Persona and Shadow in Donnie Darko
Nathanael
Persona and Shadow in Donnie Darko
John F. Kennedy University
Nathanael Chawkin
Enneagram Assessment
Winter Quarter 2008
Via Negativa – The Minor Mode
The first time I saw Donnie Darko, a 2001 cult classic from first time director Richard Kelly, I was deeply moved. I was also deeply bewildered, although smiling simultaneously like someone who knows a secret he can’t speak. I think something in my personality resonated with the dark, somber, subtle, beautiful depths of the mystery, the same feeling that had me transfixed at the end of American Beauty, deeply absorbed in a place beyond thought yet filled with the resonance of meaning. I think this is what made the movie so personal for me – it takes a certain kind of person who can sit with the darkness, who can feel the melancholy in a sad piece of music without recoiling or running away from the introspection it inspires. This is a person who can contemplate his death and let it teach him how to live – let it strip him down to the bare bones of his soul in a search for what is real. I guess this kind of humility, this willingness to be opened from the inside to something beyond is what it means to be spiritual, although, to Donnie and those like him, this is not a religious belief – in fact this process starts with an existential resignation of belief all together.
DR. THURMAN
Do you feel alone right now?
He looks at her for a moment.
DONNIE
I'd like to believe that I'm not...
but I've just never seen any proof.
So I just choose not to bother with
it. It's, like, I could spend my
whole life thinking about it...
debating it in my head. Weighing the
pros and cons. And in the end, I
still wouldn't have any proof. So...
I don't even debate it any more.
Because it's absurd.
(beat)
I don't want to be alone.
(beat)
So, does that make me, like, an
atheist?
DR. THURMAN
No. That makes you keep searching.
I think it is this soul searching – the inner strength to walk ahead alone and into the darkness that best defines this phase of the spiritual path. The idea of death, that “Every living creature on this earth dies alone,” that we're all wearing "stupid man suits" on loan to us till we die, can either throw us into despair, into denial or initiate this search for meaning.
It wasn’t until my second viewing of Donnie Darko and a third viewing some years later of the Director’s Cut that things started to fall into place. In the time between viewings, I had begun my education in Integral Psychology, a psychology which contains all of the psychologies developed thus far – from Behavioral and Freudian to Cognitive to Jungian and Humanistic/Existential to Transpersonal– integrating the best of eastern and western approaches to human development in the process. In particular, my recent study of the Enneagram personality type system lead me to a deeper understanding of how and why we develop certain ego personae and the meaning of psycho-spiritual growth in this context. Sparked with a new curiosity I began to explore the internet, searching for a general consensus as to what Donnie Darko meant to people (including the director). What ensued was a small journey of self-discovery that allowed me to clarify and strengthen my own theory about the movie and, in true Integral fashion, match up themes from various fields of study: Freud’s unconscious, Jung’s shadow, Yoga philosophy, Christian mysticism, mythology, the existential thought of Nietzsche, Zen Buddhism and self awareness, self-inquiry, and personal transformation in general. If I found a consensus in the interpretations I read, it was more in the lack of their ability to look beyond a literal interpretation of the film – especially the ending – to one of archetype and metaphor, much in the way Joseph Campbell might look at universal symbols in religion, or in modern movie myths such as Star Wars. This frees the film to embody the meaning we feel in our gut, to inform our life in a meaningful way with the message we intuit but can’t quite put our finger on. It is my best intention here to explain the basics of ego psychology, shadow work and individuation to provide the reader with a simple framework for understanding the core metaphors of the film. Rather than discussing specific points from the Enneagram, I wish to take a more in depth look at the transformation of persona and shadow in general. In short, I hope this paper will serve as an injunction for spiritual practice, namely shadow work – sleepwalking our way to an awareness of that which is within us that can save us.
The Formation of the Ego: Persona and Shadow
TITLE CARD:
OCTOBER 13 1988
INT. ENGLISH CLASS - MORNING (THURSDAY, 8 A.M.)
Donnie stands in front of the class. Ms. Pomeroy sits behind
her desk. On the chalkboard is "Poetry Day".
DONNIE
"A storm is coming, Frank says. A
storm that will swallow the
children... and I will deliver them
from the kingdom of pain."
(beat)
"I will deliver the children to their
doorsteps. I will send the monsters
back to the underground. I will send
them back to a place where no one
can see them... except for me. Because
I am Donnie Darko."
The formation of our particular personality traits start with the conditioning of our very early childhood. Since a small child is entirely dependent upon the caregivers for survival, any behavior that upsets the parent in some way, even if only subtly, and results in some kind of punishment – a grimace, or even setting the baby down – is suppressed and any behavior that is rewarded is reinforced. The behaviors that are selected as “good” remain in consciousness and others that are deemed “bad,” if selected out for long enough, become repressed i.e. unavailable to consciousness. The part of the psyche that does the suppressing as a mechanism of defense according to Freud is called the ego (Almaas, 1992 p2). In other words, the ego originally helped us dissociate from being present to things that caused us suffering so we wouldn’t have to experience them. It is like tensing our body and wincing with our eyes shut in anticipation of being struck, so that we don’t have to be conscious to the pain as it happens. In addition to this, the Enneagram recounts that rather than the formation of our personality being the simple result of our extrinsic conditioning (the nurture aspect of the nature/nurture equation), it is also our inherent reaction to what is happening to us from the inside that defines who we are. You can have the same parents in a family and, of course, each child will form their own reactions differently, with different coping mechanisms, based on their own inner nature. Each forms a slightly different scab, in a manner of speaking, over a slightly different wound, resulting in a slightly different personality. Ego then is a scab, a hard surface, a mask or persona in Greek – who we are or intend to be consciously (what Freud called the ego ideal) – that compensates for or covers our shadow – who we are not, or are not allowed to be. Ego = Persona + Shadow; the dividing line between the conscious and unconscious parts of our psyche. In the Enneagram, they speak of each personality type having a basic Desire – what we value or attempt to be consciously which, I would suggest, arises in conjunction with a basic Fear – what we don’t value and try to avoid being at all costs.
