Joseph Morcos
Un-Characterizing Madness
The Semiotic Revolution of Donnie Darko
I find it hard to tell you, I find it hard to take:
when people run in circles it’s a very, very mad world, mad world.1
A
t one point in
Donnie Darko, Richard Kelly’s
complex film about a troubled young teenager who struggles
to find love in the midst of high school homogeny, the titular
protagonist sits in his English class discussing Graham Greene’s
The Destructors. Ms Pomeroy, his teacher, asks the class why the
story’s band of children desires to break into and destroy the
home of an innocent old man they call “Old Misery.” One student
offers up a motive of theft, but Ms Pomeroy explains that the
children burn the money they find in the house. Then she turns
to Donnie. With a slight grin and approving tone, he replies:
“destruction is a form of creation…they just want to see what
happens when they tear the world apart. They want to change
1 All references to the movie Donnie Darko, including these lyrics from the first
chorus of the closing song, refer to Richard Kelly’s film.
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JOSEPH MORCOS
things.” Donnie’s understanding of The Destructors goes not to its
characters’ criminal act, but rather to the way its characters might
alter the crime’s significance – destruction becomes creation. In
one sense, Donnie’s reading of the story acknowledges that the
arson cannot govern its own semantic significance. This model,
by which Donnie claims the very meaning attached to the arson,
not only helps define Donnie’s character but also speaks to Kelly’s
film at large, in which the troubled youth must negotiate a wide
gamut of institutional pressures in order to carve out a personal
sense of the world.
But this scene in Donnie Darko speaks equally to the larger
issue of semiotics, or the experience of meaning, and its relation
to society. The film addresses a society’s regulation of meaning
and how an individual, like Donnie, might lead a revolution
against these semiological constructs. Donnie’s quest in the film
does not pit him against individuals per se, but rather against
frameworks of how meaning should operate – those imposed
structures that attempt, as Els Van Dongen might understand
Donnie, to rob him of his “personal world of significations” (1).
Though not dealing specifically with Darko, Dongen prompts a
deeper consideration of meaning amid the potential madness that
tinges the film. The question for psychiatrists like Dongen is the
moment in which this “personal world of significations” devolves
into madness. Says Dongen: “psychotic people are thought to
have access to a world of meaning that remains locked to others”
(1). As Donnie upends the authoritarian prompts of language,
teachers, and celebrity therapists, he may seem to be mad; indeed,
he seems to reject the very laws of the cosmos. But, following
Donnie’s upheavals of expectation, he might claim himself to
be simply living among madness – hence his understanding of
arson as an act of creation. Perhaps the most revolutionary claim
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of Donnie Darko is Donnie’s assertion that it is an individual’s
ability – duty even – to disturb the normative meanings attached
to societal prompts. In this sense, the debate over madness can be
re-signified as a debate over duty. Shed of societal prompts, the
individual can construct a personally desired sense of significance
from the surrounding world, not because he is mad, but because
he must. For Donnie, it is a matter of survival.
I functions, is certainly not an easy task; one must first lay aside
solation of the film’s semiological claims, or how meaning
Darko’s slippery plotlines, endless cultural references, and
tangled chronology. But even then, how does one begin to
discuss the film’s wealth of semiological exclamations? The
human sciences employ a convenient philological vocabulary
to articulate, in this instance, Donnie’s personal understanding
of arson, but this philological vocabulary also applies to any
society-created system that allows for such an upheaval, or
“transfer,” of meaning. In other words, the technical discussion
of language becomes a model for the general examination of the
human sense of significance. Language, therefore, is not limited
to the conventions of words, but can be applied likewise to events
that hold significance. As presented by linguist Ferdinand de
Saussure, the foundational claim holds that in language there
exists an inherent division between the event of language (what
might be understood as the act of arson in the Destructors) and
its attached meaning (how Donnie interprets that arson as an
act of creation). Saussure labeled these events and meanings
“signifier” and “signified,” respectively, in which they form pairs
(“signs”) for the sake of meaning. Saussure makes the radical
claim that, however counterintuitive, it is the signifier that limits
and defines the signified; he argues, essentially, that language
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JOSEPH MORCOS
controls meaning. The nebulous, uncontrollable urges and
formless thoughts contained within the human psyche – the
savage, socially untouched sense of meaning – is actually under
the power of arbitrarily invented societal prompts.
