country and then went straight to DVD, earning a meager half-million dollars at the box office. Within two years, however, this film about a troubled, suburban teenager played by the then-unknown twenty-year-old actor Jake Gyllenhaal became an obsession for young adults around the world, evolving from a box office flop into a cult classic.

The timing of the original release helps explain Donnie Darko’s trajectory from a nearly forgotten independent film to a home video and art house smash success. The film opened six weeks after September 11th, and an early scene showing a jet engine crashing down on a suburban home most likely didn’t sit well with many U.S. audiences at the time. Closing after a very limited run, the movie seemed destined to fade into obscurity. For twenty-six year old director and screenwriter Richard Kelly, who had made his debut with Donnie Darko, the project seemed like an inauspicious beginning to his professional career. But soon everything started to turn around. Walking through the East Village just months after the film’s release, Kelly spotted a poster promoting his film. A small, independent movie house, the Two Boots Pioneer Theatre, had been screening the film every Friday and Saturday night. Other houses around the country, including the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, soon began similar screenings.

Defying traditional structures and conventional storylines, the film could never have been a mainstream Hollywood hit, even with a star-studded cast that included Drew Barrymore (who produced the film and gave the project crucial financial support through her production company Flower Films), Patrick Swayze, Mary McDonnell (Stands With A Fist in Dances with Wolves), and Katherine Ross (Elaine Robinson in The Graduate). But the film’s enigmatic, open structure and storyline are precisely what have made Donnie Darko such a sensation with audiences around the world and especially with the devoted base of diehard Darkoists.

Set during the 1988 U.S. presidential election campaign, the film fuses sci-fi comic book fantasy, teen horror film and domestic drama. The eponymous protagonist is an intelligent, angst-ridden teenager who gets summoned out of his bed one night by a haunting figure in a bunny suit who calls himself Frank. The frightening but strangely soothing omniscient Bunny leads Donnie to a golf course and warns him that the world will end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds. While Donnie is out sleepwalking and receiving this first message from Frank, a jet engine falls out of the sky and smashes into his bed, triggering a parallel or tangent universe that will end in 28 days. As the countdown continues over the course of the film, Frank keeps appearing to Donnie, issuing instructions that provoke him to wreck havoc around his school and town. Meanwhile Donnie begins to see strange, liquid worms protruding out of himself and people around him. Through the intentional and unintentional help of Frank, his high school science teacher Dr. Monnitoff (Noah Wyle), his high school English teacher (Drew Barrymore), his psychiatrist (Katherine Ross), and a book titled The Philosophy of Time Travelwritten decades ago by a local centenarian known around town as Grandma Death, Donnie eventually realizes that these serpentine wormholes may allow for the possibility of time travel. Bit by bit, he pieces together clues and signs that help him understand how he could use the wormholes to save the world from impending doom and destruction.

But what exactly Donnie sees, the logic of time travel, Frank’s identity, Frank’s role in Donnie’s plight, and the ending are all left ambiguous. The film is a jigsaw puzzle that may or may not have all its pieces. Like Donnie, who struggles to understand what’s happening around him and what he’s meant to do in response to his nightmarish visions, the audience isn’t given easy answers or a tidy, clear-cut resolution. As the plethora of Donnie Darkowebsites and online forums demonstrate (www.stainlesssteelrat.net/ddfaq.htm#.1is particularly extensive and helpful), fans all have their own interpretations of what happens in the film and their own ideas about the sources of Donnie’s adolescent anxieties. And the film’s extensive, interactive website (www.donniedarkofilm.com) opens the door for even more possibilities and interpretations.

