Donnie Darko - Parapolitical message hidden in movie?

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I found this

Postby Mentalgongfu » Wed May 17, 2006 2:21 am

while searching for something or other a while back, and decided to post it.<br><br>You know? For fun?<br><br>Maybe Frank is trying to reach you. <br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr><br>(\__/)<br>(='.'=)<br>(")_(")<br><br>This is Bunny. Put him in your signature and help<br>him on his way to world domination.<br><hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br>I guess the thing that always got me about Donnie Darko was the time travel meme. Roberta Sparrow's book and Donnie's trip into the vortex with his dead girlfriend at the end are never fully explained - even after exploring the website, the storyline seems open to interpretation, while there are some clear descriptions of theories related to time travel. <br><br>I could say the same for 12 Monkeys, another of my favorites. <br><br>Star Trek TNG had some time travel episodes, and Quantum Leap was popular in the same era. <br><br>Come to think of it, there was a futuristic drama show on Fox which appeared around the same time as X-Files and Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, which dealt with time-traveling cops. <br><br>I'm not generally inclined to follow the reasoning that ALL this popular media portraying weirdness like time travel (or anything else) is orchestrated, but I am not so naive to think there is NO manipulation of news and media as a means of "population control."<br><br>I am quite curious about how the concept of time travel is spread and interpreted in various contexts. <br><br>I think Donnie Darko, with its idea of the tangent universe, and 12 Monkeys, with its own circular interpretation of time, are a good starting point for exploration.<br><br>(and how noteworthy, and probably sad, it is to realize I am able to divide segments of my memory according to what TV shows I was watching at the time) <p></p><i></i>
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Re: I found this

Postby thoughtographer » Wed May 17, 2006 2:24 am

You know, I really like the way you think sometimes. <p><!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>"A crooked stick will cast a crooked shadow."</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--></p><i></i>
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...

Postby Ted the dog » Wed May 17, 2006 12:41 pm

good find on that cartogram image! <p></p><i></i>
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Re: ...

Postby dude h homeslice ix » Wed May 17, 2006 1:18 pm

all im sayin is: the dog statue at the school was definately moloch. <p></p><i></i>
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Re: ...

Postby thoughtographer » Wed May 17, 2006 1:50 pm

Yeah, I came across that cartogram when Southland Tales first came up, but I must have actually done some work(!) instead of posting it.<br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>all im sayin is: the dog statue at the school was definately moloch.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br>It's funny that you would be so conclusive and final when comparing vague, indistinct symbolism to something which also lacks distinct meaning. Yes, I suppose "The Mongrel" could be "Moloch", but then again so could any mascot -- could be Baal, too.<br><br><!--EZCODE IMAGE START--><img src="http://www.jmu.edu/photography/university/Campus2/photofeatures/Dog%20Statue/H17927O_8.18.05_014.jpg" style="border:0;height:234;width:328;"/><!--EZCODE IMAGE END--><br>From: <!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://www.jmu.edu/photography/university/Campus2/photofeatures/photofeatures.html">www.jmu.edu/</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--> <p><!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>"A crooked stick will cast a crooked shadow."</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--></p><i></i>
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Re: ...

Postby dude h homeslice ix » Wed May 17, 2006 3:04 pm

shouldnt have said "definately." however, you have likely seen those old depictions of the dog statue where the kids are thrown.<br><br>now its the main statue at the school...ill shut up too. <p></p><i></i>
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Re: ...

Postby thoughtographer » Wed May 17, 2006 3:10 pm

No, don't shut up. I think you brought up a valid point of discussion, since we're all talking about vague impressions and interpretations here. I meant "funny", like "peculiar" -- it made me think. <p><!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>"A crooked stick will cast a crooked shadow."</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--></p><i></i>
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Too much in this film, especially the title.

Postby Hugh Manatee Wins » Sun Nov 04, 2007 5:47 am

Finding someone important named Darko Suvin from McGill University brought me back to this year and a half-old thread.

I've examined one hell of a lot of movies in the last 18 months and found that most if not all mainstream megaplex movies are psy-ops, both social engineering/recruiting and counterpropaganda. Putting the main elements of that which TPTB want hidden into a fictional context desensitizes the brain to those elements should the item to be hidden be found later.

There's too much deep mind control scandal in this movie to be just the work of a clever 24 year-old. And now he's going to be doing not just the 'Southworld' thing but a big WWII picture. Big WWII pictures are recruiting anchors and even John Belushi was suckered into doing '1941.' We just had to endure Ken Burns' 'The War.'

I think Richard Kelly was assisted with his 'Donnie Darko' script to launch him as an 'independent' for later use in The Big Time. Movies with his name on it are now targeting a conspiracy culture-oriented demographic and fictionalization of reality is well under way and being injected into American youth with the painless needle of craftsmanship.