Freud used the term ‘ego ideal’ interchangeably with the more familiar term superego for our inner critic, the internalized voice of our parents encouraging us to be a certain way, while shaming us for being others. Whereas in the beginning we are born with the potential for an array of personal capacities, a whole pie in a sense, the ego draws the line between what is safe to exhibit and what is unsafe, “send(ing) the monsters back to the underground” that threaten the survival of the organism. This line, this split between what is flexed consciously at the expense of what is repressed into the unconscious – between what is acceptable and unacceptable is then enforced by our increasingly rational and sophisticated superego. It makes sure that we maintain a certain façade based on what is appropriate to the superego of our particular family or society as well (which has its own familial or cultural shadow). Of course this creates a kind of inner battle between our unexpressed, unconscious bodily (or libidinal from Freud’s Id) impulses which want to leak through and the efforts of the Superego to repress them in favor of what is proper. It is the classic war between body and mind, feeling and thinking, feminine and masculine, Yin and Yang. The Superego will do anything to keep the supposed monster from surfacing from the depths of the archetypal water. Almaas (1992) explains:
“For this repression to be done effectively, the whole operation becomes unconscious; i.e., both the ego defense mechanism and the corresponding coercive parts of the superego become unconscious…. Especially for the well-developed and integrated ego, the moment that there is the likelihood that part of the unconscious is going to surface to consciousness, the ego starts experiencing anxiety. This anxiety is a response to the anticipation of danger. In the past, libidinal impulses and accompanying actions…became perceived as dangerous to the person because of the reactions encountered in the environment to them (especially from the parents) such as disgust, rejection, punishment, abandonment, belittlement, humiliation, judgment, criticism, invalidation, being threatened, doubted, ridiculed, made to feel guilty or shameful, etc.” (p 3)
The important thing to remember here is that the Superego is part of the scab too – the rational aspect of the ego defense mechanism designed to keep the behaviors that threatened our survival from surfacing into consciousness. Even though as a grown adult, we are no longer physically dependent on our parents for survival, the actual primal fear of death remains: to experience these fragmented parts of our self is to face the fear of death, and to reintegrate them in a healthy way feels like dying in that we have to let go of our need to protect ourselves – a potentially traumatic endeavor to be sure (Ibid p 2). This integration of the conscious with the unconscious, this healing – a word which comes from the Latin holos, to make whole – is the purpose of most psychotherapy. And as we cease to repress, we cease to overcompensate and vice versa – the hard scab and the soft wound it covers melt away simultaneously.
Defense Mechanisms: “I know you are, but what am I?”
“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” – Nietzsche
Let’s step back for a minute and look at an example to illustrate just what we’re talking about here: let’s say you were yelled at when you were little by your father (who was probably yelled at for the same reason when he was little and so on) for not paying attention when someone was talking. As a result you develop the superego message that it is selfish, bad and wrong not to pay attention to someone and failing to do so will result in a withholding of love, or worse. You try your best consciously to be a good boy/girl, but unconsciously there is a part of you the leaks through, perhaps after you’ve become too tired to listen any more, perhaps as an unconscious act of rebellion on account of the repression of your own natural need to be heard. All around, you find “poor listeners” who you take very personally, reprimanding them for not listening to you properly. (Of course, they only reflect the part of you that wants a break from its constant overcompensating). On the surface, you feel like you are helping them – after all not listening got you very hurt! In one of the rare moments that someone points out to you that you might not be listening to them, you vehemently deny it, telling a story about how the opposite is true and that really they are the one not listening to you! So the interesting point is not that we don’t display these behaviors, we do, it’s just that when we do we dissociate from the fact that we are as a defense mechanism so we don’t have to own or experience the thing that triggers our fear of rejection – a rejection which early on, it was sensed, would mean death. Naturally, there are huge assumptions, huge webs of irrational beliefs forming many stories that underlie our projections, e.g. “If I don’t listen to people, I won’t be loved.” Part of cognitive behavior therapy is to surface and examine these unconscious “scripts,” to see how they match up or rather how they often fail to match up with reality – a kind of shadow work in its own right.
Shadow Work – “Warning: Objects in the Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear”
“The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves.” - Carl Jung
That which is unconscious within us is called our shadow. It is important in shadow work to understand that all shadows are unconscious, but not everything in the unconscious is shadow – or dark shadow at least. The Yin-Yang helps describe how a dot of unconscious dark shadow can come through consciousness unseen e.g. as projection, just as a dot of what is called our “bright” or “golden” shadow is repressed in the unconscious waiting to be awakened (those parts of ourselves we selected out of in order to survive or fit in). But what we fail to become conscious of happens outside as fate, over and over again. Until we bring the shadow into the light of consciousness, we will continue to polarize with others, projecting our dark shadow when our enemies mirror what we secretly embody and projecting our bright shadow, the disowned and repressed parts of our own beauty or power onto others whom we envy, seek approval from or fall in love with. This process of making the unconscious, conscious, of bringing conscious awareness to our ego reactions is the essence of shadow work. While, as Jung thought, the persona is identical to the ego at first, defining how we ought to behave to be accepted by our parents and later by society, it is by no means the same thing as our true individuality. Only once we have integrated the repressed fragments of our self through a process of conscious self-actualization (or individuation as Jung called it) will we know what our self looks like when it is wholly itself, in full bloom without impairment. A helpful metaphor here is the process off self-mastery in a sport or art. Through the training process, we become conscious of our unconscious habits and choose consciously how we would like to craft every move, every note, so we are expressing our self intentionally. A master of his craft is constantly looking in the mirror, competing, and testing himself in order to reveal the holes in his game, the gaps of consciousness in his understanding or expression, the mistakes in his form so that he can constantly refine his technique until it is as he wants it to be.
