Rewatching Donnie Darko

I loved Donnie Darko from the first time I saw it. And that's no understatement: I loved this offbeat sci-fi story and all it has to offer. High school drama? Check. Temporal paradoxes? Check. Patrick Swayze as a child pornographer? Check. In the autumn of 2002, my cellmate and I watched the film twice in two days on VHS, hungry to unravel its Möbius strip of a plot.

The movie centers around Donnie (played by Jake Gyllenhaal). He's a brooding, troubled teenager living in swanky suburbs, circa 1988. He takes mental health meds, wanders the town at night, questions the notion of free will, and hangs out with a menacing six-foot-tall gray rabbit named Frank—truly, an all-American kid.

When we first meet Donnie, he wakes at dawn in the middle of a hillside road, a few feet away from his bicycle. What he's doing there, and why he stands up and smiles like someone who's just unexpectedly won a race, is only slowly—and partially—revealed. Along the way, we learn all sorts of things about time travel, the history of the Smurfs, and what's significant about the phrase "cellar door." It ends in a tragedy almost no one could see coming. Plenty of people have walked away from Donnie Darko scratching their heads or cursing the filmmaker, Richard Kelly, for making a movie that defies linear storytelling and forces them to go into analytical mode.

Echo & the Bunnymen, The Church, Joy Division, Tears for Fears, and that great Michael Andrews and Gary Jules cover of "Mad World" make the soundtrack really enjoyable, too.

I was twenty-three at the time. The prison where I'd recently been confined played seven videos per week. A staff member drove over to the local video store and rented two cassettes every couple of days. You never knew what you'd get. Each movie played for two days, alternating with another on the same channel. Donnie Darko played, and while it rewound, the other movie played, then it rewound and Donnie Darko played again. That other movie wasn't worth remembering.

The digital air channel Comet plays all kinds of science-fiction-y cult classics, so maybe I shouldn't have been so surprised when Donnie Darko popped up there. Other movies I've seen in Comet's recent listings include Space Truckers and Night of the Comet—hardly masterpieces of cinema, but entertaining nonetheless. (I admit, I may be too close to the issue to say whether Donnie Darko is objectively good or not. Critics liked it, but it bombed at the box office.) Last Saturday, the TV guide said that Donnie Darko would start at 4:30 PM, and I nearly squealed. What are the odds that one of my fifty favorite movies would play at a reasonable hour—even after you factor in the many commercial breaks for assistive devices and Medicare plans?

I made a cup of coffee. I settled in. I watched Donnie Darko for the first time in twenty-three years. What else was I going to do?

The film delighted me, but its true: you can't step into the same river twice. This viewing experience was radically different. I'm twice as old as I was when my cellmate and I sat in front of that tube TV in our cell, noshing on smoked oysters and smoking roll-your-owns. This time I didn't have a viewing companion to discuss the metaphysics of the movie's tangent universe, or to debate whether or not Donnie knew or merely hoped to know what Frank's prophecy foretold. More importantly, I no longer have the perspective of a kid drawn to the outré for its own sake.

Donnie's journey into a metaphysical realm of potential predetermination and madness seemed less urgent to me now. Put another way, the movie didn't hit me in the gut this go-round. Frank felt less threatening, while Donnie himself seemed more so. Details had been lost, but I knew where it was all headed, which, when I stopped to think about it, was quite fitting.

In a word, my love has changed. I suppose that's everything, always.