Starting with the name 'Darko.'

Ever heard of...
Darko Ronald Suvin (born July, 19, 1930) is a Yugoslav-born academic and critic, who became a Professor at McGill University in Montreal — now emeritus. He was born in Zagreb, capital of Croatia, and after teaching at the department for comparative literature at Zagreb University, moved to Canada in 1968. He is best known for several major works of criticism and literary history devoted to science fiction.

He was editor of Science-Fiction Studies (later respelled as Science Fiction Studies) from 1973 to 1980. After his retirement from McGill in 1999, he lives in Lucca, Italy.
.....
H. G. Wells and Modern Science Fiction (1977) — edited by Darko Suvin, with Robert M. Philmus
.....
Victorian Science Fiction in the UK: The Discourses of Knowledge and Power (1983)
.....
US Science Fiction and War/Militarism (Fictions, Studi sulla narrativita, Anno III, Pisa 2004, issue 3: 1-166) - guest editor, with Salvatore Proietti, special issue in English
...etc. etc.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_science_fiction
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls, contains an extensive discussion of the problem of definition, under the heading "Definitions of SF". The authors regard Darko Suvin's definition as having been most useful in catalysing academic debate, though they consider disagreements to be inevitable as science fiction is not homogeneous. Suvin's cited definition, dating from 1972, is: "a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment."[2] The authors of the Encyclopedia article - Brian Stableford, Clute, and Nicholls - explain that, by "cognition", Suvin refers to the seeking of rational understanding, while his concept of estrangement is similar to the idea of alienation developed by Bertolt Brecht, that is, a means of making the subject matter recognizable while also seeming unfamiliar.


Ahhh. "...a means of making the subject matter recognizable while also seeming unfamiliar."

THAT's precisely what decoy movies and keyword hijacking do:
>deprive coherent context to the several main components of a narrative dangerous to TPTB.

This is done through dispersion of keywords into other narratives, a semantic dismemberment where the components are still recognizable and in a vaguely similiar context...which serves to desensitize the brain to those components IF found in their original connected context...due to pre-biased brain perceptions that hinder being able to recognize the wholistic and thus coherent original narrative that TPTB want suppressed.

And that's the REAL Darko Suvin.
He writes about the relationship between power, culture, cognition, and narrative.
This is the perview of...psy-ops. And THAT's why we were given 'Donnie Darko.'


Darko Suvin wrote something about Disney (CIA for Kidz!) that matches something in Kelly's 'Donnie Darko.'

From-
Science Fiction Studies
#95 = Volume 32, Part 1 = March 2005
in a book review of Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, eds.
Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination

http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/review_essays/murphy95.htm
The political relationship between 9/11 and market forces reveals the second point of departure for Dark Horizons: the corporate commodification of Utopia. The key essay exploring this commodification is Darko Suvin’s “Theses on Dystopia 2001,” wherein he argues that we are living “morally in an almost complete dystopia—dystopian because anti-utopian—and materially (economically) on the razor’s edge of collapse, distributive and collective” (187). [b]This razor’s edge is psychologically epitomized by Disneyfication, a strategy of

"infantilization of adults. Its images function as an infantile “security blanket,” producing constantly repeated demand to match the constantly recycled offer. The infantilization entails a double rejection. First, it rejects any intervention into the real world that would make the pursuit of happiness collectively attainable: it is a debilitating daydream that appeals to the same mechanism as empathizing performances and publicity. Second and obversely, it rejects any reality construction of one’s desire, however shallow or destructive.Wedded to consumer dynamics of an ever expanding market, Disneyland remains deeply inimical to knowledge
." ([/b]194; italics in original)2


So there is a guy named Darko indicting Disney for infantalizing us and hiding things.
Disney is CIA for Kidz.

Let's see what Richard Kelly has in this department for 'Donnie Darko'--
http://www.culturewars.org.uk/2003-01/darko.htm
At school he grills teachers on the possibility of escaping God’s path through black holes in the universe, and creates IMG’s with Gretchen – Infant Memory Glasses, which you put on your child to make sure that their images and memories of the world are of beautiful rather than tragic things.


"Beautiful rather than tragic." Sounds just like what CIA-Disney would tell us, ay?