This journey as it applies to our psychological maturation or self-mastery is described by Joseph Campbell as the archetypal hero’s quest:
The hero...discovers and assimilates his opposite (his own unsuspected self) either by swallowing it or by being swallowed.... He must...submit to the absolutely intolerable. Then he finds that he and his opposite are not of differing species, but one flesh. (Campbell 1973)
The hero’s quest is at first the quest for adulthood and mature individuality, the quest to confront and integrate what we have forgotten within to create who we would like to become. This growth process elevates us to a place of autonomy, of self-authorship and integrity as we take responsibility for ourselves rather than continue to project onto others the good or evil that we embody unconsciously within. Waking up to the slumbering parts of our self, and above all, being true to the idea that “when you point the finger, there are three fingers pointing back” is a personal journey of self dis-covery, around which the many patterns of our life that we thought existed randomly outside ourselves are suddenly revealed to repeat and cohere with certain themes, certain synchronous meanings that lead us deeper and deeper within, until we are fully conscious of what it is our shadow is unconsciously creating. Why do we always date the same kind of person, end up with the same kind of boss, or find ourselves in the same situations over and over again? Are we even conscious of these patterns and the general subconscious mood they create? “When people run in circles, it’s a very, very mad world.”
The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali (Hartranft 2003) describe in short aphorisms this very process of bringing pure awareness to the past conditioning of our mind. The opening sutras explain: “Yoga is to still the patterning of consciousness. Then the self abides in its very nature” – present to what is without the emotional reactions of our past conditioning – “Otherwise awareness takes itself to be the patterns of consciousness” (Ibid p2). These patterns of the mind are built on the attachments and aversions, the residues of past “positive” and “negative” experiences from our early conditioning. Each residue, called a samskara, lies dormant in the unconscious waiting to be triggered as karma – which simply means action (more properly reaction for our purposes). Each time we react unconsciously, clinging to what is “good” or averting what is “bad,” we paradoxically reinforce the latent ego impressions that have given rise to our reactions in the first place. Unconsciousness is therefore determinism – what is latent is determined to be triggered eventually – in this life or the next – as it is put ominously (Ibid p25). This is why, contrary to popular belief, the metaphor of the wheel of karma describes not just reincarnation, or “what goes around comes around” – the good or bad luck that comes back to us, but rather the suffering that results in our reactions to what happens to us based on our past conditioning. What we fail to become conscious of repeats in unconscious cycles, karma reinforcing samskara reinforcing karma…like a gerbil wheel that keeps us trapped on an increasingly determined-to-be merry-go-round, “going nowhere.” “But suffering which has not yet arisen can be prevented” and shadow work is this daily practice of dying to ourselves by bringing consciousness to what is unconscious and in so doing avoiding the potential future suffering we may cause ourselves and others (Ibid).
What does shadow work look like in everyday life? How can we work on instead of box with our shadows? Many suggest that meditation and mindfulness practice (what Yoga means inherently) are an integral part of this kind of psychological work, since they allow us to still our mind and develop our capacity to be steadily aware of what is without reaction. Again, this allows us in the same stroke to disidentify from the unconscious and automatic mechanisms of our personalities and find healthy expression for what has been repressed. The Enneagram suggests getting familiar with our basic personality traits so that we can “catch ourselves in the act” of our repetitive, unconscious behaviors. In a sense, “Know Thyself” and “Know Thy Enemy” becomes the same thing here. To be clear however, self-awareness is different from self-judgment. Riso and Hudson (1999) explain:
One of the most important skills we must acquire as we embark on the inward journey is the ability to “observe and let go” of the habits and mechanisms of our personality that have trapped us…..Our maxim is deceptively simple. What it means is that we must learn to observe ourselves, seeing what arises in us from moment to moment, as well as seeing what calls us away from the here and now. Whatever we find, whether pleasant or unpleasant, we simply observe it. We do not try to change it, nor do we criticize ourselves for what we uncover. To the extent we are fully present …the constrictions of our personality begin to relax, and our Essence begins to manifest more fully.” (p40)
The Enneagram also uses the lines of stress and integration to help explain the simultaneous dissolution and actualization of our dark and bright shadows respectively. Each personality type under stress will become an unhealthy version of another type (our dark shadow). As we cease to act out the aggressions of our particular superego on others, we naturally cease to perpetrate these things on our self as well. This results in the release of the healthy qualities that we have been repressing (our bright shadow) and as such, our natural integration towards yet another personality type. Another way of looking at the Enneagram then is as a map of an integrated psyche – really, we contain all 9 different ways of constructing the world and with continued personal growth work we skate around the lines of stress and integration until we have done shadow work at each stop. What is suggested in general is that we offer support to those areas within us that are underdeveloped or of which we are ashamed or self-conscious and challenge the other more selfish behaviors that we may flex when threatened or under stress – a generally sound formula for growth. This relates as well to Jung’s idea of the Anima and Animus, the feminine and masculine aspects of the soul, one of which we inhibit unconsciously as shadow while the other we more consciously assert as persona. When we learn to empower what is weak and surrender what is tough by learning to set boundaries around what is healthy or unhealthy in self or in others, we allow our bright shadow through and transcend our dark shadow in the same stroke. Like leveling the sides of a scale – start on either side and mutually both sides come into balance sympathetically. Many would say this unifying power that makes us whole within and simultaneously reconciles self and other is called love.
