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Originally released in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Donnie Darko sank like a stone. That was not a propitious moment for a movie in which a jet engine comes crashing through a suburban house. But DVD gave the film new life—so much so that it enjoyed a limited theatrical re-release in 2004 in a director's cut, now available on DVD as well. The film is particularly popular among college students. Like The Matrix trilogy, another campus favorite, Darko taps into the common adolescent experience of the falsity, the inauthenticity, of the external world. Unlike The Matrix, however, Darko maintains a certain ironic distance from its protagonist.
The film starts and culminates in Donnie's house with a jet engine dropping directly into his bedroom. But the result is not a standard flashback, ending exactly where it began. For example, Donnie's location is different in the two crash scenes. Donnie's fascination with time travel suggests an explanation for the altered ending. And the possibility of time travel turns out to be a clever way of posing the issue of divine determinism and human freedom.
It is a common-sense assumption that the past cannot be altered, that it cannot be other than what it now is. But common sense also supposes that it might have or could have been other than what it became. If time travel is possible, then perhaps the entire flow of time is radically contingent, open to human or divine intervention. The more seriously the movie takes its metaphysics—as it sadly does in the additional, explanatory footage inserted into the director's cut—the more it invites dismissal as philosophical and scientific gibberish. When it touches more lightly on these themes, as in the original release, fertile ethical and theological issues emerge.
Like many adolescent heroes, Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a confused quester. He is on some sort of medication, has regular visits with a psychiatrist, sleepwalks, has dim memories of being involved in destructive acts, begins dating the new girl at school (Jena Malone as Gretchen Ross), and develops an interest in the physics and metaphysics of time travel. But in the midst of all this, he enjoys regular visits from a giant, ominous-looking bunny, who commands Donnie to perform acts of mayhem and repeatedly warns him about the end of the world. A dateline and clock appear at various intervals in the film to mark how much time is left before the apocalypse.
The most direct attempts by characters in the film to speak to Donnie's angst and confusion do not prove fruitful. A local self-help guru, Jim Cunningham (Patrick Swayze), encourages students to "face their ego reflection" and overcome fear with love. In an entertaining send-up of the self-esteem movement, Cunningham sees lack of self-love as the cause of every teen vice from drugs to premarital sex. And teen vices are often on display in Darko. During one of his hypnotic encounters with the Bunnyman, Donnie receives the command, "burn it to the ground." We then see footage of the charred remains of Cunningham's home and of Cunningham being arrested for what police call a "kiddie porn dungeon." This is a searing indictment of therapeutic moralism.
A potentially more fruitful adult source of wisdom is found in the teacher, Professor Monnitoff (Noah Wyle of ER fame), who introduces Donnie to the topic of time travel and provides him with a book, The Philosophy of Time Travel, written by a local oddball. But when questions about determinism and human freedom take an explicitly theological turn, the teacher states abruptly that he "can't continue the conversation" because he "could get fired."
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