Darko Suvin, being an emigre intellectual, writes about how power uses media to suppress us. Now we can see why this real Darko might be occluded by the fictional one.
He is an expert in the trauma of crossing boundaries, literal and figurative.

http://newleftreview.org/A2546
DARKO SUVIN
DISPLACED PERSONS

To be displaced from one’s country of origin and upbringing—the experience of over 175 million people in the world, on a conservative estimate—is a wrench perhaps comparable in impact to that of war, long-term hunger or imprisonment. [1] It has similar roots to these in the odium theologicum of modern power-holders, although displacement is of course a relatively milder variant. In this sense, too, it is quite unmetaphorical. Instead of a person creatively carrying over (meta phorein) meanings, across accepted borders of sense, a person is here bodily pushed over borders by forces beyond his or her control. But all our lives are shot through with ways of apprehending ourselves and others (what is a border? and a person?), so that right at the outset a secondary, metaphoric usage of displacement needs to be brought into play: the sense of feeling alien and out of place, a widespread unease sometimes deepening into despair, that seems so intrinsic to the experience of modernity. Marx, of course, found the root of alienation in the labour process. The acute critic of the first modern mass democracy, Thoreau, postulated that most people live lives of quiet desperation, but the sentiment is most often articulated by and about intellectuals, from Nietzsche to Sartre to Said.

But this depends on how we define intellectuals. Sociologically, they have been characterized as those middle-class people, largely university graduates, who ‘produce, distribute and preserve distinct forms of consciousness’—images, stories, concepts. [2] In another sense, however, anybody is a potential intellectual insofar as she or he attempts to articulate meanings and make sense of the forces shaping our lives, as Brecht and Gramsci put it, combining a lived concern for knowledge and for freedom. For the present purpose I would differentiate between two poles, one of critical intellectuals and the other what Debray has called reproductive or distributive intellectuals: the engineers of material and human resources; admen and design professionals; the new bishops and cardinals of the media clerisy; most lawyers—in other words, the ‘organic’ mercenaries, for whom postmodern cynicism dispenses with the need for alibis. Most distributive intellectuals work to reproduce, at one level or another, the means of psychophysical repression. The critical intellectuals, those who produce new forms of consciousness and subconsciousness, are most likely to be alienated from today’s regimes, to feel themselves what used to be called ‘inner émigrés’ or undeclared exiles.

Yet this is too ambiguous a category to be used at the outset of an investigation into ‘actually existing’ displacement. The metaphor, ‘all modern thinkers are exiles’, might tend rather to conceal the brute fact of bodies not only psychically but physically in exile, and the new ways of feeling, thinking, and living that this brings; to elide the experience of working and downtrodden people. The metaphor is of Christian origin, evoking the expulsion from Eden; and the quasi-Christian insistence on the alienation of the post-lapsarian soul seems to obscure ‘what is truly horrendous: that exile is irremediably secular and unbearably historical; that it is produced by human beings for other human beings’. [3] I want therefore to hold the metaphor in abeyance; yet also to keep it in mind for later use, because it wonderfully illuminates, first, some central facets of the phenomenology or inner sense of exile, of the existential alienation or opposition most displaced persons feel toward where they were displaced from and displaced to; and second, some of the cognitive and creative uses to which displacement can be put.


Woa.
"Most distributive intellectuals work to reproduce, at one level or another, the means of psychophysical repression."

Now THIS is dangerous to power.
Because that's what is used to control us, language.

And 26 year-old Richard Kelly says he wrote 'Donnie Darko' in a few weeks.
I think he's a conduit for a dense web of keyword hijackings and meme decoys to hide, not expose, starting with this Darko Suvin eclipsed by Kelly's title and which is now almost a figure of speech in some circles.

'Donnie Darko' is filled with allusions to paedophelia and ritual abuse, like the Johnny Gosch kidnapping, the McMartin pre-school scandal, and the Franklin Cover-up.

Folks have mentioned lots in this thread so at the risk of duplicating efforts while I finish catching up....

88 Reasons To Watch Donnie Darko Again
written by: Daniel Hernandez

web.mit.edu/djh/Public/do...easons.txt

Some of them:
.....
43. [motif]
The jet engine has a spiral painted on it. These are painted to tell if the engine is spinning. The Fibonnaci spiral is based on the mating patterns of rabbits.


I think this is allusion is to the homonym for...Paul Bonacci.

48. [politics]
The first line in the movie is "I'm voting for Dukakis."


Another homonym, do-cock-his.

53. [politics]
When Jim Cunningham is arrested, his employee Linda Connie claims that he is the victim of "a vast conspiracy,"


"Jim...Connie"...maybe more homonym...Theresa Duncan wrote before she died about Jim Cownie's involvement with activities related to the Franklin Cover-up.

66. [terrorism]
The jet engine that falls in Donnie's bedroom tears through the American flag he has on his ceiling.


An investigator of the Franklin Cover-up died in a small plane crash and this doomed boys who were witnesses to being killed later.
(1988 was also the year of PanAm 103 or the Lockerbie bombing.)

85. [mythology]
The Pontiac Trans Am vehicle in the film has a phoenix painted on the hood. The phoenix is an Egyptian mythological bird that consumes itself by fire and resurrects from the dead.


