??????????donnie darko???????????????

Question

can somebody please explain donnie darko 2 me. whats happens at the end (him dying), it doesn't make sense to me. And who is Frank?? cheers!

Answer 1

Donnie is caught in a kind of time warp. Frank is a guy who will eventually be responsible for Donnie's girlfriend's death if Donnie doesn't stop him. Changing time like this eventually leads to Donnie's death when the airplane part crashes into his bedroom and kills him. Ultimately, his sacrifice is ironic because, due to his sacrifice, he never actually meets her. Catch it on IFC tonight by any chance?

Answer 2

Plot and/or ending details follow:

The film is set in 1988, in fictional Middlesex, Virginia during the 1988 presidential election campaign, however Middlesex is not to be confused with the real Middlesex County, Virginia. The viewer is introduced in the beginning to the Darko family, especially their emotionally troubled son, Donnie. Numerous scenes throughout the film show Donnie speaking to his therapist, to whom he relates most of the story of the film. Donnie is awoken from his sleep by a disembodied voice on the night of October 2 and led out of his house, where he is then confronted by a demonic man-sized rabbit named Frank. Frank tells him that the world will end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds. Donnie wakes up the next morning on a golf course and sees 28:06:42:12 written on his arm. He returns home to discover that a jet engine has inexplicably fallen onto his house, crushing his bedroom.

The next day Donnie goes to his private school. His English class is in the middle of a discussion on Graham Greene's short story "The Destructors" when a new girl, Gretchen, walks in late and asks where she should sit. Donnie's English teacher Ms. Pomeroy provocatively instructs Gretchen to "sit next to the boy you think is the cutest." After a few moments, Gretchen eyes Donnie and the teacher tells the girl sitting next to him to move. Later in the day, Donnie attends a gym class where he participates in an exercise in which he is asked to assign the motivation behind a given situation to either "fear" or "love." But Donnie refuses, saying that the entire spectrum of emotions is far more complex than those two simple extremes. His teacher takes him to the headmaster after he tells her to "Forcefully insert the Lifeline exercise card into [her] anus!" (It is unknown if that is exactly what he said, it is most likely that he said "Shove it up [her] ***", as his sister says when talking on the phone.) Donnie is suspended from after-school activities for six months.

That night, Frank wakes up Donnie again and tells him to flood the school. Donnie obeys, breaking the school's water main with an axe. While waiting for the school bus with his friends the next morning, Donnie hears that school has been cancelled because of the flood. Meanwhile, the police and school officials are baffled because aside from the flooding, the solid-bronze school mascot, the mongrel, has an axe stuck into its head and the phrase "they made me do it" has been spray-painted on the pavement. According to detectives, the locker rooms have also been trashed and smeared with feces (which, according to a young schoolgirl talking with Donnie's sister, are baby mice). On his way home Donnie spots Gretchen being harassed by two school bullies, and she asks Donnie to walk her home. Donnie tells her he is happy that school was cancelled — for otherwise they would not have had a chance to talk — and then awkwardly asks her to "go" with him. She agrees.

Some time later, Frank asks Donnie if he believes in time travel. Donnie then questions his science teacher Dr. Monitoff about the idea, and the teacher gives him The Philosophy of Time Travel, a book written by Roberta Sparrow, the 101-year-old woman nicknamed "Grandma Death" who lives alone in a decrepit house on the edge of town and spends all her time checking her mailbox and standing in the middle of the street.

Later, Donnie finds the wallet of one Jim Cunningham on the sidewalk. Cunningham is a successful motivational speaker whose methods Donnie had loudly denounced in front of a microphone at a school assembly. Donnie and Gretchen then go on a date to a movie theater; Gretchen falls asleep in the empty theater and Frank appears. He and Donnie have a dialogue about why Frank wears the bunny-suit, to which Frank replies, "Why do you wear that stupid man-suit?" After being asked by Donnie to remove his rabbit mask, Frank complies and reveals a human face with a bullet hole in his right eye. After asking Donnie, "Have you ever seen a portal?" — and then showing him an image of Jim Cunningham's house on the movie screen — Frank commands him to "burn it to the ground." Donnie obeys again. The arriving firemen soon discover a secret room filled with pedophilic material. As a result Ms. Kitty Farmer, a school teacher and fervent believer in Cunningham's methods, decides to defend Cunningham. Ms. Farmer consequently asks Donnie's mother to chaperone the school dance-group, 'Sparkle Motion' (of which their daughters are members), on a trip to California to perform on Star Search. Meanwhile, Frank tells Donnie to write a letter to Grandma Death about his views on her book.

With both of their parents out of town and his older sister Elizabeth just accepted into Harvard, Donnie and his sister decide to throw a large Halloween party. During the large party, Elizabeth's boyfriend also named Frank drives off to pick up more beer. After a brief romantic interlude Donnie and Gretchen leave the party and ride their bikes to the basement of Grandma Death's house to see her "cellar door" (which Donnie's English teacher Ms. Pomeroy had earlier told him was the most beautiful phrase in the English language, according to a "famous linguist". It was J.R.R Tolkien who said this. See also Franz Kafka - "And I dream of a grave narrow and deep where we could hold each other as if with iron bars and you would hide your face in me and I would hide my face in you and nobody would see us any more."); there, they come upon the two school bullies already in the basement, presumably looking for the woman's known gem collection. A struggle ensues between Gretchen, Donnie, and the two other kids, and Gretchen is thrown out onto the road outside. The viewer then sees Roberta Sparrow standing in the middle of the same road, reading Donnie's letter, when a red Trans Am appears a short distance away. It swerves to avoid the old lady and runs over Gretchen, killing her. Two people emerge from the car—first, a kid in a clown suit, and then from the driver's seat, Frank wearing a large bunny suit and holding the rabbit mask in his hand. Donnie runs to his girlfriend and sees that she is dead. Willing to do what needs to be done to save Gretchen, Donnie shoots Frank in the right eye, killing him.

Donnie then takes the dead Gretchen in his arms and drives to the hilltop where the storm is gathering strength. The plane carrying his mother and sister back from California passes through the storm at this moment and one of its engines tumbles out of the sky after being ripped off the wing; this engine is then thrust back through the open time portal. At this point a collage of past scenes viewed in reverse suggests Donnie traveling backwards in time. In the next scene he is back in his bed on October 2, laughing. His sister comes home from her date and his mother lies down to sleep, as in the beginning of the movie. The jet engine then crashes through the roof and into Donnie's room, killing him.

Afterwards the viewer sees some of the main characters alive in their respective bedrooms, perhaps recollecting varying memories from the future Tangent Universe. For example, Frank is shown in his bedroom fearfully staring at what is shown to be his bunny mask. He then proceeds to move his fingers over his right eye, the same place where Donnie shot and killed him. In the last scene, the Darko family is in turn shown outside, crying, as construction crews remove the jet engine from the house and a forensic team wheels away Donnie's shrouded corpse. Gretchen rides her bike down the street and asks a neighborhood kid what happened. Gretchen tells the neighbor that she didn't know Donnie. Donnie's mother and Gretchen then exchange looks and Gretchen waves. Donnie's mother waves back.

happy new year ^_^