Payphone Scene From “Enemy”

Enemy, a strange film from 2013, contains an appropriately strange payphone scene. The movie was filmed in Toronto, which in 2013 still had a decent quantity of working payphones on its streets. But I’m not certain these payphones are real or if they are props. Not that it really matters but most payphone enclosures in Canada bear the Bell Canada logo. What makes this scene somewhat unusual is the appearance of what looks like a legitimate phone number: 905-292-2362. Since the early 1970s most appearances of phone numbers in film and on television use 555 as the exchange. Thanks to TL;DR at spiralofhope.org I know that this number is reasonably authentic, and would have likely been assigned to a phone that originated in the area where the scene was set. The number is presently unassigned so it seems inevitable that it will eventually become somebody’s phone number, and that this somebody will get occasional calls from Adam.

I think the film is fundamentally about Adam, the meeker of the two characters played by Jake Gyllenhaal. Adam has some serious issues with women and he is, I think, cheating on his wife and living a double life. Anthony, Adam’s surly alter ego, does not directly respond when his wife asks if he’s been cheating again. So I think Adam and Anthony are the same person, both cheating on the same wife.

If the film was not so conspicuously ponderous I might give it another try to better comprehend its deepest meaning. It opens with Anthony and others attending a sex party in which a tarantula is almost crushed by a woman wearing stiletto heels. Tarantulæ appear throughout the film, symbolizing (I think) both sexuality and tyranny. Adam lectures college students (unconvincingly, I think) on matters of dictatorship and the history of tyranny. The stalking scenes made me feel especially uncomfortable.

The final scene, described by critics as terrifying, cuts off just as Adam’s face forms a wry smile. Or maybe that’s just my interpretation. If he thinks of women as ghastly tyrannical creatures then perhaps, being one himself, he’s OK with that. He had his alter ego and his paramour killed, leaving me to ask if the woman really existed or if he was intellectually torn over the mere idea of cheating on a woman. If so then my initial premise that he was cheating on his wife would be false. The final scene did alarm me on first pass but I gave it another try and found it hilarious.

If this conflicted individual could not decide which person he wanted to be, the meek Adam or the crusty Anthony, the decision was made for him when the car crash killed Anthony and Adam’s girlfriend, whose demand that Anthony drive her home after she discovered he was not Adam did not make a lot of sense to me. Neither did the decision that Adam and Anthony meet in a sleazy motel room. Why not be safe and sane and just meet in a public place? I half expected a sex scene to unfold between Adam and Anthony in the motel room, but filming a guy getting it on with himself would probably not be easy.

This isn’t meant as a coherent review, but an expression of how disjointed the film in question was to me.

I liked the payphone scene, though. It illustrates how people use payphones in times of distress and when they need anonymity. But that assumption of anonymity gets thrown back at Adam in a strange way when the woman he called seemed certain (at first, at least) that it was Anthony calling.