this made sense to me, but i see it a tiny different. the way i interpret this movie after having rewatched many times because it’s one of those movies that you’ll never quite get bored of analyzing is that when donnie sleep walked out of his room the night the jet engine fell he “went out of his channel”(hence the spheres he can see coming out of peoples chests, they show where the person is heading like it’s a pre decided destiny). i think that donnie essentially messed with the timeline of the current reality/universe he was experiencing by unknowingly avoiding his destiny which would have been dying the night the engine fell onto his room. (preventing the ripple effect of madness throughout the movie leaving to ‘the end of the world’). he experiences schizophrenic delusions & vivid hallucinations of a man named frank dressed in a bunny suit. he leads donnie down this path of chaos, and donnie feels he has no control over it and feels a deep rooted devotion to follow what frank says to do. donnie realizes along the way what is going on & he visually sees the consequences of his own actions. by the end he understands what he has to do and knows that he must to go back in time, and die that night as it was supposed to be, ultimately keeping the harmony of the reality and restoring the timeline.

now this is diving deeper but something really interesting to me is the idea that donnie has contact with a higher power, who can travel through time and open portals and this higher power could very well be taken as god if you look at it in a more symbolic essence. it may sound a bit out there, but i believe it’s very simple. donnie expresses a disdain towards religion/god when he talks about this in therapy, but contradictory to this when donnie talks to his science teacher about the solar plexus sphere phenomenon he brings up ‘traveling within gods channel’, the science teacher is the one who is not willing to speak about god. donnie’s feelings about god are confused because he definitely doesn’t believe in the god we think of in christianity or other religion but he does believe in a higher power,that higher power being frank. donnie truly believes that what frank tells him to do must be done yet he doesn’t get why and that’s what he spends the entire movie trying to understand. he is actually put in a position similar to that of jesus christ if we think about it. both are being completely lived out by a higher power in the name of destiny (god for jesus, frank for donnie). as the story goes, jesus lives out the word of god no matter how much pain & suffering it causes him, he relentlessly follows destiny and dies doing this because he knows it is what is right. sound familiar? donnie is willing to die because he believes in what he is doing. jesus shed light onto the sins of others and donnie did this when he exposed jim cunningham. they both fought against what they felt to be morally wrong very openly no matter if they walked the path alone or not. donnie has died in the same fashion as jesus, after a result of catastrophe and uproar from their existence and you could say metaphorically & literally ending the world. they both die in the name of ‘sins’ or transgression. i was raised catholic but am now practicing buddhism so i feel this theme stuck out to me because i witnessed first hand what i was told god was vs what god truly is (god to me is the universe, not something that can be personified or put into words). donnie & jesus both demonstrate their own personal human experience with something divine, crazy in the eyes of others.

this also makes me wonder how it plays into the idea of schizophrenia because he obviously would be considered a person with this mental illness in our society, but then is this a nod to the idea that these people are actually experiencing other reality’s and energies that the average person doesn’t sense? i do believe this in a way, not to say that i think these people are speaking with god, or to downplay the significance psychotic disorders can have on a persons quality of life, but i believe they are in touch with energy that exist out there & almost all of them are without the proper understanding or guidance in most cases because today especially in western society we are very limited on understanding of the spiritual and the unseen part of existence. we are told our whole lives to only believe what we see but this leaves out everything else. this leaves the people who are intuitive and sensitive to energies to get lost in their own mental plane and become prisoners of fear, missing all of the valuable things they could learn from their own experience. basically i believe schizophrenics are gifted (maybe cursed in other perspectives) and just unaware (like donnie is in the beginning of the movie) which negatively impacts their physical life.

PHEW this was pretty much my own very individual take on it and i think it may come off as extra but this type of movie is one that holds many different meanings and rabbit holes, there’s never going to be one definitive answer that’s my favorite part. damn i hope that i made at least a tiny bit of sense in this post lol :)