Donnie Darko, The Bunnymen, and me
There was a time in my life where I did not “get” New Wave. I understood its place in Pop/Rock history and had listened to it mostly for work and never really understood its draw. Every song sounded the same to me.
When I worked in Music Programming at Sirius XM they assigned me to program the Classic College Radio channel, which was “online only” at the time. Meaning listeners could only stream it on their browser, and not on the actual satellite stations while in the car, the company’s “bread and butter.” It was a low stakes responsibility, one of the three channels I programmed, one of the six channels of daily operations I was responsible for as an entry level assistant employee. (Ask for more work and you shall receive!) It taught me how to program—don’t let the same song play at 8:03am every day when someone is getting into their car to go to work—and it gave me a crash course in New Wave.
Classic College Radio played The Smiths, The Cure, Echo & The Bunnymen, Sonic Youth, The Replacements, The Pixies, Dinosaur Jr., and should’ve included every band from Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life but I guess that depends on how much Meat Puppets you really want and what Nirvana isn’t too played for you. (Answer: none of it is!!) My boss, the VP of Rock Programming, who once led what ended up being a two hour meeting where elder Boomers debated Rod Stewart’s catalog and whether or not he should get his own channel, told me we could play Smashing Pumpkins, but only Gish era stuff.
Because this is my blog, I’m allowed to tell everyone I find The Pixies to be extremely overrated and The Replacements to be unlistenable, whiny bastards. My eldest sister is a family law & domestic violence attorney in the Hudson Valley and I happen to know that Tommy Stinson’s former partner was her former client. This was maybe ~10 years ago and yes she has some loose fuckin’ lips. Either way, since she told me that I’ve never been able to separate the two pieces of information. I digress.
Let me say what I came here to say: Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko got me into New Wave.
The original soundtrack only contains three pop songs: Tears For Fears’ “Head Over Heels,” Echo & The Bunnymen’s “The Killing Moon,” and Duran Duran’s “Notorious.” There is a British re-release that also includes INXS, The Church, Joy Division, and Oingo Boingo, which really just proves the point I realize I haven’t even made yet. Whatever. This is my blog.
The Donnie Darko score was written by Michael Andrews, who I am just now learning did the score for “Freaks & Geeks” (my favorite TV show) and after that groundbreaking and revelatory show was released and canceled in 2000, Kelly asked him to score DD. The OST went on to sell over 100k copies, which feels like a lot. (What I am also just learning is that Andrews did the score for, including many others, lolol, Walk Hard: The Dewy Cox Story, the greatest musical comedy ever made. Anyone who makes fun of Brian Wilson is a friend.)
To me “Love Will Tear Us Apart” and “Head Over Heels” are the sonic language of fall. Donnie Darko specifically captures and marries a very distinct visual story about time, our understanding of it, or our lack of understanding it, and the moodiness of fall with thanks to Andrews’ compositions but also to those three very dead-on songs. Kelly’s artistic vision of Donnie Darko is so exact and concrete. These songs and their booming synths and slow motion emotions are the glossy, blurry time portals that lead and follow the characters. Kelly’s use of rewinding, speeding up, and time lapses not only create a very specific visual story and concept, a tricky trick that I’m amazed every re-watch Kelly pulled off. The image plays to the way the music sounds. The dissonant tones and off kilter melodies boom electricity while Roland Orzabal sings round and sweetly. It is a mood.
“The Killing Moon” opens the film. Patrick Swayze and someone else are golfing and they find Donnie asleep on the green. Somnambulism, a fancy word for sleepwalking I learned while reading William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist this summer, is a built-in part of the Darko family narrative. Donnie wanders off at night, so much so that the wipe board on their fridge reads “where is Donnie?” when we first see it. They all know and accept Donnie’s mental illness. It defines his character and how he gets around. He can’t drive until he’s 21 so he rides a bike most places, walks, or takes the bus when he’s not being driven somewhere by his bumbling dad, another fantastic absent ’80s movies dad, played by Holmes Osborne. Teens on bikes in a movie set in the 1980s is begging to be soundtracked; and when Donnie starts to pedal in his PJs and socks, the metallic trickle of “The Killing Moon” starts. And as the drums kick in and the lyrics start, “Under blue moon I saw you/so soon, you’ll take me…” all the vibes coalesce like weeds growing over a hole in the ground.
There’s even something curious about the name Echo & The Bunnymen. Is it the word “echo” where the name of the thing mimics how it sounds? Or is the strange compound word “bunnymen”? I’m don’t really want an answer. Asking questions is part of the fun.
These songs are their own twisted carnival in the world of Pop music, which is the ultimate scary soundtrack: an organ off in the distance, lowering the sounds of childhood jewelry boxes—the one with the spinning ballerina on a spring—and jingles found in toys. It’s the soundtrack of the evil luring children, and adults, into a fantastical place of oddities, from Pennywise The Clown to 1962’s Carnival of Souls. I imagine it’s the music that plays when you call Stephen King instead of a ringer; it’s the hold music of his brain.
