Un-Characterizing Madness The Semiotic Revolution of Donnie Darko

[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.
UN-CHARACTERIZING MADNESS [ 81 ]