‘Donnie Darko’ at 20: Richard Kelly’s Cult Classic Remains A Devastating Portrait Of Despair In Our Mad World

There is a moment in the first third of Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko where Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) has some kind of vision: rows of his high school’s lockers in the middle of some kind of body of water, looming like skyscrapers in some major city flooded by climate misadventure. It’s only clear they’re lockers – or, at least, it was only clear to me – on the third or fourth watch. When Donnie takes the vision as a spur to break into his school and destroy the water main, I thought he was translating his prophecy of the world’s end as essentially the same thing as drowning his high school; how for a high school kid, especially a depressed one, high school was the world. Discovering that Kelly has just made it appear as though the lockers in the school were buildings left standing in the wake of the apocalypse just deepens Donnie Darko as a work fully formed and in absolute control of the terminal mindset of kids in thrall to the Romanticism of self-destruction.

Donnie’s arch-nemesis, the self-satisfied, prim teacher Ms. Farmer (Beth Grant), the book-burning/holy-rolling Evangelical Christian who was a standard feature of every school at the end of the 1980s, thinks whomever so defiled her school was probably, and diabolically, influenced by English teacher Ms. Pomeroy’s assigning of Graham Greene’s “The Destructors.” She says to Ms. Pomeroy (Drew Barrymore) “Why don’t you go back to graduate school?” in the very same way racists will ask why someone born here doesn’t “go back” somewhere foreign, and frightening, to a ruling majority in the midst of their inevitable decline.

Some are tempted to try to unravel the time travel plot that drives the narrative action of Donnie Darko, and Richard Kelly’s “Director’s Cut” of the film does a fine job of centering that narrative and diving deep into the mechanics of the piece – but for me, the raptures of Donnie Darko have very little to do with how the time travel plot does or doesn’t work, but instead, has EVERYTHING to do with how it captures what it feels like to be lost and looking for a thread. As it happens, the threads in the film are literalized. They appear as wormholes – visualized like the sentient water tentacles in The Abyss, and seen by Donnie as a means to challenge the notion of free will or, in a particular moment, to travel through time back to a flex point where a meaningful decision could actually be made. It’s not unlike It’s a Wonderful Life in that sense: both films arrive at the realization that the world is corrupt beyond repair, the bad guys will always win and suffer no consequences for the crimes they commit.

Donnie, too, is not unlike that film’s George Bailey in that he seems to have good friends, he has a pretty girlfriend who adores him, he has a strong moral compass that he follows to a fault, and he has a pretty bad temper that gets him in trouble sometimes. Donnie Darko pays tribute to another dark Jimmy Stewart fantasy, Harvey, in its presentation of a spectral rabbit named “Frank” who guides Donnie’s path. What fascinates about Donnie Darko, though, is how it nails what it feels like when the instinct to find a plot in your life leads to mental illness; feelings of grandiosity in the writing of a story in which you, who feel as though you are nothing, can make decisions that might affect everything.

The pull of belonging to a larger narrative can be a dangerous undertow for the depressed. Donnie sees a therapist (Katharine Ross) regularly, has been prescribed medications that his Harvard-bound sister Elizabeth (Maggie Gyllenhaal) has just told their mother Rose (Mary McDonnell) he’s stopped taking, and spends his nights sometimes sleeping on golf courses or passed out next to mountain roads. I am the exact age of the Donnie Darko character (if he’s fifteen in the film in October 1988); like him, I was depressed and believed that if I killed myself, everyone would be better off. I gave it a try about six months later. Donnie Darko suggests that even if I’d had a therapist, meds, parents who would talk to me about it and confront me for my terminal thoughts, that even then it might not have made a difference.

One night, while Donnie is sleeping somewhere other than his home (I used to sleep under park benches sometimes when the prospect of home was a little overwhelming), an airplane engine drops from the sky and crushes his bedroom. No one seems to know where it came from. The rest of the film is essentially Donnie’s choice whether or not to be home when the end comes. It’s possible to look at the film as a version of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” – a coming to terms of a dying boy in the instant of his surcease of suffering. I look at it as a fairytale of how suicidal ideation will tell its victim that he’s a burden on others, and how his death will be the best and most heroic thing he can do for the people who love him. Indeed, the fact is that our life is the only thing we have control over. He asks his mother what it’s like to be the mother of a nut – and his mother, because she doesn’t know how to save him, says that it’s wonderful.

