Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko buys up the early films of Steven Spielberg, the live-action fantasies of the Disney studios and the entire legacy of John Hughes, tears them apart and builds them up anew. The picture is more than the sum of its parts. If George Clooney’s equally brilliant Confessions of a Dangerous Mind was the first opera made about trash TV, Donnie Darko is the first opera made about popular TV. In 1988, I was just six years old, and between heavy use of my classic Nintendo Entertainment System, there existed only three channels that I would watch: USA, The Disney Channel and Showtime.

USA used to be really cool back in the early ‘80s. There was the el cheapo Commander USA’s Groovy Movies, which according to the Internet Movie Database showed black-and-white movies from the thirties and forties, but in my memory was more likely to present us with stuff like God Told Me To, Night of the Creeps or Bloodbath at the House of Death (which was way too much for me). USA was also home to Saturday Nightmares which often showed a lot of the same stuff as the Commander, and, of course, USA Up all Night which was into more popular fare and in its later years just when I needed it showed The Bikini Carwash Company 2 and Wish Me Luck. The USA channel was also cartoon central in those days before Nickelodeon, and this is where I first encountered Scooby-Doo and Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels. Not to mention He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, which was at least syndicated on the network in a few subsequent years. The Disney Channel showed the old cartoons, but also had original TV series like Sidekicks with Ernie Reyes Jr. as a “karate kid” partner to a cop; and Kids Incorporated, a sort of Fame clone that featured a young Jennifer Love Hewitt. And finally the Showtime network seemed to specialize in macho action fantasies featuring Dolph Lundgren, Chuck Norris and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and occasionally, late at night, softcore porn.

There’s a difference between the trash that Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is based on and the trash that Donnie Darko is based on. I like the junk that I watched as a kid. Or at least I liked it when I saw it. Chuck Barris’ The Dating Game and The Gong Show are too seedy to really be enjoyable. You literally feel guilty after it’s over, and following feeling guilty you feel depressed, much like Barris’ most obvious modern equivalent Jerry Springer. The whole of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind can be summed up with when Clooney shows us the infamous “Up the Butt” clip from The Newlywed Show, to illustrate Barris’ ascension into the big time. It’s a loud wallow in pigshit, mud and ice, and you squirm in your seat. If Barris gave us sensationalism and obscenity for its own sake, the implications of the more evolved Springer and the Barris-esque Elimidate are even more chilling. The sexual politics of Springer and Elimidate are more about the dynamic of power than simply a celebration of depravity. The people on those shows, the women especially, aren’t as interested in hooking up with the sexually superior mate as much as humiliating their sexually inferior ones. As homosexuality has probably become mainstream enough to lose its shock value and power as a rebellious activity, it’s replaced by incest on the Springer program. The people on the show sleep with their father-in-laws to show how inadequate their husbands are. Elimidate is even stranger, as when the guy takes out like five women on a date and gradually eliminates them one by one, they fight amongst each other and try to be the one who will go the furthest in their attempt to be the winner. You’re just embarrassed for the people on the Barris programs. With these shows you actively hate the human race.

Between Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Donnie Darko, I have to admit to finding Confessions of a Dangerous Mind to be the more powerful and possibly deeper “pop-culture apocalypse” film. If that film has a significant flaw, however, it’s possibly in being too fashionably nihilistic, as Clooney and the screenwriter Charles Kaufman tack on a pessimistic coda to the upbeat ending of Barris’ novel. An absurdist, Kaufman has never offered us any answers, although when his scripts were directed by Spike Jonze (a fellow absurdist but more of a humanist) there was enough purely ephemeral beauty to overcome the taste of bile in our mouths.

I frankly don’t know if Donnie Darko is a crock, but it’s really a lot more fun than Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. It comes from roughly the same well of ‘80s pop culture that I did, but it realizes that we got high off that trash and it didn’t do us all that much harm in the long run. The picture plays rather smoothly and cleanly, free of too many thorns, as a satirical comedy. It’s enormously entertaining. Somewhere in the middle of the picture Donnie Darko takes his girlfriend to the movies. They’re watching The Evil Dead, but when Donnie leaves we see that The Evil Dead is double-billed with The Last Temptation of Christ. It seems like a cheap gag of juxtaposing the sacred with the profane, but there is more method to the image. Donnie Darko reveals itself to be a loose retelling of The Last Temptation of Christ with Donnie as, of course, the Christ figure.

(It would probably be wise to set this review aside if you want to avoid spoilers.) Donnie meets Frank the Rabbit (a man in a rabbit suit and an evil death mask) late one night and wanders out of his room to hear his message. The message is that the world is going to end in 28 days. And Frank’s delivery of the message got Donnie out of bed and caused him to get out of the path of a fallen jet engine that had his name on it. In the subsequent stretch of life that Frank has given him, Donnie meets his girlfriend and apparently loses his virginity to her at a Halloween party he’s thrown with his sister. (There’s a genuinely, youthfully erotic moment afterwards when they walk downstairs holding hands and he gives her an open mouth kiss goodbye.) For teenage boys, the loss of virginity is often seen as proof that you’re normal. In The Last Temptation of Christ, that’s more or less the message that Jesus gets when he loses HIS virginity in his hallucinated marriage to Mary of Magdelene. The world ends, however, and Donnie decides to go back in time and relive it again. He dies, as we are lead to believe he was meant to, by being crushed with the jet engine, and the apocalypse seems to have been averted. Like Jesus, he was born a freak and he was meant to die a freak.