The film’s disreputable pop-therapy master, Jim
Cunningham, provides an example of Saussure’s claim that
language controls meaning. Throughout the film Cunningham
preaches the self-help binary “fear vs. love,” and believes Donnie
is “controlled by fear.” In doing so, Cunningham assumes that
there is a distinct human emotion clearly aligned with “fear.”
The pop-therapy master understands a segment of meaning to
be aligned succinctly with a certain resulting linguistic signifier,
the word “fear.” Saussure, though, would assert the opposite:
it is Cunningham’s use of “fear” that defines what it means.
Language for Saussure is not a simple “nomenclature” that works
to articulate preexisting structures of meaning. Rather it is the
empty word that manages to divide and imply a certain signified
– those emotions associated with fear, fright, and terror. This
tidy package of signifier and subjugated meaning form Saussure’s
sign. And again, Saussure would argue that Donnie’s emotions
result from certain combinations of prompts and randomly
assigned significance. “The bond between signifier and signified,”
for Saussure, “is arbitrary” (788). What Donnie shows us, then,
is that the relationship between signifier and signified is not only
arbitrary, but alterable. In other words, where Saussure shows
us that the genesis of meaning is arbitrary but to some degree
socially determined, Donnie shows us that meaning continues to
be a calculus of signification. For Donnie, even after the signifier is
arbitrarily assigned to the signified, meaning continues to change.
The state of “fear” that Cunningham so adamantly opposes does
not, in fact, preexist its word. Donnie aims throughout the film
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to overthrow this linguistic opposition.
“Fear and love,” the “lifeline” Cunningham devises to map the
human psyche, cannot, then, be “the deepest of human emotions.”
Embracing the construct, Mrs. Farmer, Cunningham’s dedicated
supporter, imposes the binary upon the students of Middlesex
High; they are told that every scenario – every action – merits
placement on Cunningham’s fear vs. love “spectrum.” Donnie,
though, realizes that such a binary exists not to reflect upon
the truth of human emotion (“life isn’t that simple,” he objects),
but rather to limit and sterilize something nebulous and utterly
unstructured (he accuses Mrs. Farmer of ignoring “the whole
spectrum of human emotion”). But, as Mrs. Farmer at one point
unintentionally implies, there is nothing intrinsically meaningful in
the “fear” and “love” signifiers – their power comes simply because
“the lifeline is divided that way.” Theorist Tor Hernes would
describe these prompts of fear and love as “mere labels, loose
prescriptions or elaborate models” (49). Or, as Dongen might
have it, the students performing this “lifeline” exercise “have no
medium of expression other than that defined by culture, and
therefore are expected to abide by the means provided” (5). In
refusing to participate in Mrs. Farmer’s exercise and exposing to
the school the absurdity of Cunningham’s binary, Donnie rejects
the imposition of linguistic structure; he refuses to “abide by the
means provided.” For him, the meaning contained in the endless
sea of human emotion is far too great and infinitely complex to
be reduced to two linguistic signifiers.
