Un-Characterizing Madness The Semiotic Revolution of Donnie Darko

A 

Jo s e P h mo r c o s 

Un-Characterizing Madness 

The Semiotic Revolution of Donnie Darko 

I find it hard to tell you, I find it hard to take: 

when people run in circles it’s a very, very mad world, mad world. 1 

t o n e p o i n t in do n n i E da r k o, ri c h a r d ke l ly’s 

complex film about a troubled young teenager who struggles 

to find love in the midst of high school homogeny, the titular 

protagonist sits in his English class discussing Graham Greene’s 

The Destructors. Ms Pomeroy, his teacher, asks the class why the 

story’s band of children desires to break into and destroy the 

home of an innocent old man they call “Old Misery.” One student 

offers up a motive of theft, but Ms Pomeroy explains that the 

children burn the money they find in the house. Then she turns 

to Donnie. With a slight grin and approving tone, he replies: 

“destruction is a form of creation…they just want to see what 

happens when they tear the world apart. They want to change 

1 All references to the movie Donnie Darko, including these lyrics from the first 

chorus of the closing song, refer to Richard Kelly’s film. 

[ 68 ] JOSEPH MORCOS

things.” Donnie’s understanding of The Destructors goes not to its 

characters’ criminal act, but rather to the way its characters might 

alter the crime’s significance – destruction becomes creation. In 

one sense, Donnie’s reading of the story acknowledges that the 

arson cannot govern its own semantic significance. This model, 

by which Donnie claims the very meaning attached to the arson, 

not only helps define Donnie’s character but also speaks to Kelly’s 

film at large, in which the troubled youth must negotiate a wide 

gamut of institutional pressures in order to carve out a personal 

sense of the world. 

But this scene in Donnie Darko speaks equally to the larger 

issue of semiotics, or the experience of meaning, and its relation 

to society. The film addresses a society’s regulation of meaning 

and how an individual, like Donnie, might lead a revolution 

against these semiological constructs. Donnie’s quest in the film 

does not pit him against individuals per se, but rather against 

frameworks of how meaning should operate – those imposed 

structures that attempt, as Els Van Dongen might understand 

Donnie, to rob him of his “personal world of significations” (1). 

Though not dealing specifically with Darko, Dongen prompts a 

deeper consideration of meaning amid the potential madness that 

tinges the film. The question for psychiatrists like Dongen is the 

moment in which this “personal world of significations” devolves 

into madness. Says Dongen: “psychotic people are thought to 

have access to a world of meaning that remains locked to others” 

(1). As Donnie upends the authoritarian prompts of language, 

teachers, and celebrity therapists, he may seem to be mad; indeed, 

he seems to reject the very laws of the cosmos. But, following 

Donnie’s upheavals of expectation, he might claim himself to 

be simply living among madness – hence his understanding of 

arson as an act of creation. Perhaps the most revolutionary claim 

UN-CHARACTERIZING MADNESS [ 69 ]

I 

of Donnie Darko is Donnie’s assertion that it is an individual’s 

ability – duty even – to disturb the normative meanings attached 

to societal prompts. In this sense, the debate over madness can be 

re-signified as a debate over duty. Shed of societal prompts, the 

individual can construct a personally desired sense of significance 

from the surrounding world, not because he is mad, but because 

he must. For Donnie, it is a matter of survival. 

s o l at i o n o f t h e f i l m’s s e m i o l o g i c a l c l a i m s, o r h o w m E a n i n g 

