Enemy

Villeneuve’s film, Enemy (2013), is ostensibly about two men who look alike (they are played by the same actor). Jake Gyllenhaal plays both Adam and Anthony. That both characters have the same frontal scar in the same bodily location signals that the identity goes beyond the possibility that they are identical twins. The identity topic in philosophy of mind is thus salient in the film, and this has invited several commentators to delve deeply into psychological analysis to suggest that Adam is a figment of Anthony’s subconscious, or vice versa. The film does not make clear what exactly is real and what may be a character’s mental construction. Suffice it to say that the film is very difficult to comprehend. Even when Anthony’s wife appears to Adam/Anthony as a giant spider at the very end of the film, it is only conjecture to assume that the spider represents the heaviness of constraint in being in a relationship of commitment rather than anything goes—the latter being inconsistent with a real relationship. The film presents the viewers with intimations of philosophy of mind and more directly of relationship ethics; these two domains play off each other.

Anthony is a movie actor who has trouble being faithful sexually to his wife, Helen, who is pregnant. Having discovered that he and Adam look alike even down to the same scar, Anthony angrily demands that Adam turn over the clothes he is wearing and the keys of his car so Anthony can pick up Mary, Adam’s girlfriend, for a “romantic getaway,” meaning sex; this cherade is a way to have yet another affair. Adam hands over his suit and the car keys, and heads over to Anthony’s apartment and to Helen, who realizes that Adam rather than Anthony has turned up. She is happy to have Adam sexually and even to stay, which he can do because Anthony and Mary have just been killed in a car accident while fighting because Mary has discovered that the man she is with cannot possibly be Adam. Whereas Adam is meek and caring, Anthony is a sexual predator and, not coincidentally, emotionally disturbed in an aggressive way. Both women easily catch on to the switch a roo, and whereas Helen welcomes the substitution, Mary does not. 

It is the stark difference in the men’s psychology that keeps them from being identical as understood in the philosophy of mind sub-discipline, and that has invited commentators to propose that one of the two men is actually a mental projection of the other. The film may not provide enough fodder from which a definite conclusion regarding whether only one of the two men exist beyond being a projection, the sexual ethics of the two men are more straightforward, and yet even in this respect, some blurring is evident.

Neither Adam nor Anthony is very close emotionally to their significant other in spite of living together. Adam would rather grade papers than have sex with Mary one night even though she is drunk and horny, and Anthony almost ignores Helen, and, as mentioned above, he is oriented to the pursuit of other women, to the adrenaline of the chase as well as the sex. Men who are addicted to the high from the conquest for sex, and from sex itself tend to treat romantic relationships as if they were possible without ethical commitment even though the latter is essential for emotional trust and intimacy. Even responding to a plea of, “I need you now, emotionally,” with “I’m going to a bar to meet some friends” eviscerates emotional trust even though sex is not involved. Such selfishness and callousness render a person utterly unfit for a genuine relationship unless the person wants to change, because emotional commitment is requisite to any romantic relationship. A relationship without at least emotional trust is a contradiction in terms. Even so, I believe that such a person as Anthony can change, and from within; asking for help is not necessary, and, besides, love provides help without having to be asked.

When outside sex is added to the mix, the toxicity of the callousness is magnified in emotional terms. A person’s de facto, unstated priorities reflect whether commitment itself is valued or rejected. Take for instance a woman whose “sugar daddy” sets her up with a monthly allowance enables trips to Miami Beach from Mexico in exchange for her always “coming back to him” in Mexico. Prioritizing such a “trophy with sex” arrangement means deprioritizing possible love that is authentic in the sense of involving commitment and thus real love. Helen instantly senses that Adam is a man with which she can have these.

Wanting to have it both ways, such as Anthony plays out in staying with Helen while cheating on her—he would even misuse “I’m poly” as if that meant separate sex as an excuse for cheating—is easily detected by potential suitors who instinctively know when they have been deprioritized below even a lower good. The combination of an allowance and an open policy on outside sex is too tempting to a weak, avaricious psyche that is addicted to sex, but this does not mean that even a weak person cannot gradually gather will-power from within and leave the void of what is actually empty space. Faced with such an arrangement as befits a sexual addiction, using people, and an aversion to commitment and thus emotional intimacy, a real suitor has no choice but to walk away unless or until the “Anthony” turns himself around. 