In this example, Kelly’s film encourages a resistance to
these impositions (the viewer clearly sides with Donnie over the
administration), but has not yet provided a solution to this linguistic
problem. How, then, can one escape and overcome the totalitarian
rule of the linguistic signifier over the human experience of
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meaning? Donnie Darko provides countless examples of these
private rebellions, these personal revolts against culturally fixed
structures. Essentially, the semiological revolution involves
a constant re-signification of these structured signifiers. The
language remains; it is only the normatively associated meaning
that is reconsidered. Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Derrida,
who applied Saussure’s theory of linguistics to anthropology and
philosophy (respectively), supplement Saussure’s vocabulary with
the term “bricolage,” French for “tinkering.” Their focus on the
social and cultural manifestations of Saussure’s ideas, particularly
the bricoleur, aid a discussion of rebellion and revolutionaries, like
Donnie, who individually appropriate established forms to create
a desired sense of meaning. For Derrida, “[t]he bricoleur…is
someone who uses ‘the means at hand,’ that is, the instruments
he finds at his disposition around him…not hesitating to change
them whenever it appears necessary” (1210). This bricoleur
therefore assumes that “meanings are not given unalterably in
advance, but can be changed” (Belsey 89).
It is this same bricolage that makes its appearance in Donnie’s
English class: the burning of Old Misery’s house is clearly
the signifying event, and its conventional meaning of sadness,
desolation and reduction its signified. Here, the viewer finds
something unexpected: Donnie turns destruction into a kind of
creative bounty. The sign in this case, the act of destruction
and its normatively negative implications, is not a concrete
pairing of signifier and signified. Like Donnie, one can “tinker”
with meaning; the beautiful and creative can be posited into a
signifier as seemingly destructive as the burning of a blameless
gentleman’s home. For Donnie, not only is the Saussurian sign
arbitrary at its inception–it remains arbitrary at every moment of
its inscription. This concept of bricolage, however, is not tolerated
UN-CHARACTERIZING MADNESS
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by the Middlesex administration and its despotic prescription
of meaning; Mrs. Farmer attempts (and, in the deleted scenes2,
succeeds) to ban Greene’s story. The revolutionary Donnie,
though, grins as Greene’s destructors appropriate for themselves
the meaning associated with their crime.
This bricolage, or the insistence upon creating varied and
desirable sensations of meaning, translates past hypothetical
book discussions and into the most acutely personal moments
of Donnie’s life. Even in the seconds following the death of his
love interest, Donnie refuses the event’s imposing “signified.”
In only about three nightmarish minutes, Donnie and Gretchen
are assaulted at knife-point by the school’s bullies; Gretchen is
thrown violently to the ground, and is hit by a car. Donnie then
murders the car’s driver with a gunshot to the eye. Considering
the event in strictly linguistic terms, with the two deaths and
overwhelming tragedy as signifier, one is tempted to read the
scene with a sense of anguish, fear, and terror. Shockingly, then,
comes Donnie’s response. He tells the surviving passenger in
the vehicle to “Go home and tell your parents that everything’s
gonna be okay!” It seems an unlikely outcome, but Donnie refuses
to surrender to anything likely, and particularly to expectations
of meaning. He refuses to allow for sorrow because, in his mind,
sorrow is only arbitrarily attached to death.
T
Donnie is not the only bricoleur,
and in this sense the film begins to take a more resolute stance
in terms of madness – perhaps it is the world that is mad, not
the individual. Gretchen serves as a particularly pronounced
he viewer soon finds that
2 “Deleted scenes” refers to the scenes only included in the “Bonus Features:
Scenes” menu of the cited DVD in its original version.
