Odd End Phenomenon: Portal, Donnie Driving

[ProvidencePortal]

Also begun in another thread and now being moved here for appropriatness:

In the context of our GAIME (generally accepted interpretation of the movie's events), there seem to be strange things afoot as we watch Donnie in the early morning hours of his final day in the TU. Specifically, two things I'm having trouble reconciling:

1) The portal's placement. Both when we see Donnie return home after the altercation at Grandma Death's (to get the car and kiss his sis goodbye) and when he drives off from the house, we see the ominous swirlings of the portal forming over the Darkos' place. Now, the GAIME tells us that what's about to happen next goes like this: Donnie will travel to Carpathian Ridge, where he'll use his LR powers to tear the engine from a passing plane and send it into the portal. It will enter in the TU and exit in the PU (on a straight-line trajectory into Donnie's PU bedroom). This will erase the TU and save the PU.

So if the portal entrance is in the TU up high in the sky, why are we seeing what is presumably an exit over Donnie's house in the TU? That exit end should be over his house in the PU, yes. We might say the universes are complete copies, and therefore the portal appears in full in both places. But if that's the case, how in the world does the engine get from the entrance in the TU to the exit in the PU?

2) Donnie's driving destination. I believe we have correctly assumed that Donnie needs to drive to the ridge for a better view of the approaching plane and the portal into which he'll dump the engine. But after the engine is sent into the portal, Donnie grins at Gretchen's corpse and puts the care into gear, as though he's going somewhere. Where is Donnie getting ready to drive to as the engine traverses the portal? If he fully understands what's happening (and if our GAIME is accurate), where IS there to go? The TU should be unwinding almost immediately, and Donnie should have no time to travel anywhere.

The fact that he seemed to know what was happening and still appeared to be planning to drive somewhere immediately raised this question in my mind: does the TU go on existing for some period of time after the PU's been saved and the experiences in the TU are all but "unwound" from the MLs' memories? Is that why Donnie mentions to his shrink that he only has "a few days until they catch" him?

Does Donnie's TU in fact continue for a couple days after he sends the engine back? Or, through some mirroring/duplication effect we haven't discussed before, is he perhaps heading back to be crushed by the engine in that universe, too?

Thoughts?

[Bigboy]

1) I may need to rewatch the end to get this straight with myself, but I always saw the 'big black swirly' above Donnies house as a manifestation of the corruption transmuting into the black hole as time was running down.
The distictly more benign looking 'swirly' that Donnie send the engine in to is a portal from TU to PU of Donnies (perhaps subconcious) construction.

2) I don't know - maybe he was going to go all Thelma and Louise if he found that in fact he was crazy - the cops are on his trail afterall.
(It's the cops, incidentally, who I think he's talking about when he says there's only a few days till they catch him. He is under hypnosis at the time and his ability to see the future does seem to be primarily subconcious.)

[John]

Yeah, I never quite understood why he put the car into gear either...your explanations are quite possible but I don't know.

And I never picked up on the idea of Donnie using his Living Receiver powers to tear the jet engine from the plane...I thought it just happened because the plane was flying to close to the portal and the portal was so powerful it ripped the engine off of it.

[Phil]

Bigboy said:

, but I always saw the 'big black swirly' above Donnies house as a manifestation of the corruption transmuting into the black hole as time was running down.

thats how i interpreted that scene aswell.

As for why he put the car in gear, i havnt got a clue about that one either

[Hatch]

All I have seen is the director's cut and maybe I need to watch again, but I don't recall Donnie getting back into the car. He is sitting on the hood just before you see his life going in reverse.

[ProvidencePortal]

Hatch said:

I don't recall Donnie getting back into the car.

We just watched the director's cut last Tuesday, and I'm positive he gets back into the car and puts it into gear. Strange, eh?

RE: the theory that the cylinder Donnie's house is the corruption becoming the black hole that will destroy all -- I can only say that there is no evidence to disprove that idea, so you may very well be right. I suppose I take from its shape (that distinct pipe-of-swirling-gasses) the suggestion that its a portal; it just feels and looks like the end part of a tube meant to transport something. That, combined with its placement (over the house, just where [my presumption here] the engine will fall from in the PU and into Donnie's room) has me still wondering if it isn't meant to be a portal -- whether that fits into our understanding or not.

After I had this question, I searched posts ("Where does the engine come from" and "portal") and several postulations presented themselves in a kind of Theory of Everything Darko. If we combine the idea that the Tangent really is an offshoot, and not a simultaneous alternate universe, with the "single engine" theory, what we come up with is the idea that there really is only one wormhole/portal ... and that somehow, in its execution, it exists both in 10/2 and on 10/31.

In that quilted theory, the engine exits the portal on both days ... from the same portal.

[Bigboy]

But, if we subscribe to the idea that the 'first' engine is the result of a 'copying error' (as we have discussed previously) caused by the corruption, given the fact that the engine hits Donnies house, we would expect the corruption to manifest above Donnie's house.

Also in this case, the portal needn't exist at both times in the TU, since on 10/2 it wasn't manifest.

However you see it 'Tangent', or 'Branch' do suggest that there is a single point of spatial point of contact between TU and PU, which (i belive) must necessarily be the location/point of corruption. The qustion is, does this point of contact constitute a 'potal' or wormhole, or is it merely a weakened point of spacetime at the point of contact between universes.
If it constitutes a portal, does that mean that we have two portals passing thought the same point (and does that matter in higher dimentional space)?
If however it is a weakened point, and the only point of contact netween universes, then Donnie is free to create a wormhole/portal to the PU which would logically appear over his house (assuming a duplicated universe).
In this case the corruption and portal would seem to be in different (3D) points in space - but again, in higher dinentional space, does this matter?

