I saw the Jed figure as existing in Joe's imagination, welling up from his unconscious mind to haunt him. Yes, Jed was at the triggering event but he haunts Joe without reference to anyone else, and challenges him on the most difficult subject for many English intellectuals: love for thy neighbour. Joe dismisses love publicly in his lectures and privately to friends: according to him it's just "biology". Naturally, this conviction makes him unaware of insulting his live-in lover. He is trapped inside his inability to love. Jed's professed love makes Joe extremely uncomfortable, and he uses all sorts of evasions to escape it. This passage of the film, roughly the first half, was rivetingly significant to me. It is dealing with a central English issue. As the plot developed and Jed emerged from the shadows into Joe's life I thought the film lost its way a little. Joe never confronted his inability to love, and Claire left him. The symbolic representation of this disaster was brilliantly theatrical, but raised some difficult issues of plot resolution that were uncertainly handled. To call this picture a stalker film is like saying Hamlet is about mental health: the more you see the stalker and the less a haunting, the less the film will entertain and challenge you.
Review of Enduring Love
