Last night (and tonight), I watched The United States of Leland, a movie which I am still deconstructing and processing, albeit with a much slighter degree of profundity than that which I gave Donnie Darko. I will not write a review of this movie; rather I'll encourage you to see it for yourselves, quickly noting that it strikes me as even more hit-or-miss than Darko. Similarities abound in setting, style, and cast, but are easily dismissed in terms of plot and theme. On a personal note, what was most striking to me was not the film, but my immediate reaction to seeing it, and how easily I understood and identified with Leland.

After viewing this film about an emotionally and psychologically troubled young man, I glanced around my room, and saw my favorite movie, Donnie Darko, resting in DVD form on the top of my collection. I looked at my bookcase and saw The Catcher in the Rye, my favorite book, resting in the most accessible place on the left-hand side of its shelf. Quietly, I mused about their respective protagonists. Musing transformed into a thoughtfulness. Thoughfulness transformed into pensiveness. In this wistful stillness, my mind drifted back to the beginning of my relationship with the first of these three figures.

After having been forced to read a few classics that were so memorable I cannot recall their titles at this juncture, my AP English teacher assigned The Catcher in the Rye during the autumn of my senior year of high school. Like anyone who has a minimal respect for literature, I knew of the book, and, thanks to Billy Joel's miracle hit of 1989, "We Didn't Start the Fire," I knew the approximate date of publish of Salinger's work. Aside from those basic chunks of information, I was ignorant of the content of the slim paperback that was plopped on my desk. The previous books had been read as though I were foreshadowing college: read a few pages, write the response, and dwell on some obscure sentence or turn of phrase on page 54 during the discussion. Catcher was different. The pages turned themselves, aided by how much I liked Holden Caulfield. He sounded like I sounded. He thought like I thought. When the pages stopped turning, I was stricken silent for hours. Here was someone whom I thought I was so similar, obviously not as fully in sync with his environs as much as I thought he was. Could I be the same?

Still in my reverie over USL, I left my memory of sitting, shocked, questioningly still, upon the top bunk of my room, and revisted the day I met Donnie. Of the four remaining residents of my Iowa City home, I was the only one home during Easter weekend, 2003. I had conveniently forgotten to ask for time off work and was left to labor at customer service during the holiday. After returning home from work on Friday evening and finding the house deserted and possessing an eerie stillness, broken only by the disquieting creaks of expanding and contracting pipes rendered confused by the vascillating Iowa springtime temperatures, I put on my coat and walked to the nearest rental store. I rented two DVDs that night, one of which, Y Tu Mamá También, was based on a roommate's recommendation. The other film was Donnie Darko, a film I could say I had heard of, but was clueless as to the plot. The stupor that befell me following the credits of that movie began not because I identified so well with Donnie's predicament--I have never seen a six-foot bunny rabbit and have yet to be charged formally with the rarefied task of saving the world in 28 days, six hours, forty-two minutes, and twelve seconds, but resulted from my equation of the end of Donnie's fictional world with the end of my world, in academic terms, as it had existed since 1986. Coincidentally, the end of my academic world occurred exactly 28 days after watching that movie. Debris from the vortex of hell my life became after watching that movie is probably still around.

There I was, last night, sitting on the floor, wondering how I have become so welcoming of such troubled characters. Maybe I should be telling all of this to a therapist someday, but I truly wonder if I am not as disturbed as these three characters. What's my excuse? Holden had his dead brother, Donnie had Frank, and Leland, well, Leland has the sadness. Crap. I just realized that Ricky Fitts was my favorite character from American Beauty. And I really liked Good Will Hunting, and Will was troubled. Oh, to be a student again, and to enjoy the free "meetings" with the university.