Enemy

Jung's shadow is everything the conscious personality refuses to own. The respectable man buries his hunger, his cruelty, his appetite for what he is not supposed to want, and that buried material does not vanish. It takes on a life. It walks around behind him. In dreams and in myth it appears as a same-sex double, a stranger with your face, the man across the street who is doing the things you will not let yourself do.

Adam is the persona. He lectures on totalitarian control, repeats the same dull routine, keeps his apartment bare, and recoils from intimacy with Mary even as she lies in his bed. Anthony is the shadow given flesh: an actor, a man who performs, a man who fails to honor his marriage and is reaching for the affair we sense he has had before. One man's life is all restraint. The other man's life is all appetite. Put them in the same body and you have a whole person at war with himself.

Villeneuve refuses to let you treat them as separate. The two never share a clean two-shot until the film has already told you they are one. They have the same scar. They are drawn to the same woman. When Adam phones Anthony's home, Anthony's wife Helen cannot tell the voices apart, because there is nothing to tell apart. Late in the film Helen visits Adam at the college and watches him, and we watch her realize that the stranger and her husband are the same creature wearing the same face. She is the only character who sees the truth the film is built on.

The film opens before we meet either man. A private club. Men watching. A woman in heels lowers her foot over a tarantula on a platter and the screen cuts to black before the heel comes down. We do not yet know whose dream this is. By the end we know it is his, both of his, the one man's.

In Jung the anima is the inner feminine, and in its devouring aspect it becomes the spider mother, the web that catches and consumes, the thing that pulls the man back into unconsciousness whenever he tries to grow. The spider is woven through the whole picture if you watch for it. A spider the size of a building walks the Toronto skyline in a dream. The tangle of telephone and tram wires over the streets is a web the city is caught in. Adam's mother, in the one scene she appears, manages and diminishes him, tells him to give up his fantasy of being a third-rate actor, a line that lands strangely until you realize she is talking to the wrong half of him.

The crushed tarantula at the start and the towering spider at the end are the same force at two scales. The man wants to crush the feminine, dominate it, keep it under his heel in a private room where other men watch and approve. What he cannot face is that it is larger than he is, older than he is, and that he is inside its web rather than above it. The heel never comes down. The spider always wins.

Three women orbit the one man, and the film keeps blurring them on purpose.

Helen is the pregnant wife, the bond, the commitment, the future that wants him to settle and become a father. Mary is the girlfriend or mistress, the body without the bond, the relationship going nowhere. The mother is the origin, the voice that shaped the persona and still tries to run it. Watch how the film refuses to keep them distinct. Helen and Mary are shot with the same lighting, the same hair, until you have to work to remember which is which. The mother lives in an apartment furnished almost identically to the others. They are facets of a single feminine principle, the anima in her phases, and the man cannot meet any of them as a real other because he has not met himself.

This is why the affair solves nothing. When Anthony takes Adam's place and sleeps with Mary, the shadow simply consumes what the persona desired, and Mary senses the wrongness instantly, feeling the scar of a wedding ring on a man who claims to be single. Appetite without integration is just the same hunger wearing the other mask. The man trades one woman for another and remains exactly where he started, which is inside the web.

The famous final shot is not a twist. It is a diagnosis.

Adam has gotten what the shadow wanted. He has the wife, the home, the coming child, the settled life. He finds Helen's note, he goes to the bedroom expecting his prize, and what sits up in the bed is the giant spider, cringing, rearing back, the same trapped and trapping feminine from the very first frame. The thing he ran from is exactly where he ran to. The commitment he fled and the commitment he stole are the same web. There is no apartment in this city, no woman, no version of the man that is outside it.

And he sighs. He does not scream. He does not flee. He has seen this before. The sigh is recognition, the weariest sound in the film, the sound of a man understanding that he has completed a loop he has run many times and will run again. Villeneuve has said the film is structured as a recurring dream, and the sigh is the moment the dreamer half-remembers the dream is on repeat. The persona killed the shadow, took the bond, and arrived back at the beginning, where a man stands over the feminine and the feminine rears up larger than he is.

Adam's first lecture, delivered twice in the film, is about how dictatorships control populations by keeping them distracted, by reducing the individual to a pattern that repeats. He is describing his own condition without knowing it. He is the population of one, kept unconscious, looping. The shadow refused integration. The marriage refused completion. The web holds.