| Chaos - Fear and Love
Posted: 10/14/2007 10:46:24 PM | I just watched through Donnie Darko after reading a few papers on the philosophy of it and wow that movie is a lot deeper than it seems. The argument the author plants is in plain sight throughout half the movie, Fear vs Love. I think the reason he chose to use time travel as the story telling point is due to it being the embodiment of the argument he poses throughout the course of the movie. When you pit fear (in the movie the people's fear of Donnie Darko's dark intellect), against love (this is hard to place, but it seems that his family and the world around him imposes this on Donnie Darko), the only result is Chaos or a Paradox (well I think the chaos is fairly obvious, and the paradox was the catch point of the film). Of course for the movie to be published it needed an ending people would accept, and that ending was love, even through his death, it was his new found love of the world and it's predictability, that he sacrificed himself to prevent so much death and dismay.
But what stood out to me especially after one of the papers I read, which is the discussion I hope to inspire with this thread, was this: If you take a world and split it down the middle, one side favors Fear as the norm, the other side favors Love as the norm. Conflict is inevitable between the two, but which one wins? Surely fear would have the advantage with destructive force, but love would have the advantage in wits.
The only answer I could come up with is. It results in a paradox, only avoidable by getting both sides to accept emotions for what they really are, nothing more and nothing less. Perhaps that was the lesson being conveyed in the film. | |
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