functions, is certainly not an easy task; one must first lay aside 

Darko’s slippery plotlines, endless cultural references, and 

tangled chronology. But even then, how does one begin to 

discuss the film’s wealth of semiological exclamations? The 

human sciences employ a convenient philological vocabulary 

to articulate, in this instance, Donnie’s personal understanding 

of arson, but this philological vocabulary also applies to any 

society-created system that allows for such an upheaval, or 

“transfer,” of meaning. In other words, the technical discussion 

of language becomes a model for the general examination of the 

human sense of significance. Language, therefore, is not limited 

to the conventions of words, but can be applied likewise to events 

that hold significance. As presented by linguist Ferdinand de 

Saussure, the foundational claim holds that in language there 

exists an inherent division between the event of language (what 

might be understood as the act of arson in the Destructors) and 

its attached meaning (how Donnie interprets that arson as an 

act of creation). Saussure labeled these events and meanings 

“signifier” and “signified,” respectively, in which they form pairs 

(“signs”) for the sake of meaning. Saussure makes the radical 

claim that, however counterintuitive, it is the signifier that limits 

and defines the signified; he argues, essentially, that language 


controls meaning. The nebulous, uncontrollable urges and 

formless thoughts contained within the human psyche – the 

savage, socially untouched sense of meaning – is actually under 

the power of arbitrarily invented societal prompts. 

The film’s disreputable pop-therapy master, Jim 

Cunningham, provides an example of Saussure’s claim that 

language controls meaning. Throughout the film Cunningham 

preaches the self-help binary “fear vs. love,” and believes Donnie 

is “controlled by fear.” In doing so, Cunningham assumes that 

there is a distinct human emotion clearly aligned with “fear.” 

The pop-therapy master understands a segment of meaning to 

be aligned succinctly with a certain resulting linguistic signifier, 

the word “fear.” Saussure, though, would assert the opposite: 

it is Cunningham’s use of “fear” that defines what it means. 

Language for Saussure is not a simple “nomenclature” that works 

to articulate preexisting structures of meaning. Rather it is the 

empty word that manages to divide and imply a certain signified 

– those emotions associated with fear, fright, and terror. This 

tidy package of signifier and subjugated meaning form Saussure’s 

sign. And again, Saussure would argue that Donnie’s emotions 

result from certain combinations of prompts and randomly 

assigned significance. “The bond between signifier and signified,” 

for Saussure, “is arbitrary” (788). What Donnie shows us, then, 

is that the relationship between signifier and signified is not only 

arbitrary, but alterable. In other words, where Saussure shows 

us that the genesis of meaning is arbitrary but to some degree 

socially determined, Donnie shows us that meaning continues to 

be a calculus of signification. For Donnie, even after the signifier is 

arbitrarily assigned to the signified, meaning continues to change. 

The state of “fear” that Cunningham so adamantly opposes does 

not, in fact, preexist its word. Donnie aims throughout the film 


to overthrow this linguistic opposition. 

“Fear and love,” the “lifeline” Cunningham devises to map the 

human psyche, cannot, then, be “the deepest of human emotions.” 

Embracing the construct, Mrs. Farmer, Cunningham’s dedicated 

supporter, imposes the binary upon the students of Middlesex 

High; they are told that every scenario – every action – merits 

placement on Cunningham’s fear vs. love “spectrum.” Donnie, 

though, realizes that such a binary exists not to reflect upon 

the truth of human emotion (“life isn’t that simple,” he objects), 

but rather to limit and sterilize something nebulous and utterly 

unstructured (he accuses Mrs. Farmer of ignoring “the whole 

spectrum of human emotion”). But, as Mrs. Farmer at one point 

unintentionally implies, there is nothing intrinsically meaningful in 

the “fear” and “love” signifiers – their power comes simply because 

“the lifeline is divided that way.” Theorist Tor Hernes would 

describe these prompts of fear and love as “mere labels, loose 

prescriptions or elaborate models” (49). Or, as Dongen might 

have it, the students performing this “lifeline” exercise “have no 

medium of expression other than that defined by culture, and 

therefore are expected to abide by the means provided” (5). In 

refusing to participate in Mrs. Farmer’s exercise and exposing to 

the school the absurdity of Cunningham’s binary, Donnie rejects 

the imposition of linguistic structure; he refuses to “abide by the 

means provided.” For him, the meaning contained in the endless 

sea of human emotion is far too great and infinitely complex to 

be reduced to two linguistic signifiers. 