Given the heroic effort this can take, Jung thought that acknowledging one’s shadow marked “the first act of courage” (Pettifor 1995). Luckily, tools like the Enneagram help us get to know ourselves in a helpful and non-threatening way by allowing us to become more familiar with our everyday habits. The first challenge consists simply in bringing consciousness to what is unconscious – the willingness to acknowledge our shadow, to just noticing when we’re being triggered. Since projection always means that a piece of the unconscious is surfacing and producing inner emotional anxiety, it is simply about connecting the mind with the body – acknowledging the thoughts, words, actions or observations that make us feel attraction or repulsion in our bodies. This is why many humanistic/existential psychologies speak about their work in terms of integrating mind (conscious) and body (unconscious emotional impulses) with spirit (awareness). Almaas well describes this important attitude when he says that “Anxiety…can be seen as a prelude to self knowledge” (Almaas 1992, p 4). Truly, as it is said, the body never lies. Just becoming conscious of our emotional state in our body without reaction can be curative in that it allows our past conditioning to dissolve rather than be reinforced through reaction. We slowly begin to learn to differentiate, as Jung did, between feeling (which is a way of evaluating) and emotion (a term which actually means disturbance) (Pettifor 1995). If something is not personal, it probably will not disturb us, and we will be able to evaluate a situation objectively or impartially. When we are “upset” or made to be emotional by something however, it is likely we are reacting defensively and we may want to ask ourselves why, using any judgments that come up as possible mirror reflections for what we enable or disenable within. How am I like that? How do I do that? Or, how could I be more like that? Maybe we can’t stand someone, or tell a story about how they have “bad energy,” or maybe we cling to people for “protection.” Whatever the case, until we’ve inquired deeply and made certain changes within, what we don’t like about someone will always uncomfortably mirror something we don’t like about ourselves.
Adopting the faith that everything that triggers us emotionally, everything we judge outside ourselves is a projection of that which is good or bad within leads us to the second challenge of shadow work – dying to our selfish ego, to all of its immature needs and preferences. There can be no childish, egocentric victim mind any longer – no one to save us and no authority to blame. Our reactions are our own, all heroes and villains within. This is what it means to face the end of the world as we know it, which requires a tremendous leap of faith on our part – the faith that we won’t be hurt again if we give up our old defense mechanisms. As the heroine learns to die to herself, she learns that even the feelings of deep grief and emptiness that arise as she contemplates her own death and the meaninglessness of all things are selfish too. In dying to even these last attempts to hang on to her ego identity, she creates a new, more poignant meaning within even where there seems to be none without – that of living for others. Transcending an existential crisis in this way entails what Nietzsche called Amor Fati – love of fate. In other words, it is the understanding of the kind of non-duality we have been speaking about, a maturation process that happens when you begin to take responsibility for your self. As Shakespeare is quoted: “there is neither good nor bad but thinking makes it so,” or as cited in Byron Katie’s (Katie, 2003) book (which restates Nietzsche’s love of fate) Loving What Is, “We are not disturbed by what happens to us, but by our thoughts about what happens” (p 2) This is not to say we don’t set boundaries, enter into agreements, make decisions about what is right and wrong, or even display righteous anger in the face of injustice – it simply means we cease to attribute our internal suffering to what happens in the environment – that much is our choice. This is the apocalypse: “revelation” or “to uncover” – in the sense of “to remove the veil” – not the end of the physical world, but the end of the world as we have known it based on our previous illusions. It is the end of our psychological world, our worldview, uncovering the mask of our false persona – a moment of truth as we remove the veil of ignorance and become conscious of what is real (Campbell 2001).
Donnie Darko – Myth and Metaphor
“The hero's main feat is to overcome the monster of darkness: it is the long-hoped-for and expected triumph of consciousness over the unconscious. The coming of consciousness was probably the most tremendous experience of primeval times, for with it a world came into being whose existence no one had suspected before.” (Jung 1940)
I hope by now that the reader can see some of the intentional foreshadowing in my descriptions of the conscious and the unconscious, the persona and shadow and the process of shadow work up to this point. (Please see Addendum B if you would like a plot refresher.) The metaphors in the film are based around what I feel are three important core meanings. First, when you judge, you draw a line between what is good and bad, and repress everything that is bad into your unconscious. Unaware our shadow side, it repeats itself over and over again in the endless karmic cycles of our lives. As Jung states:
“It is perfectly possible, psychologically, for the unconscious…to take complete possession of a man and to determine his fate down to the smallest detail.” (Levy, 2005)
However, secondly, “suffering which has not yet arisen (as a potential future or ‘tangent universe’) can be prevented.” The hero’s task is to become conscious: to confront his enemy as his own inner shadow. In the process, he simultaneously follows his destiny, a meaningful quest of inner self-realization that results in the individuation of his own unique potentials – his bright shadow. In the end (of the world) he ultimately becomes fully conscious of that which is within him (removing the veil or false persona), choosing consciously to die to the karmic cycle that will otherwise repeat itself unconsciously. Finally, the movie offers commentary throughout on an analogous cultural shadow – what happens when society as a whole is dissociated from reality and wears a mask to cover and control what it is afraid to confront within. I will discuss briefly these ideas in context of the film.
The Shadow as Anti-Hero
“And Jesus said, ‘If you bring forth that which is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you fail to bring forth that which is within you, what you fail to bring forth will destroy you.’”
