Incredibly Shrinking Donnie

Finally saw the director’s cut of Donnie Darko and while I like it better overall (Kelly has deepened all the relationships, I think, in ways that for the most part are subtle and lovely), I hate the substitution over the prologue of the INXS song “Never Tear Us Apart” for Echo and the Bunnymen’s “The Killing Moon”. It’s not just that the latter has a sense of suspension that the former doesn’t (making sense of Kelly spare, poignant use of slow-motion) but that the latter also speaks more eloquently to the kind of childhood’s end that I think is Donnie Darko’s chief recommendation. Close analysis of both openings also reveals that the Director’s Cut softens the noise of a passing car and almost mutes completely the sound of Donnie’s bike - where in the theatrical cut, the passing car becomes part of the song (menacing); ditto the bike (rattlesnake, and menacing, too). I understand that the INXS song was the original choice for the scene and that after Sundance, Kelly was forced to sub the Echo and the Bunnymen tune because of prohibitive licensing costs (and besides, happy accidents are the stuff from which masterpieces, even minor ones, are made) – but I don’t agree with the rationale that this song fits better during the party scene where it directly presages the death of the girlfriend. That’s the kind of shit I precisely dislike about cut-and-paste soundtracks – but putting it way at the beginning, especially with that brilliant minor guitar sting launching from the white-suffusion. . . I don’t know that there’s a more perfectly stung moment in film that year.

Another story of man in time, space, and the quagmire of existential identity is Jack Arnold’s long-out-of-print The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) that, widely available on eBay in fairly decent DVR editions (most of them packaged with a trailer narrated by Orson Welles, on the Universal set while shooting Touch of Evil), has been denied a proper DVD release because of some stupid thing or another. As you gaze down the endless walls of super special editions at Blockbuster, weep a little for the masterpieces (major this time) that either sit unreleased, or have only ever gotten substandard treatment (like Weir’s Fearless or Penn’s Night Moves) by distributors too lazy or too venal; waiting to release a second wave special edition should the barebones version do surprisingly well. But as the rationale was once explained to me, why promote what no one’s going to see anyway? Good thinking, yes? My dad once told me that it wasn’t wise to argue with idiots because idiots are never wrong, and so my solution isn’t a letter-writing campaign a’la Marge Simpson, but just to shell out the ten bucks ad by the bootleg.

Because The Incredible Shrinking Man is an extraordinary film – perhaps the pinnacle of the 50s science fiction cycle in that it addresses theology from a Kirkegaardian sense (hero Scott Carter must shrink to escape his prison) but also the disintegration of the myth of the fifties suburban utopia. Carter has it all: beautiful wife, beautiful house, beautiful car, and, apparently, a yacht where, one afternoon, he’s exposed to a radioactive cloud that mixes with a pesticide on his skin and sends him on a journey inward. With one of the most unusual endings in film, Carter first loses every single accoutrement of what it meant to be a man in the popular consciousness at the time (and always): he loses his ability to please his wife (a wedding ring slides off his finger in the film’s most loaded metaphor), becomes literally a child all of tantrums and long reaches, loses his job, runs out on his wife, is attacked by his housecat, and is, finally, forgotten by friend, family, and lover alike in a dark basement that he describes as “a vast, primordial plain.” Reduction of man to his basest elements, Carter nonetheless proclaims that he will master his new environment as he did his last – Nietzche rears his grizzled head even here among the spiders and the matchheads – but Carter keeps shrinking, and The Incredible Shrinking Man becomes one of the most thoughtful and philosophically rich pictures in American flickers.

Besides, it has a spider-fight that Peter Jackson appears to have at least borrowed from heavily for The Return of the King’s Frodo vs. Shelob.