Portuguese novelist José Saramago’s works often tackled the human struggle of coming to terms with one’s identity and place in society. Growing up underPortugal’s authoritarian Estado Novo, influenced his approach to narrative. The protagonists of his novels face their own inner complications and demons, as well as the world they live in.
His 2002 work,The Double, is a psychological suspense novel about a man dealing with the existence of his doppelganger. As the story moves on, Saramago delicately brings in multiple layers of conflict and narrative that transcend the bizarre situation of a man facing the absurd. The 2013 cinematic adaptation of the novel,Enemy, directed by Denis Villeneuve and with Jake Gyllenhaal, takesThe Double’score ideas and expands on them through brilliant visual poetry. Here’s a closer look at this fascinating film.
What Is Enemy About?
Adam Bell (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a Toronto history professor whose life is ruled by a monotonous routine. While watching a movie, he becomes fixated on an actor called Anthony Claire (also Gyllenhaal), who is identical to him.
Filled with fascination, he delves into the other man’s life. As these two indistinguishable men meet, their existence becomes entangled and so do the women in their lives. What ensues is conflict, confusion, identity crisis, and chaos.
Symbolism in Enemy and the Illusion of Control
To properly graspEnemy, one should see it twice. The first viewing, as an experience. The second, as an analytical exercise. The film is filled with visual metaphors and symbolism, which can be quite hard to grasp as some are very subtle, and others just quite difficult to get. Yet, it’s important to try and make sense of them, as they are all relevant to multiple ideas the film is dealing with.
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At its heart, the film is about 30-year-old men dealing with the lack of direction in their lives. Both Adam and Anthony seem to have deep issues with themselves. The former is a history professor who knows everything about authoritarian and controlling societies, but ironically seems to have no ownership of his own existence despite having a standardized routine. The latter is dealing with marital issues and the looming birth of his child (i.e. a threat to his irresponsible life), and when confronted about his infidelity, is incapable of accepting his own misgivings.
Duality and Escapism
A good starting point to understand the film upon a second viewing would be the following: Anthony and Adam are the same person. Once this is taken into account, everything will be easier to follow.
Adam/Anthony is a married man but is having difficulties coming to terms with his wife’s pregnancy, so he is a prisoner of his own desires and fears, and cheats on her as a coping mechanism. Adam’s life with Marie (Melanie Laurent) is the representation of escapism, a frumpy man who largely does what he wants, while Anthony’s life with his wife Helen (Sarah Gadon) is the mimesis of perfection (a swanky apartment, fine clothes, a masculine motorcycle), while still in suffering and denial.
When they meet, Adam gets scared, because seeing Anthony means facing the fact he lives in a fantasy, while for Anthony seeing Adam is synonymous with excitement, because it makes him feel like he can escape his marital situation trough becoming someone else.
Fascism in the Shadows
Despite it appearing to be a Kafkaesque narrative about man facing the absurd, deep down,Enemyis a film about living under totalitarian rule. This is first expressed by Adam when lecturing his students about dictatorships. He tells them that the one obsession of dictators is control, and that throughout history various methods such as entertainment, depravation of education, or bribery have been used to sedate populations into not knowing they are being controlled.
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Adam’s seemingly organized yet purposeless life is an exercise in the individual’s search for meaning through control. This echoes the phrase from the book which is the film’s opening line, “Chaos is order, yet undeciphered.” This refers to the situation of duality; this apparent chaos in which his life has fallen into, at the end of the day, is his life, which he has not deciphered yet. His illusion of control is shattered when he finds out he has a double (i.e. repressions and problems), and must find sense in this chaos.
Webs, Metaphors, and Spiders in Enemy and its Ending
So where do the spiders fit in the story? One of the many confusing things one will notice when watchingEnemy, for the first time, is the constant appearance of spiders and spiderweb-like objects. This is not some random visual anomaly or sheer weirdness, nor does it come directly from the novel. This visual metaphor devised by screenwriter Javier Gullón, appears in dream-like sequences that Adam is apparently having. One of these sequences finds him attending (as Anthony, due to the wedding ring) an underground erotic show, where a woman is about to crush a tarantula with her heel. Another one features a giant spider walking around Toronto, and another one of these is in that same underground club, where a naked woman with the head of a spider walks past him.
The use of spiders and webs works in seemingly two separate ways, which are actually interwoven. First, inEnemy,there’s a clear correlation between spiders and women (especially the fear of a woman controlling a man). The very ending of the film, in which everything seems to be resolved, has Adam/Anthony’s pregnant partner become a massive, horrific spider, revealing that the threat still exists in his mind.
His sexual fantasy finds a spider being crushed by a high heel, indicative of the elimination of being trapped in the web of marriage and fatherhood, killing off that part of his life. The massive spiders roaming Toronto in his dreamlike state seem to suggest this fear of women (and commitment) looming large over everything.
Second, the metaphors inEnemycould refer to the silent entanglement of fascism. Various scenes feature the city as a cloudy place, others focus on the street car’s cables, and other visual allegories (such as shattered glass looking like a web) convey the idea of a society of control slowly taking over everything. Though the novel never makes a direct reference to spiders, in an earlier Saramago novel, titledThe Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, the author refers to the fascist police and their allies as spiders.
There is no lack of spiders’ webs in the world, from some you’re able to escape, in other you die. The fugitive will find shelter in a boardinghouse under an assumed name, thinking he is safe, he has no idea that his spider will be the daughter of the landlady… a dedicated nationalist who will regenerate his heart and mind.
Taking this into account, spiders can then be interpreted as both external totalitarianism and also a part of the subconscious, as an inner dictator who is taking people through a certain path (in this case, Anthony’s compulsion to cheat on his wife and Adam’s one to meet his double). The oneiric sequences in the erotic club are a representation of the psycho-sexual compulsions Adam/Anthony is facing. The appearance of spiders and their association with women in these, allude to his inability to deal with married life, and a misogynistic notion that his wife is a repressive (and even fascistic) force that will not allow him to be free.
