Spoilers obviously.

Still a cool movie. I read it as American society suffocating every character in the film except for Donnie, who rebels with multiple acts of violent sabotage. He is basically a communist insurgent living in the belly of the beast, but he doesn't know it, and it's almost impossible for him (in Reaganland) to access leftwing literature. To do so might make him feel even more helpless since no one in this suburban hellscape would ever help him bring it down. The closest he gets is the short story "The Destructors," about creative destruction, a dialectical concept. I haven't read the story or any Graham Greene, but apparently he was a member of the Communist Party of Britain and attempted to emigrate to the USSR. The synopsis of the story makes it sound cool and reminds me of Explosion in Cathedral, which basically features a French revolutionary traveling to the Caribbean and stirring shit up inside a decadent decaying mansion, literally like a hurricane of change.

Donnie Dark is also kind of a liberal fantasy though. How many liberal films feature a high school PTO meeting where the good liberals denounce the idiotic Southern rednecks who want to suppress everyone's freedom of speech? (I'm thinking of a similar scene in Field of Dreams.) We get not one, but two evil characters in this film with Southern accents (the gym teacher and Patrick Swayze). Swayze himself is basically '80s Jordan Peterson which I found kind of fucking insane even though one molecule of Swayze has more charisma than all of Jordan Peterson combined.

There's also a lot of Christian shit underlying this film which I'm not even sure the people making it were aware of. Donnie Darko is basically a superhero who doesn't know, until the end, that he actually has superpowers: the power to move objects through time and across universes and even to bring the dead back to life. ("I am the resurrection and the life.") He battles the false prophet Jordan Peterson (although counters conservative self-help bullshit ("don't have premarital sex" incel nonsense) with liberal self-help bullshit ("tell your fat cousin to get on a stairmaster")), smashes the false idol dog statue that is profaning the temple (the Christian school with the cross on the roof), and spreads a message of love, telling his shithead friends to leave Charita alone and later on telling her that things will get better for her (presumably in the afterlife!). If my friends told someone like Charita to go back to China, they wouldn't be my friends anymore, but again this is, on the surface, a liberal fantasy film. I kind of cringe at the Charita character but also closely identify with her since she is by far the most alienated character in the film. She's basically what Donnie would be if he wasn't so physically fortunate and if he wasn't literally the Son of God. He also goes to a screening of Evil Dead / The Last Temptation of Christ, where the holy spirit / Frank the evil bunny / his id tells him to take off his human mask, since Donnie is literally part man, part god, a Hercules-Jesus figure.

A pretty weird thing about this film is the fact that it was released right before 9/11 and features a piece of an airplane basically destroying the American suburban dream. The engine, as it falls on Donnie at the end, pulls the American flag on his ceiling down with it. One of the "good" teachers, Drew Barrymore, after she gets fired from her job, walks out of her classroom with an American flag in the cardboard box she's carrying, and on her way out she gets kind of stuck in the doorway because of the flag. So basically death to America; Donnie the intellectual with the "intimidating" test scores knows that America has no future and delenda est. Donnie causes the airplane to destroy his house, so he himself is basically a suicide bomber. It's a film very weirdly in touch with the global zeitgeist and the director/writer must have been freaked out by the Lathe of Heaven doing its thing right before his eyes.

There's also a weird Q-like preoccupation with adults taking sexual advantage of children: Swayze-Peterson is a child pornographer, the crazy gym teacher who loves him has a weird predilection for sexualizing the girl dance troup (and even sends them to dance for Hollywood weirdos), and Donnie's therapist gets pretty intimate with him while he's hypnotized on multiple occasions. Donnie also suffers from what the film calls paranoid schizophrenia—basically the entire universe is constantly showing me signs that guide me toward some kind of apocalypse. This is a characteristic trait of the beliefs of Q folks: everything has a hidden meaning which points to Trump as God and a kind of final reckoning with the devils in the deep state. (I want to add that having schizophrenia does not necessarily mean that you are into Q.)

Two more things on weird sexualization: when the "good" teacher Barrymore tells Donnie's future girlfriend to sit next to the boy she thinks is the cutest. Such a weird fucking thing to say! And also there's a shot at the end where Donnie is basically sitting between his mom and a poster of a sexy woman in a bathing suit. (He lives in a place called Middlesex.) His sister also basically dresses up like his mom for Halloween, and Donnie kisses her on the head at the end right before he destroys everything.

I wanted also to talk about the dad. He's basically what Donnie would become if he lived out the rest of his life in the USA. Though his dad is really not that bad a guy and generally supports his family, he plans to vote for fucking Bush and specifically gets pissed off when Dukakis is on the TV talking about the Iran-Contra scandal (although Dukakis is such a fucking lib that the only problem, for him, is that the Contras were drug dealers). The dad's wealth is derived from the enslavement of the global south, but he doesn't want to hear about it.

Donnie is basically unable to connect with anyone except his girlfriend, who is also a social outcast. He gets close to his science teacher who is forced to abandon him for fear of losing his job.

Frank the terrifying bunny is like Donnie's id from the future, basically guiding him toward his destiny, maybe even a kind of holy spirit. Donnie often sees Frank right as he's taking his medication—since suppressing something only makes it stronger, revolution is impossible without sacrifice, and Donnie's death brings about new life. ("Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.")