Intermediality in Film and Internet: Donnie Darko and Issues of Narrative Substantiality

Intermediality in Film and Internet: Donnie Darko and Issues of Narrative Substantiality Paul Booth (bio) The structured re-telling of events from our life forms a narrativized account of who we are. But it's not just our own narratives that shape our experiences; it's what we see on screen: as Sandvoss shows, in many ways we identify our sense of self with mediated narratives (96). With websites that facilitate hypertextual and multilinear narratives, and with cinematic representations of narrative meaning, it becomes important to examine changes in mediated narrative structure, so that we can start to understand changes that happen in our conception of our selves. To illustrate this, I examine the narrativity of the Donnie Darko über-text through a comparison of the website < www.donniedarko.com > to the film Donnie Darko. I show that the viewers of both become actively engaged in the narrative formation of the text. I then go on to demonstrate that the website uses conventions of linear narratives while the film itself is multi-linear and ultimately hypertextual. I suggest that this difference creates an intermediary between media states, and it is in this intermediary that the text named "Donnie Darko" exists. This über-text exists in-between the film and the website, and emerges through a user's complex interaction with digital media. It is important to examine this mediation of narrative because narratives are a distinctly human trait—if we are the only species to elaborate [End Page 398] our life in narrativized terms, then a shift in narrative form would indicate a shift in the way people organize their lives. Indeed, Stephen Johnson shows that new narrative structures encourage more intellectually demanding viewers; that is, audience members whose intellects have been stimulated and advanced by the demands that new narratives have placed upon them. Indeed, narratives and stories universalize experiences to such an extent that they are useful in settings outside the normative expectations for fictional plots. For instance, as pointed out by Dan Gruen et al., narratives can be seen as "powerful communication and teaching tools" for corporate endeavors, and can "help multidisciplinary teams work together, and help end-users understand and discuss how a [computer] system would fit into their lives" (504). It is the story that translates between fields of study. The comprehension of narrative designs allows people to understand the structures that influence their lives, no matter what the contexts. Indeed, an understanding of new narrative structures becomes foundational for studies of human activity. The interplay between narratives in different media, however, reveals a disturbance in our understanding of narrative form itself. On the one hand, linear media like cinema have low interactivity, but a high degree of narrativity. On the other hand, multilinear media like the Internet are limited in their narrative structure because of their high degree of interactivity. Specifically, the Donnie Darko website lies in a different relation to the eponymous film. Beck has written about the relationship between the film and the website for Donnie Darko: the website "pick[s] up on the thematic logic inherent in the actual film text" and "allow[s] . . . users to dwell, protract and luxuriate in the diegetic space that the film has constructed" as a narrative (56–57). For Beck, the website for Donnie Darko enhances the narrative by including dispersed elements that operate together to form one cohesive plot. I argue instead that, with the change in the temporal structures of new media, the website for Donnie Darko, based on the film and serving as both an extension of and an explication of its plot, exists in a relation to the film that belies its status as a unique media. The website completes the fabula of the film, but in doing so, must subsume its own multilineality. The website substitutes lineality for interactivity in order to fulfill filmic expectations, just as the Internet negates the effects of a temporal narrative. In other words, the website makes the syuzhet a formal aspect of the online medium. Thus, in the film Donnie Darko, the relationship [End Page 399] between the fabula and the syuzhet differs from their relationship in the website Donnie Darko. This difference is...