I did what a lot of people have done after watching this movie: I watched it again. Between the "Director's Cut" and the original version, the commentary tracks and outtakes, I have absorbed this work repeatedly. It's endlessly fascinating. Richard Kelly has done what Joseph Campbell has said a good storyteller must do, which is to take a myth and dramatize it. The myth Richard Kelly used is one he himself created. Just as Yeats had a construct of what he called "gyres" informing his poetry, Kelly has his timeline. I would say that the timeline helped him flesh out a primal story. Studying the backdrop to DONNIE DARKO is obviously legitimate (as are studies of Yeats's gyres) but, in order to be moved by this work, the viewer does not have to have it charted out.
Review of Donnie Darko
