Un-Characterizing Madness The Semiotic Revolution of Donnie Darko

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.
UN-CHARACTERIZING MADNESS [ 79 ]