Un-Characterizing Madness The Semiotic Revolution of Donnie Darko

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
UN-CHARACTERIZING MADNESS [ 75 ]