| Finn Odum |
Donnie Darko plays on glorious 35 mm at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, July 18th, through Sunday, July 20th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
This essay contains spoilers about Donnie Darko
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The night I’m writing this is the evening of July third. Five years ago, somewhere between this time that evening and the morning of the fourth, my grandfather Jim passed away.
I don’t like fireworks anymore.
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love will tear us apart
To the potential detriment of my parents, my friends, and the general public, I write a lot about death. Car crashes, suicide, and familicide. Real deaths, film deaths, and real filmed deaths. You’d think it’s because I’m deeply depressed or just like, really, really messed up.
There’s a real answer, but I like to think it’s because I watched Donnie Darko at an influential age.
I was eleven (I think), with mostly unmonitored access to Netflix. I wretch thinking about it now, but back then, I was a huge WatchMojo.com fan. With the wide world of digital streaming, I’d made it my mission to watch every movie my sacred YouTube channel listed as somewhat decent. Donnie Darko was probably fifth or sixth on some list about messed up science fiction or best movies that make you go HUH?!
The science fiction elements did make eleven-year-old Finn go HUH?! The rest of it felt familiar. I felt known. Richard Kelly reached nearly a decade into the future to read my mind and depict a young adult losing themself in reality as the rest of the world burned around them. The Halloween party sequence resonated as I too drifted, aimlessly, past peers who didn’t understand me, and I didn’t understand. It was as if that amorphous portal broke through the screen and burrowed into my skin.
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When I celebrate Samhain, I put out photos of Jim, my paternal grandmother Evelyn, and my friend Marisol.
I don’t have space for everyone else.
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head over heels
From an early age, my father instilled in me a love of Tears for Fears. We listened to Songs from a Big Chair so often that I could recite the track listing for a few years. One can ascertain that a twelve-to-thirteen-year-old who was really into Shout wasn’t popular; they were weird, perhaps. Abnormal. I felt my oddness reflected in Donnie, who, despite having friends and a girlfriend, wasn’t understood by the rest of his peers or his family.
There was also the Head Over Heels of it all. It’s on so many of my playlists. Subtle references to the song are slipped into some of my freelance work. I knew all the words to a now-extinct parody version, and still sing, “I check the files out, when I head over heeeeere” when the first chorus hits. While everyone else my age was listening to modern pop, I was playing Head Over Heels over, and over, watching the world pass by in an accelerated time loop.
Dissociation, more or less, which only got worse when I started high school.
The Head Over Heels sequence is one of the best uses of non-diegetic music in 21st-century film. It’s disorienting and expository, opening on a sideways shot of the school bus door, the rotating upright as Donnie jumps out with his friends. Smith and Orzabal’s vocals take over the audio—save for a few key auditory cues from the students, like Gretchen’s locker slamming or Seth Rogan’s friend snorting coke. The cuts to Drew Barrymore’s English teacher, who reminds me of my freshman year American Authors instructor.
It’s iconic. It’s what my brain looked like when the world passed around me.
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Once a year, every year, from 2016 to 2021, someone I went to school with died. Some of them were my friends. Matias, a sophomore from my Spanish class at Macalester, was one of the few people I could open up to about grief.
I still see his Facebook profile in my friends list. A digital haunting.
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notorious
The second time I watched Donnie Darko was the first time I saw it in a theater. The Avalon is on KK in Bay View; it was one of my mom’s theaters when she was younger, having closed and reopened sometime in the 2010s. The main screen is nearly triple the size of the Trylon, with a full bar and kitchen and a ceiling dotted with twinkling stars.
Marisol had died the previous fall. A bus turning right in a low-visibility thunderstorm. Now, a cinematic car accident or poorly timed joke about traffic accidents activates painful memories. Then, Donnie carrying Gretchen home didn’t shake me. It was so fresh in my mind that I didn’t panic, didn’t remember it like I was dunking my head in ice water. I felt numb, but so was he. His shoulders sagging, arms shaking as he walked her home. Blood leaking through his clothing. The world was somehow still moving around them as Gretchen lay in his arms, frozen forever as a teenager. When time winds backward, when Donnie dies, smiling, Gretchen gets to live. A life for a life.
