犹如莫比乌斯环的影片结构。
What Should We Make of Enemy’s Shocking Ending?
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/03/14/enemy_movie_ending_explained_the_meaning_of_the_jake_gyllenhaal_and_denis.html
这个影评组织了一些更重要的提示和更深层次的命题。影片主题并非是人格分裂或者欲望外遇这么单一化的小格局命题。
通过一系列意象化的隐喻性细节，让人反复咀嚼个中意味，几乎每一帧画面都有值得反复玩味的复数个细节。
过去还是现在？现实还是幻想还是回忆？可以说互相交织，也可以说几乎无法区分。重看多次，觉得妈妈的两次说话（一次是电话留言），隐含了极大的信息量，是最重要和关键的时间定位功能。其中说到的“one woman" 也非常耐人寻味，是否提示了其中一个女人是幻想或者回忆？
影片的台词非常有限，但每一句台词都有着深刻的意味。
重看多次后，不断发现了诸多忽略的细节。但有一些画面仍然费解。
导演似乎不打算也不乐于给出答案。能让人反复咀嚼，甚至每次重温都能获得新的信息和寓意，则是这部电影的高明或说高深之处。
能让人动脑子去看，甚至看完还在不断动脑筋的，这就是获奖片和pop corn movie的区别。
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MARK:
Control. It's all about control.
Every dictatorship has one obsession, and that's control.
They want to hv control over the ppl.
So, in ancient Rome, they gave the ppl bread n circuses.
They kept the populace busy with entertainment.
In other dictatorships, they use other strategies, to limit information, to control ideas and knowledge.
How do they do that?
They lower education, they limit culture, censor information, they censor any means of individual/self expression.
And it's important to remember this, that this is a pattern, that repeats itself throughout history.
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What Should We Make of Enemy’s Shocking Ending?
By Forrest Wickman
The last shot of Enemy is terrifying and unexpected. But what does it mean?
Photo by Caitlin Cronenberg © 2014 A24.
The ending of Denis Villeneuve’s new movie Enemy has been called perhaps “the scariest ending of any film ever made.” And much of its scariness derives from its initial inexplicability. The movie has described as “head-scratching,” “mysterious,” and “gloriously enigmatic.” As one critic put it, “I kinda dug it but I have no idea if it’s any good or what happened or where I am anymore and what aiiiiiiiieeeeeeee that last sound/shot.”
Forrest Wickman
Forrest Wickman is a Slate staff writer.
This was my first reaction as well, but one thing critics haven’t done thus far—probably because they’re confined to the spoiler-free zone of the review—is offer a theory that tries to make sense of it all. This is a movie that begins with the epigraph, “Chaos is order yet undeciphered” (a line from José Saramago’s The Double, the novel on which the movie is based). Though the movie may appear inexplicable at first, this epigraph suggests that we can make some sense of it, some order, if we just know how it can be deciphered. And Villeneuve has backed this up. In an interview with the Huffington Post, he said, “If you look at Enemy again, you can see that everything has an answer and a meaning.”
Major spoilers ahead, obviously.
I’ll offer a theory. While Enemy has been billed as an erotic thriller and a doppelganger movie—and it is both those things—I think ultimately it’s a parable about what it’s like to live under a totalitarian state without knowing it. It’s an Invasion of the Body Snatchers movie in which you don’t even realize it’s an Invasion of the Body Snatchers movie until the end—until it’s too late for our hero. In this case, the body snatchers just happen to be giant spiders.
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When we meet our hero, Adam Bell, he is lecturing about the ways that totalitarian states keep the people down. The Romans used entertainment, he reminds us, “bread and circuses.” This recalls the opening scene of the movie, which takes place at a sex show. There we see our first spider. Anthony, Adam’s twin, goes to these shows (we can distinguish the two because Anthony wears a wedding ring), and we later learn from his doorman that men will do anything to see them. Anthony’s profession also allies him with the entertainment industry—he’s an actor.