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example; she continually fights against signifiers working to
impose certain sensations of meaning – events that seem to
demand a natural resulting signified of pain or terror. These
signifiers can be adjusted to create a personally desired signified
– the linguistic sign must be remembered as arbitrary and
therefore alterable. Gretchen’s tendency, like Donnie’s, is to
carve out moments of beauty in her life by rejecting impositions
of meaning . The viewer witnesses this when the young girl is
verbally attacked. The same bullies who are partly responsible
for her death a few scenes later expose to the entire class the
secret of her tragic past: Gretchen is on the run from a father
who attempted to murder her mother. The cruel students jeer
and mock until Gretchen flees the building, crushed. Donnie
runs behind to assure her wellbeing; they meet outside, and
without letting Donnie finish his sentence, Gretchen begins to
forcefully, fervently kiss him for the first time. The viewer is
surprised, though, for Donnie had been denied a kiss earlier in a
setting that was certainly more romantic. Gretchen had agreed
with Donnie at that earlier moment of refusal: their first kiss
should be “at a time when it…reminds [her] how beautiful the
world can be.” Gretchen takes an event that would normally
be seen as associated with an undesired significance, and shifts
the attached meaning to create something good. In this case,
Gretchen takes a signifier that would assumedly be paired with
a resulting misery and hatred, and uses “the means at hand” –
her first kiss – to “tinker” with the associated meaning. For the
bricoleur like Gretchen, even humiliation and public derision can
be reminders of beauty.
English teacher Ms Pomeroy also pits herself against the
administration of Middlesex High, an authority that moves
beyond simply establishing laws of behavior to enforcing laws
UN-CHARACTERIZING MADNESS
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of meaning. Her first struggle for the personal appropriation of
meaning comes with the Graham Greene story: she is clearly
furious that the school ends up banning such a classic. Ms Pomeroy
is then told by the principle that she must give up teaching at
Middlesex on account of her “inappropriate methods.” “You
don’t have a clue what it’s like to communicate with these kids,”
she responds. In this moment Ms Pomeroy gives an insightful
name to Middlesex’s semiotic despotism: “we’re losing them,”
she sighs, “to this prescribed nonsense.” Her term “prescribed”
encapsulates Saussure’s sign; indeed, meaning is prescribed
by language. She despises the administration for its similar
prescriptions both in banning Greene’s book and in supporting
Cunningham; Ms Pomeroy rejects the idea that signifiers must be
associated with certain meanings. Her swan song to Middlesex
seems to send the message that any signifier can have a personal
signified – any signifier can be beautiful. She leaves the school
with only two words etched on the chalkboard: “cellar door.”
Preparing to leave, she references to Donnie a “famous linguist”
who claimed: “of all the phrases in the English language…cellar
door is the most beautiful.” The linguist she references, J. R. R.
Tolkien, specifically claims that “people…will admit that cellar
door is ‘beautiful’, especially if dissociated from its sense (and
from its spelling)” (36). To Tolkien and Ms Pomeroy, the beauty
of the phrase emerges once we reject its imposed meaning, the
physical cellar entrance. And so Ms Pomeroy, in opposing the
Middlesex administration, joins the rebellion against the rule of
structurally imposed meaning.
Even Frank, Donnie’s six-foot, rabbit-suit wearing personal
prophet, understands the power of language over meaning. In
one of the film’s most poignant scenes, Donnie first asks Frank
why he wears “that stupid bunny suit,” based on the natural
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assumption that there exists a fundamental disconnect between
the visual aspect of Frank’s white rabbit character (signifier)
and the truth underneath (signified). Frank’s response comes
with a haunting and formidable power: “why are you wearing
that stupid man suit?” His query highlights the fundamental
precept of the bricoleur and Saussure’s linguistic theory: the event
of language can be nothing but a label, one that can serve only
to limit and restrict the underlying sense of meaning. Donnie’s
original questioning of Frank’s terrifying outfit serves as
a model, an exaggeration of the shocking truth that so much
of human existence dissolves into a series of costumes and
labels that cannot be representative of the underlying reality.
Frank’s question attacks one of Donnie’s (and the viewer’s)
most unchallenged and subconscious assumptions, the incorrect
supposition that the signifier of even physical existence – the
claim “I am a man” – naturally represents a correlating truth
concerning existence. “Man” has no preexisting signified, but
rather arrests the shifts and movements of nebulous meaning.