The Gospel of Thomas, verse 70 (Mabry, 2007)
The first words that Frank whispers are “Wake up” – a spiritual wake up call similar to the injunction at Delphi to “Know Thyself.” He then announces to Donnie that the end of the world is coming. Frank is the personification of our shadow – an unconscious potential future, not yet arisen from within, yet determined to be if left as such. In order to awaken to what is beneath our thickly formed persona, it becomes necessary “That…destruction is a kind of creation” as Donnie puts it. Rather than take things at face value, the world as he has known it according to his personal paradigm, Donnie adopts a certain faith, trusting what is unconscious within him to be his guide to a larger perspective. Curiously, it is while he is sleepwalking that he is conscious of and follows the dictates of (read: integrates) his shadow, Frank. St. John of the Cross perfectly defines this metaphor: “If a man wishes to be sure of the road he treads on, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark” (Merton, 2004) Differentiating this kind of faith in what is, Amor Fati, an inner act of self-surrender as opposed to the holding of certain concrete religious beliefs, is crucial. This is where the psychological begins to intersect with the spiritual and as Byron Katie (2003) suggests, “God, as I use the word, is another name for what is. I always know God’s intention: It’s exactly what is in every moment.” In other words, what is is God’s will –and “If you argue with reality, you lose (suffer), but only one hundred percent of the time (p xx).” We can find so many cross-cultural instances of this practical kind of faith. This quote from a Vietnam POW inspired what author Jim Collins calls “The Stockdale Paradox:”
“You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end — which you can never afford to lose — with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
(Collins, 2001)
Or from the third Zen Patriarch, Seng T’san in the Absolute Faith Mind:
“The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are both absent everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart. If you wish to see the truth, then hold no opinions for or against anything. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind. When the deep meaning of things is not understood, the mind’s essential peace is disturbed to no avail. The Way is perfect like vast space where nothing is lacking and nothing is in excess. Indeed, it is due to our choosing to accept or reject that we do not see the true nature of things.” (Dowling, 2003)
The picture that begins to be painted here transcends mere psychology. Being conscious of our shadow seems to imply an inner equilibrium, a capacity to be present without judgment to what is – a pure awareness that results in inner wisdom and compassion. Donnie experiences what it is like somatically to be present to his shadow and you’ll notice him holding his stomach and wincing at the nausea he experiences each time he is about to see Frank. He has chosen to awaken and face what is within himself with the faith that the truth will set him free. In actualizing his (bright) shadow he becomes uninhibited and heroic, gaining “special powers” as Frank leads him to commit what appear to be dark criminal acts. As time goes on however, we learn that these events guide Donnie along the path of his personal destiny, each act of destruction or indignation tearing opening a false persona to reveal what is hidden within others and ultimately, within himself. The horrific character of Frank is not evil then, he is the antihero.
American “Beauty” –The Mask of Modernity
“I had a dream and because I did not live my dream, my dream was making me sick.” - From Black Elk Speaks
In her book, “Getting our Bodies Back,” somatic psychotherapist Christine Caldwell (1996) explains that we actually become addicted to our defense mechanisms since they prevent us from experiencing pain much like we might get addicted to pain killers. In other words, we get addicted to staying unconscious, to the feeling of being “comfortably numb.” Like Donnie, waking up to reality and catching a glimpse of what we are repressing is likely to make us feel as though we are on some kind of medication. (In the director’s cut, Donnie’s psychiatrist actually explains that his medication has been placebos all along.) Just as the development of the superego meant the repression of certain unconscious bodily impulses, Modernity in history marked the rise of the mental ego of society, the scientific era, and industrialization. This was taken so far however that it too resulted in the dissociation from and repression of the body, the feminine, religion and nature. For many, modern life is marked by dissociation from how our familiar, daily races and daily routines make us feel in our bodies. We repeat the same dole drudgery, day in day out, preferring “familiar faces, worn out places,” even though we are never really seen or heard – racing ahead even though we feel dead inside. Somehow we supplement a genuine need for emotional connection or authentic self-expression with the consumption of perfect, sterile, material products (As Fight Club attests to), destroying and isolating ourselves from natural life in the process. It is no wonder that having taken the blue pill and awoken from the Matrix to the horrors of reality that the despair is too great and we want only to be reinserted. The burden of becoming conscious of the damage the rational has caused – our inner emotional wounding or the symptomatic wounding done to nature – makes our addiction to numbness too painful to live outside of (see Shawshank Redemption). This is when an existential crisis can ensue, a dark night of the soul, and for some, it is too much to cope with. Rather than continue ahead a place where mind and body are integrated, healed, we choose instead to retreat back to the body, back to nature, back to a place prior to mature rationality (the so called “retro romantic agenda.”) The rise of the mental ego from our animal nature, (or historically of science from the dark ages) is represented in the early myths where a knight slays a dragon or serpent. Having slain the monster, however, the hero must return home to share the knowledge of his journey (Campbell 1973). A failure of the hero to return home (like Odysseus) marks the inability to become conscious of and integrate our shadow. Rather than returning to an infantile paradise or garden of Eden, we must finish the circle by moving ahead on our path, allowing the reemergence of the sacred feminine as part of a harmonization with the masculine, a regression to the body in service of body-mind integration, a mutual embrace honoring feel and thinking, nature and technology, grandfather time and “grandma death.”
Donnie sees right through the hypocrisy of the adults in his world who are unable to be true to what is within them – who bully or shame people who are afraid but cannot acknowledge their own fear. In response to the “lifeline exercise” in which Kitty Farmer has the class divide life situations into “fear” and “love,” Donnie exclaims, “You're just lumping everything into these two categories... and, like, denying everything else.” And he senses there is something insidious, something terribly wrong with Jim Cunningham too – all is a bit too pretty on the surface. “Controlling fear” only builds a larger scab over a deeper wound, denying our capacity to be honest or vulnerable to what we are truly feeling, which further perpetuates the fear we were attempting to transcend. The callousness of the public school system, the religious conservatism and the few teachers who comment on how the children can smell the BS of the adults a mile away and are “better off saving themselves these days” all illustrate the film’s commentary on the insensitive cultural shadow of Modernity and the very few people attempting to deal with this reality. The scene in the movie theatre when Frank explains that he is called Frank because that was his father’s name and his father’s before him hints at the karmic patterns that repeat themselves throughout history in our specific families, in society or even in the world at large. Shadow work involving our immediate family can be some of the most challenging, yet powerful work we can do, as those nearest to us are often responsible for our deepest wounds, and simultaneously the strongest mirror into the parts of our self we’ve disowned as a result. How many people swear they’ll never be like their parents, only to witness themselves “pulling the trigger” in exactly the same way as their mother or father did?
