Ideology behind Donnie Darko ***spoiler***
***spoilers***
Watch Slavoj Zizek's A Pervert's Guide to Ideology, and it will open your eyes: Movies are tools of social programming. Ideas that are buried in your unconscious, to make you compatible with the social hub. Like a device driver for a desktop computer, a piece of software is written in your mind, to allow the cpu and the operating system to use you.
Ideology is a collection of notions and concepts and ideas, not necessarily true, valid or beneficial, that are being instilled into the individual, ever since he is born, by his parents, his friends, neighbors and acquaintances, the corporation, the state.
Notions like "freedom" or "democracy" or "good and evil" or "right and wrong". An example of how ideology works, can be seen in South Park's episode about "Cow and Chicken vs. Whale and Dolphin" - the arbitrary idea that eating cows and chickens is "good" and eating whales and dolphins is "evil".
Ok, what ideology, what ideas, what programs are being accessed by Donnie Darko? There are certainly more than a few, so feel free to add your observations to this list:
1. The male has to sacrifice his life for the survival of the female. Donnie Darko dies to save that chick, I forgot her name.
If you haven't read about it yet, google "alpha ethology" and understand that mammalian societies, including humans, are hierarchical social groups. Hierarchy means "one above the one below":
in a corporation there is a stock holder above everybody below, who has absolute power over everyone else below, he decides if the corporation lives or dies.
below the stock holder there is the CEO and an administration council
below the CEO and the administration council there's managers of subsidiaries, HR managers, quality assurance managers, etc.
below the managers there's team leads, directors, supervisors, experts, network admins, logistics admins, etc.
below them there are the seniors, the juniors, and finally the interns, janitors, nightwatchmen, etc.
This hierarchical pyramid exists in every aspect of our society - go to certain discos or clubs or restaurants, and you will not have access, unless you qualify in some way: you either have to pay a lot of money, look very good, be very well connected, be famous, or able to destroy the place. If you are a wimpy broke student who knows nobody, you will not get access, the bouncers will bounce you off that location, and you'll get back to playing CoD or WoW in your mommy's basement, and masturbate to porn until you become famous, get in shape, befriend someone important, or get rich. Then the bouncers will let you in.
Ok, why does Hollywood want you to sacrifice your life to save the girl you like?
Because no manager in a corporation will ever hire someone who is able to replace him. That manager is not good or evil, or corrupt and stuff... That manager is concerned only with self preservation, or how Darwin explained us - survival.
It is paramount, to the males at the top of our society, that they do not allow the survival of any male capable of replacing them. Imagine a king promoting a general who is capable of thinking "hey, I could be a king too, I just punch this Louis XV dude in the face, and take his throne, the entire army is under my command, who can go against me if I take the throne?"
Understand? When a king promotes a general, or when a manager promotes a team lead, he has to make sure that that general or team lead, are obedient workers.
The way to keep a general or a team lead obedient, is to convince him that he lacks the qualities that make one a king or a manager. How do you convince a man that he is not fit to become the uber boss?
This is where it gets messy. Nobody has such complete knowledge in how to convince a man that he is not good, without sending him into a self destructive downward spiral, that renders him unproductive.
You can break a man's self esteem, his sense of being of value. You can tell an employee that he is stupid, and of no good. He will not dare think of taking your place as a manager, but he will also stop being productive, since you have just convinced him that he is of no good.
Ok, so Donnie Darko is about programming a man to think that his own life is worth less than the life of the woman he loves. Which is contrary to the nature of human relations: nobody loves you if you consider yourself worth less than them. Women fall in love for men of high value. Not for males who think about themselves that they are worthless.
By being exposed to a cultural onslaught propagating the idea of self-sacrifice for the preservation of the woman, the male is being turned against himself. Nobody wants to die for someone else. Yet, that's what "the society" seems to require from the male - a state of readiness of the male to sacrifice his own life to save the damsel in distress.
The male's energies are thus consumed in a fight against his own natural self, instead of being allocated to fighting the tyranny of the males at the top of the social pyramid.
2. If you do not love someone, you are worthless. Donnie Darko, his father, and the holly spirit (teacher who gave him the book about time travel) are the only males who experienced love in this movie. The rest of the males were either violent, perverted, immature, aloof or fool of sh!t.
This is the second idea that is being programmed into your mind. That only love gives you value. Aggression is a big no-no. And since love means "sacrificing your life for the woman you love", you are being herded into a state of self conflict.
Because, as Freud explains us, the engine of our psyche is the dynamic between Love and Aggresssion:
Say you love your woman, your kids, your family. And one day a grizzly bear wants to eat them all. If you are unable to turn into a beast and cut that grizzly bear with a knife, your family is dead.
Donnie Darko is unable to prevent the attack on his woman. He only avenges her death, unable to prevent it. He was unable to prevent it, because he was never able to be aggressive, and destroy the threat that was building up against her life - punch the fcvk out those 2 dudes who were harassing the girl he liked.
3. The Trinity. Donnie is the Man, the Son. He has a biological Father. But he is guided by a Spiritual Father - the teacher. The rabbit is Satan, the Evil self. Donnie defeats Satan through self sacrifice.
4. Self sacrifice is triumph over Evil Self.
The Capitalist order is constituted of 2 classes: the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat. The Bourgeoisie oppresses the Proletariat, exploits its work, a process that afflicts and eventually destroys the exploited. Capitalism is Alienation from the Self, as K.Marx explains to us. The worker's labor is turned into a commodity, the worker himself is treated like an asset, like a machine or cattle.
Evolutionary psychology explains to us that humans can not exploit their keen. In order to exploit other humans, you have to dehumanize them, think of them as non-human, sub-human, evil.
Thus, the Bourgeoise class, in order to preserve its mental balance, protect their psyche from the realization of the horrific process of exploitation, has to come to consider the Proletarian class, as evil.
Understand? In the mind of the Bourgeoisie, you - the worker, the proletarian, are evil. Slaving your life away for the benefit of the Bourgeoise, is self-sacrifice, which is good, as you redeem your inherent sin, because the Proletarian is evil by birth.
Thus, the fact that the Bourgeoisie exploits you, is good. In the ideology of the Bourgeoise, work sets you free. You - the Proletarian. Not him - the Bourgeoise. The Bourgeoise sees himself as the divine hand of God, that shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness.
Donnie Darko is the weak, being shepherded through the darkness.
ok, I'm tired, ideology is toxic, exploring it is like going to Chernobyl, damn...