Emotional intimacy does not necessarily mean instituting monogamy and thus a social conservative ideology. An "open relationship" sexually may be preferred, if, for instance, a significant age difference exists such that sexual drives differ in intensity, as long as no separate romantic connections go along with the separate sex and neither person is lying or feeling emotional pain.

In the film, it is clear that Helen has given up on Anthony, and yet she is pregnant with a baby with him. Were Adam not to have slipped in due to Anthony’s insistence on going off for the weekend to have sex with Mary, Helen would be in the living hell of being with a serial liar who is emotionally absent.

Can someone like Anthony turn around? Were he not killed in the crash with Mary near the end of the film, would he eventually get tired of the recurrent empty sex with other women and come to value and even crave Helen’s emotional/sexual affection? Do people who are trophies of “sugar daddies” eventually tire even in spite of the money and seek out a real relationship—meaning one that includes emotional commitment rather than lies? In the film, even Adam decides to cheat on Helen by taking the key that he has discovered to a stripper club that evening. Even Adam, who presumably has been faithful to his girlfriend, Mary, has absorbed a bit of Anthony.

Whether one of the two men is actually the alter-ego of the other—a mere figment in a divided psyche—the message of the film may be that emotional commitment requires maturity and the desire and will to take oneself as a being a promise-keeper rather than an exploiter and serial liar. The sheer divergence mentally between Adam and Anthony, even though neither is perfect nor could be expected to be, demonstrates the difference between sexual ethics as a challenge and alternatively as disvalued in favor of utter selfish disregard even in the face of another’s love. To say that the Adams of the world are pure whereas the Anthony’s are lost causes is too strict and thus not realistic. To say Adam is “good” and Anthony is “bad” is oversimplistic, and thus inaccurate. We are all human, all too human. In Anthony, there is something worthy of being loved, and in Adam, something that diminishes emotional intimacy. Adams may occasionally lapse (and be forgiven for being human), and a few Anthony’s may decide to shift from one world to another, especially if a soul-mate happens to be met. The fates of both Adam and Anthony are not written, and outside help is not required, should either or both men (or the same person) actively opt for emotional intimacy in a genuine relationship. Besides hinting at the identity problem in philosophy of mind, the medium of film is capable of projecting two alternative routes in terms of sexual ethics in the context of a higher good of which everyone is capable of attainment.

 

The Terminator

Lest the dystopian subtype of science fiction be taken too literally as a predictor of how human civilization will be likely to turn out, the underlying meaning of such films can be construed as bearing on human nature, which, given the glacial pace of natural selection, is very likely to stay pretty much the same for the foreseeable future. In Avatar (2009), for example, the human proclivity to greedily extract wealth for oneself or one’s company without ethical concern for the harm inflicted on other people (or peoples) in the process underlies any assumed thesis concerning space travel and whether we will eventually colonize other planets. The meaning is much closer to home, in us and the regulated capitalistic societies that we already have. Similarly, The Terminator (1984) can be understood less as a prediction of a future in which androids enslave mankind and more as a snapshot of how machine-like and destructive our species had already become. The machine-like efficiency of the Nazis, for instance, in killing enemies of the state and clearing eastern villages entirely of their inhabitants in such vast numbers can be labeled as a state sans conscience. Thirty years after she had graduated from Yale, Jill Lepore returned to give the Tanner Lectures on fears stemming from that pivotal film of a robot apocalypse in which machines rather than humans control the state. Besides predicting a highly unrealistic future, Lepore’s orientation to prediction using the science-fiction genre of film can be critiqued.

Yale’s Tanner Lectures are on human values, and so too, I submit, are science-fiction films. So Lepore’s “inquiry into what humans mean and intend in abandoning constitutional democracy and the liberal nation-state by automation and government by machine” is better thought of as an introduction into how or even whether the values underlying representative democracy and those supporting automation conflict.[1] Her assumption regarding the possible future abandonment of constitutional democracy for government by machine is so draconian and absolute that the prediction can be taken as highly unrealistic. The rise of the “tech-dominated ‘artificial state’” that she deemed already underway can be reckoned as likewise overdrawn and even hyperbolic, and her linkage to “the fall of animals” and even the natural world seems more like science fiction than anything actual.[2] Put another way, in her talks, Lepore went to extremes both in how she characterized the current world and her rule-by-machines future for mankind.

