Red Mosquito

Spoiler: show

First off, "Adam" and Anthony are the same person.

Anthony is a college professor who used to be an actor.

He creates "Adam" as a character, one with the opposite personality of his own.

When Anthony's mother mentions that he has a respectable job, she is talking about him being a professor. She mentions blueberries, which Anthony likes but the character "Adam" doesn't.

She also mocks Anthony's acting career. This is the key to understanding the movie.

Let me repeat that: Anthony's mother mocking his acting career is the key to understanding the movie.

"Adam" talks about control at the beginning, to his class. How information is withheld, etc. Then he is shown with his girlfriend, who withholds information from him.

"Adam" is in a relationship with a controlling woman, which echoes Anthony's relationship with his controlling mother.

Anthony has created an entirely new personality to go with his job as a professor. He has done this because his lifelong dream - mocked by his mother - is to be an actor. His mother convinced him to become a professor, which he resents her for.

His wife is shocked when she sees "Adam Bell" on the website, because this is when she discovers that he has the job under a pseudonym.

Likewise, when she goes there and looks shocked when she sees "Adam," she is shocked not because this person looks exactly like her husband, but because her husband is acting like he doesn't recognize her.

This review is correct about the car crash, in my opinion: the entire thing was imagined by "Adam" in order to kill off his real personality, Anthony.

At the end, "Adam" is going home, not to Anthony's apartment. But he's acting like "Adam," and when Anthony's wife - who is, in reality, his wife - mentions school, and initiates sex with him on the couch, she has figured out that her husband Anthony has been teaching as "Adam" in some strange split personality/subconscious fulfillment of his dream to be an actor.

She has taken control of the relationship at this point, and "Adam"/Anthony realizes that.

That's why she appears as a spider.

Explaining this requires no mythology: female spiders kill and devour male spiders after mating.

All of the spider imagery in the film represents Anthony's controlling mother. The spider being squashed by the woman in the scene at the beginning represents Anthony trying to escape his mother's control.

Which he temporarily does, until his wife finds out... and turns into a spider.

Spoiler: show

Enemy appears to say that even though Adam has done away with Anthony — and Mary, an innocent bystander who represents some sort of purely sexual relationship, in the process — he still has a ways to go before he can reconcile these two facets of womanhood. And note the names: Mary, the mother of Christ; and Helen, the catalyst for the Trojan War.

Adam’s name is noteworthy; you might remember that, in the Book of Genesis, Adam, the first man, was created in the likeness of God. God then took a rib from Adam and using it made Eve. Adam and Anthony’s scars are on their rib cage.

Steve Albini wrote:Whenever there's active promotion on the part of somebody else, whenever I see somebody all dolled up for a fancy photograph and someone's handing out flyers or whenever there's active promotion for something like that, as an imposition on my day, I hate all those people and I want them to fail. I have a visceral reaction to advertising and promotion. There's just something about salesmanship that grates on me on a very base level and I react very negatively towards it. I want those people to suffer and I want their enterprises to fail.

Farmer John wrote:Babylon was absurd. I loved it.