Enemy-- CALL Discussion Notes

Enemy — director Denis Villeneuve

Actor Anthony Saint Claire (Jake Gyllenhaal) gets a phone message that his mother (Isabella Rossellini) doesn’t like his new apartment. (Later she will say he should give up his fantasy of being a third-rate actor, presumably to join her higher class world, and that he has troubles with fidelity.) A shot of a pregnant woman turns out to be Anthony’s pregnant wife Helen (Sarah Gadon).

Anthony leads another man down a long industrial corridor, unlocks a door, and they join a group of middle aged men watching a nude woman masturbating. Two other scantily robed then nude woman enter. One raises the lid on a silver tray, revealing a large tarantula, which one woman prepares to squash.

History prof Adam Bell (Jake Gyllenhaal again) comes out of a depressing class. A  colleague recommends a particular “cheerful” movie. He rents the DVD and watches it after his tipsy girlfriend Mary (Melanie Laurent) goes to bed. She storms off when he tries to make love to her. Adam dreams a scene from the film, which prompts him to rerun it back to a scene where his cleaner shaven lookalike plays a bellboy.

Adam (Jake) obsessively tracks Anthony (Jake) down. He goes to the actor’s agent where the security guard thinks he’s Anthony and gives him a personal letter. When he phones he finds Anthony’s wife Helen thinks he has her husband’s voice. Anthony at first refuses to meet the man he says might be a crazy stalker. Helen, suspicious of her unfaithful husband’s strange behaviour, goes to Scarborough campus and sees and talks to his academic double. Anthony phones Adam and arranges to meet him at the Breezeway Inn. There they find themselves identical, even down to the same chest scar. 

The academic Adam flees the scene but now the actor wants to pursue the mysterious dual unity. (They met in Room 221.) He rehearses a jealous speech (“Did you fuck my wife?”) then delivers it and proposes that to get even Adam has to make his car, clothes and girlfriend available to Anthony. Waiting for the actor’s wife to return to her apartment, Adam studies the actor’s domestic world, the posh flat and clothes, etc. 

The two sex scenes are intercut. Helen calls Adam to bed. She intuits he might be Adam (“Did you have a good day at school?”) but they make passionate love. Anthony is screwing Adam’s Mary until she notices the wedding ring tanline that Adam doesn’t have. She is livid. They tear off in Adam’s car. In frustrated anger Anthony smashes Adam’s car, apparently killing both himself and Adam’s wife.

Adam awakens blissed out the next morn and calls out to his (i.e., Anthony’s) wife. She says he has a phone message from his mother. Adam opens Anthony’s private envelop and finds a key, presumably to return to the sex-club his concierge mentioned having gone to with Anthony. Presumably out of academic interest, Adam plans to go. When Adam looks in on her in the bedroom he sees instead a monstrous tarantula.

Questions to Consider

1.What does this film share with Villeneuve’s most recent successes, Incendies and Prisoners (the latter which he made at roughly the same time, also with Gyllenhaal)? Is Adam here an extension of the contemplative detective Gyllenhaal played in Prisoners and the wilder actor Anthony perhaps a version of the kidnapped girl’s violently vengeful father? 

2. How do those films also treat the theme of discovering one’s double? The Double (aka O Homem Duplicado) is the title of the Portuguese author Jose Saramago’s source novel.

3. Is the tarantula maybe a symbol? Aha, but of what? Adam dreams an inverted spider woman coming down that hallway. Another fantasy shot has a spider over the Toronto skyline. Anthony wears a spidery helmet. After the car crash the broken window is a spider web. So? Is the ultimate spider Adam’s interpretation of Helen (and the snare of domesticity) or perhaps an emblem of the dangers of eroticism? Something else?

4. Why is Adam specifically a History prof? Why is Anthony an actor? One possibility: A historian studies past/others’ actions. An actor plays other characters and makes them present. And why not a lead actor? 

5. Who or what is the enemy?

6. Saramago: “Chaos is order yet undeciphered.” What is the chaos here? What is the underlying order discovered by the end?

7. What’s the point of Adam being family-named Bell? And Anthony Claire? Why does Adam’s hallway walk in front of Anthony’s concierge parallel Anthony’s early scene with him? 

8. The first Jake we connect with is Adam, whom we see lecturing, then eventually discovering his lookalike. But the film opens on the actor Anthony, both through his mother and the sex club scene (where we see his wedding ring). Why does Villeneuve play this structural trick on us? Does it prevent or encourage our reading the film as either Adam or Anthony dreaming the other? 

9. How is Toronto depicted? What atmosphere or themes are in the city shots? Is there any relevance in "tarantula" being etymologically derived from the Italian town Taranto?

10. What’s the point of the two Jakes’ characterization? Adam doesn’t go out much, is all work, doesn’t go to movies, and asks for a “cheerful” one. Anthony eschews the establishment life for the liberties of motorcycle, affairs, etc.

11. How is Anthony’s character redefined by what we see of his mother? Why does the Canadian actor have so much nicer a flat than the U of T Prof? Huh? Where’s the justice? I mean, what’s the point?

12. Why are Helen and Mary such lookalikes in hair, face and legs? What do their differences signify?

13. How do Adam’s lectures resonate in the film? e.g., his thrice repeated lecture on dictatorships being “all about control” and Hegel’s remark that everything important happens twice, to which Marx added first as tragedy, then as farce.

14. How does the film’s disturbing elements exempt it from the “bread and circuses” by which Adam says dictatorships control their subjects?

15. What is the function of the early scene of erotic spectatorship? Does the confusion between Adam and Anthony establish us as the voyeuristic presence?

16. Why is the rented film titled Where There’s a Will There’s a Way? And Anthony’s other credit, Passenger Without a Ticket? How do they relate to the sex club scene? Why does the actor have a book titled History in Reverse on his shelf? 

17. What’s the point of the end-credit lyrics: “After the lights go out, What will I do? After the lights go out, Facing the night without you.”

18. Why does Adam buy a pair of flashy shades before setting out to find Anthony?

19. What resonates in the concierge’s lines: “You actors are something else.” “Don’t be a stranger.” Why is Anthony given a stage name, Daniel Saint Clair? Note it’s not the usual St (as in the Toronto street) but the spelled out Saint.

20. What do the dreams mean here? Is there a dream-like element in the city shots? Who’s dreaming?

21. How does “Breezeway” read as a metaphor? 

22. How does the film assume additional meaning from the fact that it’s directed by arguably Quebec’s foremost director? Consider its characterization of Toronto and Villeneuve’s return from making the Hollywood thriller Prisoners.