If you’ve been following my Substack or my Letterboxd or you talk to me on a regular basis, you will already know that I am in the throes of what I am calling a “Jake GyllenHAUL.” (TL;DR: I am going through his entire filmography in no order, whether that’s first-time watches or rewatches. And yes, I am considering trademarking the term “Jake GyllenHAUL.”)
The other night, I decided to rewatch a Jake cult classic (cult classic, cult cult classic), Donnie Darko. I hadn’t rewatched this one in a minute. In early high school, it was The Bible to me. I was blown away by it even though I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant at the time. I just thought it was fuckin’ cool and rock ’n roll. My friends and I quoted “Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion!” on a regular basis. We gasped when Frank the Bunny asked, “Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?” We were obsessed.
I rewatched Donnie Darko expecting to be kind of “eye roll at my teenage interests and what I thought was deep before I had any actual life experience” about it this time. Instead, I was moved from the very first frame.
The opening shot is of Donnie sleeping in the middle of an empty mountain road overlooking an incredible view at sunrise. The colors are unreal. It’s so beautiful that it looks like a painting. As the scene went on, I thought to myself, “I’ve been there…”
Come to find out, this was filmed at actual sunrise on the Angeles Crest Highway in the San Gabriel Mountains in LA County. It was the first shot of the movie to be filmed. Apparently (according to Reddit, a reliable and respectable source), the view looks a bit different now after 20-odd years of forest fires, but still I knew it instantly. This is something unique to living in Los Angeles that happens often: I drive past somewhere in my car and think, “I know that place from that movie” or I watch a movie and think, “I know that place because I drove past it.” With Donnie Darko, I was transported twofold: back to 14-year-old me, who had no idea where this was filmed or even cared and was just sitting there thinking that this was the coolest movie ever made. And then adult me, who now recognized the location as a familiar place and a drive that is sacred to me. If I’m feeling uninspired or questioning why I moved all the way to the West Coast from my home of Chicago, this is one of those places where I go. California is so very different from what I know, have known. Sometimes that’s a good thing and sometimes it’s difficult. On the Angeles Crest Highway, it’s a good thing.
As Donnie Darko began, my two selves existed side by side for a moment. Movies can do that. It turns out, I loved the film even more now that I’ve had actual life experience.
To round this out, below is a journal entry I wrote after my first drive up the Angeles Crest Highway a few years ago:
I drove up there on a whim, to heaven. I saw it on Google Maps and thought “what is this?” And the images were so beautiful I just decided to go for a drive at sunset for no reason. The turnouts were either empty or had one or two cars parked in them, people stopping to sit and enjoy the view or getting out to take pictures. One woman sat on the side of the road by herself staring at the view of downtown tiny in the distance. She got up and asked the strangers in the car next to her if they had a light. They did. And then she went back to sitting and staring at the city from high up above. I didn’t talk to her, but she seemed like she was in a pivotal moment, a delicate one.
I stopped at every other turnout and ran out and took pictures of the views. At two different points, I turned off my car and got out and when I slammed the door shut and if there were no cars going by – for a few seconds, it was absolutely silent. No birds, no wind, no cars, no people, no bars on my phone. Just silence. So silent it was disorienting, like an out of body experience or a waking dream.