Frank makes an obvious Satan figure, especially the Satan as portrayed in The Last Temptation of Christ. He’s played by James Duval, an unbelievably beautiful boyish actor who is a favorite of the openly gay director Gregg Araki. Duval speaks in the same detatched Valley Boy whisper that he does in the Araki films. Here, however, he’s genuinely ephemeral instead of maddeningly faux-ephemeral like the Araki films, and his scene here, where he takes off his mask for the first time, is the most beautiful moment in the film. Much like how the greatest moment in The Last Temptation of Christ when Satan takes Christ off the cross and kisses his wounds. If we read Frank as being responsible for producing the many “Temptations of Darko,” a reading that sure feels right, then he does so like Last Temptation’s Satan under the guise of being a savior. Later in the film, Donnie chastises a self-help guru played by Patrick Swayze as being a hypocrite. He says that his advice is meaningless and he is only doing this for the money. We’re immediately reminded of the money changers at the Temple in Mark 11:15-17, illustrated in The Last Temptation of Christ. The episode at the temple is said to be the only time that Christ ever exhibited anger, which is why it is so unbelievably bizarre and fits so well in the Last Temptation of Christ perspective. Though conflicted and confused, Donnie basically says that Swayze is a false prophet and is motivated by the almighty dollar instead of some mission for truth or understanding or to provide any real salvation for humanity.

The introduction of Swayze into the picture provides the film the opportunity to preach against pop spirituality. Kelly reveals later in the film that he is in charge of a kiddie porn ring, which is sort of funny, but sort of obvious and sort of sloppy. But it sends us the message that the picture really hates this guy. The film is anti-pop spirituality, but is it actually a pop spiritual film itself? What can you say about a film where we’re literally meant to accept Donnie Darko as a Christ figure? Somewhat recently I made an observation to somebody that you never ever see a department store Santa in our popular culture who isn’t chomping cigars, fat, rude, disgusting, and/or ugly. A Christmas Story, Home Alone, Look Who’s Talking Now, The Simpsons Christmas Special, the upcoming Bad Santa, et cetera… they all have awful department store Santas. The only good department store Santa is in Miracle on 34th Street and he was the real thing! Similarly, whenever you see a Christmas pageant, something always go awry. The hidden message is that Santa is real and everybody should know about it, but we have to keep Jesus out of here. Is Donnie Darko trying to provide a similar kind of trick, by giving us a red herring in the form of Patrick Swayze’s self-help guru?

Well, the film is utterly without sappiness. It references and plays with Cocoon and E.T, it’s not like it IS Cocoon or E.T. And the very inclusion of The Last Temptation of Christ on the theater marquee with The Evil Dead gets me thinking that Kelly is doing a little self-conscious winking, and we aren’t to take the Christ parallel too seriously. And it ends with quite the absurdist kicker. Donnie Darko saves the universe, but nobody knows and nobody cares. His girlfriend rides up on her bicycle to see the jet engine that killed Donnie. Somebody asks her if she knew who he was, and she just shrugs and says no. I think that we can best defend Donnie Darko as being one of those alienated teenage anti-heroes like Travis Bickel, Barry Egan, George Romero’s Martin, or Enid from Ghost World. Making him into a Christ figure, the Christ figure of The Last Temptation of Christ, is the best illustration of teenage narcissism and self-hatred that I could possibly think of. It brings us back to the horrifying Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, in particular to the sequence where the Julia Roberts character quotes Nietzsche to Barris: “The man who despises himself still respects himself as he who despises." Or to Charles Kaufman’s script for Adaptation where he describes himself as miserable, fat and bald. Donnie Darko isn’t simply satirical, however; it really likes Donnie Darko and believes in him. Otherwise it wouldn’t give him the hateful Swayze to destroy. The film, very delicately, celebrates and laughs at his insecurities.

I’m going to go off on another tangent. In reviewing the new film Sylvia, the critic Walter Chaw makes the “so obvious why didn’t I think of it” observation that Gwyneth Paltrow is essentially reprising her better turn in The Royal Tenenbaums. My wife was a Sylvia Plath kid, and while now she admits that she doesn’t like Plath as much now as she’s not depressed anymore, she LOVES The Royal Tenenbaums. The reason that The Royal Tenenbaums works so well, and Sylvia apparently doesn’t, is because Sylvia can only work on the primary level of reverence. The Royal Tenenbaums laughs with, laughs at, and cries with Paltrow’s Margot Tenenbaum. The Royal Tenenbaums, and Rushmore for that matter, are filled with cartoons, but seeing yourself as a cartoon can be enormously therapeutic. It’s cleansing. It acknowledges the condition of the depressed adolescent, but instinctively tells them that they’ll move beyond it. This is the sort of movie that Donnie Darko is.

There are so many ways that the film wouldn’t have worked. A major one is, of course, that it could take itself too seriously or not seriously enough. It could provide itself with a solution when one shouldn’t exist. Or it could confuse winking self-conscious poetry, like the journey through the high school scored with Tears for Fears’ “Head Over Heels,” with the real thing, like the unmasking scene. The movie retains a sardonic absurdist sense of humor. What is particularly conducive to its overall effect is Kelly’s really refined craftsmanship. Amazingly, the film was shot in 28 days for five million dollars. It’s not hard to imagine it costing six times that much. The craftsmanship is not only aesthetically pleasing to watch and cinematically exhilarating, it sidesteps the danger of the film becoming nihilistic and depressing, and too serious. Kelly makes the film look exactly like a Spielberg/Hughes production, but it’s more complicated than anything in their oeuvre. You don’t get quite as high off the film as you do in a Spielberg film, but you still get wasted in the same way, and the dilution of the effect is for a good cause. It makes for a considerably smarter and even ethical film that you can love without any guilt. Donnie Darko knows how to use ironic distance, and it knows how to leave in some heart.