Nameless city, faceless man: choices and strategies in the movie adaptation of The double

Abstract

When it hit theaters in 2013, Enemy, a Spanish-Canadian film directed by Denis Villeneuve that adapts the novel O homem duplicado (2002), by Portuguese writer José Samarago, radically divided critics and audiences. Enemy’s experimental, dark and psychological character also called into question his own fidelity to Saramago’s source text, who, as is common knowledge, is also used to experimenting in prose. In view of the innovative and bold potentialities of the film and the novel, each in its own territory and with its own artifices, what we propose in this article is a study, from the perspective of Adaptation Theories, on the adaptive strategies employed in the remediation process (BOLTER; GRUSIN, 2000) from Saramago’s novel for the cinematographic language. Therefore, we intend to carry out an immanent reading based on the formal and thematic aspects of the two works: alterations and permanence of narrative and imagery elements; formal, symbolic and thematic ruptures and continuities, in addition to the choices and resources of cinematographic language used by the adapters in Enemy, as well as their (possible) motivations. The scope of our analysis is mainly focused on two unusual elements of the novel that were maintained by Villeneuve during the intersemiotic translation process (PLAZA, 2003): the modern city as an unsettling, suffocating and labyrinthine space that dwarfs individuals and takes away their identity; and the cultural, literary and psychoanalytic archetype (RANK, 2013) of the double.