Donnie Darko (2001) Explained: A Journey Through The Director’s Theory: A month after the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001, a fiction about the transformative power of small catastrophes reached American cinemas. In the plot, a troubled teenager escapes death when an airplane engine crashes into his bedroom. He then starts to have visions with a large bunny rabbit, which instead of presenting playful fantasy, involves him in a dark and criminal premonition. The fear and distrust that permeated the scene at the time boycotted Donnie Darko’s debut, but word of mouth caught the attention of Pioneer Theatre in New York, which insisted on showing it for two years. Consequently, rejection gave way to catharsis, soon DVD sales soared and the newest generation of midnight films began deciphering enigmas in broad daylight.
Although director Richard Kelly’s script works with philosophical issues and uses references ranging from the Bible to Alice in Wonderland, it also builds a singular and complex universe. At first, the idea was to answer only part of the narrative puzzle, but three years later, a new cut brought the missing pieces. The reissue includes some additional scenes and reveals in full the twelve chapters of the fictional book The Philosophy of Time Travel, written by Roberta Sparrow. Its content, on which this analysis is based, expands an internal logic hitherto unknown to the public, besides explaining what they saw in movie theatres. Thereby, both the central conflict in Donnie Darko (2001) and its moral dilemmas were re-signified, because, after all, who could have guessed that order would emerge from destruction?
Act I: October 2nd, 1988
Sparrow introduces the book by discussing the concept of time, a stable construction, but not an impenetrable one. If the fourth dimension is broken, the environment in which we live, the so-called Primary Universe, will be replaced by the parallel reality of the Tangent Universe. The occurrence of this anomaly is indicated by the appearance of a metal artifact under mysterious circumstances, but its existence doesn’t exceed a few weeks.
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At the beginning of the story, the characters are in the timeline of Primary Universe, on October 1st, 1988, then overnight young Frank, dressed as a giant rabbit, takes Donnie to a golf course to alert him to the imminence of a possible apocalypse in 28 days 06 hours 42 minutes and 12 seconds. Meanwhile, an engine opens a crack in space from the future and crashes into the boy’s room, establishing the new chronology of Tangent Universe along with its characteristic duplication: the version of the artifact somewhere in the present and the one that traveled through time.
The accidental presence of an artifact can cause the self-destruction of the temporary reality, so it must be returned to the Primary Universe. To accomplish this task, a Living Receiver is chosen by undisclosed criteria and blessed with Fourth Dimensional Powers such as increased strength, telekinesis (ability to move objects at a distance by mental power), plus the capacity to conjure fire and water. Donnie becomes responsible for guiding the engine back within a few weeks, as Frank warns, but if he fails, the Tangent Universe will collapse upon itself together with a black hole capable of extinguishing all humanity. From then on, the Manipulated Living come into play, individuals who unconsciously assist the Receiver. All the characters are part of this group except Gretchen and Frank because they both died before normality was restored.
Act II: October 2nd to October 30th, 1988
English teacher Karen Pomeroy is one of the most prominent Manipulated Living on the journey. During a class, she raises a discussion about The Destroyers, a short story published in 1954 by English writer Graham Greene. It follows a group of young people who break into a man’s house, but instead of robbing, they vandalize the place from the inside out. When asked what would have motivated the crime, Darko answers “They wanted to see what happens when they tear the world apart”, a nod to the chaotic scenario he will have to face in order to restore the balance of the fourth dimension. In another attempt at instinctive contribution, the teacher encourages Gretchen Ross to sit next to the protagonist and finally, before being fired, she writes “Cellar Door” on the blackboard, a compound noun famous for its pleasant sound, but also where a turnaround in the events takes place.
Kenneth Monnitoff, the physics teacher, contributes a lot to the narrative as well. Donnie looks for him to clarify principles of time travel ten days before the possible apocalypse, soon the pair begin debating ideas from Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. According to the scientist, the locomotion in spacetime would be possible if some matter went through a wormhole, a tunnel between two ends in space, faster than the speed of light. This topic directly relates to the mission of the main character, as does Roberta Sparrow’s book, which Kenneth presents to him in sequence. Known by the nickname Grandma Death, the author used to be a nun until she was chosen as the Living Receiver of an artifact. However, Roberta’s huge transformation led her to swap celibacy for science, so she starts teaching physics at Middlesex School and wait for a response from whom she could have helped with her written records.
Apart from Manipulated Living, those who die during the regency of the Tangent Universe can also contact the Living Receiver and, if necessary, control the classical elements and move in time. To that end, the so-called Manipulated Dead uses the Fourth Dimensional Construct, a wormhole made of water whose operation was illustrated by Sparrow in two appendices of her work. Over the 28 days the adventure unfolds, Gretchen and Frank are murdered, but while the first one unwittingly collaborates with Donnie, the second goes back in time to build an Ensurance Trap, that is, to rearrange events in a chain to facilitate the mission of returning the artifact to the Primary Universe.
At the beginning of the month, Frank mentions time travel while he communicates with Donnie, hence why he talks to his physics teacher after class. The boy is also encouraged to flood the school and because of class suspension, he walks home with Gretchen and gets to know her better. When the couple goes to the movies, the man dressed as a rabbit appears again to order the troubled teenager to burn down Jim Cunningham’s house, the motivational leader revered by the neighborhood. It leads the police to discover an arsenal of child pornography hidden in the basement, resulting in Jim’s arrest. Teacher Kitty Farmer pities him, so she decides to stay in town and ask the Darko’s to replace her on a trip with their youngest daughter’s dance group.
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With the house empty, Elizabeth Darko, the protagonist’s older sister, organizes a Halloween party on October 30th to celebrate her admission into Harvard University. On this occasion, exactly 27 days after the story begins, Frank takes Donnie, through the Fourth Dimensional Construct, to a note taped on the fridge saying the rabbit was at the party and went to get some beer. Moments later, the boy hears the word “Cellar Door”, a reference to the clue left by teacher Karen, and heads with his girlfriend towards Roberta Sparrow’s cellar. Two hooligans from school were waiting for them there, so they go up to the street and get into a fight when Gretchen is accidentally run over by Frank, who was driving back with drinks. Darko finally pulls out the gun found in his parents’ room, thanks to Frank’s Construct, and shoots the young man in the eye, allowing him to go back in time to be his guide.
Act III: October 31st, 1988
Until dawn the next day, there was a version of the jet engine that returned from the future and another one somewhere in the present, both within the Tangent Universe. On October 31st, this last engine flies on the plane that brought Darko’s family back home, so Frank’s Ensurance Trap culminates at the moment he goes up a hill to return it. As his mother had left a message on the answering machine announcing the takeoff time, Donnie vagally knew when they would fly over the city. By using those Living Receiver powers, he creates a wormhole with cloud water and sends the artifact back to Primary Universe. Once the duplication problem has been promptly solved, temporary reality comes to an end without a massive disaster.
When the Tangent Universe collapses, all its occurrences fade away. Therefore, the Receiver and the Manipulated can either confuse their experiences with dreams or forget about them altogether. After the jet engine is restored, those 28 days are rewound and the Primary Universe returns from where it stopped on October 2nd, instants before the accident. In the meantime, Donnie’s voice is heard reading a letter sent to Roberta Sparrow, in which he demonstrates a desire to live and seek for answers. It turns out the engine guided by him returns to his bedroom, since a crack in space had been opened there before, but now the error has been repaired, so nobody travels in time to save him. The other characters then wake up to the sound of Tears for Fears’ Mad World, while the hero hysterically laughs, because as the lyrics say, “The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had”.
Donnie Darko 2001 Links: IMDb, Wikipedia
