The following is a bit rambling. I chose not to fix it.
I actually liked this movie. I didn’t want to watch it, since I had the vague sense he wound up shooting up his school–and certainly they played with that fear in the movie, with him carrying the axe and playing with the slasher movie knife and then the gun–but was pleasantly surprised.
If I understood it correctly, the plane engine that killed him came from a future which he was able to prevent with his sacrifice, making it a bit like Tarkovsky’s film The Sacrifice. His “schizophrenia” was heightened awareness. This is the view, in my understanding, of many traditional cultures. Most of their shamans would be medicated and hospitalized in our own culture.
And I watched this since I had read it is a “cult” film. Like most cult films I think it is popular since it is very different. It doesn’t follow the rules of most films. I had no idea where any of that was going.
And Donnie, of course, is emblematic of many people who don’t fit in in one way or another. I myself saw plenty of shrinks in my teens and early twenties. That was a familiar scene to me, although I have found I am a very poor hypnotic candidate. You need a little trust somewhere to relax enough to put yourself in someone else’s control. I don’t have that trust. I suppose my parents were both trying in their own ways to hypnotize me to overlook and even embrace their patent pathologies, and I developed the ability to resist it continually.
That is perhaps why it is relatively easy for me to look at something that is red, that everyone else is calling green, and call it red. I have practice in asserting my own reality in the midst of those calling me crazy.
My niece used to say “if you’re not weird you’re boring”, and that fits with all this.
Here is what I will assert: we might perhaps invert the emotional wealth of what I have decided to start calling the Poor World with the physical wealth of the Rich World. Their kids, playing in garbage strewn streets with human feces on them, feel loved, valued and understood. They don’t need to be weird to stand out from a lonely crowd. They just need to be themselves.
And of course our own young, playing in their rooms on video games with the door closed, often feel disconnected, alone, ununderstood, and sad. And they become adults. And the adults continue all this. They don’t like it, but they don’t know what the alternative is, and most of them are afraid of sticking out. This is where the permission to be weird helps, but is far from offering a coherent, much less a comprehensive, answer. But it’s a start. If you are afraid of being different, then you have to face that fear, or you will never be different; and if you are never different, you are never going to be who you were born to be. You have sold your birthright cheaply.
Me, I’ve reached an age when most saner folks are starting to think about retirement. It’s still over the hill, but it’s not far. I don’t have a house, I don’t have a retirement account, I don’t have shit. I’m a terrible failure by that metric. All you have to do is put two beans in the pot every time you walk by, and start when you are 18, and by my age you have many many pots full. Simple, right?
But for me, just LIVING to this age has been the miracle. The rest is added.
And all of this is something. All of this is stuff I won’t leave behind when I leave this world. It will come with me.
And I hope I am not too irrational when I hope this blog does others good too. That is the intent. I dislove the word, because it usually means someone is lying to you, but this really is an offering that comes from a place of love and caring.
I want to see the world succeed. I haven’t been able to figure out how best to help that happen, but I continue to try daily.