Un-Characterizing Madness The Semiotic Revolution of Donnie Darko

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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 UN-CHARACTERIZING MADNESS [ 71 ]
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 [ 72 ] JOSEPH MORCOS
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Page 19 and 20: [ 86 ] JOSEPH MORCOS Taubin, Amy.

Un-Characterizing Madness The Semiotic Revolution of Donnie Darko

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