Perversion and Enemy, film with Jake Gyllenhaal

Brief thoughts on the film Enemy with Jake Gyllenhaal:

This is billed as loosely based on Saramago’s novel The Double, but strays quite a long way from it.

The film loses impact by being too short and over-edited so that potentially fertile ideas weren’t given time to germinate.

On reflection and with effort after the event it is possible to lay a loose interpretation over it.

The film is about perversion, that is, authentic psychoanalytic perversion, one theory for this, and there are other ideas out there, loosely based on Freud and Lacan, would suggest that the true pervert is the person who fails to go through phallic castration as a way of solving (up to a point) the Oedipal complex, in other words, the person who fails to establish a sense of self by adopting an identity provided to him by culture (The Father Figure), and who, as a result, is condemned to remain in an anguished state of no-identity, forced to confront his meaningless, an unbearable horror which is represented symbollically and psychoanalytically by the gaping mouth of the Mother Figure from whence he came, seeking to swallow him up whole. This horror is too great to bear, and so the person replaces the Mother Figure with a phobic object and a fetish, a displacement of the horror and a replacement with an object to obsess over and to soak up sexual instincts, without love.

Back to the film then, early scenes indicate, the sexual energy of a scene observed by an entranced male audience, in who a pregnant women masturbates, and a spider is crushed, [the Mother Figure, destroys the men’s phobic object for them (the spider0, as they satisfy sexual instincts by fetishising her masturbation. A scene of Toronto shows the huge spider sculpture by Louise Bourgeois, (1999) known for her spider sculptures which she says represent Maman, her mother, and famous for her use of art to depict for example, bisexuality and sexual ambiguity.

The sculpture is over 30ft high and one 33ft wide, and includes a sac containing 32 marble eggs and its thorax and abdomen are made of rubbed bronze. It is on display at the National Gallery of Ottawa, Canada.

Adam, the diffident college professor, teaches on fascist control. hegel’s ideas on repetition of historical events and quotes marx, first as tragedy then as farce, and is under the overly critical eye of his mother who mocks him, as if he has ‘dreams’ of being a wealthy actor. he appears to rape his partner in one scene, displaying his inability to love and his objectification of womanhood.

Daniel in a typically Saramago touch of magical realism represents his impossible psychic alter ego, the fully psychically castrated male, who tries to have power over his partner, his pregnant wife, who finds and threatens Adam aggressively, riding his penile extension the motorbike wearing a super macho helmet, and who then ’steals’ Adams wife, to ‘have’ her as well.

The film ends when the alter ego kills himself and Adam’s partner in a rage induced car crash, as his sexuality fails him, (the patriarchal castrated male is a flawed being and has to go), and when Adam is taken back into the womb, and left to deal with the world go phobic/fetish object, his ‘partner’ the Spider, and what will be the horrible pleasure of the prohibited incest with the Mother Figure, and the fetishstic voyeuristic voiding of sexual energies, of watching her masturbate alongside other selected perverts, that he as King Pervert, selects.

A longer and deeper film could have wrung out these ideas a little more explicitly, maybe a director like David lynch, ‘well known for his films blending psychological horror with film noir’.