I first watched Donnie Darko alone on my laptop in high school, a rented DVD from the library. I am positive I had no idea what I had watched. I recall the movie theater scene where Donnie is alone with Gretchen and Frank shows up taking my breath away: the lights were off, I was alone in my headphones, and, also, a notorious scaredy cat. By the time I returned to this as an adult years later, I had read SK’s IT twice. And seeing Rose Darko reading it just made all the details of DD come more alive. I love the choice Mary McDonnell makes with her hand turned out while she reads. There’s something about that added, small gesture she brought to a very intimate moment that is so completely unimportant. Anyone who has read IT will understand because the terror in those pages are consuming. She is such a caring mother with deep concern for her son and what is happening to him. When Donnie catches her in his room staring into the calendar he drew of Frank The Bunny, her hand clutching her mouth in awe, is another moment that strikes me, telling me the internal wall this mom is running into over and over again. This family has it’s own universe and they each bring a different piece of the puzzle to the wider story.
The chemistry of the perfectly cast family is really what makes Donnie Darko. Casting Jake and Maggie as brother and sister is organic instinct. I like to imagine they went in to read their scenes together and everyone knew right at that moment, oh this is gonna be great.
This whole blog post started when the other day I posted “it’s officially “what’s a fuck ass?” season. (I’d embed the video here but YT tells me that the content is age restricted.) Only for my husband to tell me its an esoteric joke no one is gonna get, and when they do get it, it’s not that funny. Well, well. My best friend who I am increasingly convinced shares a brain with me, only she is much smarter, and a mom, was the sole person to like it.
“I think about getting squashed by an airplane engine all year long,” she DM’d back when I thanked her for liking my very specific joke post. “‘I’m voting for Dukakis.’ gets me every time,” she said. “I’ve revisited Donnie Darko a few times thinking, “surely this movie must actually be stupid” and it’s never been stupid. I love it.”
Which is the same exact way I feel about Donnie Darko.
Over the last few falls I’ve stumbled upon Donnie Darko either on TV, watched it on Criterion, or sought it ought on my own. Last year we watched it on October 27th and it was the first time my husband had seen it since he was a teenager. He was the nagging “is this movie dumb?” in my head; but I enjoyed what he had to say about it. I’m not ashamed to admit that every time I watch Donnie Darko I feel like I’m closer to understanding its time loop chronology. But part of the fun of this film, for me, is not quite knowing and not quite getting it. I guess I like asking questions knowing there is no answer.
I made a playlist in October of 2019 that I keep coming back to every fall and I sprinkled the Donnie Darko Pop songs next to other, lesser known 1980s hits: The Waitresses’ “I Know What Boys Like,” The Specials’ “Little Bitch,” Altered Images’ “Happy Birthday,” Oingo Boingo’s “Wild Sex (In The Working Class),” alongside the folk classic by Norma Tanega “You’re Dead” — which listeners know as the theme music to the TV show “What We Do In The Shadows”—The Cramps’ “I Was A Teenage Werewolf,” and Harry Belafonte’s “Jump In The Line.” (If you need me to explain to you why that song is on a spooky October playlist, I’m so sorry/and you’re in the wrong blog.)
Sound is story—which is my own personal ethos when I am watching movies, listening to music, or understanding and explaining life—and New Wave is the soundtrack of fall. I am not the first blogger to suggest this, nor will I be the last. There is a legion of music history behind it, about Post-Punk and Goth Rock, where it’s all dark romantic lyrics and eerie jangles, lonerism, and tragedy. All I need to say is Bauhaus and I think you’re right there with me. Look at this image and you will hear “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”
A song of slow building torture, released one month after Ian Curtis killed himself, as a non-album single. Curtis, is, of course, also known for being into Nazis. (Some say they “were just trolling.” Sure, Jan.) I’m more of a New Order kind of gal. (“Blue Monday” forever!!!!!) “Love Will Tear Us Apart” is the most famous Joy Division song and every time I try to listen to more of their music I get sad and then bored and then said again. But the track is so perfect, and so famous for a reason, marrying ideas and sound and a spectral spirit of a tortured man and his liminal spaces.
And in the end we have the story of Donnie Darko itself: the story of a young man and his family struggling to deal with and navigate his mental illness. It is the story of someone giving into the psychotic break of their illness, in this case paranoid schizophrenia, to, Donnie thinks, prevent catastrophe by sacrificing himself. The scene Donnie has with his therapist, Dr. Thurman, played by Katharine Ross, is an internet meme about imaginary friends. But when you’re in the movie, it it a much more powerful moment. And again, when Donnie’s folks go talk to Dr. Thurman on their own and she reveals to them what they have been unable to detect or realize. It’s almost like they can’t believe it, even though it’s happening all around them.
Unfortunately I believe the potency of the movie weakens the more you see it. Which is why I return to the songs. I like to walk through the crisp leaves and stare into the deep blue sky as the trees yellow and orange at its edge as the “Head Over Heels” piano slams at me. I can see the turned camera, Donnie and his friends getting off the bus and going to school, time speeding up and slowing down as Drew Barrymore and Noah Wyle move through the halls, students bustling in their uniforms, Seth Rogan, the bully, among them. I guess I’m head over heels.
Don’t take my heart/don’t break my heart/don’t throw it away. Happy fall!!