[John]

I think the point of intersection between the PU and TU constitutes a wormhole because the way I see it, at the end of the movie, when the wormhole opens up over Donnie's house and the jet engine goes into it, time goes back to that point of intersection. The only way back to the PU is to go back in time to that point of intersection because like Bigboy said, a tangent only intersects a line at one point, so there would be no other point of space time to go.

[Hatch]

I would have to say the swirling black clouds are definitely not a portal. Sparrow's writing says the following...

"Eventually it (the tangent universe) will collapse upon itself, forming a black hole within the Primary Universe capable of destroying all existence. "

So at that point in the movie the tangent universe can no longer sustain itself and has formed a destructive black hole. Donnie, was basically witnessing the destruction of the primary universe caused by the collapse of the tangent one.

If you are trying to figure out the exact point where the engine fell from or where a portal opening was, I don't think you can. I thought of it as another universe super-imposed onto our own. So there isn't a true point of origin for the artifact, it just is.

[John]

Hatch said:

I would have to say the swirling black clouds are definitely not a portal. Sparrow's writing says the following...

"Eventually it (the tangent universe) will collapse upon itself, forming a black hole within the Primary Universe capable of destroying all existence. "

I was always under the impression that the black hole would only form in the PU universe IF and only if the artifact wasn't sent back to from the TU to the PU before the TU collapses. But the artifact was sent back in time. Remember, when the clouds were swirling and all that, that was still in the TU.

[Hatch]

I see what you are saying, but it does say that the hole will form in the primary. Also, the other times you see portals in the movie they have the make-up of water. The circle forming in the sky is black and even had a tornado forming at the bottom. I don't think they are the same thing. Also, the last time you see the engine falling (while Donnie is at the car watching), I believe it is in the primary. It hits Donnie's house in the primary and is recovered once again by the FAA.

[ProvidencePortal]

Some of the exact questions I've asked myself, BB. And I've wrestled with them but found few answers. The core struggle I'm having is the need to bridge both time and space, coupled with the fact that we're presented with not a tear (that "single point of temporal/spatial contact" I also believe we SHOULD have), but with a tube -- a wormhole-style portal that begins in one place and time and ends in another. Every time I think I'm getting my head around it, the idea that the portal has to traverse both -- that is, have one end in the TU's 10/31 and the other in the PU's 10/2 -- I get wrapped up. Here are some thoughts:

1) expecting the portal to manifest over Donnie's house -- yes, I agree here; we would expect it to manifest over his house in the time when it will deposit the engine on Donnie's bed/noggin.

2) of criss-crossing portals -- in fact, I think I'm only left with two options:
A. There is both a portal and a tear. It's through the portal that the second engine passes back to enter Donnie's house and kill him. It's out of the the tear the first engine appears in the TU, crashing into Donnie's room while he's snoozing on the links. This avoids the nastiness of the loops and repeats I'm starting to worry occur in this next theory ...
B. There is one universe. There is one portal. It begins in the sky over Middlesex and ends over Donnie's house. We spend most of the movie traveling a Tangent Path, not moving in a Tangent (mirror) universe). And there is no "first" or "second" engine -- there's one engine. The first time we see it, it's the inexplicable paradox someone (Phil?) mentioned in a previous thread -- the conceit on which many "time-travel" movies are based. The second time we see it, we understand where and when it's been sent from.

I'm sorry, but I'm still getting twisted around on this bit of twine. I keep going back to the idea that this line of reasoning is going to take us directly to the place we've so ardently opposed (and with good reason) throughout our discussion of the movie: that it's just another paradox-set-right movie, and that Donnie in fact DOES need to kill himself, because God's path has been mucked up by a divergence.

I'm smacking over and over again into this: I can't make the PoTT's LR rules (corruptions occur spontaneously and randomly, LR is chosen and returns the artifact, no time travel) reconcile with the visuals we get of the portal that everyone -- Frank, Donnie and Prof. Monnitof included -- seems to put so much emphasis on throughout the movie.

ARggh!

[Bigboy]

Well I never believed that Donnie had to die - so I'd opt for 2a every time.

In my opinion any discussion trying to resolve God with Fate AND God with Free Will, is inherantly paradoxical - so maybe paradox is unavoidable when you follow the 'Donnie was meant to die cos' God says so' explanation of DD (ie 2b)

[ProvidencePortal]

That's just it: I've never believed Donnie was meant to die/had to die either -- but that's primarily because of the PoTT and its assertion that the PU is saved the moment the artifact is returned.

But now, suddenly, I'm faced with other elements that make the PoTT and the in-movie events harder and harder to reconcile, which has things blurry for me.

[Bigboy]

Regarding the shape of the 'corruption';

The corruption itself is a degradation of the structure of spacetime, and wouldn't necessarily result in visible phenomena - and it doesn't; If you could see the corruption then it would have been visible throughout the film.

When the corruption eventually results as a black hole, the gasses of the atmoshere would would swirl around before collapsing into it or forming an accretion disc. This 'swirl' would most likely resemble a funnel - and this would seem to be what we see.

Another way of looking at it is this:
A portal = Wormhole, and a Wormhole is basically two black holes joined in the middle.
Since you can only ever see one end of a portal - a portal and wormhole would look more or less the same.