“Fate up against your will”: Donnie Darko’s terrible lesson.

The song played during the opening sequence of the film Donnie Darko, is “The Killing Moon” by Echo and the Bunnymen: “Fate up against your will, though thick and thin, he will wait until you give yourself to him.” This song does not just function ornamentally: it provides an important clue to the film’s underlying themes. We know the song selection is intentional because Donnie’s imaginary friend Frank is himself a kind of grotesque bunnyman (as well as being an allusion to the much gentler film Harvey). The song acts as a kind of key. The fundamental opposition in both song and film is between ‘fate’ and ‘will’. Can one repudiate one’s own destiny? Is life a choice between love and fear? In the character of Donnie, we are presented with a protagonist who attempts to oppose or refuse his fated end but, by the finish of the film, finally accepts that he needs to die to save others, those he loves and even those he doesn't. (There is a second reason why the song is important that I shall discuss this later.)

Donnie Darko is a film that is often misunderstood. To state quite baldly the most obvious and salient point about it: Donnie is schizophrenic. He takes medication, hallucinates glowing tubes emerging from people’s chests and has a malign imaginary friend who encourages him to vandalize the school and burn down Patrick Swayze’s house. It amazes me how few people notice that Donnie is schizophrenic. (In my local video store the film is filed under science-fiction). Yet it describes a common aspect of the psychotic experience - the feeling that one’s life is not under one’s own control, that one is in the grip of outside powers. When Donnie wrecks the school, he spray paints “They made me do it” on the school forecourt: the common excuse schizophrenics always give when they do something terrible.

The key moment in the film occurs right at the beginning. An airplane turbine falls from the sky into Donnie’s room. This is the film’s inciting incident. Donnie escapes death because Frank has lured him outside to inform Donnie that he has only a month left before the end of the world. Donnie has fluked his way out of catastrophe. Later, in the hotel, Donnie’s father thinks of a school acquaintance who died on his way to the prom. “He said he was doomed. Jesus. That could have been Donnie.”

In fact, it genuinely was Donnie's doom to die that night. One way of interpreting the film is to suppose that Frank is granting Donnie a month-long glimpse of what his life could have been like if he had survived.  (In this respect, most of the film could be viewed as a dream, reminiscent in this respect of Mulholland Drive.) I am not going to give a full synopsis of the film – it suffices to say that the most important thing that happens to Donnie during the month he has been allotted is that he meets a girl, falls in love and, the night before the end of the world, sleeps with her. The other thing that occurs is that his condition worsens. The glowing tubes that he sees emerging from people’s chests represent their destinies, either by fate or choice– the film equivocates about this. The night before he burns down the house belonging to self-help guru Jim Cunningham he exits from a cinema screening “The Last Temptation of Christ”. Like Christ in that film, he is being tempted by the possibility of disavowing his own fate.

During this month Donnie becomes obsessed with time-travel. He discusses it with his science teacher. “If God controls time, all time is pre-decided […] Every living thing follows along a set path and if you could see your path or channel you could see into the future, that’s a form of time travel.” The teacher replies, “You’re contradicting yourself Donnie. If we could see our destinies manifest themselves visually than we would be given a choice to betray our chosen destiny, and the fact of the choice would make all pre-formed destiny come to an end.” “Not,” Donnie says, “if you travel within God’s channel.”

This scene is a fairly blatant description of the idea at the heart of the film. Donnie has, temporarily at least, betrayed his chosen destiny. The result of this choice is the end of the world: at the conclusion of the month, his girlfriend, mother and the unfortunate Frank are all killed. Donnie is in eminent danger of being discovered as the arsonist who burnt down Cunningham's house. As his therapist tells Donnie, “If the sky were to suddenly open up, there would be no law, there would be no rule, there would only be you and your memories, the choices you’ve made and the people you’ve touched. If this world were to end there would only be you and him [Frank] and no-one else.” In the end, Donnie chooses to save the people he has touched by accepting his destiny, time-travelling back to the moment the jet engine fell and accepting his death.

Donnie Darko concerns a struggle between fate and free-will. There is another perspective on this conflict. Throughout the film, we are presented scenes in which Jim Cunningham and his acolytes expound their self-help philosophy: that life is a choice between love and fear. Donnie despises this philosophy as overly simplistic and despises Cunningham because he senses that Cunningham is a fraud. Nevertheless Cunningham is actually right: his world-view is the fundamental thesis of the film. When Donnie confronts Cunningham in the auditorium, attacking both him and his pop-psychology, the soundtrack indicates that Donnie is fighting on the wrong side. Narratives are often founded on ironies and the chief irony of the film is that the people who openly espouse Cunningham’s philosophy are idiots and hypocrites and yet, in the end, Donnie embraces this world-view himself, choosing love over fear. This is why he dies laughing.

So what does Donny gain from his month-long excursion into an alternate reality? The principal thing is the girlfriend. Donnie is as obsessed by sex as any other adolescent male and, at the end of the month, he gets to get laid by the girl he loves. Donnie Darko,  in its most emotionally resonant sequences, is a love-story and Donnie dies for love, for love of Gretchen and for his mother. The film, particularly because of its musical score, is very romantic, treading that fine line between a fundamentalist Christian notion of ‘no sex before marriage’ and the crude notion of sex for the sake of sex popularized by films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High.  This is the other reason “The Killing Moon” is the key to the movie.  Donnie Darko is a film that suggests that sex is something that shouldn’t be trivialized.

To conclude with an anecdote, this interpretation of Donnie Darko occurred to me a couple of years ago. At the time I was halfway through writing a film about a girl I’d known and had just received a shock from reading on the Internet a poem she’d composed. The insight about Donnie Darko came to me in the swimming pool. I decided (perhaps wrongly) to accept the lesson, to choose love over fear and finish the script. On the way home I experienced a reappearance of psychotic symptoms that I hadn’t had for a number of years: I heard voices telling me to ‘turn left’ and ‘turn right’ which I blindly obeyed. I was making a decision when I wasn’t in possession of all the facts. It was an important moment for me. Perhaps there is such a thing as fate and perhaps there is no way to escape it.