by Ben Powers
February 4, 2008

I almost forgot to sign the waiver. I was halfway through my first lemon-frosted sugar cookie when Guerilla Film Society officer Kaley Hearnsberger ushered me to the front of the classroom to sign the waiver stating that I knew I would be watching Donnie Darko, an R-rated film, as a part of an educational film forum.
  
The GFS film forum hosted about 20 students and faculty last Thursday. A group of PLNU filmmakers created GFS with the goal of providing a networking conduit to students interested in the film industry.
  
“Our constitution cites not only film production, but film appreciation as one of our purposes. This is half of what we do,” said club officer Bryan Bangerter, who has led the group in the completion of at least five productions since the club’s inception last fall.
  
Donnie Darko (2001) was written and directed by Richard Kelly, who also wrote the screenplay for Domino (2005). Kelly weaves into the life and experiences of the emotionally troubled Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) beautiful themes of adolescence and adulthood, destruction and creation, dying and living, fear and love, and sacrifice.
 
These themes wind themselves around concepts of philosophy, psychology and physics, upon which certain professors were invited to expound.
 
Although I’m usually am not captivated by the field of science, I still found myself interested in a scientific explanation of time travel.
  
“If space were two-dimensional, it would be easy to understand,” explained assistant professor of physics Paul Schmelzenbach, as he pulled out a piece of paper to demonstrate the concept of folding space and creating a worm hole. He explained that time is relative and that the faster an object travels through space, the less it will experience time, which is why astronauts age slower in space than they do on Earth.

Professor of philosophy Heather Ross called the film “a work of art about a complex, sad … bizarro circumstance.” She talked about the Christ-like sacrificial figure of Donnie Darko, the emptiness that “has an evil quality about it” and the “awesomeness” of Darko’s English teacher, Karen Pomeroy. Evidently philosophers are allowed to make up words, presumably in an effort to overcome the boundary that language imposes on thought.

After watching the movie for the third time, I‘m still left asking: What really happened? At one time I hated that I couldn’t figure it out. But now, I appreciate the beauty of ambiguity.

How life really happens is a mystery to me. I cannot see past my place in time into the realm of what truthfully is. Plato called it the realm of Eidos, or true forms—not bound by time or space or perception. But, in spite of this, I can still see the beauty in the process of living, and I think that is what Donnie Darko attempts to point out.