Donnie Darko and the Philosophy of Time Travel

Matt Damore

Jake Gyllenhaal plays the insomniac Donnie Darko in the movie Donnie Darko. This is director and writer Richard Kelly’s debut, and what a debut it was. I actually saw this for the first time with Matt Johnson, and I remember while it was playing looking over at him and knowing that we were watching something unique, something that we hadn’t seen before. The most interesting part of the movie to me is the philosophy of time travel that pervades the story.

In the movie, a character nicknamed Grandma Death wrote a book called The Philosophy of Time Travel. Near the beginning of the film, Donnie is led away from his bedroom and outside the house where he meets a 6-foot tall rabbit with a demonic looking face. The rabbit informs Donnie that the world will end at a certain time. While Donnie was out, a jet-engine inexplicably landed on Donnie’s bedroom, which would have killed him had he not been lured away by the rabbit.

But where did the engine come from? If you remember, both the rabbit and Donnie put there hand on a liquid-like substance that acts like a wall between them. Well, what is that? Why do we see Donnie at certain parts of the movie with what are called wormholes coming out of his chest? What is that dark, ominous cloud that forms above Donnie’s house near the end of the movie? Why is Donnie dead at the end and his girlfriend Gretchen not know him? Obviously because the jet engine killed him; but why show earlier in the movie him avoiding the jet engine to talk to the rabbit about the end of the world?

Well, Richard Kelly has the answers to all our questions. Let’s see if they satisfy.

What really happened right when Donnie left his bedroom to talk to the rabbit and the jet engine fell on Donnie’s bedroom? According to Kelly, around that moment (some time after Donnie got out of bed and before the engine fell) there was what is called a Tangent Universe that split away from the Actual Universe. Keep in mind that now that this split has happened, everything in the Actual universe is duplicated in the Tangent Universe. So, for example, we now have the Donnie in the Tangent Universe, and the Donnie in the Actual Universe.

Kelly got this notion from geometry. If you remember, scientists picture space/time as a curve, and so we can represent the universe as a circle. A tangent is a straight line that skims one point on the curve. In essence, at that particular point that the Tangent intersects with the point on the Curve, the jet engine falls on the bedroom, leaving only the Donnie of the Tangent Universe. But guess what? The Tangent Universe is essentially unstable. That means the Tangent will eventually re-collapse into the Actual Universe. The time of the re-collapse is what the rabbit meant when it was telling Donnie about ‘the end of the world’: it was giving the exact date of the re-collapse.

Donnie’s task now becomes what Kelly calls The Living Receiver, whose job it is to ‘close’ the Tangent universe manually. If he doesn’t, when the Tangent Universe collapses, it takes the Actual universe along with it and both universes are destroyed!

By virtue of the Tangent universe, Frank (the rabbit) can communicate with Donnie only through the medium of what is called The Fourth Dimensional Construct (water), which is the liquid-like substance that always separates Donnie from Frank. Those who die in the Tangent that would have lived in the Actual universe are Frank and Gretchen. And those that prod Donnie along with his mission are his science and english teachers. The ultimate mission for Donnie is to be killed by that jet engine, technically called The Artifact.

So, let’s tie these loose ends together. Donnie is lured out of his bedroom by Frank the rabbit. Frank the rabbit is from the future. Which future? The future of the Tangent Universe only. Why? To warn Donnie about the end of the world, the collapse of the Tangent Universe into the Actual Universe, and the destruction of both if Donnie isn’t killed by The Artifact. The movie from then on is the run-up on the Tangent timeline up until it hits that exact point on the space/time curve of the Actual Universe, the point at which the jet engine is supposed to fall on Donnie and kill him. However, Frank has the other role to play as Donnie’s sister’s boyfriend. In this manifestation, Frank is the Present Frank that is destined to be killed by Donnie in this Tangent Universe, but alive in the Actual One. Frank the Rabbit came back from the future to fulfill his role by being killed as Present Frank (Donnie kills him) in order to ensure the re-collapse of the Tangent Universe into the Actual One.

Donnie’s break from the Actual Universe into the Tangent One and Frank’s time travel all use elements from The Philosophy of Time Travel. It’s primarily based on the phenomenon of wormholes, shortcuts through space/time, tunnels that would take you from one point in space/time and immediately teleport you to another point. It is these wormholes that allow Donnie and Frank to travel as they do, and that answer those questions we puzzled over earlier. Such as: just what was that tornado doing hovering and forming just above Donnie’s house? Well, it was forming just at that time because that time was the point at which the Tangent Universe was re-collapsing back into the Actual Universe; and in the Tangent Universe, Donnie’s mom and sister were flying in a plane while it was sucked into the twister, disconnecting the engine, which sent it tumbling down onto Donnie’s room killing Donnie in the Actual Universe, since the engine traveled through a wormhole from the Tangent Universe (in which the twister engulfed the plane) to the Actual Universe (in which the mom and sister are safe in their house).

Donnie is killed, the Tangent Universe re-collapses, saving the Actual Universe from peril. Make sense?