Eli Solt

Three years ago, in the dead of night, I awoke in a panic. Drenched in sweat, I let myself slowly catch my breath and bring my thoughts back to reality. I had just woken up from one of the worst nightmares I had ever had yet it wasn’t anything complex or even outright frightening. In my dream, I was sitting in my bedroom in the middle of the night when I looked out my window and saw someone standing in the street outside my house. He was looking directly at me through the window and as my vision focused I could see that it was myself, staring up with a blank expression. It was only a fleeting moment, but the image lingered in my head for months, slowly eating away at the edges of my consciousness, casting the hint of a shadow on all of the preconceptions that I once held of the world. To this day, whenever I go to peek out my window at night, that same fear rises at the back of my brain.

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This is the kind of uneasiness and paranoia that propels Denis Villeneuve’s 2013 thriller, Enemy starring Jake Gyllenhaal who plays two different characters, both identical. When directing this film, Villeneuve was just coming off the huge success of his first English-language film, Prisoners, which premiered at the 2013 Telluride Film Festival and received very positive audience reception and critical acclaim. For Enemy, Villeneuve once again takes the methodical, dread-building, suspenseful approach that he used in the more crime-oriented Prisoners. However, this time he twists the story into a different kind of horror, the kind that resonates on an existential level and ends up leaving the audience with more questions than answers.

Villeneuve doesn’t have to try too hard to create this horror unnaturally as the plot revolves around a man finding a duplicate of himself out in the world. There is something fundamentally unsettling and disturbing about the nature of doppelgängers, and this film demonstrates the interpersonal anxieties and consequences of the absurd situation of seeking out one’s duplicate. While the plot is relatively simple, the narrative complexities lie within the carefully woven web of symbolism and metaphors which reveal an even more compelling subtext that explores femininity, the “uncanny,” and our concept of individuality in a postindustrial society.

Enemy begins with a rather disheveled history professor, Adam, stuck in a tediously repetitive life. Every day of class he gives a similar lecture, one with related content but lacking more and more in organization and coherent thought each time. Taking the busy cable car home, Adam finds himself returning to a bleak, dimly lit apartment where he grades papers and engages in empty, casual sex with a girlfriend who he seems to have little emotional connection with. The audience is shown several repetitions of this dismal existence until one day, during a break at school, a colleague recommends a movie to Adam completely out of the blue. While not particularly interested in cinema, Adam rents the film from a local video store in the hopes that, if nothing else, it could lift his spirits. He watches it without much interest and falls asleep only to be awakened by an image that he remembers from the film. Rushing back to his laptop, Adam pulls up the movie and in an anxious panic scrubs through the film until he finds what he is looking for. In just a few frames of the film, Adam can make out a background actor who looks completely identical to himself. The non-diegetic violins in the scene begin to whine with an eerie resonance and Adam is left speechless as a distant and unplaced dread begins to creep through the screen and toward the viewer. This dread continues to build throughout the rest of the film as Adam searches for his double, whom he discovers is an actor named Anthony who also lives in Toronto with his wife. The story builds off Adam trying to contact Anthony and once he eventually does, he quickly regrets it as everything begins to spiral out of control.

As a human species, the concept of doppelgängers has fascinated us since early conceptualization of the topic long ago in ancient cultures. While appearing in various mythologies over the centuries, the term itself began gaining popularity in the early romantic period near the beginning of the 19th century. Various accounts have told of people seeing a double of themselves out in the world, though the accuracy of these stories is impossible to determine. However, the concept has been thoroughly explored in a variety of artistic mediums throughout the past several centuries. Shakespeare utilized this horror in Hamlet where Hamlet’s father returns as a ghost and asks him to get revenge (which is a prominent theme in Enemy as well). Famous authors such as Poe, Conrad, and Dickens similarly explored the use of Doppelgängers as a plot device to influence the thoughts and actions of their characters. This fascination exists even today on Twitter. A common trend is finding your “look-a-like” in historical paintings or photographs. The result while often comedic can sometimes be a bit unnerving, especially if the resemblance is almost identical.

Film, perhaps, has been the medium to explore this concept the most. It appears as early as the 1931 film Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and is used in a variety of ways to motivate plot in films such as Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Nolan’s The Prestige. While these movies use the doppelgänger as a kind of plot device, Villeneuve attempts to push beyond that, exploring the innate human fears about the loss of individuality when discovering you are not the only version of yourself. What is this strange feeling that the existence of a double creates? And how does film exploit that into a unique cinematic experience?

The beginning of the film is worth close reading as it seems out of place with the editing style of most of the rest of the movie. The beginning consists of three different shots and then a line of text, none of which seem connected and act as a symbolic, visual montage.