Filling in the film’s narrative gaps, posing questions, and grappling with the possibility of multiple answers have become part of the Donnie Darko experience. As Jake Gyllenhaal writes in his Foreword to The Donnie Darko Book, “What is Donnie Darko about? I have no idea, at least not a conscious one. But somehow I’ve always understood it. The most amazing thing about making this movie, for me, was the fact that no one – including the man from whose mind it emerged – ever had a simple answer to this question. And that, ironically, is the very thing the film is actually about. There is no single answer to any question. Every person’s explanation differs according to how they were brought up, where they were brought up, who brought them up.” 1

In the documentary They Made Me Do It Too– The Cult of Donnie Darko, British Darko aficionados suggest the film is about growing up, a parallel universe, a troubled passage through time and space by someone who may or may not be psychotic, the theory of time travel, fear, love, martyrdom, religion, escape, and being given a second chance to do something with your life. Richard Kelly suggests that it’s about “possibilities, the unknown, and trying to comprehend the unknown.”

The film has had a profound impact on viewers around the world. Many claim it completely changed their lives. Others say that it led them to study science and time travel. Some, acknowledging that they may have an unhealthy addiction to the film, admit to watching Donnie Darkoonce a day. In London, the film inspired an exhibition titled “They Made Me Do It” – a reference to one of the acts of vandalism Frank commands Donnie to carry out at his school. The exhibition, which ran for 28 days, featured graffiti art that was completed in 6 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds. By 2005, the film was so popular that an open-air screening was held in London’s Kensington Gardens.

When Newmarket Films decided to rerelease Donnie Darkoafter watching DVD sales figures soar, Kelly reworked and restructured the movie. His 2004 Director’s Cut, which added twenty minutes to the film, included a number of scenes he had been forced to eliminate from the original release. It also included pages from Roberta Sparrow’s book The Philosophy of Time Travelthat Kelly ostensibly inserted to shed some more light on the time travel aspect of the film. (The book can be read at http://ruinedeye.com/cd/time1.htm.) The additions help explain some of the plot’s twists, but Kelly has never tried to push one interpretation or reading on his viewers. “To offer a final solution is like forcing something on people,” he once said in an interview. “I couldn’t possibly answer or completely solve the riddle of this film. It would mean I have all the answers and I don’t.”

The son of a NASA technician who helped design the first camera to photograph Mars and of a teacher of emotionally disturbed students, Kelly drew from a wide range of artistic and personal sources while writing and filming Donnie Darko. His cinematic and literary influences range from Stanley Kubrick, to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, to Stephen King, to Steven Spielberg – all of whom can be felt in some way in Donnie Darko. Part thriller, part sci-fi adventure, and part touching suburban family drama, the film is a mélange of genres. As a result it has attracted a wide range of audiences with diverse backgrounds and interests. The era in which the film is set has also resonated with audiences who remember the distinct sounds, styles, and politics of the eighties. The first spoken scene of the film is a family dinner conversation in which Donnie’s older sister Elizabeth (played by Jake Gyllenhaal’s real-life sister Maggie Gyllenhaal) defiantly announces that she’s voting for Michael Dukakis. The election campaign resurfaces later in the film with a clip of a debate between Bush and Dukakis, and there are many other references to the period including a discussion about the sexuality of the Smurfs and songs by the bands Tears for Fears and INXS.

Two years after the release of the Director’s Cut, Donnie Darko remains one of the top 120 movies on the International Movie Database (www.imdb.com). Critics, fans, and scholars have tried for over seven years to label and describe the movie. Some compare Donnie to J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. Others reference the science fiction writing of Philip K. Dick. And some, captivated by the film’s references to Stephen Hawking’s 1988 best-selling book A Brief History of Time, fixate on the intricate scientific theories of the film. There’s no easy way to categorize or describe Donnie Darko. You just have to see it and then join in the discussion. As Jake Gyllenhaal writes in his introduction to The Donnie Darko Book, “I wish … people could spend a day with me sometime. So they could sit at a meal, or walk down the street when a total stranger walks up and starts a philosophical discussion about what exactly Donnie Darkois about. It makes my day every time. Because every time, I answer, ‘I have no idea, what does it mean to you?’” 2

Ryan McKittrick is the A.R.T.’s Associate Dramaturg

1,2 Richard Kelly, The Donnie Darko Book, London: Faber and Faber, 2003.6_12