My New Favorite Movie (after Fight Club)

In the last three days I have watched Donnie Darko several times. I have not watched it all the way through every time, but I certainly have noticed that every scene has infinite meaning compacted into it. My two favorite scenes are first the scene where it cuts back and forth from Donnie burning down the Cunningham house and second the first montage showing the character of the school. I will be discussing the shot where Donnie burns down the house.

The shot begins with Donnie leaving the movie theater, and over his shoulder is the marquee displaying the movies The Evil Dead and The Last Temptation of Christ. Donnie Darko is set in 1988, Evil Dead came out in 1981 and Last Temptation DID come out in 1988. Donnie has a sick little grin on his face, and there seems to be a question of which marquee is actually the caption to Mr. Darko. Is he a Christ-Like figure, or he is simply the conglomeration of horrific comedy? This is the central argument to the entire movie, is Donnie actually crazy, or is he able to mold reality to his own liking? This question cannot be answered with a review of this scene alone, and there are arguments to both sides. The importance is not the question itself, but to how much we can identify or impose the question on our own lives. Are we crazy, or can we make a difference? Is there one possibility in the infinite amount of possibilities that we can choose?

Moving forward we cut scene to the talent show that Donnie's little sister Sam is performing in. This show is the complete antithesis of the question inherent in Donnie's character. For the audience is not filled with people who ask these sort of questions, the audience is filled with gawkers laughing at the artistic portrayal in dance by Sherita who have likely never questioned reality or their subjective place in reality. These are the other's, people who will never be able to understand Donnie or reality in any way other than it is different and therefore beyond their scope.

I could go into much more detail, but for the sake of brevity I will skip ahead to the part I particularly enjoy. It's when Sparkle Motion starts their dance. Their dance is perfectly anti-personality. All the girls look the same, move the same, are dressed the same, and have the same facial expression-blank (the same as the people in the airplane escape manuals in Fight Club). They cease to be human and represent only that spectacle for which the audience can understand because the spectacle is all they know. As a friend of mind says, how can you ask a fish to describe water? The people watching the show are the fish, the spectacle is the water. They don't see it, because they can't see it! (By the way, friend, you can learn to see things completely different with an internal reference point) The girls are robots, that is why they sparkle and move. Is that all humanity is?! To these people, yes. The spectacle has reduced them to a point where all they desire is to sparkle (appearance) and go through the motions (to be an object).

I haven't even got to the fire and everything going on when that happens. I will have to do that in a subsequent post.