The movie ended and I was okay. I’d been telling people for years it was my favorite movie—I was validated, vindicated, even, that it still held up. It still meant something.
Even if the meaning and the memories changed. Could I go back in time? Trade my life for someone else’s? What happens when there are too many lives to replace?
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I dread making new friends because I have to tell them, eventually, why I can’t drive. Why certain “dark humor” eats me alive. Why I can’t watch But I’m a Cheerleader. Why why why—
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mad world
I wrote a lot of essays in college to the Donnie Darko score. I’m listening to it right now, with one headphone in and the other listening to Pete and Vern chatter behind the Arbeiter bar. The soundtrack is incredible—INXS, Duran Duran, my aforementioned Tears for Fears—but the score? Haunting, and dower, and unwavering in its mesh of sorrow for the past and hope for the future. As a first year in college I put it on to write for my media theory classes (which, in some ways, butterfly-effected me to writing for you right now). The YouTube playlist was bookmarked in between scores for Mad Max: Fury Road and Guy Ritchie’s The Man from Uncle.
I played it everywhere. The Gary Jules Mad World took over for the original, to the point I forgot there was ever a different version. I listened to Notorious before rugby practice. Everything blended seamlessly into my already chaotic taste in music.
This love for the score resulted in my third viewing, as neither of my soon-to-be roommates had ever seen Donnie Darko, and I had been listening to it on and off for weeks. We put it on in the lounge, where anyone on our floor could come in and watch over our shoulders while studying for chemistry finals. They agreed it was good. They agreed it was better than just good.
They also spent a lot of time talking about the science and the meaning and the psychology of it all afterwards. Did any of it actually happen? Was Roberta Sparrow right? Was Donnie crazy?
I sat on the couch, holding a stuffed animal, thinking about Gretchen and Donnie.
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I only talk to one of my former roommates these days.
My therapist says that my connection to death is about abandonment.
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never tear us apart
I don’t rewatch Donnie Darko that frequently. The memories it carries are a lot; I can hold them for fragile moments, listening to the music that comforts me, but sitting through it with others who don’t share my fears and trauma can be tedious. When our programmer John first mentioned we’d have it at the Trylon, I lost my metaphorical marbles. I told everyone. I wanted to write about it and talk about it and (oh, god) podcast about it. The score returned to my regular music rotation. I added the soundtrack to a playlist called Natural Enemies (named after the familicide film with the same title). It’s my weepy, memory-laden, exhaustion mixtape, blending Watsky, Good Kid, and Gully Boys with Edgar Winter Group, Yes, and John Carpenter.
Time has worn since then. I originally conceded this essay spot, and reclaimed it when it became open again. I’ve stopped hyping it up to friends and leaking it to the non-Trylon public. I’m excited—it’s on 35 mm, bro—and afraid.
I don’t expect it to mean the same to everyone else. I understand that for every person who connected to Donnie the way I did, there’s someone who’d rather unpack the theory. For everyone who thinks about Gretchen there’s someone who wants to know more about Frank. For everyone who hears Head Over Heels and thinks about how lost they feel, there’s someone who’s never given the song a second thought. That’s okay, and it should be okay.
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I write about death as if it’s the only way to create permanent memories of the people I’ve lost. I write because I can’t talk about it without laughing or my throat closing up. I write because what if a jet engine crashes into my apartment tomorrow morning? I write because what if I get hit by a car? What if life decides we need to start the twenty-six club instead?
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the killing moon
If you see me at Trylon’s Donnie Darko screenings, and I’m crying, I promise that I’m going to be okay.
If I see you at Trylon’s Donnie Darko screenings, and you’re crying, I promise that you’re going to be okay.
Sometimes it takes seeing a movie four or five times to find the people who understand.
For Mac.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon
Incredible Finn. Thanks