In this example, Kelly’s film encourages a resistance to 

these impositions (the viewer clearly sides with Donnie over the 

administration), but has not yet provided a solution to this linguistic 

problem. How, then, can one escape and overcome the totalitarian 

rule of the linguistic signifier over the human experience of 


meaning? Donnie Darko provides countless examples of these 

private rebellions, these personal revolts against culturally fixed 

structures. Essentially, the semiological revolution involves 

a constant re-signification of these structured signifiers. The 

language remains; it is only the normatively associated meaning 

that is reconsidered. Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Derrida, 

who applied Saussure’s theory of linguistics to anthropology and 

philosophy (respectively), supplement Saussure’s vocabulary with 

the term “bricolage,” French for “tinkering.” Their focus on the 

social and cultural manifestations of Saussure’s ideas, particularly 

the bricoleur, aid a discussion of rebellion and revolutionaries, like 

Donnie, who individually appropriate established forms to create 

a desired sense of meaning. For Derrida, “[t]he bricoleur…is 

someone who uses ‘the means at hand,’ that is, the instruments 

he finds at his disposition around him…not hesitating to change 

them whenever it appears necessary” (1210). This bricoleur 

therefore assumes that “meanings are not given unalterably in 

advance, but can be changed” (Belsey 89). 

It is this same bricolage that makes its appearance in Donnie’s 

English class: the burning of Old Misery’s house is clearly 

the signifying event, and its conventional meaning of sadness, 

desolation and reduction its signified. Here, the viewer finds 

something unexpected: Donnie turns destruction into a kind of 

creative bounty. The sign in this case, the act of destruction 

and its normatively negative implications, is not a concrete 

pairing of signifier and signified. Like Donnie, one can “tinker” 

with meaning; the beautiful and creative can be posited into a 

signifier as seemingly destructive as the burning of a blameless 

gentleman’s home. For Donnie, not only is the Saussurian sign 

arbitrary at its inception–it remains arbitrary at every moment of 

its inscription. This concept of bricolage, however, is not tolerated 


T 

by the Middlesex administration and its despotic prescription 

of meaning; Mrs. Farmer attempts (and, in the deleted scenes 2 , 

succeeds) to ban Greene’s story. The revolutionary Donnie, 

though, grins as Greene’s destructors appropriate for themselves 

the meaning associated with their crime. 

This bricolage, or the insistence upon creating varied and 

desirable sensations of meaning, translates past hypothetical 

book discussions and into the most acutely personal moments 

of Donnie’s life. Even in the seconds following the death of his 

love interest, Donnie refuses the event’s imposing “signified.” 

In only about three nightmarish minutes, Donnie and Gretchen 

are assaulted at knife-point by the school’s bullies; Gretchen is 

thrown violently to the ground, and is hit by a car. Donnie then 

murders the car’s driver with a gunshot to the eye. Considering 

the event in strictly linguistic terms, with the two deaths and 

overwhelming tragedy as signifier, one is tempted to read the 

scene with a sense of anguish, fear, and terror. Shockingly, then, 

comes Donnie’s response. He tells the surviving passenger in 

the vehicle to “Go home and tell your parents that everything’s 

gonna be okay!” It seems an unlikely outcome, but Donnie refuses 

to surrender to anything likely, and particularly to expectations 

of meaning. He refuses to allow for sorrow because, in his mind, 

sorrow is only arbitrarily attached to death. 

h e v i e w e r s o o n f i n d s t h at do n n i e is n o t t h e o n ly b r i C o L E u r, 

and in this sense the film begins to take a more resolute stance 

in terms of madness – perhaps it is the world that is mad, not 

the individual. Gretchen serves as a particularly pronounced 

2 “Deleted scenes” refers to the scenes only included in the “Bonus Features: 

Scenes” menu of the cited DVD in its original version. 


