Post by dkbuckley on Sept 17, 2003 0:19:21 GMT -5
What if you showed in movie format the fleeting moments of a person's death, as perceived by their mind. Like, if the person was dreaming and something terrible happened, leaving them in a dying and horrid dream. Of course, the movie would meander through this decaying madness and insanity, especially if the character were already a little pyscho to being with, who just fell asleep after taking some mind-influencing medication. Like say a teenager with some mental problems already. The movie shows their dream in a realistic form, which of course, has all the peculiarities, symbolism, and nuances of the dream state.
It is my contention that Donnie Darko is this movie. I believe that the first couple of minutes and the last couple of minutes are the only "real" events, with everything else being the portrayal of this poor kid's dying conscious and unconscious mind caught in making sense of it all. The opening of the sky, the search for God and reason, interwoven within memories and aspirations culminate in a perverse combination of coincidence and stumbling sense that dreams always seem to have; one that makes sense on some levels, but eludes words and easy definition.
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However, my interpretation falls short of the director commentary on the DVD. He really envisions it as a sci-fi about a parallel universe, with this kid being some comic book hero guided into restoring the space-time continuum. This makes no fucking sense to me, as there remains this giant vestage from the alternate universe: the fucking jet engine remains and it seems to contradict the plausible sense of space-time and all that, but maybe I am just an idiot who does not know enough about space-time.
That said, it makes more sense to me that the kid turned the numbers on the engine into something of meaning (time until the end of the world), a drawing hanging on the wall of a scary bunny rabbit costume into a person that delivers this message, and the death process as something with profound meaning.
I do have evidence for my interpretation. 1) He finds the guys wallet and burns his house, straight out of school lesson, no easy coincidence in a real world. 2) the deleted scenes reveal him to flush the pills and the doctor to say they are placebos anyway. This means to me that he wants to find some semblence of sanity in his life in his wanings moments of delirium. 3) the deleted death scene shows him with a shard of the engine plunged out of his still heaving chest, which would no doubt be the watery-abyss-like spears he sees in his dreams and which he attributes a divine purpose to. He is alive and staring at the wall, further giving creedence that he is merely alive and encorporating the things on his shelf (a book he read and whose tales he lives out, comic book mentality of super-human purpose, the drawings made into real personas, a wish to have a great romance). The songs even point to this, with lyrics that have direct correlation to the events of the story shown and which perhaps he recalled in his mind and used as inspiration for his manic dream sequence.
The fact that the director states something else and that the movie portrays a different sort of ending - with characters awaking as if they remember something from this parallel realism - do not deter me from my interpretation in any way. I feel more comfortable with accepting it as stepping inside someone's dying dream than that it was some mythic spacec-time travel novel wrapped within itself with unanswerable mysteries.
It is my contention that Donnie Darko is this movie. I believe that the first couple of minutes and the last couple of minutes are the only "real" events, with everything else being the portrayal of this poor kid's dying conscious and unconscious mind caught in making sense of it all. The opening of the sky, the search for God and reason, interwoven within memories and aspirations culminate in a perverse combination of coincidence and stumbling sense that dreams always seem to have; one that makes sense on some levels, but eludes words and easy definition.
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However, my interpretation falls short of the director commentary on the DVD. He really envisions it as a sci-fi about a parallel universe, with this kid being some comic book hero guided into restoring the space-time continuum. This makes no fucking sense to me, as there remains this giant vestage from the alternate universe: the fucking jet engine remains and it seems to contradict the plausible sense of space-time and all that, but maybe I am just an idiot who does not know enough about space-time.
That said, it makes more sense to me that the kid turned the numbers on the engine into something of meaning (time until the end of the world), a drawing hanging on the wall of a scary bunny rabbit costume into a person that delivers this message, and the death process as something with profound meaning.
I do have evidence for my interpretation. 1) He finds the guys wallet and burns his house, straight out of school lesson, no easy coincidence in a real world. 2) the deleted scenes reveal him to flush the pills and the doctor to say they are placebos anyway. This means to me that he wants to find some semblence of sanity in his life in his wanings moments of delirium. 3) the deleted death scene shows him with a shard of the engine plunged out of his still heaving chest, which would no doubt be the watery-abyss-like spears he sees in his dreams and which he attributes a divine purpose to. He is alive and staring at the wall, further giving creedence that he is merely alive and encorporating the things on his shelf (a book he read and whose tales he lives out, comic book mentality of super-human purpose, the drawings made into real personas, a wish to have a great romance). The songs even point to this, with lyrics that have direct correlation to the events of the story shown and which perhaps he recalled in his mind and used as inspiration for his manic dream sequence.
The fact that the director states something else and that the movie portrays a different sort of ending - with characters awaking as if they remember something from this parallel realism - do not deter me from my interpretation in any way. I feel more comfortable with accepting it as stepping inside someone's dying dream than that it was some mythic spacec-time travel novel wrapped within itself with unanswerable mysteries.