I recently rewatched Donnie Darko, it’s been around ten years since the last time I watched it and had a completely different viewing experience. The last time I watched this movie I was still in my teens and engaged with it as shallowly as relating vaguely to Donnie and finding it compelling for reasons I could not discern. Well, I think I can discern them now.
While I’ve seen people go in deep on the science fiction and mental health elements of the story, I’ve not yet seen anyone discuss just how laden with satire this movie is. It holds a mirror up to suburban middle class America and reveals the inherent hypocrisy of it.
With the mother that is judgemental of those around her, narrow-minded and rigid, who defends a motivational personality when he is accused of owning sexual images of children. The psychiatrist, who seems wildly out of her depth and offers Donnie shallow platitudes, and spends the epilogue staring at the ceiling. And the flat and shallow political discussion between Donnie’s dad and his sister, which is nothing more than mud filling while they try to rile each other up. The previously mentioned judgemental mother leading the PTA to ban a book, while the young progressive teacher tries to stand against it, but is ultimately thwarted. When Donnie going off on a tirade about Smurfette, a heightened version of school yard discussions, it is horrifically reminiscent of ‘nerd’ personalities online over the past ten years. Then when his psychiatrist tries to hypnotise him, he starts talking about how he thinks about sex all the time and begins to undo his pant.
It almost perfectly captures a moment in time, and it’s also incredibly funny.
Take for instance the Fear and Love activity. Donnie has a real honest human response to being told to determine whether a scenario is a product of fear or love, he questions whether anything can really be made that simply and says that most things require more nuance and context, but the teacher says that he has to do it otherwise he won’t get the class credit. Donnie stares at her as he boils with futile rage and we quickly cut to a farcical scene in the president’s office where it becomes clear that Donnie told the teacher to shove the info card up her ass.
Then there’s the scene where Patrick Swayze’s character is doing his thing at the school. The previously mentioned scene acts as set for this one, we already know that this ‘motivational speaker’ is giving people easy answers to difficult questions, and we’re waiting for something to happen. Swayze’s character talks to various children at the school and gets them to stand with him on the stage. Then Donnie comes up to the microphone. At first he addresses Swayze with all the usual shallow criticism of these sorts of people, and then he addresses the other kids, in another movie you might expect him to give them genuine advice, but instead he gives them a different kind of useless easy answer because he’s a damaged teen. Here the comedy comes first and then the raw reality comes in like a sucker punch. Swayze’s character says that Donnie is angry and scared, troubled and confused. And Donnie agrees, he is troubled, confused and afraid, but he also thinks that Swayze is “the fucking anti-Christ”.
And as we approach the end, it feels like we’re picking up momentum to finally find out some secret or hidden truth that the whole movie has been leading up to, but it just culminates in a few minutes of high tension, tragic accidents and bad decisions. In the end everything falls apart instead of coming together.
There’s something of the divine comedy to it, take the ending, Donnie and God are watching and they’re laughing at us.
The Captive Returns 