I agree with what everyone has been saying about fear being a constant topic throughout the film. But I also think that in recognizing the fantastic notions that are ascribed to the film through the website and additional material provided by the director, the idea of dealing with fear needs to be confronted. It seems to be undercutting almost every scene in the film. Dealing with fear is something each character must do, and how they go about it is one of the main ideas I believe the diredtor may be dealing with, even though it may be latently.
I kept asking myself the question "What is it the director fears so much that he would go and make a film that seems to bent on coping with fear"? The references that are used in the film all deal with having some sort of control over fear, from Graham Green’s short story to the quantum mecahnics and time travel that allow Donnie to control the future. Small or large, it all revolves around being able to control fear. Even Jim Cunningham’s entire "program" is a way for him to show that Jim Cunningham has control (when he obviously does not), however it was received by the public in the movie.
This is a constant theme in all the postmodern texts that we are dealing with. But in many cases, the method of dealing with fear often involves a regression into the past. Palahniuk does this not only in "Fight Club", but in almost every one of his other novels. The character is always dealing with fear by delving into the past, or at least making the world go into the past. Art Spiegelman uses cartoons that look like older newsprint comics to deal with very graphic material. Even "Donnie Darko" relies on going into the past to fix the future and relying on a childish idea of a superhero with amazing capabilities. So it would seem to me that the postmodernists ideas of dealing with fear is to return to the past. Maybe that explains all the intertextuality.
Either way, I think that the incredible amount of imformation that the director has given only proves this idea. He continues to create this mythology of "The Philosophy of Time Travel", not just to promote the movie, but to further the myth that there is control over fear,or at least the possibility of control. It just seems to me that it’s a bit of overkill, but it on a different note, it goes along with the notion that came up last week about the novel being published based on a novel that would be published in "Lost". Again we have almost an entire body of work (and a fan base for it) for something that didn’t exist and was created solely forthe purpose of furthering the sales of a movie. What does that say about all the imformation we are taking apart and dissecting? Can we actually make any real assumptions or conclussions about a completely fake text? or are any texts real since they are the creations of imagination? I don’t know anymore! Now I’m getting scared!