example; she continually fights against signifiers working to 

impose certain sensations of meaning – events that seem to 

demand a natural resulting signified of pain or terror. These 

signifiers can be adjusted to create a personally desired signified 

– the linguistic sign must be remembered as arbitrary and 

therefore alterable. Gretchen’s tendency, like Donnie’s, is to 

carve out moments of beauty in her life by rejecting impositions 

of meaning . The viewer witnesses this when the young girl is 

verbally attacked. The same bullies who are partly responsible 

for her death a few scenes later expose to the entire class the 

secret of her tragic past: Gretchen is on the run from a father 

who attempted to murder her mother. The cruel students jeer 

and mock until Gretchen flees the building, crushed. Donnie 

runs behind to assure her wellbeing; they meet outside, and 

without letting Donnie finish his sentence, Gretchen begins to 

forcefully, fervently kiss him for the first time. The viewer is 

surprised, though, for Donnie had been denied a kiss earlier in a 

setting that was certainly more romantic. Gretchen had agreed 

with Donnie at that earlier moment of refusal: their first kiss 

should be “at a time when it…reminds [her] how beautiful the 

world can be.” Gretchen takes an event that would normally 

be seen as associated with an undesired significance, and shifts 

the attached meaning to create something good. In this case, 

Gretchen takes a signifier that would assumedly be paired with 

a resulting misery and hatred, and uses “the means at hand” – 

her first kiss – to “tinker” with the associated meaning. For the 

bricoleur like Gretchen, even humiliation and public derision can 

be reminders of beauty. 

English teacher Ms Pomeroy also pits herself against the 

administration of Middlesex High, an authority that moves 

beyond simply establishing laws of behavior to enforcing laws 


of meaning. Her first struggle for the personal appropriation of 

meaning comes with the Graham Greene story: she is clearly 

furious that the school ends up banning such a classic. Ms Pomeroy 

is then told by the principle that she must give up teaching at 

Middlesex on account of her “inappropriate methods.” “You 

don’t have a clue what it’s like to communicate with these kids,” 

she responds. In this moment Ms Pomeroy gives an insightful 

name to Middlesex’s semiotic despotism: “we’re losing them,” 

she sighs, “to this prescribed nonsense.” Her term “prescribed” 

encapsulates Saussure’s sign; indeed, meaning is prescribed 

by language. She despises the administration for its similar 

prescriptions both in banning Greene’s book and in supporting 

Cunningham; Ms Pomeroy rejects the idea that signifiers must be 

associated with certain meanings. Her swan song to Middlesex 

seems to send the message that any signifier can have a personal 

signified – any signifier can be beautiful. She leaves the school 

with only two words etched on the chalkboard: “cellar door.” 

Preparing to leave, she references to Donnie a “famous linguist” 

who claimed: “of all the phrases in the English language…cellar 

door is the most beautiful.” The linguist she references, J. R. R. 

Tolkien, specifically claims that “people…will admit that cellar 

door is ‘beautiful’, especially if dissociated from its sense (and 

from its spelling)” (36). To Tolkien and Ms Pomeroy, the beauty 

of the phrase emerges once we reject its imposed meaning, the 

physical cellar entrance. And so Ms Pomeroy, in opposing the 

Middlesex administration, joins the rebellion against the rule of 

structurally imposed meaning. 

Even Frank, Donnie’s six-foot, rabbit-suit wearing personal 

prophet, understands the power of language over meaning. In 

one of the film’s most poignant scenes, Donnie first asks Frank 

why he wears “that stupid bunny suit,” based on the natural 


assumption that there exists a fundamental disconnect between 

the visual aspect of Frank’s white rabbit character (signifier) 

and the truth underneath (signified). Frank’s response comes 

with a haunting and formidable power: “why are you wearing 

that stupid man suit?” His query highlights the fundamental 

precept of the bricoleur and Saussure’s linguistic theory: the event 

of language can be nothing but a label, one that can serve only 

to limit and restrict the underlying sense of meaning. Donnie’s 

original questioning of Frank’s terrifying outfit serves as 

a model, an exaggeration of the shocking truth that so much 

of human existence dissolves into a series of costumes and 

labels that cannot be representative of the underlying reality. 

