Needle Drops is a column that asks writers about—you guessed it—their all-time favorite needle drop in a film. In this edition, Danielle Chelosky talks about Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” from Richard Kelly’s 2001 psychological thriller Donnie Darko.
Before he hanged himself at the age of twenty-three, Joy Division singer Ian Curtis endured violent seizures. “When he has his attacks, it makes him surreal, terribly frightening, I have seen him practically airborne,” his mistress, Annik Honoré, once said. “But it’s also something magical as a contact between the conscious and unconscious. Suddenly, he would enter a world with no relation to reality.”
Though Joy Division had only two albums, they went on to pioneer an entire genre and maintain a legacy as one of the most important bands of all time. The group’s bleak sound is haunted by a sense of otherworldliness, which could be connected to the frontman’s epilepsy. Droning instrumentation can feel like blacking out and soaring through the unconscious. Curtis would imitate his fits on stage with erratic dances. Joy Division brought something completely alien to music.
“Love Will Tear Us Apart” remains their untouchable hit. Less enigmatic and more conventional than their previous work, the song is still heavy with inevitable doom. In Richard Kelly’s 2001 psychological thriller Donnie Darko, “Love Will Tear Us Apart” comes on during a Halloween house party, right as Donnie (played by a young Jake Gyllenhaal) opens the door to find love interest Gretchen (Jena Malone) crying. The use of the beloved tune in that scene takes on far more meaning within the context of Curtis’s tragic life, which is very similar to that of the sixteen-year-old Donnie.
Donnie Darko begins with Donnie waking up in the middle of a road surrounded by a purple landscape of mountains. From there, we watch the angsty teenager reading in bed, fighting with his sister at the dinner table, and taking his meds in the bathroom, all in the shadow of political dread. The pills don’t stop him from hearing voices, sleepwalking, and having visions of a man named Frank dressed in a bunny suit who is counting down to the end of the world.
Reality quickly unravels. A plane inexplicably crashes into Donnie’s home while he’s sleeping on a golf course. A confused 101-year-old woman known as Grandma Death constantly checks her empty mailbox. Space shifts and warps with strange omens. Donnie asks his physics teacher about time travel and receives an answer about wormholes that are “a shortcut for jumping between two distant regions of space-time.” The weird instances slowly become interconnected, like the world is a puzzle only Donnie can solve. As his mischief and curiosity persist, he’s diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Frank instructs Donnie to flood the school and burn down a house, so he does.
Sometimes Curtis would pull wooden tiles off the stage and throw them into the audience. One time he smashed a pint glass and rolled around in the shards while the crowd watched. Another time he tried to overdose on barbiturates, and another time drunkenly slit his wrist. While Joy Division was recording their second and final album, Closer, he had a seizure in the studio bathroom and hit his head on the sink, lying unconscious for two hours until bassist Peter Hook found him.
I don’t remember how old I was when I was diagnosed with epilepsy, but I was around sixteen when medicine finally took it away. My seizures were never too bad. I still faint when getting blood taken. To me, losing consciousness feels like floating in a place that doesn’t exist. It’s the most terrifying experience because coming to feels like being born again. For a split second you know absolutely nothing about who you are or where you are or what anything is. In ancient times, some speculated that seizures were prophecies or exorcisms. Donnie’s distorted perception is not unlike Curtis’s epileptic episodes; both chip away at reality and reveal what lay beneath: reality is not black-and-white but fluid.
“I don’t want to be alone,” Donnie tells his therapist. But even when he’s around others, he’s in his own world. He hallucinates in his living room while watching football with his family. He can’t connect to others because of his unique perception. He is misunderstood; he is inhabiting a separate world than they are. At the Halloween party, “Love Will Tear Us Apart” is an echo as Donnie and Gretchen talk upstairs. Gretchen says her mom left because of Gretchen’s abusive stepdad. “I guess some people are just born with tragedy in their blood,” Gretchen says as she slips the hood off Donnie’s head. He kisses her, maybe feeling, for once, the dissipation of his isolation. There is the potential of love as a force that can protect them both from the fear that’s ravaging their lives. But “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” playing downstairs, is already foreboding, communicating the inherent destruction of romance. They have sex for the first time. Momentarily, Donnie forgets that the end of the world is supposed to arrive in mere hours. It is a temporary solution.
Donnie’s fate, like Curtis’s, is death by his own choice. His hallucinations turn out to be prophecies that result in Frank killing Gretchen. Donnie then uses a wormhole to reverse time and die in the plane crash from the beginning of the movie, thus saving Gretchen. In this way, love really does tear them apart—not only is Donnie dead, but their relationship never happens at all. Some people may be born with tragedy in their blood, but such outsiders have a way transcending the mundane, revealing possibilities no one else notices, like portals to another galaxy. “Love Will Tear Us Apart”—like Joy Division’s whole discography—endures because of its glimpse into the cosmic. Its role in Donnie Darko has dimensions that only some viewers can see.
Danielle Chelosky is a writer from New York. She is the author of Pregaming Grief and Baby Bruise.
Illustration: Josh Simmons
