8 Small Details You Only Notice Rewatching Donnie Darko

Jim Cunningham, even before he is exposed as a paedophile, is the movie's antagonist. His smarmy and self-righteous attitude is designed to rub audiences up the wrong way.

During his Attitudinal Beliefs seminar, which he forces on school pupils, Cunningham sets out the "instruments of fear" - alcohol, drugs, and premarital sex. He proposes that teenagers too often give into these temptations and in turn give into their own fears.

Cunningham and Donnie have an adversarial relationship. Still, it can be seen that Donnie gives into these proposed "instruments of fear". His partaking in drinking alcohol, consuming drugs, and sex with Gretchen, inadvertently makes him a case study for his snide enemy. Alongside this is Donnie being constantly plagued with the existential fear that the world is going to end; perhaps that's why he gives into fear on a whole other level to his peers.

However, in exposing Cunningham as a degenerate, Donnie also shows that there are far worse things a person can do than teenage experimentation. The "instruments of fear" ultimately only affect the individual rather than Cunningham's crimes that destroy victim's lives.