Donnie Darko

In this essay I’m going to tell about the story with a summery and after that i’ll tell about the settings in the story. Settings = time, place, cultural enviroment, social enviroment, historical enviroment and atmosphere. The purpose with this description is that it will give other an insight into this story and a good analysis.
In our english lessons we saw a movie called ’’Donnie Darko.’’ It was a really good movie.

Time:
The storys time is in 1988 during the elections to America's new president. I can’t say precisely if the is in the real world or in an imaginary world, because he’s paranoid schizophrenic. So he sees things who aren’t real. Like a big bunny named Frank and some ’’ghost-snakes’’ coming aout of people and lead him somewhere.

Place:
The story takes place in Middlesex, Virginia where he lives with his family. Also at his school where he gets a book from one of the teachers, and when he looks at the writers name he founds out that it’s his grandmother who has written the book about ’’time travel.’’
At the golf curse, where he writes ’’28064212’’ down at his arm.
In the cinema he sees Fransk talk to him and after that he walks home to Jim Cunningham's house and stars a fire in his living room. After the fire the police founds a secret room with many picture of small, naked kids.
The last time at the psychologist, when he tells her about Frank and the number he wrote down at his arm.

Atmosphere:
The 2. October 1988 (the fall)

Cultural Environment:
His family is opper-middleclass. They go at a High School where you have to wear a school uniform.

Social Environment:
The focus in ‘’Donnie Darko’’ is on youth problems. The teenagers/young people seem to have a poor life vision, no expectations, little faith and are very angry in the most situations and violent.

Themes:
Friendships
Love
Young, youth and identity
Fear
I’m going to elaborate the theme ’’fear’’ because I think that ’’fear’’ and ’’young, youth and identity’’ is the biggest themes in the movie/story. There is so much fear in the story, examples:

When he’s at the golf curse he’s sleepwalking he writes 28064212 down at his arm. It stands for 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds. It’s a countdown to the end of the world.

When he sees things who aren’t real. Like Frank, the big bunny and the wierd silver-ghost-snakes coming out of his family members. When they follow him to his parents room where he founds a gun.

Donnie and his girlfriend, Gretchen is in the cinema. Gretchen falls a sleep and suddenly Frank shows up in the movie. He begins to talk with Donnie and get him to leave the cinema to burn a ’’port to heaven.’’ That ’’port’’ is at Jim Cunningham’s house behind a big picture, after the fire Donnie is going back to the cinema, like nothing happened. Behind the ’’port’’ the police founds a lot of pictures by small, naked kids.

When Donnie and his older sister Elizabeth is having a Haloween-party, Donnies girlfriend, Gretchen shows up. Her mother is gone and she thinks her stepfather will killd her mother.

When Donnie and Gretchen is at Roberta Sparrows house some bad boys shows up and beats them, suddenly there’s a car in the driveway and the bad boys run away, but one of them pushes Gretchen so she falls down in front of the car and it’s driving over her so she dies. Donnie sees Frank, the big bunny, sits in the front seat and drive the car. He takes his parents gun and shoot him in the eye.

I havn’t seen the first 15 – 20 minutes of the movie. But Maria gave me a summery, so I’d tried.