Donnie Darko and evil

I finally saw Donnie Darko the other night and I think he would agree with Augustin’s take on evil – that it doesn’t exist in itself, but is rather the privation or absence of goodness. In the end we discover that Frank, the bizarre, evil-seeming rabbit-friend of Donnie is actually a human being from the future. The emotional impact of discovering compassion for what we had at first feared was for me the true impact of this film. It is the technique of peeling back the black and white appearances of first impressions and revealing the human shades of gray.