When compared to time travel and the concept of free will, the giant,
humanoid rabbit in Donnie Darko is one of the film's more straightforward plot points.
Although it has a lot to offer beyond just rational explanations,
it's impossible to comprehend Donnie Darko without a basic understanding of its science
fiction elements. Fortunately, Roberta "Grandma Death" Sparrow wrote her book,
The Philosophy of Time Travel, on this very subject. At various points,
Donnie and his teacher, Professor Monnitoff paraphrase excerpts for us.
"Every living thing follows a long-set path,
and if you could see your path or channel, then you could see into the future right?"
In short, the appearance of the paradoxical jet engine at the beginning of the movie
creates a "Tangent Universe." As the nearest person to "The Artifact,"
Donnie becomes charged with the mission to ensure the plane enters the vortex at
the end of the film and "returns" the engine to where it came from.
In other words, Donnie Darko is set in a parallel universe where everyone in Donnie's
life is unconsciously working to resolve this jet engine quandary. Everything from Donnie's troubled
dreams to his increased strength that enables him to put an axe into a statue's head to his visions
of a dead Frank in the rabbit costume — they're all part of the mythology laid out in the book.
The presence of the engine will eventually cause a black hole in the "Primary Universe,"
which is essentially the regular timeline. For this reason, Frank isn't lying when he gives
Donnie the precise time that the world will end. The curious can find excerpts online from The
Philosophy of Time Travel and see how thoroughly it accounts for each little bit of Donnie Darko.
As explained in Sparrow's philosophy, Frank is a member of "The Manipulated Dead" because he
dies during the alternate timeline. His role is to be Donnie's guide through his adventure with
the jet engine. He wakes him up and serves as the unsettling Virgil to Donnie's teenage Dante.
However, if you view the movie through the lens of Donnie's potential paranoid schizophrenia,
there are a few clues that the messenger might live solely in his mind. We eventually learn
that Frank is Donnie's sister's boyfriend, so it's possible Donnie is drawing from reality.
Midway through the movie, we see that Donnie has also put a drawing of Frank in the rabbit costume
over his wall calendar. It's not clear if Donnie drew this himself, and in fact we learn at the
end of the movie that Frank is an artist when we see his early sketches of the rabbit mask design.
Did he draw Donnie's picture as well? Interpretations range from Frank being
a product of Donnie's psychosis to the entire story being something that Frank
himself is remembering as a dream when we see him touch his eye near the movie's end.
Graham Greene's short story The Destructors is arguably just as important to understanding
Donnie Darko as the time travel manual. As we come to learn, Donnie has lived a life that parallels
that of the boys in the story who destroy an old man's home; Donnie is currently in therapy and
can't drive until he's 21 after "accidentally" burning down an abandoned house himself.
Generally morose and inarticulate about his problems, he immediately
understands the motivations of the kids in the story:
"Destruction is a form of creation, so the fact that they burned the money is ironic.
They just wanted to see what happens when they tear the world apart."
This makes Donnie a perfect vessel for Frank, who directs him to flood the school and burn
down Jim Cunningham's house. However, all of his destructive actions in the movie ultimately serve
to create the world anew and restore order by closing the loop with the jet engine.
In a broad and operatic sense, Donnie Darko is an allegory for
what Graham Green describes as "the pain of puberty." When you become a teenager,
you enter a phase of nihilistic destruction — whether it's a goth-punk phase or more aimless
rebellion against the status quo. In destroying your view of the world,
you find an entirely new one, which you've created for yourself in the throes of early maturation.
A big part of growing up is the acceptance of complexity: There's no real good and evil,
and the world isn't as simple as childhood often makes it seem. This is why Donnie sees
so thoroughly and immediately through Jim Cunningham's self-help schtick,
which involves reducing every scenario in life to either "fear" or "love."
Without boiling its message down, Donnie Darko states its purpose with the story of Ling
Ling and the wallet, in which a woman returns a lost wallet but not the money inside. While
Donnie's teacher insists that the scenario be analyzed on a simple spectrum of fear or love,
Donnie insists that not everything can be categorized or reduced to a simple explanation.
Our protagonist is outraged by the fear-love spectrum for the same reasons he is drawn
to Gretchen's emotional honesty about her messed-up family life:
he realizes the full realm of human emotion is available to him. The film
makes it clear that if you spend your life looking for clarity,
you'll end up a cardboard cut-out of a person like Cunningham or the dreadful Mrs. Farmer.
Despite having seemingly unlocked the secrets of the universe,
Roberta Sparrow lives up to her "Grandma Death" nickname when she encounters Donnie and points
out that everything dies alone. One could argue that, being one of the "Manipulated
Living" in the Tangent Universe according to her own theory, Roberta shares this
insight with Donnie so he comes to accept the sacrifice he ultimately has to make.
As we learn in Donnie's therapy sessions, the idea that everyone dies alone is something he's tired
of debating internally; it makes the search for meaning or a higher power fundamentally absurd.
As we age into adults, we struggle to truly reckon with the idea of mortality. Donnie
struggles with this concept, especially as he begins to realize he has to die to
stop the world from ending. But unlike his childhood dog Tally,
he doesn't crawl off to be alone. Instead, he returns to his family home,
dying to save his parents, sisters, Gretchen, and everyone else he cares about the most.