Frank’s question attacks one of Donnie’s (and the viewer’s) 

most unchallenged and subconscious assumptions, the incorrect 

supposition that the signifier of even physical existence – the 

claim “I am a man” – naturally represents a correlating truth 

concerning existence. “Man” has no preexisting signified, but 

rather arrests the shifts and movements of nebulous meaning. 

Just as Frank is not truly a giant rabbit, the term “man” – the 

societally created signifier – cannot utterly contain the true 

sense of what Donnie is. As Catherine Belsey asserts, “lives are 

narratable as coherent in terms of the categories language makes 

available” (51). Essentially, even uttering “I am a man” restricts 

and categorizes the sense of self. Donnie’s “man suit” is truly 

only a confining classification. 

The location for this scene, a movie theater, only adds to 

the moment’s acute focus on costumes and labels – the role of 

signifier as a restrictive disguise. Frank uses the theater to prove 

to Donnie that even the most basic and seemingly unrestrictive 

signs, such as “man,” can always be challenged. “I want you to 

watch the movie screen,” Frank says. “There’s something I want 


to show you.” He illustrates that even the signifier “movie screen” 

restricts meaning to what is culturally delineated. As the light 

shifts and the movie screen opens to become something entirely 

unlike what a movie screen should be, Frank asks: “Have you ever 

seen a portal?” He confirms that even such linguistic prompts as 

“movie screen” or “man,” which seem to be utterly representative 

of their signified, still structure and therefore limit the capacity 

of meaning. Our understanding of signs can never be absolute. 

Frank continues with revolutionary claims: having asserted 

that even an individual’s sense of self serves as a restriction, 

Donnie’s prophet now works to undermine assumptions about 

the semiotic, structural distinction between individuals. Frank 

appears to the Donnie in his bathroom, separated from the 

teenager by a supernatural, invisible wall. They face each other 

from opposite sides of the partition as Donnie repeatedly tries to 

push through this invisible but seemingly indestructible barrier. 

Donnie and Frank have been structurally (and physically) 

polarized. This moment of rigid opposition models the film’s 

claim that rules, structures, and binaries can appear concrete, 

even insurmountable. But the film works to undo this rigidity, 

to introduce a bricolage that brings new meaning to signifiers 

and destabilizes seemingly fixed binaries; indeed, the bathroom 

barrier is only Donnie’s imagination. In other scenes, this 

apparent polarization of the two characters dissolves. The 

vandalism of Middlesex High, for example, seems to have 

been committed by a character neither fully Donnie nor fully 

Frank. The viewer clearly holds Donnie responsible, as the teen 

feels guilty for the crime and becomes a suspect in the police 

investigation. But it cannot have been distinctly Donnie’s work, 

as the criminal had the supernatural strength to strike an axe 

through a “solid bronze” statue. The graffiti at the crime scene 


constitutes an interesting piece of evidence: while the message 

itself was obviously Donnie’s intent, the handwriting belongs 

to Frank (we later see Frank’s handwriting from his note on 

the Darko refrigerator). This strange Donnie/Frank hybrid 

blurs the binary that appeared so fixed in Donnie’s bathroom. 

The viewer is reminded that even personal signifiers can be resignified. 

Essentially, there is always room for bricolage. 

The film continues to advocate this semiotic revolution, 

even when paralleling literary sources; consideration of these 

parallels gives light to the true nature of the bricoleur. The whole 

of Donnie Darko, for instance, relies heavily on the “mad world” 

of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass – from Donnie 

following the “white rabbit” to a realm of the supernatural, to 

Middlesex’s dance team’s bunny costumes (Mathews 42) 3 . Belsey, 

for example, draws attention to the semiological weight of the 

dialogue between Alice and Humpty Dumpty. 4 In a discussion 

with the giant egg about ‘unbirthdays,’ Alice is confused by 

Humpty’s statement concerning the potential abundance of 

these “unbirthday” presents: “there’s glory for you!” he exclaims. 