Time Travel, Vector Spears and the Wheel of Karma: The Predestination Paradox
“Ancient myth tells us of the Mayan Warrior killed by an Arrowhead that had fallen from a cliff, where there was no Army, no enemy to be found. We are told of the Medieval Knight mysteriously impaled by the sword he had not yet built. We are told that these things occur for a reason.”
(Addendum C Philosophy of Time Travel Chapter 12)
Part way into the film, Donnie begins to see silvery tubes of liquid projecting from people’s solar plexuses – a visual indication of their unconscious intention extending several feet in front of them. An important conversation about time travel and the nature of free will vs. determinism ensues between Donnie and his science teacher, Dr. Monnitoff.
DONNIE
If God controls time... then all
time is pre-decided. Then every living
thing travels along a set path.
DR. MONNITOFF
I'm not following you.
DONNIE
If you could see your path or channel
growing out of your stomach, you
could see into the future. And that's
a form of time travel, right?
DR. MONNITOFF
You are contradicting yourself,
Donnie. If we could see our destinies
manifest themselves visually... then
we would be given the choice to betray
our chosen destinies. The very fact
that this choice exists... would
mean that all pre-formed destiny
would end.
DONNIE
Not if you chose to stay within God’s channel…
The vector spears lead us deterministically on a trajectory towards our inevitable destinies to the extent we are unconscious of our choices. Unless we awaken, we are already dead, like Frank, killed by the sword we have “not yet built.” The whole movie, whether you think of it as a dream or premonition (ala Mulholland Drive) or literally as a sci-fi tangent universe, represents the awareness of a trajectory, a possible future. The fact that Donnie eventually becomes aware of this shadow future in Frank means he can consciously choose to avert what is as yet unmanifest – otherwise, there is an inescapable paradox in that the jet engine falling from the future creates the events that deterministically lead to the jet engine falling back in time from the future in the first place! (A metaphor for the paradox of karma: our pain reinforces our numbness or unconsciousness which perpetuates our pain and so on.) Awareness gives Donnie the chance to break this self-fulfilling cycle. There is an important truth in Dr. Monnitoff’s view that an awareness of our destiny would mean we would be free to choose our future differently – there would be no higher destiny. But Donnie rejects this reductionist view and aims for what I believe is a middle way (again, a higher integration) between pre-rational religious pre-destination and the empty and meaningless randomness of rational scientific materialism. If we have the faith (sleepwalking) to die to our ego preferences and integrate our shadow, then we empty ourselves out for God’s channel, become transparent to God’s will. This becomes a metaphor for the individuation process – the capacity to consciously co-create our own unique destiny, to find a purpose beyond our individual needs in selfless acts of service (see Maslow’s Deficiency needs vs. Being needs). This is the mastery of form that takes us to a place beyond form: the flow state – after much practice and study we enter the performance, start the game, and the music plays us, the dance dances us, the move chooses us in a free, creative act of higher self expression. The raw unrefined ego persona is not the same thing as our individuality, whole and consciously developed. Whether the religious languaging works for you or you prefer conscious self-actualization, the movie gives the feeling throughout that there is something larger at work, something mystical beyond, some Kosmic purpose (Dharma in Sanskrit) lying hidden for each of us just as there is for Donnie.
Existential Crisis – Agnostic, Not Atheist
Donnie painfully feels the weight of his existential cross to bear, the apparent curse of his awareness of what is false in the world, of his knowledge of good and evil and of his ultimate aloneness in death. And for a time, he regresses, denying the world any goodness or meaning as he argues with Gretchen in class about how “there’s no point in crying for a dead rabbit… who never feared death to begin with.” In an important scene with his psychiatrist, Donnie comes to the realization in the midst of his darkest moment that the midpoint between a religious belief in God and nihilistic atheism is agnosticism: the willingness to persevere in the face of an inability to comprehend why there is so much that is wrong in the world, to find meaning in the midst of emptiness. Just as there can be no proof of the existence of God, neither can we deny the possibility that God exists. This leads to the faith and inner meaning, as we described before, that initiates a shift from an adolescent lamenting and self-pity to the heroic adult capacity to sacrifice self for other – the commitment to make things better in whatever way we can, an act of service to humanity for its own sake. Indicative of this shift for Donnie is the scene in the movie where he says to Cherita Chen, “I promise that some day things will get better for you.” Symbolically, he is later seen wearing her earmuffs.
“Dea Ex Machina…Our Savior.”
“And you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” -John 8:32
In the final scene, everything is revealed to have conspired in a deterministic chain of events that leads in the end to Donnie witnessing himself killing Frank, creating another predestination paradox. It seems that, having taken the journey, Donnie ends up right back in the place he would have been if he hadn’t been called by Frank to take the journey! And yet there is subtly a difference… he knows what it all means now. He has become fully conscious of the shadow that was unconscious within him. So, there is no paradox – he travels back in time retaining the consciousness of what was within him. He chooses to die willingly, consciously, knowing that reverting back to his previous unconscious state will result deterministically in the events we saw unfold in the movie. Time travel is then another metaphor for ego death. When we can embrace our shadow we simultaneously revisit and heal the wounds of the past and avert suffering which has not yet arisen – we potentially “see into the future. And that’s a form of time travel,” as Donnie ponders. In bringing presence to healing the past, we die to old ego mechanisms and instead of unconsciously living out the past over and over again, we are reborn to the new possibilities of the eternal Now. We travel back in time to travel beyond time – back to the past to transcend the past. We can wake up to what is going on in any moment. All this is the Dea Ex Machina – “god(dess) from the machine” – originally the device by which gods were suspended over the stage in Greek theatre. It is also a literary device wherein a divine savior appears suddenly to rescue the protagonists or resolve a stuck situation. The Dea Ex Machina in Donnie Darko is the consciousness of our shadow: paradoxically, the consciousness that means our death; the death which means our life – our resurrection or transformation. It is the end of the world, the apocalypse, the revelation: that moment of truth in which we remove the false persona, destroying that which allows us to become conscious of what is within. And symbolically, as the climax of the final scene when Donnie exclaims “Dea Ex Machina…Our Savior” to the bully who sits on top of him with a knife, he also wrestles with him and removes the face mask from his head, revealing his identity. Ultimately for Donnie it is in catching himself in the act of killing Frank that he becomes fully conscious of what has been within himself all along. If we are unwilling or incapable of acknowledging what it is within us that makes us suffer, then that which makes us suffer remains within. What we fail to bring forth destroys us. Kind of funny how we think we’ll die if we look within when that is precisely what sets us free; kind of sad that we seem unable to wake up and are left to suffer unknowingly. This is the mystery of human development. What gives rise to the moment in which we become aware of what here-to-fore has been on automatic pilot, cycling unconsciously, creating only a more deeply ingrained habit with each recurrence? Why for some does suffering beget more suffering, while for others, it prompts their resurrection and rebirth? What prompts us to wake up? Dea Ex Machina – from lies, truth, from death, life, from sleep, consciousness, from determinism, freewill, from the conditioning of the past, the life of the eternal moment, from insentient particles to sentient life, from predictable reactions, a “cellar door” of creative emergence.