Just as Frank is not truly a giant rabbit, the term “man” – the
societally created signifier – cannot utterly contain the true
sense of what Donnie is. As Catherine Belsey asserts, “lives are
narratable as coherent in terms of the categories language makes
available” (51). Essentially, even uttering “I am a man” restricts
and categorizes the sense of self. Donnie’s “man suit” is truly
only a confining classification.
The location for this scene, a movie theater, only adds to
the moment’s acute focus on costumes and labels – the role of
signifier as a restrictive disguise. Frank uses the theater to prove
to Donnie that even the most basic and seemingly unrestrictive
signs, such as “man,” can always be challenged. “I want you to
watch the movie screen,” Frank says. “There’s something I want
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to show you.” He illustrates that even the signifier “movie screen”
restricts meaning to what is culturally delineated. As the light
shifts and the movie screen opens to become something entirely
unlike what a movie screen should be, Frank asks: “Have you ever
seen a portal?” He confirms that even such linguistic prompts as
“movie screen” or “man,” which seem to be utterly representative
of their signified, still structure and therefore limit the capacity
of meaning. Our understanding of signs can never be absolute.
Frank continues with revolutionary claims: having asserted
that even an individual’s sense of self serves as a restriction,
Donnie’s prophet now works to undermine assumptions about
the semiotic, structural distinction between individuals. Frank
appears to the Donnie in his bathroom, separated from the
teenager by a supernatural, invisible wall. They face each other
from opposite sides of the partition as Donnie repeatedly tries to
push through this invisible but seemingly indestructible barrier.
Donnie and Frank have been structurally (and physically)
polarized. This moment of rigid opposition models the film’s
claim that rules, structures, and binaries can appear concrete,
even insurmountable. But the film works to undo this rigidity,
to introduce a bricolage that brings new meaning to signifiers
and destabilizes seemingly fixed binaries; indeed, the bathroom
barrier is only Donnie’s imagination. In other scenes, this
apparent polarization of the two characters dissolves. The
vandalism of Middlesex High, for example, seems to have
been committed by a character neither fully Donnie nor fully
Frank. The viewer clearly holds Donnie responsible, as the teen
feels guilty for the crime and becomes a suspect in the police
investigation. But it cannot have been distinctly Donnie’s work,
as the criminal had the supernatural strength to strike an axe
through a “solid bronze” statue. The graffiti at the crime scene
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constitutes an interesting piece of evidence: while the message
itself was obviously Donnie’s intent, the handwriting belongs
to Frank (we later see Frank’s handwriting from his note on
the Darko refrigerator). This strange Donnie/Frank hybrid
blurs the binary that appeared so fixed in Donnie’s bathroom.
The viewer is reminded that even personal signifiers can be resignified. Essentially, there is always room for bricolage.
The film continues to advocate this semiotic revolution,
even when paralleling literary sources; consideration of these
parallels gives light to the true nature of the bricoleur. The whole
of Donnie Darko, for instance, relies heavily on the “mad world”
of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass – from Donnie
following the “white rabbit” to a realm of the supernatural, to
Middlesex’s dance team’s bunny costumes (Mathews 42)3. Belsey,
for example, draws attention to the semiological weight of the
dialogue between Alice and Humpty Dumpty.4 In a discussion
with the giant egg about ‘unbirthdays,’ Alice is confused by
Humpty’s statement concerning the potential abundance of
these “unbirthday” presents: “there’s glory for you!” he exclaims.
Slightly confused, Alice responds: “I don’t know what you mean
by glory.” Trying to lessen her confusion, Humpty opts to
rephrase: “I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”
Alice’s bewilderment, though, has only escalated by this point:
“but ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’” she
exclaims. Here the reader finds Humpty Dumpty’s momentous
3 Mathews stresses the importance of laying Donnie Darko aside Through
the Looking Glass to further understand Carroll’s work. Here, the allusions to
Carroll that Mathews articulates help to further understand Donnie.
4 The relation of Through the Looking Glass to these central concepts
of structural linguistics and semiology is found in Catherine Belsey’s
Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction.
