Wow. Talk about class application. The AV Club has a piece today on Donnie Darko and the formulation of a cult genre canon. Read it here.
The opening paragraph begins:
"In embarking on the mammoth, open-ended project that is The New Cult Canon, I face the scary and exhilarating prospect of a journey with no set course and no planned destination, but there was never a question that I'd be leaving port with Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko. To my mind, Donnie Darko is the quintessential cult movie of the last 20 years: Here was a much-hyped washout at Sundance that fell to a second-tier distributor (Newmarket), which released the film to middling reviews and feeble arthouse box-office (barely half a million when all was said and done). The film was left for dead until, miraculously, word of mouth started to swell and an audience steadily grew and rallied around it. The Pioneer Theater in New York ran it as a midnight movie for two years—this at a time when the midnight movie itself had long been left for dead. And DVD sales were so robust that Newmarket attempted to re-release the "Director's Cut" theatrically. (It tanked a second time, too.) The movie has inspired a level of obsession that separates cult phenomena from the everyday hits that wither past opening weekend."
If you read the whole piece, it's got some really good postmodern intertextuality analysis, ie. saying the secret of the film has to do with the seond bill at the double feature Donnie Darko takes his date to (Last Temptation of Christ), but what's really interesting is the story's link to the writer's ongoing series on the Cult Canon. The assumption is that "Cult" at this point is a genre, based not on semantics or syntax but more on demographics, exhibition history, etc. This series is worth watching if only to see how wide he casts his genre net in pursuit of all things cultish.
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