Miller, I’m not really clear on your opinion of what the director says, would you mind repeating it? 
You know, I really don’t care what the director intended or what people think this movie was about, it’s just freakin’ cool, IMHO.
I thought it was pretty clear that the engine was an ordinary airplane engine and that Donnie sent it from the tangent universe into the primary one.
*Well, yes, but the only way a viewer could possibly know that is if they listen to the director’s commentary and go through all the supplemental info on the DVD. From the perspective of the ordinary viewer, the story gets going when the engine hits the house. Where did it come from? Why did it happen? The rest of the movie builds towards a very complicated answer to these questions. Unfortunately, it’s so complicated it doesn’t actually do a very good job of answering the very first questions raised by the movie.
*Exactly. So how can the same engine be in point A (primary universe) and point B (tangent universe) at the same time if the tangent universe has already split off?
*If this were the director’s intent he cerainly didn’t make it clear even with the supplementary info, and I don’t think it makes much difference to the story anyway. The end result is the same whether the two universes are running parallel or the tangent universe is a sideways “loop”.
*Yes, I understand all that. What I don’t understand is why the engine also falls on his house in the tangent universe. How can it be in both universes at once?
*Wait…are you saying that god dropped the engine on the Darko home in the tangent universe just to get the plot rolling? Wow. I can believe this was what the director intended but…that’s an even stupider explanation than I was giving him credit for. If god goes around dropping engines on people’s houses anyway, why’d he need Donnie to do it the the primary universe?
Thinking of the psychiatrist reminds me, there’s a cut scene on the DVD that the director says he really wishes he’d been able to keep in the movie. It’s a scene in which the psychiatrist calls the Darko house and leaves a message that Donnie’s pills were a placebo and he doesn’t need to take them anymore. Apparently the director intended this scene to reassure us that Donnie wasn’t schizophrenic at all and that his visions of Frank were all real. If that’s his intended message, it’s lucky for him the scene was cut! If Donnie saw Frank despite being on antipsychotic meds that might indicate that Frank wasn’t a delusion, but if Donnie saw Frank despite being on sugar pills…well…not exactly a sign of good mental health.
I’m totally with Miller on this one. I’m of the opinion that the dierctor doesn’t quite understand his own movie.
It wasn’t.
Think of it this way: Say you go to the pond, and pick up a rock. The rock is at the pond. Later, you take the rock home. The rock is at your home.
“The rock is at the pond.” “The rock is at your home.” Mutually contradictory, right? Well, no… because FIRST it is at the pond, and THEN it is at home.
The “tangent universe” doesn’t happen at the same time as the “real universe”. That’s the important bit to remember. When the “tangent universe” is fixed - by moving “the Artifact” - the “real universe” continues.
That’s why the whole tangent-thingy is so problematic… because the “real universe” can’t continue until its unstable nature is resolved.
Forgive all the quotes. I recognize the movie is hooplah, though I have respect for anybody that can mentally build their own universe from scratch… I find the movie eerily internally consistent.
So made-up stuff is boring, eh? I pity the life you’ve led.
Are you fucking kidding me?
Hey man, YOU said it. I guess I should be asking, are YOU fucking kidding ME?
… Or should that be, “ARE you FUCKING kidDING me?”
Or maybe “Are YOU fucKING kidding ME?”
Oh nevermind…
Yeah, SPOOFE, you got me. I don’t like anything made-up. Can’t stand it. If I catch the faintest whiff of fiction - or, God-forbid, science fiction - then I’ve lost all interest in it. That’s why you’ll never catch me posting in a thread about Star Wars, or Firefly, or Buffy, or Salman Rushdie, or Star Trek, or Neal Stephenson, or Babylon 5, or William Gibson, or comic books, or D&D, or video games. And you will most especially never, ever, ever see me post in a Donnie Darko thread, to say nothing of me inventing a fairly intricate explanation for the events of the movie that presupposes several supernatural effects and fundamentally contradicts the director’s stated intent.
Because I don’t like things that are made-up.
I saw this movie for the first time last night and I thought I didn’t understand it, but I was wrong. I didn’t really not understand it until I read this thread and saw how many different levels there were for me to not understand it on. I now truly and thouroughly don’t understand better than I have ever not understood before. I’m not even sure if t was in English now.
That’s the joy of SDMB. We’re so much better off than everyone else, because we have whole vistas of ignorance that the common man doesn’t even know he has.
Just finished watching the film, and I noticed something interesting: though there are a large number of windows in the movie, the only characters to be framed in a window are Gretchen, Donnie, Roberta Sparrow and Frank - the Living Receivers and the Manipulated Dead. (Jim Cunningham is seen through a window on TV, but that’s not the framing of the shot.)
Hey, little boy, if you don’t like people asking, “You don’t like things that are made-up?” then don’t fuckin’ say “I don’t like things that are made up.”
Jesus. Go outside, wouldja?
Don’t worry when I first saw the movie I didn’t get what was really going on at all. All I thought that happened was that he somehow opened a time portal so that he could go back and time and die so he wouldn’t screw everything up. I thought he was a super wussy because that ment
- His sister still died when the plane crashed
- His Girlfriend’s mom still got abucted (or whatever happened to her)
and - the kiddy porn ring never gets exposed
I thought he should have gone back and fixed those things. I felt much better after I listened to the commentary and found out his death was more likely an accident (though the director says it could be either way)
Subtly seeming to have failed, I’ll just go ahead and point out that I never said any such thing.
