Enemy In-Depth Analysis (Fully Explained Theory)

Kudos for such a great analysis!!

I would not have understand it even with 100 rewatches... thank you!

Clickable version:-
https://shoton35.wordpress.com/2014/06/05/enemy-in-depth-analysis/








She'll come back as fire to burn all the liars, leaving a blanket of ash on the ground

This was brilliant!!!! Thank you. I know I enjoyed the movie, but my mind was searching for a logical analysis. Thanks for taking the time to provide it. :)

Thanks... Great Analysis. I was on the right way to some conclusions about split personality and cheating but I missed so many things. Your explanation did it for me. Kudos Danielito ;)

Thanks so much for posting! Makes so much more sense now! I definitely want to watch this a second time now that I have a better theory!

[Plenty of spoilers below.]

Good review of the chronological order of the movie, Daniel. I agree with you on most parts. However, there might be two facts that speak against your interpretation of the events:

1. The car crash seems fatal for both passengers. Just before the crash you can also see that neither of the passengers had their seat-belts on. And at the end there's a beam of light (at least that's what I saw). Death comes to collect. Zoom in on the spiderweb in the broken windshield. Neither Anthony/Adam or Mary are visible and the car looks empty.

2. The scar looks old, like something that happened during childhood. A way to indicate that Anthony and Adam actually are the same person, not twins separated at birth. It's unlikely to think that the car accident only resulted in a tiny scar and not more serious injuries.

[If this is the case, I have a hard time figuring out the real story as well...]

Another detail:

The sex club is not just a "normal" strip club/bordello. The extreme secrecy with the keys seems to indicate that the men attending live out their darkest, most violent sex-fantasies. They fantasize about rape and domination. Women are objects and commodities. They are looking for something much more extreme than watching women masturbate. They are looking for control.

--

What makes this movie really great is the underlying theme. Or themes perhaps.

Anthony/Adam quotes Hegel and Marx:

"It was Hegel who said: 'All the worlds greatest world events happen twice.' And then Karl Marx added: 'The first time it was a tragedy, the second time a farce.' It's strange to think a lot of the world thinkers are worried that this century will be a repetition of the last one."

Anthony is trapped in a post-modern capitalist society; the bourgeois lifestyle-driven farce we have around us. We in the western world knows, just like Anthony/Adam, that fascism is on the rise. The dictatorship is already here, or at least around the corner.

The symbolism with the spider is partly a (patriarchal) representation of women/femininity. It's a defense mechanism. But it cuts deeper than that. The spider is also Anthony's fear of acting in a way that he subconsciously know is wrong and inhuman. It goes beyond his fear of intimacy and he doesn't understand how to handle this hypocrisy. This is contrasted by the beautiful and empathetic women in the movie. Why on earth would he betray these women?

"Lowering education. They limit culture, censure information. They censure any means of individual expression"

I think this is a movie about gentrification. The steel and glass of the high-rises spreading like a virus. Inside this bubble of conformity you can't find any life. No humans seems to live here. No art or human interaction at all. A cultural wasteland.

Slavoj Zizek - First as Tragedy, Then as Farce:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpAMbpQ8J7g

I'm sorry, but I strongly disagree. I don't see any real, close attention to textual evidence in your analysis. Instead, you're simply forcing the film's scenes to into a contrived and unsupported alternate chronology. There's no onscreen evidence that what you say is true. Frankly, it makes a great deal less sense than the story taken simply at face value, as a surreal thriller about trust & identity.

Enemy is a film about a timid young history professor in a troubled marriage who one day, seemingly by chance, crosses path with his double, a somewhat more confident and apparently successful actor. Despite superficial differences of station, their lives are similar and, crucially, both are inclined to infidelity. Throughout the film, the sexualized male observation of women is framed as predatory and even dangerous. More dangerous still is the simple fact these two versions of the same person can't (or at least shouldn't) exist in our one world. Their identicality is a nightmarish aberration. Adam realizes this when Anthony shows him his scar, and there the film begins to tip into something like supernatural horror.

As each man falls into the other's orbit, reality begins to splinter, blurring the lines that separate them. When Adam agrees to Anthony's role-switching scheme, their duplicity is exposed, with tragic consequences. In order to survive this calamity, some fundamental betrayal must be recognized and accepted, as seen when Anthony's wife embraces Adam in full knowledge of his true identity. This is what happens, narratively. The story need not be any more "realistic". Understanding it requires no magic key.

One way to think about the film might be to say that infidelity breaks the reality of identity within relationships. Those who cheat create divergent selves that they must keep hidden from their partners. Over time, the accumulation of discontinuity gives rise to distrust, fear, chaos, and even violence. Betrayal, like the film's spider, grows with time until it corrupts the false reality on which trust was initially founded. In such a betrayed and broken relationship, it's hard for either party to know the other or even know themselves. In order to move forward, each must accept the other not as they knew them before, but as the "new person" exposed by the revelation of infidelity.

