In his newest film Enemy, French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve immediately springs on us an omnipotent sense of dread. The chiaroscuro-tinged opening — a dynamo dream sequence in a film that feels like one long, unending hallucination — takes us inside an invitation-only sex club, populated by hard-looking, well-dressed men, one of whom is Jake Gyllenhaal. What are they watching? Scantily clad women doing seemingly erotic things that involve tarantulas. Bear with me. Soon we meet a pregnant blonde (Sarah Gadon) who’s waiting at home for her husband. Is it Gyllenhaal whom she’s waiting for? The next time he’s glimpsed, he […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 17, 2014In Robert Bly’s examination of Jung’s concept of the shadow, Bly talks a lot about this thing called “the bag.” The bag is where, for the first 20 years of our lives, we hide the stuff we’re ashamed of. Or have been made to be ashamed of. Then we spend the rest of our lives trying to get those things out of the bag. Things like our emotions, our anger, our creativity, our vulnerability, our troublemaker, our defiance, our gut instinct, our spontaneous wildness. They’re in the bag a lot of the time. So, boys learn how to put their […]
by Noah Buschel on Jan 10, 2014