I was very interested in the significance of the \u201ccellar door.\u201d Granted, it could merely be a foreshadowing element used to heighten anxiety when Donnie\/Gretchen stumble upon, coincidentally, a cellar door later in the movie, but maybe there was more depth behind its choice. If a cellar door can be viewed as the deepest, darkest part of say, a house, then it could also represent similar things, such as someone\u2019s deepest, darkest fears, vulnerabilities, dreams, etc. I think of crazy Tim Robbins out of his mind, lurking around the cellar of that old house in War of the Worlds, and the vision of a \u201ccellar door\u201d has a negative, creepy connotation. It\u2019s where you hide the clutter and unwanted junk, or maybe the things too inappropriate for common living areas of a house. And so it is entering the cellar door that provides the catalyst to the climatic ending of the movie. Donnie is faced with his greatest, crippling fear, solitude, when Gretchen dies, and so I draw the conclusion that there is a connection between the image of a cellar door representing his fears, and the roll it plays in Donnie ultimately facing those same fears. <\/p>\n
And then I read a whole Alice in Wonderland analogy on a website specifically titled \u201cCellar Door,\u201d and well, it made a lot more sense. <\/p>\n
I also think it\u2019s interesting, and probably intentionally planned, that White Noise\/Donnie Darko\/In the Shadow of No Towers all share a very similar theme. The primary characters are all paralyzed by their fear. I\u2019m not sure if you would say that Donnie was afraid of death as much as his lack of control of death, his fear of being alone in death. Jack and Babette\u2019s whole \u201cwho will die first\u201d was based on the same fear of being alone, dying alone. In the Shadow of No Towers is less about being alone in death than it is about fearing the uncertainty, the lack of control over death \u2013 something Jack and Donnie both grapple with. And then there\u2019s Fight Club, and I just can\u2019t bring myself to think about that yet. Anyways, my point is that I wonder if this is a postmodern theme \u2013 fearing, and fearing death specifically, because it\u2019s something that we have no control over. Technological advances make it to where there is ultimately very little about your day that you can\u2019t control. Jack went so far as to obsessively control his image. Donnie relies on medication to control his anxieties (Dylar connection). And so we begin to obsess on the things that we can\u2019t control, such as death. But then we create things such as \u201ctime travel\u201d to control even that. But then again, I\u2019m pretty sure people have always obsessed over death, and it might not have anything to do with being postmodern, and it\u2019s just a little coincidence that I noticed between the texts. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was very interested in the significance of the \u201ccellar door.\u201d Granted, it could merely be a foreshadowing element used to heighten anxiety when Donnie\/Gretchen stumble upon, coincidentally, a cellar door later in the movie, but maybe there was more depth behind its choice. If a cellar door can be viewed as the deepest, darkest … Continue reading Fears<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}