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claim: “when I use a word…it means just what I choose it to
mean…The question is…which is to be master – that’s all”
(Carroll 163). This passage becomes a self-evident complement
to Donnie Darko’s support of bricolage. The authority of culture
struggles to enforce meaning; the bricoleur fights to re-signify
arbitrary signs. Here lies Donnie Darko’s fundamental question:
“which is to be master,” the word or its speaker? The film, of
course upholds the bricoleur’s cause. If Alice asks “whether you
can make words mean so many different things,” the film responds
in the clear affirmative. The individual can be master over the
word, and therefore the world – he can construct the meaning.
I individual world, a question begins to emerge: when might this
f being the master of the word means being a master of an
highly individualistic weltanschauung become the province of
insanity? When does one cross the line from personal freedom
to madness? If Donnie can re-signify mindless destruction
and death into moments of beauty, what prevents viewers
from seeing him as mad? Els Van Dongen’s claims in his book,
Worlds of Psychotic People: Wanderers, ‘Bricoleurs’ and Strategists
acknowledge the thin line separating individual interpretations
of events from a more alienating understanding of them. Again,
Dongen does not deal with Darko specifically, but he does demand
a reconsideration of the madness that plays such a heavy role
in Kelly’s film. Dongen’s central claims – that “[t]he world
of psychotic people is considered to be a personal world of
significations” (1) and that psychotics “have access to a world of
meaning that remains locked to others” (1) – begs the question:
might the bricoleur be mad?, Might bricolage be a symptom of
insanity? Dongen borrows the term from Lévi-Strauss, asserting
that madness is, in fact, bricolage:
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[psychotics] prefer (or have no option other than)
to wander, and to tinker. They roam the world of
values, norms, ideas and beliefs, looking for whatever
is sufficiently useful to give expressions to their
musings. Like traveling ‘bricoleurs’ (Lévi-Strauss
1962, 1996), they make specific and intentional use of
whatever bits of knowledge or skills they may acquire
in their wanderings. (5)
And just as readers find Humpty Dumpty and Wonderland
slightly maddening, critics certainly doubt Donnie’s sanity.
Critic Jared Rapfogel diagnoses the young protagonist as
“deeply disturbed, mentally ill”; Andrew O’Hehir writes of
“a boy fighting a losing battle against madness and darkness”
(par.1). Donnie himself prefers the term “wacko.” Regardless of
adjective, however, the issue of madness cannot be ignored while
wrestling with the film’s semiological claims. For just as the film
advocates bricolage and a constant personal claim to meaning,
Dongen would assert that these bricoleurs, who “seem to have
dispensed with the restrictions imposed by rules, authority, and
culture” (5), are simply exhibiting symptoms of insanity. This
drive to overthrow the imposition of prescribed signifiers over
the experience of meaning is simultaneously endorsed by Donnie
Darko and diagnosed by Dongen (and others) as madness.
So how extensively does this madness suffuse into Darko’s
characters? Where rests the line between the liberating bricolage
upheld by the film and the madness diagnosed by Dongen? While
Dongen maintains that it is madmen who “have access to a world
of meaning that remains locked to others,” Kelly’s film seems to
urge the importance of bricolage across a spectrum of characters.
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Donnie, Gretchen, Ms Pomeroy, even Frank – each embraces a
semiological revolution that the film seems to argue is necessary
for a life unfettered by the despotism of imposed meaning. What
the film titles liberty, the psychiatrist labels insanity.
