Originally Posted by
Jean
... I understand that people appreciate something else about that film, and this something is what I totally fail to see
Existential despair? Eh, that is, by my theory, more like a type of angsty repressed self-hatred. Many people, young people, at least in this country, carry a lot of free-floating anxiety. Particularly children of the middle class whose parents outwardly seem models of virtue and who are provided with easy material abundance yet loaded with intense pressure to maintain status and gradually uncovering the deprivation in the world from which they've been sheltered. This produces an urge to reject their own privilege, coupled with a fear of the consequences. It's a bit of a relief to identify with the taboo feelings in
Donnie Darko -- that at least suggests that you're not the only one. But of course this is all quite negative and rather unproductive; not much to which genuine romantics and activist idealists can relate at all.