Perhaps River Phoenix.

Full grown man wearing a bunny suit.


McMartin pre-school scandal where adults in costume molested kids in tunnels under the school.

Someone upthread wrote-
"the name Roberta Sparrow always struck me as a name that means or signifies something, but I don't know what."


How about the male name implied? Cock Robin?

Someone upthread wrote-
When the police make all the English students write "they made me do it" on the chalk board, the scene starts with them calling a "Sam Bylan" or some such. The camera pans to Donnie. They call Donnie's name, and he goes up to write next to line #8. Afterwards, there is a shot of the officer's clipboard.


The False Memory Syndrome Foundation and other RA deniers have claimed that abused kids were merely coerced into accusing their abusers.

Someone upthread wrote-
Has anyone pondered the fact that because Donnie is successful in going back in time and dieing, he is now not in a position to uncover Jim Cunningham’s pedo ring? So, not everything is “solved” by his sacrifice.


"Going back in time..." as in, hypnotic regression.

Quote:Donnie: [reading poem in class] A storm is coming, Frank says / A storm that will swallow the children / And I will deliver them from the kingdom of pain / I will deliver the children back the their doorsteps / And send the monsters back to the underground / I'll send them back to a place where no-one else can see them / Except for me / Because I am Donnie Darko.


McMartin pre-school scandal, underground tunnels. Again.

The burned down house revealing a child porn basement alludes to this, too.

When the keywords or plot components of a scandal are fictionalized and out of context, it helps to pre-bias the brain away from the reality. So this serves to cover up the reality, not nudge the ignorant towards it.
CIA runs mainstream media since WWII:
news rooms, movies/TV, publishing
...
Disney is CIA for kidz!
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Postby FourthBase » Mon Nov 05, 2007 12:59 pm

And 26 year-old Richard Kelly says he wrote 'Donnie Darko' in a few weeks.
I think he's a conduit for a dense web of keyword hijackings and meme decoys to hide, not expose, starting with this Darko Suvin eclipsed by Kelly's title and which is now almost a figure of speech in some circles.


And that's your fundamentally unsound assumption:
If there's any overlap, the goal is always hiding/discrediting, not exposing.

As for eclipsing Darko Suvin...are you serious? How can something unknown to 99.9999999999999999999% of the world be "eclipsed"? I'm sure you'll say it was "preclipsed", planted to later discredit Suvin in case anyone ever encountered his work. But the vast majority of the very few people like yourself who would ever encounter his work = probably radical enough to totally fucking dig his work regardless and whatever faint glimmer of discrediting overlap that might reside in that person's fucking subconscious would be utterly impotent.

Donnie Darko' is filled with allusions to paedophelia and ritual abuse, like the Johnny Gosch kidnapping, the McMartin pre-school scandal, and the Franklin Cover-up.


I don't see how Donnie Darko would act as a discrediting force the same way the notoriously "kooky" X-Files or even a dumb romantic comedy would. Donnie Darko has served to OPEN young minds to real life possibilities of the bizarre. There are few people in the world who despise the very notion of fiction like I do, but not even I would say that all fiction by the mere fact of being fictional discredits whatever subjects it addresses.

And really, Hugh, your examples above near the end of your post are good candidates for the most asinine examples you've ever posted. I mean, yeah, of course the Swayze thing is supposed to resonate with the McMartin case...but how in the fuck is that BAD for the credibility of the McMartin case among the demographic of people who have attentively watched Donnie Darko??????

When the keywords or plot components of a scandal are fictionalized and out of context, it helps to pre-bias the brain away from the reality. So this serves to cover up the reality, not nudge the ignorant towards it.


If there was some amazing critic that nobody had ever heard of, and I wrote a movie and named one of the heroes after him...you'd say I was trying to cover up his existence, and that's AN ABSOLUTELY MIND-BLOWINGLY STUPID ASSUMPTION HUGH. Do you truly not realize how stupid an assumption that is?
“Joy is a current of energy in your body, like chlorophyll or sunlight,
that fills you up and makes you naturally want to do your best.” - Bill Russell
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Postby Pele'sDaughter » Wed May 13, 2009 7:07 pm

In this trippy sequel to Donnie Darko, Donnie's younger sister, Samantha (Daveigh Chase), sets out for Hollywood, only to become stranded in a remote town where she begins to have visions concerning the end of the world. Now she and best friend Corey (Briana Evigan) must unravel the mystery -- and confront their own demons -- before the world is doomed. Chris Fisher directs this genre-bending thriller that also stars Jackson Rathbone.


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1231277/
Don't believe anything they say.
And at the same time,
Don't believe that they say anything without a reason.
---Immanuel Kant
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