Donnie Darko: Deterministic or Optimistic?

So my good friend Bo and I disagree about this movie. Now I don't want to suggest that I have "figured it out." After all, I've only seen it once, and the website has got me baffled. But, still, I think calling it deterministic is way too easy. There are too many layers, too much going on for it to be simply a weird convulsion of Calvinism. I think that's just a poor read. I find the film much more optimistic than this. Though I will submit that there is a peculiar stoic thread running through its course. After all, at the end, as Donnie sits on his car roof looking out over the valley with his dead girlfriend in the car and the world seemingly about to come to an end, he laughs. He laughs. It is a detachment from the reality of life. He's achieved that mood, that sensual space where he can be (literally) above all that is happening and has happened. I thank my good friend Bud for pointing this out. Yet, I can't help but think that this film is about a search for possibilities, not submission to a pre-determined course. No one forced his hand. I do not want to play the "free will" card, because I think that, too, is not the point. Perhaps, in the end, it is rather Wesleyan. There is a reality before you. Take it or leave it, but know that one is the better of the two in which you are not free to be as you choose, but to be as you are appointed. Go and do, not because you can but because your will has been subsumed into a far great schema. It is not free will, but a will freed from the constraints of this ill-percieved world and enslaved in the will the the Other (capital "O" very intentional). So, Donnie is merely traveling toward his supernatural end, namely, a will freed from the fear of his (and everyone else's) natural end. At first, I did not think too much about the issue of "fear" in reference to this film. Patrick Swayze's character (the self-help guru) speaks about "fear" as a force that keeps everone from reaching their full potential which is love. Strickly speaking, this isn't necesseraly a bad idea. However, his failing is in his suggestion that one must dive into oneself to find the answer to fear - to find love. He uses the imagery of the "mirror." He says that you must look through this mirror, at and through yourself to truly "see" who you are. Well, obviously Donnie disagrees. So do I. You see, you cannot find yourself "in" yourself. That's the problem - every living creature dies alone. That's the conflict of the film - finding the alternative to being alone. The point is not to find the alternative to death - that is natural. Perhaps even dying alone is natural (though I'm not entirely convinced), but our supernatural end is in the Other, to whom Donnie submits. Release from fear is in this Other, not in oneself. Throughout the film, we see how "empty" the lives of all the characters are (particularly Donnie's family). So, love is not supremely found by seeing onself deeply. No, to truly see oneself deeply is to find, ultimately, an emptiness, an incompleteness. That is fear. Supreme love is in the Other, to whom we are being drawn unto. Finally, and I think this is just kind of cool, there are two mirror-symbols in the film. First is Patrick Swayze's talk about seeing oneself in the mirror. The second is when Donnie is in the bathroom taking his "medication" and finds the force field that separates himself from Frank the giant bunny. Obviously these are allusions to Alice in Through the Looking Glass. In the former case, one is challenged to go through the mirror to find truth. Yet, as we all know, the other side of the mirror is not reality, but a distorted perception of reality. We oftentimes see what we want to see, but never do we see perfectly what is on the other side. In the latter case, Donnie cannot cross this "mirror". He cannot go there. The point here is that the other side is forbidden precisely because it is not true. We do not see rightly through the mirror. We only see distortion, confusion, and fear. Donnie's search for truth never takes him "through the looking glass."