Donnie Dreado

There's a really interesting article from a few days back over at PopMatters about the ways in which Lost is one of the first episodic dramas to operate off of a kind of video game interface, like an extended RPG with consistently new levels, new clues, new bad guys, new challenges, food bars, etc. This is something that all the video game adaptations Hollywood has churned out have never attempted, and is probably the main reason for their failure. I'm not the most devoted fan of the show (its occasional inertia and inability to resolve anything often makes me think I'm wasting my time), but I also see parallels to comic book thinking too. The flashbacks and dys-chronology, the intercrossing storylines, and particularly the "commentary" episodes, which showcase each episode's own self-referentiality.

Another interesting, though totally tangent analogy I came across was on The Bug's new album. The few bars of Tears For Fears's "Mad World" that Warrior Queen intones at the end of "Insane" would certainly make any one who has been alive during the last decade think of Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko (and hopefully not the embarassing director's cut nor the unsolicited sequel being planned). You wouldn't immediately think of the film in terms of representations of the dub/ dubstep/ soundboy music scene, but there are some interesting shared traits; the apocalypticism, the vague connection to sci-fi, the allusions to divine/jah intervention, the rudeboy figure of Donnie- part punk/ part-avenger/ part-time romantic, the mess of pills (though the director's cut crudely reveals them to be placebos) and warped hallucinations, the obsession with the terminal. The feeling of dread alone could make it the tonal equivalent of a dark Kode9 or Digital Mystikz track. In fact, I now nominate it to be what Scarface is to gangsta rap, a cross-subcultural distillation of one's delusions of grandeur.