Un-Characterizing Madness The Semiotic Revolution of Donnie Darko

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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.
[ 74 ] JOSEPH MORCOS