People speak of Donnie in the DVD extras and on the internet as a messiah and in the film Gretchen remarks that Donnie Darko sounds like the name of a superhero. And he is Christ-like – he dies to save the girlfriend he will never know and to save Frank and his mother and sister whose jet engine falls into the wormhole, which sets the events in motion in the first place. It is the ultimate act of heroism and self-sacrifice in that no one will ever know it has occurred. And yet, at the end of the film, there is a faint remembrance – a subconscious knowing that the sacrifice has made a difference. Maybe we are all heroes to the extent we have the courage to awaken within. In the agnostic’s view, we can’t know that becoming more conscious of our shadow makes a difference in the world – but we can’t know for sure that it doesn’t. Bringing awareness, healing and compassion to life is an act of sacrifice for its own sake that allows us to change ourselves, and in forgiving ourselves, naturally we forgive others; in ceasing to hate others, naturally we experience the relief of ceasing to hate ourselves. In the familiar Christian koan: "For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will save it.” And so he lies there, back where he started, laughing the laugh of someone who knows a secret but can’t speak it – the laughter of one who has awoken from a dream – a dream in which he’s dying. It’s the great Zen paradox of enlightenment – riding around on an ox looking for an ox, the gateless gate. We seek that which in seeking we lose sight of. We seek what is doing the seeking – the divinity that is the nature of our own higher Self. This is the ultimate “unveiling.” It never went anywhere to begin with and is with us even as we seek – it is both immanent and transcendent at once. We have only to Wake Up to what already is, to realize the Self we already are. With each awakening, we laugh at the fact that’s it’s all been a dream, and laugh too at the fact that what we thought was our greatest fear becomes our greatest relief. Dea Ex Machina… Our Savior. We can step off the cycles of suffering in our life whenever we want; we have only wake up to that which is within us.
Dear Roberta Sparrow,
I have reached the end of your book and... there are so many things that I need to ask you. Sometimes I'm afraid of what you might tell me. Sometimes I'm afraid that you'll tell me that this is not a work of fiction. I can only hope that the answers will come to me in my sleep. I hope that when the world comes to an end, I can breathe a sigh of relief, because there will be so much to look forward to.
References and Resources
Almaas, A.H. (1992) Work on the Superego. Diamond Books.
Caldwell, C. (1996) Getting Our Bodies Back. Shambhala.
Campbell, J. (1973) The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Princeton UP
Campbell, J. (2001) Thou Art That - Transforming Religious Metaphor. New World Library.
Collins, J. (2001) Good to Great. Collins.
Hartranft, C. (2003) The Yoga-Sutra of Patanjali. Shambhala Classics.
Katie, B. (2003) Loving What Is. Three Rivers Press.
Mabry, J. (2007) The Way of Thomas. O Books.
Merton, T. (2004) The Way of Chuang Tzu. Shambhala.
Neihardt, J. (2004) Black Elk Speaks. Bison Books.
Reps, P. (1994) Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. Shambhala.
Riso, D. & Hudson, R. (1999) The Wisdom of the Enneagram. Bantam Books.
Internet Resources
Abraham Maslow. Received from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Maslow on March
16th, 2008
Barry, A. (2008) Levels of the Shadow. Received from http://www.shadowwork.com/levels.html on March 13th, 2008.
Dea ex machina Received from http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_does_dea_ex_machina_mean on March 6th, 2008
Deus ex machina Received from http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=deus+ex+machina on March 6th, 2008
Dowling, P. (2003) Hsin Hsin Ming. Received from
http://home.att.net/~paul.dowling/archive/zen/hsin.htm on March 14th, 2008.
Gospel of Mark 8:34. Received from http://www.rc.net/wcc/readings/mark8v34.htm
C.G. Jung Quotes. The Shadow. Received from http://psikoloji.fisek.com.tr/jung/shadow.htm
Kelly, R. (2000) Donnie Darko. Script received from
http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Donnie-Darko.html on February 20th, 2008.
Levy, P. (2005) Christ Would Not Support Bush. Received from
http://www.awakeninthedream.com/bushchrist.html on March 16th, 2008.
Nietzsche Quotes. Received from http://thenietzschechannel.fws1.com/popular.htm on March 13th, 2008.
Pettifor, E. (1995) Major Archetypes and the Process of Individuation. Received from
http://pandc.ca/?cat=car_jung&page=major_archetypes_and_individuation on March 15th, 2008.
