Six words you don’t want coming
out of your child’s mouth when it’s nearly midnight and you’re at your vacation
home out in the middle of nowhere: “There’s a family in our driveway.” With
that sentence the frights really begin in
Jordan Peele’s Us, the
follow-up to his masterful 2017 debut,
Get Out. I’m finally getting
around to some of the sophomore releases of the directors who I thought had the
best directorial debuts in the horror genre during the 2010s, and I’m going to start
with
Us and
Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019), because I think both
filmmakers share a lot of similar storytelling characteristics and show a comparable
career progression as directors through their first two films. Both men
specialize in layered storytelling laden with dense symbolism that requires
repeated viewings to fully reveal the sinister intentions of their characters,
and the multiple allegories woven into their head-spinning narratives; and while
I don’t enjoy either of their follow-ups as much as their renowned debuts
(which turned them into titans of the genre seemingly overnight), both
sophomore films saw the directors going bigger and getting more ambitious with
the scope of their projects, expanding their formalistic repertoires behind the
camera, and their world-building in front.
In Jordan Peele’s second social-horror film about the
terrors of modern America, there’s no such thing as coincidence, only destiny.
And fittingly enough, just about the entire first act of
Us is a
continuous string of foreshadowing: everything comes back around, again and
again, like a fateful cosmic pendulum counting down one minute to midnight. Where
the horror of
Get Out lies right beneath the skin, the horror of
Us
lies right beneath the surface of the Earth, taking us to a different kind of
sunken place. It’s the place where we keep our shadow selves locked up and
hidden away, our baser instincts chained and writhing in the dark. It’s the
place where oppressed communities are forced to exist, going through the
motions of living without having true freedom, plotting for their day in the
sun when they can rise up and overcome their oppressors. It’s the dark
reflections of humanity, glossed over with commodities and the pursuit of the
“American Dream.” It’s what we can be reduced to, and the lengths we’re willing
to go for liberation.
Us sees these violent, voiceless reflections – doppelgängers
of every American citizen, known as “The Tethered” – crawling out from their
subterranean dungeons, wearing red prison-like jumpsuits, and exacting their
revenge on their surface-world counterparts, cutting their way to freedom with
razor-sharp scissors in an act that their leader deems: “The Untethering.”
We don’t get a whole lot of backstory on “The Tethered”
other than that they were a failed experiment set up by the U.S. government to
control the population, and I think the film would have worked better as a
miniseries as it seems to leave more plotlines open rather than closed. I wouldn’t
mind as much if it were an avant-garde film that’s more about mood than story,
but some of the monologues don’t make as much sense with the movie’s twist
ending either, so it doesn’t feel nearly as well thought-out as
Get Out,
or at the very least feels rushed in comparison. What
Us does have going for it though is Jordan Peele’s allegorical storytelling, his adept symbology, and
lead actress
Lupita Nyong’o’s commanding performance.
Every time I watch this film I have to continuously remind
myself that Nyong’o is playing the roles of both Adelaide, and Red (the leader
of The Tethered). The Oscar-winning actress demonstrates a masterclass of
physical performance while playing Red, from the unsettling ways she contorts
her face – where every expression is taken to its extreme – to the character’s
utterly unnatural body movements that are rigid and jerky, yet somehow graceful at
the same time. It’s almost as if Red phases in and out of materiality when she moves, like a
glitch in the matrix. It’s this same reason that makes the climax of the film
such a joy to watch. Over a symphonized
version of “
I Got 5 On It” by
Luniz, Nyong’o engages with herself in some of
the most unique fight choreography of the decade, as Red and Adelaide enter a
sort of death ballet, a Danse Macabre, dodging and slashing at each other while
gliding through the forsaken tunnels of The Tethered. Adelaide erratic, swinging her fireplace poker with a reckless, fiery rage, and Red nothing but cold, calculated maneuvers, scissors held close, always waiting for Adelaide to get near enough to stick her with the
pointy end.
Of all the symbolism though, one of my favorite motifs that Peele
threads throughout
Us revolves around arachnids. At the beginning of the
film, a young Adelaide wanders through a hall of mirrors while whistling “Itsy
Bitsy Spider” to herself. And later on, while flashing back to her childhood,
an adult Adelaide stares at a small spider crawling across a glass coffee table
as a giant toy tarantula looms behind it like a colossal, menacing shadow; the
specter of her past finally catching up with her. The motif twines its way to
the surface again during the first confrontation between the protagonist and
her double, where Red presses Adelaide’s face against the aforementioned coffee table with
enough force to crack it, creating a radial fracture in the glass that
resembles a spider web, with Adelaide as the hapless prey caught at its center. And
what does a spider web do to its victims? It tethers them, of course.
I’ve already mentioned how
Us works as an allegory
for oppressed classes rising up, and for the darker parts of ourselves that we
keep suppressed within the tunnels of our unconscious minds, but there’s a
third allegory that can be read in
Us as well: Black girls having their
voices and agency taken away from them at a young age, and having to fight their
whole lives to gain it back (assuming they ever had any to begin with).
[SPOILERS] We learn at the end of the film that “Adelaide” was actually born a
doppelgänger, born without a voice as one of The Tethered, and “Red” was born
on the surface world, the true Adelaide. During an encounter as children
“Adelaide” choked “Red” unconscious, fracturing her larynx in the process, and
dragged her underground, taking her place on the surface world. In flashback
scenes we see the young girl’s parents asking a child psychologist why “Adelaide”
doesn’t speak anymore. Assuming that the child is suffering from PTSD, the psychologist tells them, “Encourage her to draw, to
write, to dance. Anything to help her tell her story.” And sure enough it’s after
“Adelaide” begins expressing herself through ballet that she gains the ability
to speak: art allowed her to step out of the shadow of herself. And down below “Red”
regains her own agency through this dancing as well, although her voice has been reduced
to a gravelly growl from the damaged larynx. After years of being forced into mimicry, Red achieves
autonomy through her own ballet, untethering from her surface-world counterpart,
and becoming the leader of the underground revolution. The whole film is both
Adelaide and Red’s struggle to be untethered; their struggle for agency in a
world that would have them voiceless and docile, like caged rabbits. One woman
rose from the depths as a child, assimilating to survive, doing all she
can to maintain the life she’s fought for; the other battled her way back after
being cast down into the darkness, becoming a violent extremist leader for the
marginalized, becoming, essentially, a martyr. The constant duality of
Us
makes for a more challenging viewing than
Get Out, but it allows Peele
to tell multiple stories wrapped into one, forcing us to confront the ambiguity
of own narratives, who we deem as the heroes, who we deem as the villains, and
who we stand upon and keep stamped down, whether consciously or not, in order
to maintain our own versions of The American Dream.
Distributed by:
Universal Pictures
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