In his 1973 monograph The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry the literary critic Harold Bloom hypothesized that in attempting to create a new work a poet must engage in a struggle with influence of those poets who have gone before. “Strong poets,” Bloom argues, are those who successfully create new and original work despite the influence of the past.
There are a lot of problems with Bloom’s general line of reasoning here, including:
1. It is, first and foremost, a convenient way to explain the dominance of certain literary figures at the expense of others, and grants a certain status to figures that Bloom particularly likes (this tends not to mean women, non-Europeans, etc.).
2. It relies heavily on assumptions about what certain figures read, and what they took away from their reading, without sufficient evidence or rationale.
3. It is grounded in a Freudian theory of defense mechanisms that is not, unless your therapist is Frasier Crane, considered best practice for assessing behavior.
But, at the same time, Bloom speaks to a problem that transcends the relatively small community of creative types. There is something in all of us that has concerns about our originality, our sense of ownership over our identity. To see your doppelganger is to augur your own death. We dread the idea of body-snatchers. We fear, some of us constantly, that our sense of self and our sense of control over ourselves is an illusion.
This is precisely the problem Canadian director Denis Villeneuve contends with in Enemy, based on the novel The Double by Portuguese master Jose Saramago, available now at your local Redbox. When we first see Adam Bell, one of the two roles played by Jake Gyllenhaal, he is lecturing a small class on the ways that fascist states control populations through enforced limits on individuality. Bell is a dreary man, who lives out Marx’s quip that history always happens twice “the first time as tragedy, and the second time as farce.” His routine is shattered when a co-worker suggests to him that he rent a movie called Where There’s A Will There’s A Way and he notices that the actor who plays Bellhop #3 (named Anthony Clare, also played by Gyllenhaal) is his precise double.
Specific plot machinations that follow are less important than the fact that the two men eventually meet. They are indeed identical, down to shared scars. In Saramago’s novel, this comparison is followed by a discussion of who was born first, who is the original. In the film, the question is posed but never answered. The fear of the knowledge that one is a duplicate is too great. The film’s final scene—which features an emotionally devastating shot/reverse shot sequence—is one of the more interesting things from any movie of 2013, drawing questions the film’s questions about the nature of individuality, self-control, and state violence together into one quivering mass.
While Villeneuve has never had the narrative knack of a Spielberg, or even of contemporary story-telling standouts like Josh Trank, he is on the short list of the most visually imaginative directors currently working. In all of his movies light plays as many tricks on the viewer as shadow does. Unlike Tarsem Singh and Guillermo del Toro, Villeneuve does not show you something new (his movies contain nothing like the towering wall of red fabric from Singh’s The Fall or the faerie throne from Pan’s Labyrinth), instead his style is aims to roughen the surface of familiar objects by showing them in strange light. This is especially fitting in Enemy because of the source material. Saramago uses polysyndetic prose to achieve the same end. It makes for hard reading. When the trick is done with light? It is mesmerizing.
Rating: Worth the $1.25
This content appeared originally at Pop, Shop, and Troll
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