And I would go outside if I weren’t in this damned iron lung.
His sister and his mom, IIRC. Except I think going back prevented that. I assume that, what with Donnie having died less than a month earlier, his sister would pull out of the dance recital. Plus, they could tell from the serial numbers on the engine what plane it came from, and when they figure that out, they’ll be all over it, taking it apart, trying to figure out what the hell is going on. That entire plane crash has probably been averted.
I don’t think anything happened to her. It wasn’t the girlfriend’s abusive father who trashed her house, it was the two thieves they run into hiding in the… er… whatever the hell they were hiding in. Someplace’s cellar, wasn’t it?
There’s that shot at the end, when everyone wakes up at the moment of Donnie’s death, of Patrick Swayze sobbing. This takes more inference than usual, even for this film, but I think he remembers more of what happened to him in the alternate universe than any of the other people, maybe because it was so much more traumatic. A pedophile in a prison doesn’t stay alive for very long, generally speaking. At the very least, it might’ve scared him off going after any more kids.
The bitchy teacher would have gone instead of his mom because she was in charge of the dance troop and only ducked out to defend the porn king. I’m unsure about the sister dropping out because of his death though. Could go either way.
The two thieves were looking through grandma death’s cellar because of the rumors of there being a major stash of money. I don’t think they had anything to do with this girlfriend’s mom or what happened there. All we ever find out about the mom is she’s missing and someone trashed the house.
Someone that goes to the trouble of building a ‘kiddie porn dungeon’ isn’t going to quit without major therapy and I don’t see that fake ego maniac doing so.
So important that there’s nothing about it in the movie at all. I don’t remember the director mentioning it in his commentary either, or anything in the supplementary materials to this effect. (Personally, I don’t think it’s playing fair with your audience to make a movie that cannot be understood without getting an additional extra-textual explanation from the director anyway.)
But if your interpretation is correct, it still leaves the question of why the engine hit the Darko home in the tangent universe. It needed to enter the primary universe in order to Save The World, but what end was served by dropping it on the tangent universe house? The engine had no will of its own, once it was off the plane it was only going where Donnie sent it. Even accepting that there are “laws” in place that allow Donnie to drop the engine on both houses, why would he do that? It only needed to go into the primary universe.
Oh, Darkhold, I was also concerned about what would happen to the girlfriend and her mom back in the primary universe. After the mom disappears, Gretchen goes to Donnie’s house because she doesn’t have anywhere else to go. Without Donnie around, what was she going to do? Sit around waiting for her dad to come kidnap/kill her? And everything in the film indicates that it was her dad behind the break-in.
Hmm, I guess I misremembered that part of the movie. I thought the burglars were just hiding in the cellar, and I didn’t realize it was Grandma Death’s cellar. But that makes her subsequent appearance when Gretchen gets killed make more sense.
Still, I’m pretty sure the plane crash was prevented, and Gretchen almost certainly survives, even if her mom isn’t so lucky.
well only if you buy the directors notion that it’s an artifact from the other universe otherwise you have a paradox either it’s torn off or it shouldn’t pop up like that.
Obviously, it’s an artifact (in the prosaic small “A” sense) from the other universe, but that doesn’t mean that you have to accept all the stuff about Living Receptors or the “Prime” universe collapsing because of the “Tangent” universe, or any of that.
It seems to me like the director’s explanation is the theory on which he based the events in the movie. What I mean by that is that he developed this pseudo-philosophy of how an alternate universe would work, then developed the story around that philosophy.
All of that is fine; all good stories exist to illustrate a point of some kind. The problem with the director’s interpretation is that there is no way to come to that interpretation solely through watching the movie.
In classical criticism, the purpose of reading (or by extension to movies, watching) is to discover the author’s intended message and/or purpose. In this kind of criticism, a work of art has one and only one correct interpretation, and that interpretation is whatever the intent of the creator was.
Modern or post-modern criticism takes a different view of artistic interpretation. In this model, a work of art can have an existence and a meaning entirely divorced from the creator and the creator’s intent. Meaning is created through the interaction of the audience with the artwork. Once the creator has finished, he/she is no longer involved in the creative process, which has been turned over to the audience. This is not to say that the author’s intent or interpretation is irrelevant. In this model, once the artwork is complete, the creator becomes another interpreter of the artwork, a member of the audience. The creator is thus often the most important, most knowledgeable critic, but does not necessarily posses the one true interpretation.
I usually approach a work of art from the latter school of thought. If the creator’s intent cannot be derived directly from the work of art itself, then it loses relevance when interpreting the artwork, and any alternate interpretation that is supported by the artwork is equally valid.
I accept that the director may have intended the movie to illustrate the ideas in hazel-rah’s explanation, but I cannot see any way to derive that explanation from the film itself. Dickens said in the introduction to one of his books, and I’m paraphrasing here, that he didn’t feel the need to comment on the book, because everything he had to say was in the book already.
Whatever the director may have intended, I don’t think the interpretation offered is as satisfying or as well supported by the content as the one Miller has been offering, or the one I’ve offered in the linked thread.
I just saw the Director’s Cut Thursday night. It was the first time I’ve seen the film in any form.
I’ve found this thread very helpful to my understanding of what I saw, but I wonder how much of what I’m reading here is irrelevant to the cut I saw.
Also, I’d like to note that Mary McDonnell is hot.