Slightly confused, Alice responds: “I don’t know what you mean 

by glory.” Trying to lessen her confusion, Humpty opts to 

rephrase: “I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’” 

Alice’s bewilderment, though, has only escalated by this point: 

“but ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’” she 

exclaims. Here the reader finds Humpty Dumpty’s momentous 

3 Mathews stresses the importance of laying Donnie Darko aside Through 

the Looking Glass to further understand Carroll’s work. Here, the allusions to 

Carroll that Mathews articulates help to further understand Donnie. 

4 The relation of Through the Looking Glass to these central concepts 

of structural linguistics and semiology is found in Catherine Belsey’s 

Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction. 


I 

claim: “when I use a word…it means just what I choose it to 

mean…The question is…which is to be master – that’s all” 

(Carroll 163). This passage becomes a self-evident complement 

to Donnie Darko’s support of bricolage. The authority of culture 

struggles to enforce meaning; the bricoleur fights to re-signify 

arbitrary signs. Here lies Donnie Darko’s fundamental question: 

“which is to be master,” the word or its speaker? The film, of 

course upholds the bricoleur’s cause. If Alice asks “whether you 

can make words mean so many different things,” the film responds 

in the clear affirmative. The individual can be master over the 

word, and therefore the world – he can construct the meaning. 

f b e i n g t h e m a s t e r o f t h e w o r d m e a n s b e i n g a m a s t e r o f a n 

individual world, a question begins to emerge: when might this 

highly individualistic weltanschauung become the province of 

insanity? When does one cross the line from personal freedom 

to madness? If Donnie can re-signify mindless destruction 

and death into moments of beauty, what prevents viewers 

from seeing him as mad? Els Van Dongen’s claims in his book, 

Worlds of Psychotic People: Wanderers, ‘Bricoleurs’ and Strategists 

acknowledge the thin line separating individual interpretations 

of events from a more alienating understanding of them. Again, 

Dongen does not deal with Darko specifically, but he does demand 

a reconsideration of the madness that plays such a heavy role 

in Kelly’s film. Dongen’s central claims – that “[t]he world 

of psychotic people is considered to be a personal world of 

significations” (1) and that psychotics “have access to a world of 

meaning that remains locked to others” (1) – begs the question: 

might the bricoleur be mad?, Might bricolage be a symptom of 

insanity? Dongen borrows the term from Lévi-Strauss, asserting 

that madness is, in fact, bricolage: 


[psychotics] prefer (or have no option other than) 

to wander, and to tinker. They roam the world of 

values, norms, ideas and beliefs, looking for whatever 

is sufficiently useful to give expressions to their 

musings. Like traveling ‘bricoleurs’ (Lévi-Strauss 

1962, 1996), they make specific and intentional use of 

whatever bits of knowledge or skills they may acquire 

in their wanderings. (5) 

And just as readers find Humpty Dumpty and Wonderland 

slightly maddening, critics certainly doubt Donnie’s sanity. 

Critic Jared Rapfogel diagnoses the young protagonist as 

“deeply disturbed, mentally ill”; Andrew O’Hehir writes of 

“a boy fighting a losing battle against madness and darkness” 

(par.1). Donnie himself prefers the term “wacko.” Regardless of 

adjective, however, the issue of madness cannot be ignored while 

wrestling with the film’s semiological claims. For just as the film 

advocates bricolage and a constant personal claim to meaning, 

Dongen would assert that these bricoleurs, who “seem to have 

dispensed with the restrictions imposed by rules, authority, and 

culture” (5), are simply exhibiting symptoms of insanity. This 

drive to overthrow the imposition of prescribed signifiers over 

the experience of meaning is simultaneously endorsed by Donnie 

Darko and diagnosed by Dongen (and others) as madness. 