The first shot is a slow pan of Toronto’s skyline as a yellow haze (that will persist as a motif throughout the film) envelopes the city. Overlaid is a voicemail message from the mother of the person being called. She expresses that she’s worried about this person and asks, “How can you live like that?” The second shot is a slow push-in behind Adam who is sitting silently in a parked car. Half of his face is visible in the rear-view mirror, looking apathetic. The third shot is of Helen who is naked and sitting on a bed, clearly pregnant. She turns and looks directly at the camera before it cuts to black and yellow text fades on the screen which reads: “Chaos is order yet deciphered.” Here, Villeneuve immediately establishes how we should watch the movie or rather how we shouldn’t. He’s telling us that this film is a kind of chaos and that it is up to us to give order to the absurdity. The opening three shots are, upon first viewing, a complete mystery to us. We don’t know who the woman on the phone is, nor do we know who the man in the car or the lady on the bed are. All three shots give off a feeling of distance to the subjects being photographed. In the first, we are outside the city looking in. In the following two shots, the camera is set behind the characters, placing the viewer in the position of simply an observer, forced to feel the same unnerving anxiety that the characters feel throughout the film.

This anxiety is represented in Adam before he even knows about Anthony. Our introduction to Adam takes place in the classroom as he his giving a lecture about dictatorships and the techniques they use to suppress people including limiting culture and censoring “any means of individual expression.” He then goes on to mention that “it’s important to remember that this is a pattern that repeats itself throughout history.” After he says this, the “pattern” of his life begins and we’re shown its repetition.

In the next lecture, Adam continues talking about historical repetition. He explains, “It was Hegel who said all great world events happen twice and Karl Marx added, ‘the first time it was a tragedy, the second time it was a farce.” This represents one of the central worries of the doppelgänger. They wonder if they are the original or the duplicate; the intention of the universe or the mistake. As the film progresses and Adam and Anthony meet, this conflict is elevated to the point where it feels like only one can continue living. While both are alive, there is only jealousy and distrust. Ironically, Adam and Anthony are physically similar in every similar manner yet they are entirely discordant in the world.

As in most doppelgänger stories, the conflict arises when both people discover their double. Before, when they were oblivious to each other’s existence, their lives were unaffected. Yet when the knowledge is gained, a chain of events is set in motion, leading most often to the death of one or both of them.

The hotel room scene in Enemy is where this begins. It is crucially placed at the midpoint of the film and is the scene where Adam and Anthony’s motivations and mental states switch. Here, Adam realizes the danger he has created by pursuing Anthony. He was following his excitement and intrigue without really thinking about the consequences. Not long after seeing himself standing opposite, Adam says, “This was a bad idea. I think I made a mistake here.” He quickly exits and Anthony is left alone in the room, symbolizing the palindromic structure of the film. Anthony is standing alone in the hotel like Adam was before and Adam, who once held the power in the relationship, has now handed it over to Anthony. Not long after, Anthony follows Adam’s girlfriend to work just as Helen followed Adam to his work earlier in the film. Soon, Anthony becomes just as obsessed with Adam as Adam once was with him. This obsession expresses a certain narcissism as both characters are fascinated with their duplicate and, in essence, with themselves. They both have very deep insecurities that rise to the surface when they realize they are not alone. By the end of the film, Adam begins the process of becoming Anthony from a mental standpoint, not just when he sleeps with Helen but also when he finds the key to the private club and sees it as a symbol of his “cheating nature.” In the final scene, when he finds Helen transformed into a giant spider, his facial expression gives off the same dejection as the very first shot of him in the car. He realizes that there is no answer to all of this and resigns himself to apathy.

While Adam and Anthony are the characters that the plot revolves around, I don’t find them to be the most interesting characters in the film. While they both seem to lack any genuine, emotional attachment to others in the film, the character I find most emotionally present and complex is Helen and not just because she undergoes a shock ‘Kafka-esque’ transformation at the end. Her fear is much different than the two men. While Adam and Anthony carry the fear of knowing there is another physical version of themselves out in the world, Helen carries the fear of not knowing which version is coming home into her apartment each night. This is the fear that manipulates the viewer as well and progresses the plot. Her arc is the most drastic as she evolves from the antithesis of fear to the embodiment of it as the spider.

Villeneuve has previously stated in interviews that the film is about femininity and the fears that accompany it. After multiple viewings, it become clear that the movie seems particularly concerned with the female perspective and the views of all three female characters. Adam’s girlfriend, Mary, isn’t as important to the narrative as Helen is but her function in the story is fascinating as Villeneuve visually juxtaposes her with Helen (both with blonde hair, wearing heels, etc.) and possibly suggests that they are as much duplicates of each other as the men are, though not physically. The third female character is the most mysterious: the mother. She makes an appearance only in one scene (although her voice opens the film too). Her distance to the narrative is reflected in Adam’s distanced relationship to her. They don’t seem to see each other often and there isn’t an apparent strong bond between the two. Some have even speculated that it is not Adam’s mother but Anthony’s, possibly even both of theirs.

