“You can’t lump things into two categories. Things aren’t that simple.”
-Donnie Darko

Donnie Darko, a schizophrenic boy whose reasons for flooding schools and burning houses evade explanation unless the audience cares enough to break into his world to sit with him forever in that bleak therapy room in a schizophrenic movie endlessly interpretable by viewers that helplessly read themselves into symbols so complex that one easily picks and chooses and convinces oneself that they understand why the six-foot rabbit in the movie theater has a bloody eye, that creepy hallucination of a Being who blurs a “troubled” child’s demarcations of fiction and nonfiction as a windy storm outside the window blows the trees of a world projected on a white wall with a brightness that makes real darkness ever darker for a viewer made blind to the true nature of a schizophrenic life scorned by bad teachers and mediated by a therapist who tells him about the world and the world about him for she knows his kind and convinces those closest to him that she is closer and will tell the worried parents tearfully embraced on her red couch everything about their son who thinks too much about girls and who asks a girl named Gretchen Ross whether she will go with him because that’s the way they say it around here where words are conveyed with absolute intention and finally find meaning despite their strange ring in a new girl who sits at the desk next to his in class and thinks it’s a compliment to call him weird, who will fall in love with him not for who he is but that he is and gracefully steal the spotlight in a deceivingly simple show about a protagonist who thinks that he is differently different while Others are only different and rabbits are only cute and horny, lovingly opposed by a partner who believes difference is a single word that cannot be defined by a film played in a class taught by the only good teacher who was fired for daring to assert that what should be taught to a child depends on the child and finds her counterpart in the only other good teacher who keeps his job by telling a gifted student that he cannot teach him everything, two teachers together constituting the living manipulated for a madman that needs a dead manipulated to ride a wormhole back home whom he finds in a beautiful girl who will leave him here to come back in another reality and meet the eyes of a mother grieving the tragically happy death of a happily tragic son in a cathartic scene wandered into by a neighborhood girl on a sidewalk who had gone with him in another life and solemnly raises her hand to signal the only sign a Being can perfectly signal, that I am here with you, and when you ask me whether I will go with you I can only say yes because in the end a girl is a heroine who never listens to the bad teachers or the incompetent therapists because she knows that knowledge about Being-with-Others is not taught but forgotten and in the end she will cry like a baby over the death of a stranger she recognizes and he will not have died alone.