With the success of Stephen King’s IT, we look at the books significance in the cult classic Donnie Darko
Books in Film is a recurring feature where we explore great literature and the films they are featured within. For our last post check out our piece on books in the work of Wes Anderson.
The 80’s are in vogue again. The decade birthed a period of political turmoil that gave rise to some of cinema’s most indelible films like Wall Street and Full Metal Jacket. We now live in an era of nostalgia where shows like Stranger Things tell new stories through the lens of the 80’s. But, before this, there was an even stranger thing: Donnie Darko.
Donnie Darko follows the titular hero, played by a teenage Jake Gyllenhaal, as he battles twisted, non-linear timelines, metaphysics and an interdimensional rabbit all along the way to finding truth in his life. Through science fiction, the experience of being a teenager in 80’s America is examined and shown in its confusing, darkly humorous (and at times outright absurd) reality, or rather, unreality.
The 80’s inflections littered in the film are small. Where Stranger Things wears its influences (from Speilberg to Kubrick) on its sleeve, Donnie Darko uses touches of the 80’s to construct its period setting. One such touch is a brief shot of Mary McDonnell’s character, Rose Darko, reading the Stephen King classic IT.
With the recent success of the 2017 adaptation of Stephen King’s mammoth horror, IT has found a new audience. The coming of age tale follows a group of children who are collectively bullied and grouped into a club known as “The Losers” as they battle an interdimensional shapeshifter that predominantly takes the form of the infamous clown Pennywise.
The significance of director Richard Kelly’s placement of IT in Donnie Darko is more than just to set the period. IT is fundamentally a coming of age story about the loss of innocence. Pennywise embodies the fears each of the Losers have and their battle against him as both kids and adults represents their accepting adulthood and eventually accepting mortality.
Donnie Darko, like IT, is a coming of age story with a dark edge. It’s the story of a young outcast whose role in the universe is to die. His role in the history of man is to die in order for the world to turn on. Ultimately, Donnie Darko and IT explore similar themes. They’re about teenagers shedding the idea that, as Bart Simpson said, “kids don’t die,” and by accepting their own mortality, they must learn how to live. Both pieces are poised on the terrifying precipice between the innocent obliviousness of childhood, where death is but a concept, and the dawning realisation of the inevitability of death. We as viewers, and readers, can only stare into their abysses.