Adam, on the other hand, doesn’t much like entertainment. He, a professor, represents education, which, as his lectures remind us, totalitarian governments try to keep down. “You don’t go to the movies, do you?” his coworker asks him, out of nowhere, and he answers, “I don’t really like movies.” Indeed, as we’ve seen in a series of recurring shots, his interests don’t seem to involve anything more than lecturing about totalitarian regimes, drinking wine, and having sex with his girlfriend.
But the coworker is leading him somewhere. Adam figures he must have asked because he must be thinking of a specific movie. “You brought it up, and I thought maybe you had a recommendation.” The movie the coworker recommends ultimately leads Adam to discover what’s actually going on around him.
There are subtle clues about what’s going on in the city from the very beginning. We see low-angle shots lingering on the streetcar wires that make them look like spider webs:
Photo still © 2014 A24.
Bell passes a graffitied image of a businessman giving a fascist Roman salute:
Photo still © 2014 A24.
Anthony gets into a fight in the car with Adam’s girlfriend Mary (Mélanie Laurent)—“You don’t think I’m a man?” he says—which leads to a terrible crash, and the camera slowly zooms in on a crack in the windshield that resembles a spider web:
Photo still © 2014 A24.
Less subtle, of course, is the shot of the giant spider hovering over the city.
A version of this shot also appears on the poster, where, perhaps notably, the spider is superimposed over an image of Anthony. (We can tell it’s him from the leather jacket, something Adam never wears.) Between his appearance at the spiders-and-sex show at the beginning, Mary's accusations that he’s not a man, and the spider web Villeneuve shows us on his car window—not to mention that his wife turns out to be either a giant spider or perhaps a woman pregnant with one—Anthony clearly isn’t what he seems.
The central irony in all this is that even the main character, though he is an expert on the ways of totalitarian governments, doesn’t see the web that’s overtaken the city until he’s already stuck in it. As he says in the lecture, totalitarian states succeed because “they censor any means of individual expression” (my emphasis). When he finds out he has a double, that’s of course exactly what happens: He can never again be an individual.
While it’s surprising that Villeneuve and screenwriter Javier Gullón decided to turn an adaptation of The Double into a spider-infested parable about totalitarianism—at least according to my interpretation—it’s not completely random. Though the novel The Double doesn’t have any of this spider conspiracy, these themes were important to Saramago. When Saramago was 3 years old, a military coup overthrew the Portuguese government, and for the next 48 years, he lived under a fascist regime. His work frequently explores totalitarianism and his experiences under a fascist regime through metaphor and allegory. In 2007, he told the New York Times:
We live in a dark age, when freedoms are diminishing, when there is no space for criticism, when totalitarianism—the totalitarianism of multinational corporations, of the marketplace—no longer even needs an ideology, and religious intolerance is on the rise. Orwell’s ‘1984’ is already here.
Why spiders, specifically? It’s hard to say. There aren’t any eight-legged creatures in The Double. But there is this passage from Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, in which he weaves an elaborate metaphor comparing the fascist police and their allies to spiders:
There is no lack of spiders’ webs in the world, from some you escape, in others you die. The fugitive will find shelter in a boardinghouse under an assumed name, thinking he is safe, he has no idea that his spider will be the daughter of the landlady … a dedicated nationalist who will regenerate his heart and mind.
And where did the spiders come from? Why do fascist regimes arise again and again throughout history, in “a pattern,” as Adam reminds us? Enemy suggests that this tendency to create totalitarian regimes is part of human nature, that it comes from within us. After all, even Adam, the ostensible good twin, is an extremely flawed character—he sells out his girlfriend, cheats on her with another woman, and earlier he tries to rape her. As the movie goes on, he becomes more and more like Anthony. Villeneuve, who has otherwise been tight-lipped about his film, has said this about Enemy:
“Sometimes you have compulsions that you can’t control coming from the subconscious … they are the dictator inside ourselves.”
