My Cultural Diet

There’s a scene in Tenet where the protagonist, upon learning the truth about entropically reversed bullets, is simply told “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.” That’s also pretty good advice concerning Donnie Darko. Yes, there are in-depth explanations for its bizarre, circular storyline involving time travel and parallel universes. And those explanations might even be relatively coherent. But Donnie Darko is best experienced as a vibe. Which is not a knock on Richard Kelly’s script, which is full of excellent lines (e.g., “Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.”) and poignant treatments of alienation and loneliness. Nor is it a knock on the film’s performances, and in particular, Jake Gyllenhaal as the titular character, a deeply troubled high school student who begins receiving strange apocalyptic visions. Donnie Darko may be too ambitious for its own good, but it nevertheless unfolds with a confidence that belies the fact that it was Kelly’s directorial debut (he was only 25 years old at the time), and its keenly wrought sense of time, place, and atmosphere is engrossing. Watching it now, nearly 25 years after its release, the film’s flaws are readily apparent. But so, too, are all the reasons why my friends and I became so obsessed with it back in the day.

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