I can’t help but ride on the Onion A.V. Clubs coattails with this one. After Nathan Rabin wrapped up the compulsively readable series My Year of Flops, Scott Tobias has started up The New Cult Canon. The opening entry is Donnie Darko. Tobias brings up, specifically this scene, and rightfully so. I must admit I’m always impressed when a filmmaker can impart a lot of information and introduce a lot of characters in a short span of time. Watch this scene below, and you get an overview of over half of the characters in Donnie’s world in the film. But not only that, just from these scenes you get a lot of body language that indicates tensions and conflicts between the characters (for example, Beth Grant’s character cradling ‘educational’ literature of Patrick Swayze’ love/hate guru before being warmly welcomed by the principle and then awkwardly being introduced to two other teachers, Drew Barrymore and Noah Wyle or Jena Malone’s character quietly prepping herself at her locker for a first day at a new school.). It is fair to say that nearly half of the films plot and subplot elements are actually introduced in this sequence. Not only does this scene intro and define relationships between a large collection of characters, it does this silently, as Tears for Fears‘ “Head over Heels” plays. It also does this sequence in two fluid long takes, the first inside the school, the second outside.

For admirers of Big Love one can’t help but notice that the HBO show nicely references the “Sparkle Motion” element in the final shot of the second season, but also the center piece of the dancers (seen in slow as the camera glides by) is none other than Daveigh Chase, who is a fairly major character in the show (albeit in another context). I can’t help but be reminded of Brian DePalma’s Mission To Mars or P.T. Anderson’s Boogie Nights, both films use a single long take to introduce the large ensemble of characters, but arguably, Richard Kelly pulls off the intro with the most style and the most foreboding (all three films, in their own way, end with great stresses inflicted on their characters). Curiously, there is also a connection to Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, which has a large part of the story told simply by having the camera float down the hallways of a highschool. Imparting feeling, information (and , moments of astutely observed human behavior in the some sort of social environment are what I live for in good Television or Film. It’s certainly what makes much of HBO’s top-tier shows so compulsively watchable, and funny that you would find this on display with such a sure hand in the debut film which happens to be a sci-fi mindbender on top of everything else.

One tends to wonder if the lasting appeal of Donnie Darko was the esoteric nature of the time-travel/tangent universe story and the joy that many of the fans took part in putting it together; or the rich texture of 1980’s issues and minutiae that are woven (in a way that denies any sort of simple genre classification) throughout the film. I tend to think the latter. Not just through this sequence, but through the more spiritual bookend sequence (also set to a Tears For Fears song, “Mad World,” as covered by Gary Jules) which was also done essentially silently.