I like your thoughtful analysis, but I think, while plausible, the idea that Mary would go back to seeing Anthony is a bit tenuous. This is a guy that apparently really angered her by being married and then nearly pushed her out of a moving car, only to crash due to his temper. A crash that would definitely leaver her very physically damaged. Would she really agree to see him again? I doubt it.

Also, although possible, I don't think that the accident caused any psychosis. That is really leaving a huge part of the story out of the film. I know it would be necessary to leave that out, if that is what happened, since it would ruin the "puzzle". But I'm just not sure that this is the intended leap for the audience to make. Instead, I think it is the philosophical "death" of Anthony, the "old" Anthony. And again, while plausible, I don't fully subscribe to the idea that the scar is from that accident. After an accident like that, if they survived at all, he would have more/worse scars than that. I think it is more likely a device used to show the audience that the two men are indeed identical in every physical way.

Another thing, though only a couple of seconds long, is that at the beginning of the film, there is a quick shot of a pregnant Mary on the bed in Adam's apartment, the "crappy" one. I'm not sure yet what this means.

Given the "order out of chaos" quote in the film's opening, I tend to think that the story is intentionally truly chaotic, or "broken". I think the audience searches for the trick, or to find order, but the story is ultimately chaos. It's also like a Mobius strip. The film ends where it begins; the underground fetish club.

I think of Adam's two waking from sleep instances, where he first goes back to watch the dvd, and then later when he dreams of the masked woman in the hallway. Both of these things "come to be" in his "reality". Anthony becomes real to him after watching the dvd and he passes a similar woman, without the mask of course, in a similar hallway "in real life". Is "Adam" still dreaming? Is he seeing the future or remembering the past?

The real problem for me, I think, keeping a solution seemingly just out of reach, is that I simply don't know what is a creation of the mind and what isn't. Is Adam the "real" person, dreaming of another life? Or is Anthony imagining a simpler life, one with a job he'd enjoy and with the absence of the responsibilities of a pregnant wife and forthcoming fatherhood? Is there really a personality split that is so complete, that a man is literally leading two separate lives? Or is one of them just imaginary. And when we see the two meet, which is the "real" one and which is the imaginary.

Adam's behavior seems to win out over Anthony in the end and he's apparently more concerned about his pregnant wife (?) but, because it is incredibly hard to change one's behavior, we see Adam curious about "Anthony's" behaviors in the end. He, possibly Anthony now as Adam, can't quite resist the urges and desires of "old" Anthony.

I also have a pet belief that the doorman represents Anthony-as-Adam's desire in the elevator (his mind), near the end. Possibly Anthony is trying, either consciously or unconsciously, to "be" Adam at this point. So we see the doorman telling the physical representation of Adam that (paraphrased)"I have to go back." I tend to think, or maybe just like to think, that this is Adam/Anthony thinking to himself. We are led to believe that "Adam" doesn't yet know about the key and the club. But maybe the ignorance of Adam is really Anthony trying to fight temptation. This would also explain why "Adam" partly covers his face but can't look away in the club. Maybe it isn't that he's shocked and disgusted and seeing this for the "first" time. Maybe, instead, it's Adam, or the Anthony trying to "be" Adam, and he knows that he's falling into his old ways. He might be feeling guilt over an urge that he can't control but knows is wrong.

Anthony-as-Adam is remembering the fetish club as he holds the key, a physical reminder of his "previous" life, the one he is trying to leave behind. He is thinking about the literal spider in the club as he looks at Mary and sees her as a giant spider. Whether he is actually hallucinating, or dreaming (?), the point is that he sees Mary as the "controller", that she is the reason he has to leave his "old" life behind. Where he once had control over the spider in the fetish club and his life in general doing whatever he wanted, he has to an extant lost the "right" to be the "old" Anthony. The representation of his control, his control over the spider in the club, now figuratively has control over him. Or, more specifically, he now sees the actual fetish has control over him, since he's trying to ignore it, where he once felt he controlled the fetish.

I don't truly feel that the main character in this film was leading two actually different lives. I think it all pretty much takes place in the mind and doesn't translate that literally into the physical world. I think it is a story of the struggle to be a better person, to contemplate our mortality, and to accept our current place in life and to come to terms with changing responsibility.

Or is this all the mixture of fiction and reality in the mind of a man in a coma?

I know I'm all over the place. I didn't want to spend too long on this and didn't really edit for consistency and clarity like I probably should. I just wanted to get some ideas down and see what everyone thinks of them.