25th anniversary review: “Donnie Darko”

This review is part of a series looking back at significant albums on their anniversaries. Through the benefit of hindsight we will be viewing the album not just as it was released, but how it stands the test of time, as well as its place in the band’s discography and the genre in general.

Flower Films, Newmarket Films, IFC Films – 26 October 2001

Why are you wearing that stupid bunny suit? Why are you wearing that stupid emo suit?

I worked at Blockbuster when Donnie Darko made its way to home video, which means I didn’t merely love this movie. I had access to an entire unsuspecting customer base upon whom I could inflict it. I pushed Donnie Darko into people’s hands constantly. Most came back converted. Occasionally, someone would return it with the inevitable complaint.”It’s boring.” “It’s stupid.””It makes no sense.”

And rather than accept that movies are subjective and people are allowed to dislike things, I took these criticisms as confirmation that I understood Donnie Darko on an intellectual level unavailable to the poor bastard standing across the counter. I was 20. I was very smart. A lot of us were very smart after watching Donnie Darko (and we couldn’t wait to tell you). Released in 2001 and finding much of its audience afterward through DVD and word of mouth, Richard Kelly’s film was practically engineered for obsessive young people to discover, dissect and then explain to other people with absolutely unbearable confidence. There were tangent universes. Manipulated living. Manipulated dead. Jet engines. Time travel. A six-foot rabbit named Frank.

There was something to figure out here, goddammit, and figuring it out meant something… but 25 years later, the mechanics aren’t really why Donnie Darko matters. Underneath all that mythology is a remarkably simple story about a teenager looking around at the supposedly normal world and realizing something is deeply fucking wrong with it. Donnie lives in comfortable suburbia. He attends a good school. His parents love him. Yet nearly every institution surrounding him offers simplistic answers to complicated questions. None is more ridiculous than Jim Cunningham, Patrick Swayze’s motivational speaker who reduces the entirety of human existence to a line between fear and love. Donnie responds appropriately by telling his teacher to shove the exercise up her ass. Punk rock.

There is even a wonderfully nerdy reversal hiding in the names. Storytellers have long enjoyed giving Christ figures the initials J.C., while double-D names have occasionally carried considerably more sinister baggage. Donnie Darko flips the expectations. Jim Cunningham gets the J.C. initials and initially looks the part. He’s a charismatic evangelist preaching his gospel of love and promising salvation to anyone willing to buy the program. Then he’s exposed as a monster. Donnie Darko gets the ominous name, the creepy rabbit friend and every outward indication that he’s the dangerous one. Ultimately, Donnie is the one who sacrifices himself so everyone else can live. Yes, this is exactly the kind of observation that made Donnie Darko fans fucking exhausting.

The movie’s punk connection runs deeper than Donnie telling authority figures they’re full of shit. Its soundtrack lives largely in ’80s alternative and post-punk, with Echo & the Bunnymen, Joy Division, The Church and most memorably, Tears for Fears helping create its permanently overcast emotional atmosphere. But Donnie Darko also arrived simultaneously to the moment emo and post-hardcore exploded into the cultural consciousness. Donnie wasn’t an emo kid.,,, but Donnie Darko was practically the emo live-action movie… it was undeniably the blueprint, aesthetically speaking.

In much the same way The Nightmare Before Christmas became inseparable from the scene’s fashion and visual identity, Donnie Darko escaped the screen and entered the wardrobe. Frank’s nightmare imagery and, especially, Donnie’s skeleton hoodie fit so naturally alongside the black hoodies, eyeliner and macabre iconography of the era that you didn’t have to look particularly hard at a show to find traces of it. Pete Wentz wore the look. Countless other kids did too. I sure as hell did.

For a moment, that skeleton hoodie was practically scene camouflage… and it made sense because Donnie himself already felt like a prototype. He’s depressed, medicated, sarcastic, angry, intelligent, alienated and convinced something is fundamentally wrong while struggling to explain exactly what that something is. Within a few years, an entire generation would discover that existential dread sounded pretty fucking good with distorted guitars.

Bands like Thursday, Taking Back Sunday and My Chemical Romance weren’t products of Donnie Darko. But they found audiences populated by many of the same kids who saw something of themselves in Donnie: suburban teenagers discovering that having a decent house and reasonably loving parents didn’t magically answer the question of why they still felt so fucked up. And maybe that’s why the movie survived beyond the puzzle we were so proud of solving.

At 20, I loved Donnie Darko because Donnie saw through the adults’ bullshit. Twenty-five years later, I’m considerably less interested in proving I understand tangent universes. I’m one of the adults now.

That’s a much less comfortable way to watch it. Because the question isn’t whether I understand Donnie or the film anymore. It’s whether, when a confused kid tells me the world isn’t as simple as I’m making it sound, I’m willing to listen. Or whether somewhere along the way I became Kitty fucking Farmer.

Maybe I’ll go find that old Blockbuster customer and apologize. They were still wrong about the movie, though.