I proffer another possible perspective based on films such as The Terminator. Whether robotic or AI machine-learning, machines differ fundamentally from humans. Descartes’ view that humans are machines who think was heavily contrived and arguably based on the illusion that consciousness (i.e., the mind) is qualitatively different and only loosely related to corporeal bodies (i.e., materialism). We are organic, corporeal beings through and through, whereas machines are not. It may seem strange to think of a person’s conscience in such terms, but in this respect too, we differ significantly from machines. In the film, Ex Machina (2015), for example, the AI android has no conscience (even in being simulated by programming) when it stabs its programmer so it can leave the house; the programmer is simply an obstacle to be eliminated as per the telos of leaving the house. The fear felt in watching The Terminator is likewise a reflection of the fact that machines are devoid of conscience as they are fundamentally different than us.

With regard to Lepore’s “artificial state” of government by machine, the salient point that can be drawn is how much of a role conscience, values, and judgment play in voting whether for a candidate or a policy. It seems severely doubtful or even impossible that a human activity can be exported to a machine, even if AI-capable, so Lepore’s prediction of an artificial state by machine strikes me as a fantasy, to which I would retort, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We need not fear a cyborg assassin sent from the future back to kill any of us any time soon, but we can realistically take stock of how machines in our world differ fundamentally from us and even ask which of our values are consistent and inconsistent with the operation of such tools.

The astute among us might even venture to reflect on how much we have come to act as if we were machines, and furthermore which of our values (e.g., efficiency) are highlighted in such a distortion of human nature. Even just in analyzing a toxic customer “service” employee on the phone who robotically (i.e., rigidly) repeats, “Unfortunately, the time line cannot be changed,” the sheer fakeness can be exposed as machinelike rather than human. That employees could relish acting as machines exposes the human will to power and the value put by some people on being in control and even dominating other people. Rather than being a machine-value, the will to power, as Nietzsche points out in his texts, is human, all too human. What we take to be machine-automatic in terms of values may really be reflections of our worst. I suspect that Lepore was projecting this outward as if onto a white screen in portraying an utterly unrealistic and extreme future of government by machines. A scholar should be able to cut through even one's own projections to grabble with that which from which they come. The science-fiction genre itself can be understood as a projection of the complexity of human nature. 

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1. Mike Cummings, “From ‘The Terminator’ to Tech Titans: Historian Jill Lepore Examines the ‘Artificial State’,” Yale News, February 9, 2026.
2. Ibid.

Hugo

Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011) is an intriguing story based on vocational functionalism, which in turn is based on deism. In other words, the film essentially applies an early modern theological "argument from design" to a pillar of modern society: one’s profession. In this regard, the film is not just a kids’ movie. The visual "3D" feature is not where the real depth of the film is located. The story achieves its fullness beyond the visuals in having several levels around a core philosophy, which serves as the story's core meaning. For this reason, Hugo has the potential to become a classic. In this essay, I explore the philosophy that lies at the basis of the film's story. I begin with deism and tie it to functionalism.

Deism posits that God is akin to a “clock maker,” designing Creation, “winding it up,” and then "stepping back" to let it work without divine intervention. The salient divine attribute is that of designer. The world, in turn functions as designed. Because the design comes from God, malfunction due to a problem of design is theologically problematic. Indeed, not functioning as designed can be viewed as evil, or at least immoral. Furthermore, if perfect design ensues from a divine designer, bad fits in nature's design must be held to be problematic. For example, the bodies of a man and woman to fit together quite well sexually; the same cannot be said of two men, yet what if the two men are in love? Those who value love are not likely to view the physiological relative lack of natural fit as problematic, yet the fact that the male and female fit is better is difficult for them to ignore. Lest it be objected that the relative lack of fit is not from God, it is difficult to hold that God is omnipotent and still maintain that design-induced malfunction is not sourced in God.