The existential despair at the idea of dying alone is only troubling insofar
as human connection gives life meaning. Even in her madness and decades of fear,
driven by glimpses of the true nature of time and the universe,
Roberta Sparrow still checks her mail every day, hoping for someone to reach out.
The "spears," or vectors emanating from people's chests that Donnie begins to see,
are a way for the movie to address an inevitable paradox that any time travel flick runs into:
free will. If you can see your future, it stands to reason that you would have
the option to change it. Donnie follows his own spear to the gun hidden in his parents closet,
but it's not until much later that we learn he chooses to take it with him.
Later, looking into Gretchen's spear, he seems to get a whole dose of her future in a flash, and so
he rushes to Roberta Sparrow's house. Donnie seems content to operate "within God's channel" — as he
puts it to Dr. Monnitoff — and follow his glimpses of the future wherever they lead.
He does seem surprised when the journey to Roberta Sparrow's cellar inadvertently
leads to Gretchen's death because he shoots Frank in retaliation with his parents' gun.
His motivations are as unclear as the paradox of free will in the abstract:
are we the architects of our own fate, or are we just following a path that we can't see?
Donnie's English teacher, Ms. Pomeroy plays a small but key role in the climactic events of
the movie, as the phrase "cellar door" leads Donnie and Gretchen to their fateful encounter
with the school bullies. Somewhat randomly, Ms. Pomeroy writes the words on her chalkboard,
inspired by a, quote, "famous linguist" who claimed it was the most beautiful phrase in
the English language. That famous linguist was, in fact, The Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien.
It's a relatively absurd connection, and the artificiality of it is driven
home explicitly when Donnie mumbles a certain phrase while fighting:
"Deus ex machina."
"Deus ex machina" refers to a random and unlikely act occurring in a story,
usually to save the protagonist from certain peril. Donnie seems at least subconsciously
aware that the entire last month of his life is one endless "deus ex machina."
All of these unlikely events are conspiring to achieve a certain world-saving result.
The reason Frank has Donnie burn down Jim Cunningham's house is one of the more difficult
things to parse in Donnie Darko. According to Roberta Sparrow, Frank is setting an "Ensurance
Trap" to make sure that Donnie goes through with his self-sacrifice. Since Mrs. Farmer ends up
spearheading Cunningham's defense efforts, she can't accompany the dance team Sparkle Motion
when they get on Star Search in Los Angeles. For this reason, Donnie's mother, Rose, goes instead.
As an indirect result of all this switching, the team takes a red-eye flight back instead
of waiting until the next day, so this ensures that Donnie's mother and younger sister will
be on the very plane that loses an engine. In addition to preventing Gretchen's death, Donnie
must also reset the timeline to save his mother and sister. This hits a little harder, since he
only got to know Gretchen as a result of Frank's instruction to flood the school to begin with.
Shortly before the dramatic events of Halloween night, Donnie writes Roberta Sparrow
a long-awaited letter. Even though he marks the envelope "EXTREMELY IMPORTANT," the letter
doesn't really seem all that time-sensitive. He says cryptically that he has lots of questions
for her that he's afraid to know the answers to. The letter ends with a morbidly optimistic phrase.
"I hope that when the world comes to an end,
I can breathe a sigh of relief, because there will be so much to look forward to."
This observation indicates that he's come to accept his death and is perhaps aware
that it saves the world in a way. But it's also a deep message about teenage
angst and existentialism. In the painful and confusing throes of late adolescence,
every problem seems to have intolerable life-and-death stakes.
Once you admit to yourself that the things you fear won't end the world,
you can live freely and be yourself in a reality that makes no sense. In dying to save the world,
Donnie is facing the unknown, just as every child grows up and has to
define the world for themselves. In its macabre meditation on fate and death,
Donnie Darko arrives at a hopeful place: every day is the first day of the rest of your life.
It's not particularly clear why Donnie drives up to the mountains with Gretchen's body near
the very end of the movie, though it kind of brings the story full circle.
It's possible that what we've seen in Donnie Darko is just one iteration of a time loop:
the jet engine creates the unstable pocket universe, and everyone within it repeats
the same span of time until they successfully transport the engine back to where it arrived.
This would explain why Donnie is already waking up after "sleepwalking" at night when we first
see him: he's at the beginning of another attempt. When it finally ends, he watches the
plane enter the vortex with a bemused look; it's possible he's actually causing the plane to get
caught in the breach via telekinesis. Another explanation would be that he needs to reach
that height to travel back through the wormhole himself to return to his bedroom on October 2.
With the timeline restored,
Donnie Darko shows that all of the major characters Donnie encountered throughout the
story are unable to sleep on October 2, clearly haunted by "memories" of an alternate timeline
that will now never unfold. Knowing that our hero has just died, we reflect on how many people
his life actually touched even though he was generally so self-possessed with his own issues.
Haunted by these glimpses, Gretchen and Donnie's mother share a strange wave at the very end of
the film: a mother whose world has just been shattered, waving to a young woman from a broken
home just beginning to put her own world back together as a young adult. Donnie Darko is about
the terrifying, complex, and hopeful intersection between fear and love. It's hard to decide if it's
scarier to consider the world ending, or to think about it carrying on without us when we're gone.