Is he some kind of superhero?

I hate Donnie Darko.

I shouldn't. The premise is brilliant. 6-foot tall bunny tells teen that the world will end in 28 days (or thereabouts). Strange events ensue. I naively assumed that the strange events would make sense, as most movies try and make sense. Instead the bits and pieces of explanation scattered throughout the movie never coalesced into something coherent by the time of the befuddling last wave. A movie that was all potential and no payoff. Yet, there was the lingering feeling that the movie DID make sense, I just didn't know how.

Bless the internet. In my confusion, I found that absolute confusion was the reaction of basically everyone who saw the Darko the first time and that there were explanatory articles for someone in my position. It turns out the only way to really understand the movie is to read the accompanying material gathered from the DVD release, interviews with the filmmaker, etc. Everything makes sense. Everything was perfectly crafted.

I love Donnie Darko.

But I still hate Donnie Darko.

I hate that the answers to the film are not found within the film itself, but have to be explained elsewhere. So much more clarity could have been injected into the film, additional explanatory passages from the Philosophy of Time Travel, a couple of bits of mysterious dialogue from Grandma Death. I was robbed of that growing excitement you feel in a confusing movie where you feel, "Hey, I'm finally getting the super weird secret about this thing!" and your brain starts to jiggle with the information you have and you sit at the edge of your seat and you want to pause the movie and turn to whoever your watching the movie with to say, "HOLYCRAP! He's DEAD!" or something like that. Instead, the discovery was belated. It wasn't part of the movie experience.

But my brain started toying around with Donnie D. "Self," said my Brain, "a number of books assume that you've read the bible. Movies assume you've seen other movies or read certain book or know of certain happenings. If you haven't, the story/joke/incident is flat. Only with context, does the event make sense. So what if Donnie Darko did it the opposite way? So what if it sent you in search of other materials to understand what you saw? Isn't that, in a way, cooler than understanding because you already had the prior knowledge? Only those who seek the additional information get the movie."

I love Donnie Darko.

(I also still hate Donnie Darko. Because the other half of my brain says, "Really, we spent that much time ruminating about a 6-foot rabbit and his prophecies of doom?" To which the first half of my brain says, "Fiver, baby. Fiver.")