Normally, Taylor Swift is not somebody that is on my radar, but I remember watching her being allowed to sing an epic ten minute break-up opus on Saturday Night Live. At first, I paid little attention, but after about the six minute mark, when I realized this song isn’t ending, I starting paying attention to the seemingly personal detail Swift was singing about a relationship that seemed to cause her a great amount of grief. My wife- who is not a Swift fan, but has a much better handle on pop culture than I do- then told me, “this song is about Jake Gyllenhaal.”

There was definitely an age gap between Swift and Gyllenhaal (albeit less than the one between Swift and John Meyer), so it is hard to think both of them were on the same level when they dated. Still, that such a personal song exists raises some questions: like is Gyllenhaal hurt when he hears the song or does he get a perverse pleasure out of knowing that his shitty boyfriend-isms have been immortalized by his ex? Honestly, I would not fault him if it’s the latter…in fact, I kind of hope it’s the latter. 

Publicly, Gyllenhaal has been supportive of the song, though he has asked Swift to ask fans to stop harassing him.

So, what does any of this have to do with the film Enemy? Well, in Enemy Jake Gyllenhaal gets the dubious task of playing two shitty boyfriends. And if you ask Swift, I bet she’d say it was a role he was meant for.

Enemy starts off, oddly enough, in some strange fetish club where the men seem to be turned on watching a woman squish a tarantula under her heel. What? Hey look! Is that Jake Gyllenhaal’s character? Which one?

Soon, we will meet Adam Bell (Jake Gyllenhaal), a University professor is rather unremarkable, except in his ability at keeping his girlfriend Mary (Mélanie Laurent) around for sex. Bell is not a man who seems fulfilled by his lot in life, and this shows in his awkward conversation with a colleague that recommends he watch a film called Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way. So, Adam finds a copy of the film and puts it on, only to see that the actor who plays the role of the bellhop looks exactly like him. Immediately after, Adam finds himself obsessed by a desire to meet the man that physically is his double.

Turns out his double, Anthony, is a man in an unfulfilled marriage. He is soon to be a father, but he clearly has his own commitment issues and a history of infidelity. (Was that him at the club in the beginning?) Unlike Adam, he’s more self-assured- but he is also a tad more unscrupulous. And after he learns about Adam, he has his own reasons for wanting to set up a meeting, even though it goes against his wife Helen’s (Sarah Gardon) wishes.

Being Canadian, I am well aware that Americans don’t realize just how many popular films are actually shot in Toronto. The American dollar stretches much farther here. But in those films, Toronto is often substituting for another American city. Enemy, in contrast, is unabashed about being set in Toronto. It even references roads in the Greater Toronto Area and has an excursion out to the neighbouring city/suburb Mississauga. When Adam goes out to Rathburn Street, he even ends up in a parking complex where landmarks can be seen that actually would be kind of close to Rathburn Street. It’s my neck of the woods, so it is nice to see it portrayed with relative accuracy.

That said, Toronto is even more populated than Chicago, but director Denis Villeneuve (who is now better known for directing intelligent, mature-science fiction films like Arrival, Blade Runner 2049, and Dune) makes it feel incredibly empty and lifeless, almost alien. For some reason, the city also has Godzilla-sized tarantulas walk around the CN Tower. Really! And in a previous scene, a woman with a spider’s head walks past Adam, or is it Anthony? Or both, as the same. It is all a bit jarringly Kafkaesque and rightly makes us question the narrative. Is Adam insane and is Anthony not real or vice versa? What really is going on here? Villeneuve films everything with such a suffocating sense of dread that there is a real atmosphere of horror, even though this film is not a horror in any conventional sense.  

Enemy’s plot is one of obsessions that climaxes in an indecent proposal. Truthfully, for Adam, the Enemy referenced in the title is as much himself as it is Anthony. The same can be true of Anthony. And since they might be the same person…well…that’s one conflicted subconscious. Both Helen and Mary deserve better than a person who is more interested in being someone else and, indeed, the real fun comes from watching these women react to their lover and then later an imposter. 

Enemy was adapted from José de Sousa Saramago’s 2002 novel The Double, but Saramago died before Villeneuve started work on the project, so the director admits that he never got to ask Saramago exactly what his book was about. Yet, even with Enemy’s surreal ambiguities, it still feels like it pinpoints an anxiety deeply embedded in the male psyche. Those who are fans of Villeneuve’s later blockbuster sized science fiction films will enjoy watching the psychological undertones work themselves out in a smaller production. 

But for me, this whole film comes back to the relationship between Taylor Swift and Gyllenhaal. Poor Gyllenhaal is not a singer songwriter himself, so he wasn’t going to enter some musical feud to respond to “All Too Well”, a song that many consider Swift’s magnum opus. (Plus Gyllenhaal thinks like an adult and writing a song specifically aimed at a past lover is kind of immature. Not that I’m faulting the much younger Swift at the time in her life that she wrote the original song.) In my mind- or overactive imagination- Gyllenhaal’s involvement in Enemy is his subtle unapologetic apology to that ex that turned their intimate moments into hurtful song lyrics. Through Enemy, Gyllenhaal is essentially saying, “Sorry babe, but there is an illogical push-pull in me. It’s like I’m two people. Clearly, I have commitment issues, and you know… I just can’t live with spiders.” Does this make things better? Absolutely not. But it is an honest expression what genuinely goes on in the heads of some men after a relationship takes a serious turn.  

So I guess the real question is has Swift seen Enemy? And if so, what did she think?

(And dude- just give the girl back her scarf already?)