The viewer, perhaps inclined like critics to label various
characters “madmen,” is soon shocked to see that the film itself
makes no such dismissals – the semiotic attitude Dongen associates
with madness is rather suffused through the characters, events,
and themes. Moments could be analyzed and labeled as either
innocent or psychotic; characters could be allocated to one side
or other of this remarkably fine line. But if the viewer is to truly
understand the role of bricolage and madness in Donnie Darko
and elsewhere, he must work within the semiological mindset
of the film itself; the viewer must resist the urge to label and
restrict characters with signifiers that can never be totalizing. If
the personal construction of meaning necessarily correlates with
madness, then as Donnie Darko must be read as emphasizing, even
mandating, the role of the bricoleur, Kelly’s work must inevitably
be seen as advocating madness as such. If, as the film asserts, the
arbitrariness of the ‘sign’ and the resulting capacity for bricolage
plays such a crucial role in an individual’s fulfilled experience,
then this semiological freedom must also relieve the pressure of
applying labels as “bricoleur” or “madman.”
It must be conceded that Kelly’s film honors the bricoleur.
Even beyond the numerous contained examples of bricolage,
the viewer must admit that the film as a whole becomes an
enormous re-signification of a linguistic prompt. The pivotal
event in the story, the mysterious jet-engine crash that appears
at the beginning and end of the story, becomes the overarching
signifier, and the entire film advocates its cosmic re-signification.
The majority of Donnie Darko recounts the expected meaning
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behind the catastrophe (Donnie’s escape of death by the falling
engine leads to the events of the story, including his relationship
with Gretchen); this signified, however, results in overwhelming
tragedy: Gretchen’s death directly results from Donnie’s escape.
To find a desirable signified, then, Donnie must ‘tinker’ with the
meaning attached to the crash. In the last shots of the film, the
viewer actually witnesses the same quiet evening as in the film’s
commencement; Kelly, in fact, presents the viewers the exact
shots as before – the signifier is identical. Donnie, though, has
decided that to save Gretchen’s life, he must shift the original
meaning – in this case, he must alter the original series of events
following the first crash. Donnie thus re-signifies the crash.
This shifted sign now causes Donnie’s self-intended death; he
must die to prevent the tragic and undesired conclusion of his
relationship with Gretchen. The same signifier has been supplied
new meaning; the bond of the linguistic sign is once again proven
adaptable, and this adaptability still hovers just above madness.
Earlier, in hearing of Donnie’s plan to travel back in time
and rend the sky to allow for his re-signification, his therapist
solemnly predicts: “if the sky opened up there would be no law.”
And in the semiotic sense, she is right: Donnie’s final act as
bricoleur certainly overcomes the authoritarian law of linguistic
structure. Darko, as a whole, surely calls for this bricolage –
madness even, in the sense of self-created meaning. As a last
reminder, in only the final chorus of the film’s closing song do
the lyrics change from “it’s a very, very mad world, mad world,”
to “it’s a very, very mad world, mad world, enlarging your world,
mad world.” Only with bricolage – and some unnamable shadow
of madness – can the world be made personal, habitable, and, of
course, truly meaningful.
d
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Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the
Author.” Critical Theory Since Plato. Eds.
Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle. Boston:
Thomson Wadsworth, 2005. 1255-1258.
Belsey, Catherine. Poststructuralism: A
Very Short Introduction. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2002.
Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland. New
York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 1992.
Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign and Play
in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.”
Critical Theory Since Plato. Eds. Hazard
Adams and Leroy Searle. Boston: Thomson
Wadsworth, 2005. 1203-1215.
De Saussure, Ferdinand. “Course in General
Linguistics, Part One: General Principles,
Chapter 1: Nature of the Linguistic Sign.”
Critical Theory Since Plato. Eds. Hazard
Adams and Leroy Searle.
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Thomson Wadsworth, 2005. 786-793.
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Donnie Darko. Dir. Kelly, Richard. DVD.
Newmarket, 2001.
Dongen, Els Van. Worlds of Psychotic
People: Wanderers, ‘Bricoleurs’ and
Strategists. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Hernes, Tor. Understanding Organization
as Process: Theory for a Tangled World.
New York: Rougledge, 2008.
Mathews, Peter. “Spinoza’s Stone: the
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