Bulldookie!
Here, just after making the suggestion, I got this email unprompted by a friend (well versed in hypnotism & NLP) who had just seen the movie for the second time (I'm adding italics myself for better bookkeeping):
Whether or not its writer/director knows it, the film uses hypnotic patterns more effectively than some of the hypnotherapists I've met. Unobtrusively, elegantly, comedy. At several points Donnie, and the audience with him, is given what amount to posthypnotic triggers. But it's always beautifully woven into what is an endlessly fascinating piece of art, rather than mindgames being played for the sake of it.
The cues in Donnie Darko are ones to open up new channels, and keep them receptive long after the film itself has finished. If it does finish. I'm still not sure about that. It resonates outside itself, rippling through worlds that already perplex me.
The film opens with an Echo and the Bunnymen song. The band were managed by Bill Drummond, who famously sent them on a tour of Scotland so that their erratic journey would make the shape of a rabbit. Drummond later went on to form the KLF. After a number of hit records influenced by Robert Anton Wilson's fact-and-fiction blending Illuminatus books (I saw Wilson speak in London in the week when the KLF reached Number One), the band faded from view. They re-emerged as the K Foundation, issuing proclamations in newspapers, became involved with the art world, and famously burned a million pounds.
In Graham Greene's short story The Destructors, teenagers lay waste to a house, flood it by damaging the water mains, and set light to a mattress that they know to be stuffed full of cash.
Donnie Darko's English teacher sets the story to his class to read. Donnie describes the money burning as an ironic act. He shortly afterwards floods his school by damaging the water mains.
Donnie's English teacher is played by Drew Barrymore. I see her character almost as an angel in the film, quietly encouraging Donnie and by extension supporting his efforts to ultimately create a new world, one in which Donnie himself is dead, but which might just be a more loving place than the world we know thanks to the love that Donnie shares with girlfriend Gretchen. That relationship means that Donnie doesn't, as he feared, die alone. But he's prepared to sacrifice himself for us all, so that every one of us might just experience the love that he's known. Maybe the wave that Gretchen gives to Donnie's mum at the end of the film expresses just that kind of love: this Gretchen has never known Donnie, but she can still reach out to someone who has lost a son.
Drew Barrymore is all kinds of angel, including one of Charlie's. And she's the angel who supported an unknown writer-director, believing in his vision of a very special film, and becoming its executive producer, to allow his fiction to become part of our reality.
I asked him about the hypnotic suggestion stuff, and he replied thusly:
I'm going to have to see Donnie Darko again to really piece together all the elements that are 'hypnotic': a full breakdown will have to wait till I've got the DVD. And I'm not stating that the writer/director intended them to be so at all, though there's so much going on that I'd not be surprised if he's familiar with Ericksonian hypnosis and/or NLP. Those approaches emphasise that there's a whole continuum of communication, verbally and otherwise, that all of us utilise: anyone who's good at getting ideas across, or changing your state, can be said to be using hypnotic techniques.
With that caveat in mind, here are some elements I did notice:
* In the scene in the cinema, there's dialogue about being in a cinema, an experience which the characters share with the
audience. You can call that metacommentary if you wish, and go that route.
It's also a way of communicating to that unconscious aspect of you which knows that you're in the audience, and if you start to think about that grant yourself the recognition that there's an interesting shift in your own state as you continue to process these words.
:-)
So, that's one way to affect the consciousness of the audience. And, whether in that scene or another, there are specific instructions given to process the meaning of the film after sleeping.
That's pretty much overt, though without having a copy of the film to hand I can't go into more detail.
Another element is the 'cellar door' phrase that Drew Barrymore has chalked onto the blackboard. It's possible that it functions as a post-hypnotic suggestion, given to Donnie. Certainly, when he sees the cellar door at a critical point, it reminds him of the incident in class, which arguably demonstrates the success of that intention. And is in turn an example of Drew's role as an angel within the film.
There's more. Lots more. But I'm aware of how tentative some of this is without me having the opportunity to examine the
film at my leisure. The fact that Donnie Darko is layered so extraordinarily well -- in terms of writing, photography, performance, design, music and so on -- is another way of saying that it is an exquisite trance induction. ...
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