In Hugo, the deism is not made explicit, so its theological problems are not dealt with directly. Rather, the theology is implied as Hugo observes the world could be one big machine. If so, it follows that even people might be machines. Because each machine contains just the number of parts needed, if the world is a machine, then—Hugo reasons—he must have a purpose even though he doesn’t know it because he has no parents to tell him what it is. In other words, Hugo faces existential angst because he does not know his function.

Combining society-as-machine with deism, Creation itself is one machine consisting of machines. In one scene, Hugo dreams that he himself consists of the internals of a clock, and furthermore, that everything is wheels. An implication is that God does not create extra parts (or extra machines). Put another way, God does not permit unnecessary machines to go on existing. The orphanage represents the place where such machines—the reprobate—go. As enforced by the train station’s inspector, kids without parents do not work, and therefore much be removed from society. To work again, Hugo says, is to do what one is supposed, or meant, to do, as per how one was designed (by God); it is to have a purpose, without which one faces nothing short of nihilism. Essentially, this is functionalism, the philosophy that one is what one does. In business schools and especially in the business world itself, people tend to assume that function explains what one is. Even in ordinary conversation, someone is wont to say something like, “I am a lawyer.” The implication is that the vocation identifies who one is. Alternatively, the sentence could read, “I do lawyering.” This sentence refers only to function, rather than ontology.

The film identifies having a function—working (as a machine works and in the sense of having a job)—not only with what one is supposed or meant to do, but also with having a home. This is ethically problematic, for it implies that people who do not work do not deserve having a home. This problem provides the basis of the film’s dramatic tension. According to Hugo’s understanding, an orphan without a home (i.e., parents) cannot know, and therefore perform, his function; he cannot work as designed. He is thus surfeit in society-as-machine, whose parts can only be necessary. Kids that don’t work (at recognized jobs) do not legitimately exist, from the vantage point of society so conceived. More abstractly, meaning is presumed to depend on function, or being able to work. Everything, including everyone, is supposed to work—meaning being meant to have a particular function. This is the deist ethic.

What of mentally or physically impaired people who cannot work as designed? Does vocational deism justify the Nazi killing of members of society deemed worthless because they are retarded? Should unemployment compensation be stopped because the unemployed are not working? Moreover, does human worth come from function or design? A person who has not found his or her functional raison d’etre might wonder if he or she deserves to exist. This is essentially what Hugo is about.

Hugo’s objects of desire all represent means he thinks will lead him to discover what he is “meant” or “designed” to do—how he was designed to function. He is driven to overcome all odds to work; he is a machine, as are we all, and he is driven to discover his purpose. His antagonist is ultimately nihilism, which can be defined here in terms of not having a purpose. Home represents the security of having evaded non-existence (or expulsion from society, as in going to the orphanage) by having found one’s necessary function and thus being able to work “as intended” and thus as one should. Deism provides the theological background here, as the design is presumed to be the basis of purpose. Ironically, Hugo’s function is to fix human machines that no longer function as designed. His function is sourced in the design of his heart in having compassion for others who have broken down. Interestingly, he didn't have to recognize his design or function in order for it to work throughout his journey. To function vocationally making use of one's design (e.g., as in Asa Butterfield being a natural actor), however, one must first recognize the natural ability in order to apply it in a job.

Hugo is an amazing story in covering several levels precisely because it goes from Deism (abstractly) to functionalism as vocation (tangible). In laboring (i.e., working), a person works like a machine works. For the viewer, the questions go from whether function proffers worth to whether our function from design is that which we use in our work. In the documentary on Woody Allen on PBS (2011), the comic points out that some people can draw really good pictures, such as of horses. Allen admits that he does not have that talent. He goes on to say that jokes, however, naturally come to him, even while he is taking a walk. It is simply how he sees the world; the jokes just come to him. He has an aptitude that is natural for him. The obvious implication is that each person naturally does some things better than other things. If a person has no idea of what comes naturally—perhaps because he or she is so close to it—that person could presumably benefit greatly by discovering it. There is indeed very little choice in one's "gifts." They are what given in one's design. If a person realizes and functions in line with one's natural excellences, one is on what Joseph Campbell called “the blissful path.” However, if worth is not derived only or primarily from function, then the blissful path does not depend on discovering one's natural talents; being transcends doing. In Hugo, this issue is front and center, with Deism serving as the foundation.

See related essay: "Oscars: Beyond Eye-Candy"