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Like most of Milligan's work, it's a bit dated upon review, but I dearly love the ending of ENIGMA. As a study in Existentialism, the story ends perfectly (with a gimmicky but fitting circular storytelling gambit on the last page). There are three parts to the last scene, for those who didn't read it or have gotten fuzzy.
1) Michael learns that his (possibly latent, possibly heretofore nonexistent) homosexuality was imposed on him by his lover, the Enigma, in order to effectively reprogram (through psychic feedback) the Enigma's Death Mother-slash-shadow anima. Given the opportunity to change back, Michael gives the post-existentialist "fuck it" reply along the lines of "nobody knows why I have green eyes either, but I like them."
2) The entire story's narrator is revealed to be a similarly altered lizard incapable of communicating with anyone but his fellow idiotic lizards, in parallel with the Enigma's Omega-Level mutation (in the TPB intro Grant calls this reveal a further parallel to the abomination that caused the Enigma's initial retreat into existentialist recreation of a 60's comic book, in that it effectively pulls the entire structure of the Enigma narrative apart -- it becomes a tale told to no one, by no one). There is a circular gimmick to this narrative that makes it kind of cheap, however, it leads directly into the best part of the conclusion.
3) Having been shown the real nature of the story we've been reading, it now makes sense that we should stay with the lizard narrator and miss the real climax/conclusion of the story -- the Enigma, Michael, and *another* comic book writer stand-in head off down the hill to confront the death mother figure and see if the entire experiment with the mutations has worked. In one step we've lost the opportunity to view the conclusion to the original story, and come into a much bigger story, this one about the act of comics and storytelling in general ... and this reframing is retroactive, making the whole story about the telling of that story leading to that one unending moment of conclusion that we're unable to resolve even using our own powers of existentialist re-creation. It's very nice.
For extra credit I'll also say that this "reframing from within" technique was used to Awesome effect in post-Kathy SHADE, when we find out (SPOILER WARNINGS are redundant in this thread, eh?) that Shade's power is pretty much *directly responsible* for everything that's gone before, making it a metaphor for the power of our unconscious desires and resentments to fuck up everything and create the world around us moment by moment. Similarly religious to the bits above, in that I was in high school and could neither spell existentialism nor define passive-aggressive. I will always love you, Peter. |
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