So how extensively does this madness suffuse into Darko’s 

characters? Where rests the line between the liberating bricolage 

upheld by the film and the madness diagnosed by Dongen? While 

Dongen maintains that it is madmen who “have access to a world 

of meaning that remains locked to others,” Kelly’s film seems to 

urge the importance of bricolage across a spectrum of characters. 


Donnie, Gretchen, Ms Pomeroy, even Frank – each embraces a 

semiological revolution that the film seems to argue is necessary 

for a life unfettered by the despotism of imposed meaning. What 

the film titles liberty, the psychiatrist labels insanity. 

The viewer, perhaps inclined like critics to label various 

characters “madmen,” is soon shocked to see that the film itself 

makes no such dismissals – the semiotic attitude Dongen associates 

with madness is rather suffused through the characters, events, 

and themes. Moments could be analyzed and labeled as either 

innocent or psychotic; characters could be allocated to one side 

or other of this remarkably fine line. But if the viewer is to truly 

understand the role of bricolage and madness in Donnie Darko 

and elsewhere, he must work within the semiological mindset 

of the film itself; the viewer must resist the urge to label and 

restrict characters with signifiers that can never be totalizing. If 

the personal construction of meaning necessarily correlates with 

madness, then as Donnie Darko must be read as emphasizing, even 

mandating, the role of the bricoleur, Kelly’s work must inevitably 

be seen as advocating madness as such. If, as the film asserts, the 

arbitrariness of the ‘sign’ and the resulting capacity for bricolage 

plays such a crucial role in an individual’s fulfilled experience, 

then this semiological freedom must also relieve the pressure of 

applying labels as “bricoleur” or “madman.” 

It must be conceded that Kelly’s film honors the bricoleur. 

Even beyond the numerous contained examples of bricolage, 

the viewer must admit that the film as a whole becomes an 

enormous re-signification of a linguistic prompt. The pivotal 

event in the story, the mysterious jet-engine crash that appears 

at the beginning and end of the story, becomes the overarching 

signifier, and the entire film advocates its cosmic re-signification. 

The majority of Donnie Darko recounts the expected meaning 


ehind the catastrophe (Donnie’s escape of death by the falling 

engine leads to the events of the story, including his relationship 

with Gretchen); this signified, however, results in overwhelming 

tragedy: Gretchen’s death directly results from Donnie’s escape. 

To find a desirable signified, then, Donnie must ‘tinker’ with the 

meaning attached to the crash. In the last shots of the film, the 

viewer actually witnesses the same quiet evening as in the film’s 

commencement; Kelly, in fact, presents the viewers the exact 

shots as before – the signifier is identical. Donnie, though, has 

decided that to save Gretchen’s life, he must shift the original 

meaning – in this case, he must alter the original series of events 

following the first crash. Donnie thus re-signifies the crash. 

This shifted sign now causes Donnie’s self-intended death; he 

must die to prevent the tragic and undesired conclusion of his 

relationship with Gretchen. The same signifier has been supplied 

new meaning; the bond of the linguistic sign is once again proven 

adaptable, and this adaptability still hovers just above madness. 

Earlier, in hearing of Donnie’s plan to travel back in time 

and rend the sky to allow for his re-signification, his therapist 

solemnly predicts: “if the sky opened up there would be no law.” 

And in the semiotic sense, she is right: Donnie’s final act as 

bricoleur certainly overcomes the authoritarian law of linguistic 

structure. Darko, as a whole, surely calls for this bricolage – 

madness even, in the sense of self-created meaning. As a last 

reminder, in only the final chorus of the film’s closing song do 

the lyrics change from “it’s a very, very mad world, mad world,” 

to “it’s a very, very mad world, mad world, enlarging your world, 

mad world.” Only with bricolage – and some unnamable shadow 

of madness – can the world be made personal, habitable, and, of 

course, truly meaningful. 

d 


w o r k s ci t e d 

[ 84 ] JOSEPH MORCOS 

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Un-Characterizing Madness The Semiotic Revolution of Donnie Darko

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