Can anyone explain the movie "Enemy" (2013)?

The movie "Enemy" can be quite perplexing.
en.wikipedia.org...(2013_film)

Can anybody explain it to me, or why on earth we have a big spider at the end?

OK, this is how I viewed it.
While the movie has a male protagonist, it is actually a female wish-fulfillment; or in that sense a type of erotic female fairytale.

On a blatant level the actor didn't get along with his wife.
She never got him blueberries!
I'm sure she gave him some other blue-thingies.

So her fantasy became a reality.
She got a sensitive academic husband, instead of a brute in biker clothes.

From a a masculinity studies' perspective the woman is a predator.
A spider - probably one who chows men after she mated.
In that sense the movie never really explores homoeroticism or brotherhood, although the theme begins with fecund possibilities.
It is rather depressing to that audience.
But I believe this is done purposefully.

The thing is we know the academic never slept with his doppelganger's wife.
But yet he admits to it.
But, although at a first glance it's a film about male identity, it's actually the spider-women who reigned us in.

Rather Kafkaesque.

Assuming they didn't put something in the water.

Or is it about ...ALIENS?

The wife who survives is pregnant.

Was the human father not good enough, so they replaced him with an alien clone?

Quite a possible reading of the film, I think.

a reply to: halfoldman

Throughout the movie there are references to the spider, reflections in the windows and such.

BUT......I've only watched it once and have wanted to watch it again. Will do now to try gain more perspective.

What about all the stuff about "chaos" on the board, and the Hegel or Marx references at the beginning?

Something like Hegel said, everything happens twice.
But Marx said, the first time it's a tragedy, the second time a farce?

a reply to: halfoldman

If the above is rule, am I not a copy of Jake Gyllenhaal?

"Adam", in one role.

I thought he was so sexy, and I'd always be another species, but I'm only two kilos under his average stats in the movie.

Seventy-two kilos is given for both roles.

He's hardly a body-builder, but a fit guy in the film.

That's virtually my weight.

I don't look like him unfortunately.

But the spider and him don't even seen interested in another at the end.

It doesn't exactly charge for him.

The war of the sexes?

But he's now entangled.

Whether he's still happy about it - mmm, I didn't think so.

www.slate.co... m/blogs/browbeat/2014/03/14/enemy_movie_ending_explained_the_meaning_of_the_jake_gyllenhaal_and_denis]Source

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.

It's all about losing our identity as individuals while TPTB take more rights away from us.

a reply to: LookingForABetterLife

OK, but where did you see that?

I think it's more about gender, and how men are slowly ensnared by women.

Is this Rosemary's Baby in reverse?

a reply to: halfoldman

Having trouble posing links. It's from the page below:
www.slate.com...

Well, on one level, if one started with a spider, or a third of the animal species that is capable of self-fertilization and clones, it could make sense.

The uncanniness with all of it is however that the spider has somehow always been there.
You're just seeing something you haven't seen before, or interpreting it differently.

a reply to: LookingForABetterLife

Wow, thanks dude:

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.”

www.slate.com...

In that reading personal compulsions are a metaphor for fascism!