Addendum A: “Mad World” by Gary Jules (originally Tears for Fears)
All around me are familiar faces
Worn out places worn out faces
Bright and early for their daily races
Going nowhere, going nowhere
Their tears are filling up their glasses
No expression, no expression
Hide my head I want to drown my sorrow
No tomorrow, no tomorrow
And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you
I find it hard to take
When people run in circles it’s a very, very
Mad World
Children waiting for the day they feel good
Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday
And I feel the way that every child should
Sit and listen, sit and listen
Went to school and I was very nervous
No one knew me, no one knew me
Hello teacher tell me what’s my lesson
Look right through me, look right through me
And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you
I find it hard to take
When people run in circles it’s a very, very
Mad World
Mad World
Enlarging your world
Mad World
Addendum B: Wikipedia Plot Summary
The story takes place in 1988 in the town of Middlesex, Virginia, during the time of the United States presidential election. Donnie Darko is an intelligent though emotionally troubled teenager who sleepwalks, and is in the medical care of a psychiatrist with whom he discusses his deepest thoughts. One night, a mysterious jet engine from a commercial aircraft falls into Donnie's bedroom; he avoids death by obeying a voice in his head causing him to sleepwalk outside from his room, corrupting space and time. The voice is that of Frank, an (arguably) imaginary friend dressed in a ghastly man-sized rabbit/skull costume. At midnight on October 2nd, Frank prophesizes to Donnie that the end of the world will occur in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds.
Frank instructs Donnie to perform further acts, provoking a certain chain of events allowing the finale to occur: he floods his high school, giving him the opportunity to court a new classmate and potential love Gretchen Ross; he pursues time travel, leading to a conversation with his science teacher, who gives him the book The Philosophy of Time Travel, by Roberta Sparrow, an aged town resident known as "Grandma Death" among the neighborhood youth.
Donnie begins seeing ripples in space-time, depicted as a water-like tentacle flowing out from people's chests, brought on by the corruption of the current timeline. The tentacles indicate where the person will travel in the near future (the next thirty seconds or so): he sees one tentacle snake into the room, followed by his younger sister skipping through the room. These singularities are described in Roberta Sparrow's book. Another tentacle leads Donnie to a pistol in his parents' closet, which he takes and keeps.
He and Gretchen go to the cinema to watch a double feature, The Evil Dead and The Last Temptation of Christ, she falls asleep, Frank appears and shows him a wormhole portal in the cinema screen, where Frank reveals himself as a teenager of the same age as Donnie, with a wound in his right eye. Frank incites Donnie to burn down the house of a motivational speaker he ridiculed at a school function, thereby exposing a secret "kiddie porn dungeon". The motivational speaker's arrest begins a chain of events that results in Donnie's mother chaperoning his younger sister and her dance group on a flight to the talent hunt program Star Search in Los Angeles, as the coach is a passionate supporter of Cunningham and wants to defend him in court. This gets Donnie's mother out of the house so Donnie and his sister, Elizabeth can do what they want.
On the night of October 29th, with Donnie's parents out of town, Donnie and Elizabeth have a party to celebrate her being accepted to Harvard. Gretchen turns up scared, because her mother has disappeared and she is worried her stepfather, who had stabbed her mother a few years back, has come back to finish the job. Donnie and Gretchen go up to his mother's room to have sex. While Donnie and Gretchen are having sex, Elizabeth's boyfriend, Frank disappears. Donnie and Gretchen and two other friends go for advice from Roberta Sparrow when they are ambushed by two school bullies, who happen to be robbing the house that night. In the struggle, Donnie is held down with a knife to his neck by one of the bullies. The bully then says: "Why the fuck are you here?" Donnie then proclaims "Deus ex Machina" (literally "god out of a machine"). The bully is confused, and says: "What the fuck did you just say?" Donnie then simply says: "Our Saviour". Gretchen; having been pushed to the ground by a burglar, is run over and killed by a car swerving to miss "Grandma Death", who is (as usual) checking the mailbox (and is holding Donnie’s letter to her). The bullies flee; (it then is past midnight, so it is October 30th). The car that killed Gretchen stops, and Donnie sees the driver. After seeing that the driver is Elizabeth's boyfriend Frank in a Halloween rabbit costume, Donnie shoots him in the eye, killing him; (earlier foreshadowed when Donnie talked to Frank in his bathroom and he raised a knife, making stabbing motions to the right eye of Frank's visage as well as during the scene in the movie theater when Frank removes his mask to reveal a gaping wound in his right eye).
Donnie carries Gretchen's body home where he places it in a car. He spots a wormhole portal opening directly over his home and he drives to a hillside overlooking Middlesex, while police vehicles come screeching to a halt in front of his home. From the hilltop he can see in the distance the portal in the shape of a tornado with an airplane flying directly over it. Donnie's mother and sister experience turbulence on their return flight home; one of the airplane's jet engines detaches and falls. The engine travels through the time portal to 28 days earlier, crashes into Donnie's bedroom, causing a time travel predestination paradox; on that occasion, Donnie chooses to stay in bed (arguably to save the girlfriend he will never meet, along with his mother and sister who would've died due to the missing engine on their plane).
The story ends on the morning after the original jet engine accident. Donnie is dead and his body is removed from the house as his family mourns. As all the people upon whom Donnie's actions had an impact (or rather, would have had an impact upon) sit stunned, Frank, with a prototype bunny Halloween mask, subconsciously touches his right eye. Gretchen is alive and rides by on her bicycle. Never having met Donnie, she talks with a neighborhood child about the sad accident. She waves to Donnie's mother; there is a sense of recognition between them.
Addendum C: The Philosophy of Time Travel Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Dreams
When the Manipulated awakens from their Journey into the Tangent Universe, they are often haunted by the experience in their dreams. Many of them will not remember. ....
Those who do remember the Journey are often over-come with profound remorse for the regretful actions buried within their Dreams, the only physical evidence buried within the Artifact itself, all that remains from the lost world.
Ancient myth tells us of the Mayan Warrior killed by an Arrowhead that had fallen from a cliff, where there was no Army, no enemy to be found.
We are told of the Medieval Knight mysteriously impaled by the sword he had not yet built.
We are told that these things occur for a reason.
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