Donnie Darko nails 1988, too. The soundtrack is perfect. Echo and the Bunnymen and The Church and Tears for Fears the anchors, and Gary Jules’ cover version of “Mad World” a minor breakout hit. Each are from a particular, Waver corner of the new British invasion (The Church are Aussies, of course) that boasted, among others, bands like The Smiths and The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Depeche Mode. It’s the circle I ran in: Doc Martens and black dusters, clove cigarettes and eyeliner. Kelly using these needle drops speaks immediately to the mordant melancholia of those specific, and exquisitely painful years, and also to the expansive melodrama of them. “Under the Milky Way” with its talk of “something quite peculiar” leading the listener somewhere “despite your destination” or “Mad World’s” declaration of how funny the narrator finds that the “dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had.” Kelly fuses these lachrymose thoughts with images like a quartet of bicycle headlamps lighting the way of four teens in a desperate race against time to… something. The scene is an echo of Eliot’s brave rescue of E.T. with the same sense that here are children playing out the fate of the world on their bikes, on a fall night, in a collision course with the rest of their lives. There’s Ray Bradbury in this moment: a little of the October Country.

1988 is the end of the Reagan era as well, a period defined by nuclear terror, dangerous religiosity, the seeds of everything that has grown up foul and thorned in the landscape of our budding dystopia. The paranoia of Donnie Darko and its doom raining inexplicably from the skies is absolutely on point. Richard Kelly is just two years younger than me. He gets it. We were all afraid then of something we couldn’t see and didn’t understand. There’s a self-help guru in Donnie Darko named Jim Cunningham (Patrick Swayze) who represents the unctuous snake oil salesmen that would become our most powerful leaders with the slavering support of the Born Agains.

Donnie discovers that Cunningham is a pedophile and the center of a child porn ring; in the film’s sole naive moment, Kelly shows Cunningham getting arrested for it rather than becoming the mayor (or the President) in spite of it. Whatever pleasure we get from his comeuppance, though, is quickly defeated by Donnie’s decision to undo the last few days of his life to save his girlfriend (Jena Malone), even if it means she’ll never know the sacrifice he’s made for her. She won’t even remember how she kisses him for the first time to replace a terrible moment with a treasured memory. She’s alive and, because she’s alive, Cunningham’s secret remains a secret. George Bailey is alive but Mr. Potter keeps all the money and, anyway, we get the sense the world is headed towards Pottersville anyway because there’s only so much a good person can do in the face of all that baked-in evil. Consider that Ms. Pomeroy is fired in the main timeline for asking her students to think and, in so thinking, to reject established norms and though she’ll be given her job back by Donnie’s sacrifice and a reset of the timeline, it’s only a matter of time before she’s fired again. Independent thought has always been the enemy of fascism and white supremacy.

I think that’s the thing that lingers for me with Donnie Darko, twenty years old this year: that sense that the despair we feel as kids when we first see how broken things are, how complicit even adults we respect and admire are in that brokenness, is neither childish nor silly. That to a certain extent, despair is the appropriate reaction to the state of the world and burning a mattress-full of money as the protagonists of Greene’s “The Destroyers” do, is the only kind of protest (one that impacts financial markets) that has any possible kind of positive impact. But it also says that the sacrifices we make for the people whom we love are, while pyrrhic in holding back the tide of ignorance and decay, are in fact the things that make a life worth enduring. There’s not a lot we can do to fix the outside – but there’s an awful lot we can do to impact someone else, one other person or a dozen or a hundred.

And that begins with questioning authority the way Donnie does, speaking out angrily whenever someone suggests that people are easy to categorize and, in that social taxonomy, reduce them to something less than human. It begins with being open to love, by being vulnerable to the moments where, as Donnie says at one point, the world seems full of possibilities rather than just the usual disappointments. It begins by being curious about others: listening when the crazy old lady in town has something to tell you, and reading things that make you nuts and open your mind to things you’d never considered before from perspectives you could otherwise never experience. Donnie Darko is a guidebook to survival for Socrates’ “considered life” – a roadmap through the weltschmerz of a mad world for the sensitive soul. Kelly’s Southland Tales is being revived now as prophetic of western culture on the skids, justifiably so, but take a look at Donnie Darko for the same reasons. It diagnosed where our modern disease began. And it’s so gloriously, piquantly sad about how nobody ever listens.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due in 2021. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.