AWAKENING DANGEROUS MEMORIES Michael Kirwan
T
HE WORLD SHOULD HAVE COME TO AN END on 31 October 1988.
The fact that it did not is all down to the self-sacrifice of Donnie Darko, who was able to discover a ‘portal’ into the space-time continuum, which he then reversed, at the cost of his own life. (‘He got smooshed. By a jet engine.’) 1 That is the plot, or part of it, of the cult movie Donnie Darko. The film as a whole, especially the director’s cut, is a lot less easy to summarise. It sprawls ambitiously between several genres, citing high-school romantic comedy, psychological thriller, Back to the Future time-travel, and general ‘coming of age’ heroics. Jake Gyllenhaal gives a fine performance as Donnie, the tortured adolescent whose visions—specifically of a six-foot bunny-rabbit named Frank—are the product of either paranoid schizophrenia or supernatural intervention. This flawed masterpiece sends out quiet but insistent spiritual, even christological, signals. They inspire no more than hints and guesses, admittedly, but there is enough here to keep the theologian happy. Donnie Darko is a very clever piece of movie-making about human meaning, discernment of spirits, forgiveness, redemption, eschatology and apocalypse, which never rams a message down the throat of its adolescent audience. It is a remarkable achievement, and here I should like to follow up some of its hints and gestures towards belief, more than twenty years after its averted Armageddon.
1
Donnie Darko was written and directed by Richard Kelly in 2001. ‘Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Donnie, a borderline-schizophrenic adolescent for whom there is no difference between the signs and wonders of reality (a plane crash that decimates his house) and hallucination (a man-sized, reptilian rabbit who talks to him). Obsessed with the science of time travel and acutely aware of the world around him, Donnie is isolated by his powers of analysis and the apocalyptic visions that no one else seems to share.’ (Tom Keogh, review at http://www.amazon.com/Donnie-Darko-Blu-rayJake-Gyllenhaal/dp/B001JNNDBA) The script is available at http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_ scripts/d/donnie-darko-script-screenplay.html. The Way, 47/4 (October 2008), 25–36