In another exploration of femininity, one prominent motif of the film is the naked female body. This could simply be a representation of the unhealthy desires of both men and the jealousy they feel toward one another. Or perhaps it is just a reflection of the shallowness of the city as the women in the beginning of the film are objectified by random men for entertainment. Either way, it is interesting to note that this motif almost always precedes a negative event occurring or a major shift in the story.

In Enemy, Villeneuve, like in most of his other films, uses an extremely distinct visual style, especially in regard to his color palette. If you were to describe this film visually in one word, the best thing you could say would be: yellow. Nearly every shot in the film is graded to some shade of yellow, sometimes making the scenes warm while at other times making them nauseating. Beyond the yellow being a very unique visual choice, it also acts as a layer of symbolism throughout the piece. While yellow is often viewed as a color of happiness, wealth, and prosperity, it has also held many historically negative connotations as well. It has sometimes been interpreted as an ‘off-white’ or a detraction from purity and innocence. Many Latin American cultures see the color as a sign of death and mourning and, in the middle ages, it was a symbol of otherness and exclusion. Within the context of the film, my interpretation of the yellow is that it symbolizes a warning to an unknown danger. It acts not as the signified but as the signifier, denoting an unknown conflict that lurks in the depths of the crowded city. It also seems to represent a kind of isolation in its claustrophobic nature. There is a heavy weight in the film, especially felt with Adam. His life is utterly dull, both in his sex life and work. He takes no joy in anything, even specifically pointing out that he doesn’t really enjoy movies. The city around him offers no solace and just as the yellow persists throughout the entire film, Adam never escapes that lonely feeling. 

Another major symbol is the spider. It seems out of place in a film that builds its suspense off the realism of the settings and situations. It wouldn’t seem like it fits and yet it fits perfectly. In my opinion, the shot of the spider walking above the buildings of Toronto is one of the most powerful images in contemporary cinema. It feels like something out of a David Lynch film which is an interesting comparison as Lynch had such a fascination with the concept of doppelgängers in his own work (i.e. Dale Cooper in Twin peaks and the Mystery Man in Lost Highway). The spiders hover over the city and cast their webs over everyone below (there is more symbolism of the webs in shots that show the crisscrossed lines of the cable cars). Spiders are inherently frightening, unnerving, and most importantly, one of the most common phobias. They are a representation of Adam’s view of the world. It’s a world without hope, without a silver lining in anything, just an endless web of doubt.

Within this movie, the manifestation of the uncanny is unrelenting. From the moment Adam recognizes himself as the bellhop in the film, a constant feeling of uneasiness ripples through both the mind of Adam and the viewer. Much like when Mary softly hits her fist against the car window as Anthony drives her to the city, the viewer feels the utter hopelessness of the situation and the fear of not knowing. That is what makes this film so brilliant. Villeneuve offers us no answers. We don’t know why Helen turned into a spider. We don’t know if Anthony and Mary even died as they are never actually shown after the crash. Adam could have just been projecting his own fears and what we saw was just in his head. We aren’t given the answers because Villeneuve wants us to place our own meaning on what we are given, in a postmodern kind of way. He wants us to feel the same hopeless isolation as the characters. He wants that cold shiver to run down our spine in the same way it does when I look out my window at night. He wants us to decipher some order in all of the chaos.

Works Cited

Dickens, David R. “Time and Postmodernism.” Symbolic Interaction, 1 Aug. 2002, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/si.2002.25.3.389?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents.

“Glossary of the Gothic: Doppelgänger.” e-Publications@Marquette, Raynor Memorial Libraries, epublications.marquette.edu/gothic_doppelganger/.

Saramago José. The Double. Vintage, 2005.

Santiago, Silviano, and Ana Lucia. Gazzola. The Space in-between: Essays on Latin American Culture. Duke University Press, 2002.

Staff, The Playlist. “20 Films About Doubles And Doppelgangers.” IndieWire, Indiewire, 13 Mar. 2014, www.indiewire.com/2014/03/20-films-about-doubles-and-doppelgangers-88174/.

Villeneuve, Dennis, director. Enemy. Pathé/Entertainment One/Mecanismo Films/micro_scope/Rhombus Media/Roxbury Pictures/Alfa Pictures/A24, 2013.

Villeneuve, Dennis, director. Prisoners. Alcon Entertainment/8:38 Productions/Madhouse Entertainment/Warner Bros. Pictures/Summit Entertainment, 2013.

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