- Why are you wearing that stupid bunny suit?
- Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?
My relationship with this movie is very curious. I became an instant fan after watching it for the first time because I found it magnetizing and I even made an important project about the movie for high school, at the end of second grade. Little did I know back then how that fiction would become part of my reality later when I experienced a psychotic break in my own skin.
The main character, who gives the movie its title and is wonderfully portrayed by Jake Gyllenhaal, has paranoid schizophrenia. But the truth is that I was never really conscious about the movie using this illness as one of its main themes before suffering the psychotic break myself. In fact, I wasn’t even conscious that having a psychotic break had something to do with the illness until 2 or 3 years after the breakdown. I guess that this was due to the fact that schizophrenia is, among mental illnesses, the greatest unknown of them all. Now, with some distance and considerable stability, I can understand better the movie and although some nostalgia has been lost along the way, it will always remain one of my favorite movies and main references, speaking in cinema terms.
For this movie tribute video, I chose the song Straight In Circles Upside Down. As I explained in the latest post, the song is about alternate universes and versions of ourselves so, although the lyrics don’t really fit in with the story of the movie, I believe their spirit and background do. The idea of the circles as a metaphor for diverse perspectives and understandings of reality has a lot to do with the universe of the movie, and the line that is drawn between design and desire fits with the inner dilemmas of the main character as well, who seems to be unable to choose about his fate. I chose the scene where Donnie speaks to her psychologist about his beliefs as an introduction to the video because I personally feel the same way about life and it is the most important scene of the movie, according to director Richard Kelly.
THESIS
It’s hard to determine a single thesis for this movie. I would say that it has multiple: the movie deals with lots of subjects such as time travel, fate, family and teenage relationships, social criticism, bullying, and mental illness. each one of these subjects may derive its own philosophical message. The final scene, inspired by the personal life of the director, is pretty revealing. I’m not sure what he wanted to transmit with it exactly, but I personally interpret it as the incapability of human beings to connect with each other. The movie contains lots of memorable phrases and lines too. I love the dialogue between Donnie and Frank at the theatre where the lines that introduce this post are reproduced, simply epic! But if I had to choose one line that could also serve as a thesis, it would be the one that Donnie pronounces in the English class, speaking about the Graham Greene short story. He says that the fact that the characters burn the money is an irony in that story because destroying is a form of creation and that would be the thesis for me or, at least, one of them. Life is unexpected and each second of it is being destructed and renewed at the same time. I also connect a lot with the idea of not following the crowd that this message implies.
Thesis: DESTRUCTION IS A FORM OF CREATION.
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