“hearts and minds” of the Arab world. Unable to ignore the similarity between their religious fundamentalism and ours—thanks to the reverends Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson’s suggestion that the events of 9/11 might be God’s punishment for America’s sinful behavior—the administration sought to promote the patriotic values of “tolerance” and entertainment.
On the other hand, according to the October 3 Washington Post, video stores were enjoying “huge rentals of heroic combat movies” with Rambo and Die Hard With a Vengeance “flying off Blockbuster shelves.” Four days later, in retaliation for the Afghani Taliban’s refusal to surrender Osama bin Laden, US and British forces launched Operation Enduring Freedom. The studios moved up military films like Behind Enemy Lines (which tested even better post-9/11) and the Somalia combat film Black Hawk Down. Warner Bros., supposedly out beating the bushes for a new Rambo, could only regret having so hastily yanked Collateral Damage—surely the season’s perfect movie.
In the weeks following September 11, New York saw a number of notable openings, including David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl, Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, and Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, not to mention the first installments of the Harry Potter saga and Lord of the Rings.2
The December 2001 press screening for The Lord of the Rings was the first I ever attended where critics were frisked with a hand-wand metal detector and asked to check their cell phones. Although this was clearly a response to the possibility of the movie being pirated, these precautions were explained as necessary in view of a presumed terrorist threat.
Ten years later, the Harry Potter franchise had grossed over $2 billion and Mulholland Drive would top several critics’ polls as the decade’s best movie but, in late October 2001, the commercially released movie to most fully manifest the post-9/11 mood, at least in New York, was the first feature by twenty-six-year-old writer-director Richard Kelly.
NEW YORK, OCTOBER 30, 2001
A moodily self-involved piece of work, part comic book, part case study, Donnie Darko employs X-Files magic realism to galvanize what might have been a routine tale of suburban teen angst—or borderline schizophrenia. Kelly begins fiddling with normality from the opening scene, the evening of the 1988 presidential debate between then vice-president George H. W. Bush and Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, wherein a sitcom family—tense mom, supercilious dad, two smirking teens, and an annoying little sister—gathers in the dining room to partake of a delivered pizza. “I’m voting for Dukakis,” announces the oldest Darko sister (Maggie Gyllenhaal), causing her father (Holmes Osborne) to choke on his slice. A discussion regarding the candidates’ respective economic policies quickly degenerates into vulgar abortion jokes and the revelation that middle child Donnie (Maggie’s actual brother Jake) is off his medication and receiving messages from outer space.
Clearly we are dealing with an advanced life form. The mysterious forces of the universe demonstrate their power most vividly in the snoozy aftermath of the Bush-Dukakis dustup, when Donnie is summoned from his bedroom out into the night. Waking the next morning somewhere in the middle of the local golf course, he returns home to discover that a plane engine has inexplicably fallen from the sky and crashed through his bedroom ceiling. Convinced that the world will end in twenty-eight days, Donnie continues to experience alien visitations in the form of a monstrous toothy rabbit named Frank.
Signs of a parallel universe abound. An unhappy fat girl roams through Donnie’s high school, an institution fronted by a bronze statue of a squatting mastiff. His gym class impassively watches a videotape on “fear management.” A beatnik English teacher (Drew Barrymore) assigns her students to read “The Destructors,” Graham Greene’s jaundiced story of teenage nihilism. Smiling and mumbling to himself, socially maladroit Donnie manages to hook up with a new girl (Jena Malone) who has the Grimm name of Gretchen and a lurid family story to match. “You’re weird,” she tells him, adding, “That was a compliment.” Meanwhile the town suffers a few curious plagues: the school is flooded, a home burns down. Donnie’s shrink ups his meds and embarks on a regimen of hypnosis. (The first session comes to an abrupt end when the spellbound patient begins fondling his crotch.)
With Barrymore (E.T.) as Donnie’s English teacher, Katharine Ross (The Graduate) as his therapist, and Patrick Swayze (Dirty Dancing) as a demonic motivational speaker, the movie’s casting is both showy and inspired. Holmes Osborne is a sympathetically smooth and spineless Darko paterfamilias; Mary McDonnell, his wife, full of false cheer, carries hilarious intimations of early 1991 and the Gulf War, through her status as Stands With a Fist, Kevin Costner’s righteous mate in Dances With Wolves. But the movie rests on the hunched shoulders of its spaced-out protagonist. Jake Gyllenhaal refuses to make direct contact with the camera. Goofy, poignant, frozen and shambolic, he convincingly portrays Donnie’s eccentric genius—riffing on the sex life of the Smurfs, arguing with his science teacher on the nature of time travel. Gyllenhaal’s sidelong performance allows him to take spectacular delusion in stride—he tries to kill Frank when the rabbit appears in his malleable bathroom mirror, and hallucinates ectoplasm emanating from his father’s chest.
Although the big influence on Kelly seemed to be Paul Thomas Anderson’s wildly ambitious and similarly apocalyptic Magnolia, released in time for the millennium, Donnie Darko is steeped in Reagan-era ’80s pop culture. The movie’s metaphysics are largely derived from Back to the Future, there’s a particularly strange and funny allusion to E.T., and in one of the most haunting scenes, Donnie and Gretchen watch Sam Raimi’s 1987 Evil Dead II in an empty theater. The sub-Toni Basil MTV-style routine performed by Donnie’s kid sister and her dance group, Sparkle Motion, is as lovingly choreographed as the soundtrack has been assembled.
Premiered in January 2001 at Sundance, Donnie Darko received a mixed response. While Village Voice critic Amy Taubin praised it as her favorite film of the festival, others appeared to resent its ostentation (big stars and special effects) or complained about its hubristic shifts in register. No less than Donnie, the movie has its awkward moments. Kelly makes too much of Beth Grant’s uptight New Age gym teacher, and there are more than enough sinister cloud formations racing across the sky. But the writer-director has a surefooted sense of his own narrative, skillfully guiding the movie through its climactic Walpurgisnacht—or, should we say, carnival of souls.
The events of September 11 rendered most movies inconsequential; the heartbreaking Donnie Darko, by contrast, felt weirdly consoling. Period piece though it is, Kelly’s high-school gothic was perfectly attuned to the present moment. A splendid debut under any circumstances, as released for Halloween 2001, it had an uncanny gravitas.3
Donnie Darko was not a hit. By mid November, after weeks of US air strikes, Taliban fighters abandoned Kabul; on December 7 (the sixtieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor), Kandahar fell to the US-led coalition, although bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar eluded capture. Rushed into theaters in late December 2002, the great box-office beneficiary of what was called the new bellicosity (and another movie predicated on a fallen aircraft), Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down proved perfectly attuned to the present moment in its tone of aggrieved injury. Adapted from Mark Bowden’s best-selling minute by minute account of the Battle of the Bakara Market in Mogadishu, the worst incident in the ill-fated US humanitarian mission to Somalia and the most costly firefight to involve American troops since Vietnam, Black Hawk Down originally ended with a specific reference to 9/11. A print screened for select journalists in mid November 2001 had a closing crawl listing events that followed the Mogadishu mission that the movie depicts, ending with terror attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.4
The events of September 11 allowed Americans to feel like victims and act like bullies—just like the hapless soldiers of the 1993 Somalia mission. (There were eighteen American casualties and more than ten times as many Somalis killed.) It’s difficult to construe Black Hawk Down as a pro-war movie, but to question its representation of us-versus-them is the next worst thing to being an American Taliban. My own less-than-enthusiastic
