Fantasy and Noir

"Brick’s tease and bite, lies within its lexicon. It is a film of language that originates somewhere within 2000s style of suburban US English, familiar from the John Hughes high school film template. Somewhere a massive yet obvious deviation has occurred, leading from the pretentious self important world of teenagers to some obscure caste system. This rigid social structure from a thousand teen movies, of jock, nerd and prom queen, has been warped and transmogrified into some inscrutable class system quite familiar to a writer from England. Except, didn’t we leave that all behind twenty years ago as we all became middle class? Shermer, Illinois, home of John Hughes’ hopeful suburban teen fantasises has been left far behind on a road trip with Anthony Burgess past wherever "Donnie Darko" happens to be set." Source: www.Sneersnipe.co.uk

"It’s not often a film comes along out of nowhere that makes an impression like "Brick". The last time, in my honest opinion, was maybe "Donnie Darko" Source: www.Empireonline.com

"Donnie Darko" is a fantasy sci-fi flick and "Brick" a high-school noir movie, but in both there are two teenager outcasts, a fact we cannot overlook.
And well, I consider one scene that never ceases to frighten me is when Donnie keeps seeing the evil bunny and for a second he seems to transfigurate into the same Frank, with the same unreal evilness visible in his smile.
In the end of "Brick" I realised that Brendan also smiled after Laura whispering to him an obscure sentence indecipherable to the viewer. In these moments I saw Donnie and Brendan as perverse. I think part of both films' cult comes from their respective literary-alike achievements that these scenes stand for. The scripts by Richard Kelly and Rian Johnson respond to Rick Moody's writing in his essay "Five Songs" (December 2003): "They articulate the passions, but they don't simplify them [...] allow feelings to stay insoluble, as they are in life -perceptible, but insoluble." Donnie and Brendan search for certainties, sometimes finishing in places of cataclysm. But as Rick Moody continues: "This is a place full of seductions, the allure of certainty, and if you turn aside the mephistophelean pact that is offered you, well, then everything is possible for you, and you are destined to be uncertain, sad, and scared". Donnie and Brendan exist in suburban scenarios apparently mass-designed and idyllic, but their worlds split open while indiferent and unreliable people try to reconduct them: the psychiatrist in "Donnie Darko", sometimes I think she really sees Frank, too, but she ignores it, she tries to teach Donnie one grows up ignoring the dark -in that case, another warning against hypocrisy by Kelly-, and Laura in "Brick" obsesses over Brendan wishing him to join her world. What makes both films being so affecting is an echo of the great American stories they share, as for example "The adventures of Tom Sawyer" by Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain, who had a recurring "real" dream throughout his life. He recounted these dreams, which he described as real, in the short story "My Platonic Sweetheart" (originally “The Lost Sweetheart”, 1898): "For everything in a dream is more deep and strong and sharp and real than is ever its pale imitation in the unreal life which is ours when we go about awake and clothed with our artificial selves in this vague and dull-tinted artificial world. When we die we shall slough off this cheap intellect, perhaps, and go abroad into Dreamland clothed in our real selves, and aggrandized and enriched by the command over the mysterious mental magician who is here not our slave, but only our guest."
"Donnie Darko" has echoes of "Tom Sawyer", as in the scene Gretchen and him go to visit Grandma Death, as well as Brendan wearing that mangled jacket in "Brick".
As colophon, one of my favourite passages from "Tom Sawyer" : For me, the moment Tom plays with Becky's inoccence and kisses her is so effective as the two scenes I've commented previously:
"He turned his face away. She bent timidly around till her breath stirred his curls and whispered, "I--love--you!" Then she sprang away and ran around and around the desks and benches, with Tom after her, and took refuge in a corner at last, with her little white apron to her face. Tom clasped her about her neck and pleaded: "Now, Becky, it's all done--all over but the kiss. Don't you be afraid of that--it ain't anything at all. Please, Becky." And he tugged at her apron and the hands. By and by she gave up, and let her hands drop; her face, all glowing with the struggle, came up and submitted. Tom kissed the red lips and said: "Now it's all done, Becky."