[2019-03-23] Us (2019)

[hermionesviolin]

I'm not a big horror movie person, and Us didn't interest/appeal to me from the trailers -- but Get Out was so good that I was intrigued to watch Jordan Peele's latest.

Zira and I saw it yesterday and left feeling like we wanted it to have been a smarter movie -- to have done more with the "they're us" element (it used that to really good effect sometimes, especially with the son, but I wanted more). Hartley went to a different showing and concurred. Also, the more I thought about the twist at the end, the more difficulty I had with "How does the worldbuilding actually work?"

I hadn't had a chance to read any thinkpieces, but Zira texted me this afternoon:

This is the first article I’ve read that’s given me a deeper appreciation for the movie:
https://www.vox.com/2019/3/22/18277163/us-movie-ending-what-happened-adelaide-red-explained
This is also a good one:
https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/3/22/18275141/us-spoilers-twist-ending-explained-jordan-peele-lupita-nyongo

From the first link:

The movie constantly reminds its audience that America’s story is one of history perpetually being forgotten or overwritten, like the genocide of Native Americans, whose iconography gets briefly appropriated and then hastily remodeled for the maze that starts the story. Characters frequently speak of forgetting things; Adelaide’s entire character is rooted in forgetting.

The ones who don’t have the luxury of losing their memories are the ones who remain Underground. (“I never forgot you,” Red tells Adelaide.) That’s because not only are they forced to live out approximations of “real” life without any agency over their own bodies or identities, but they are the only witnesses to their own misery and enslavement. In Red’s world, a good memory is the key to escape.

[...]


That assumption — that the Doppelgangers are different, shadow figures — helps cement the audience’s belief early on that Adelaide must have successfully escaped from the carnival maze. After all, compared to Red, she’s so fully human, so powerfully emotive, so loving and caring — right?

So the revelation that she was born in the Underground is jarring to us for multiple reasons. Not only does it make us think differently about Adelaide herself, but it forces us to reconsider our views on the rest of the Tethered. They’re clearly every bit as human as we are — capable of living fully self-actualized and happy lives above ground.

And this is where Peele’s metaphorical work really pays off. Because once we start thinking about the Underground as an allegorical space that represents dehumanized and marginalized bodies, then suddenly “we” are forced to contend with the troubling idea that perhaps the only things separating “us” from various “thems” — society’s countless marginalized communities — are chance and privilege. And even this isn’t enough to ever fully sever us. We are all, as the movie repeats, tethered not only to each other, but also to the sins of our country’s past and present, to the people and cultures we have tried to erase and diminish. And that connection leaves its traces, even when we try to deny it.

The subtitle of the "an allegorical space" one linked above is "The new movie’s conclusion is one elastic metaphor after another. That’s what makes it frustrating. And brilliant." -- which feels very true to me.

Excerpts from that article:

If you want to read what happens to Red and Adelaide as a commentary on how differently traumatic incidents weigh on children of means versus children who grow up with little money, doing so can support both an interpretation of the film as being about mental illness and one where it’s about class.

What’s more, Us doesn’t seem to want to be read as social commentary in the same way Get Out was. That middle hour is so fun precisely because it never really bothers to stop and make you think about the movie’s deeper themes. It’s too busy killing off Tethers by chewing them up in a boat’s motor.

[...]

I don’t literally have a shadow self, but there’s some other person out there in the country right now who could have had my life and career but, instead, has some less comfortable one because he grew up with parents who didn’t have enough money to send him to college, or because he grew up some race other than white, or because he was born a girl, or ... fill in the blank.

Taking Red at her word means believing in an idea that seems self-evidently kooky, but it’s also an idea that drives much of modern society. Capitalism demands that we cling desperately to what we’ve got, and the fear that some dark underbelly might come and rob us of what little we have is always present.

Yet the very idea of society means we’re all tethered together somehow, and the actions of those of us with power and money often make those without either jerk about on puppet strings, even if we never know how what we do affects our doppelgängers.

And all the while, “they” — whoever “they” are — get richer and richer and more and more powerful.

[...]

In 1986, the hall of mirrors features a stereotypical painting of an American Indian that sits atop its entrance. The art is offensive in the way all thoughtlessness is. Nobody cared who might be hurt by this painting. They just went ahead and painted it. Peele isn’t digging into one of America’s original sins here in the way he alluded to slavery in Get Out, but the evocation of a terrible genocide is at least there.

In 2019, the hall of mirrors has now, clumsily, been converted into one for Merlin the wizard. The inside is the same. Most of the outside is the same. But the painting of the Indian has been replaced — not particularly convincingly — with a painting of Merlin that’s seemingly just been mounted over the old American Indian one. It’s a really good joke, honestly; it’s a spin on how willing modern America is to gloss over the horrors in its past in the name of simply coming up with some other story entirely.

[...]

And this reading of the film’s ending, that it was always about the perils of trying to ignore inconvenient truths when they’re looking right back at you in the mirror, is one that unites every other possible reading of the film, too. Race, gender, class, trauma — they’re all covered by the idea that you can have a great life and be a good person but still unknowingly be causing so much suffering.

Addendum: There's a lot about the worldbuilding that doesn't hold up to scrutiny -- how do the Tethered move when Aboveground people are moving faster than is humanly possible (e.g., in cars or on planes)? how are the Tethered able to un-tether to come aboveground? and to do all that prep work? where did they even get/how did they make those outfits and shears? how does anything (e.g. their clothing) materialize Underground? do those rabbits just constantly materialize, never eating or pooping? -- but that closing line about how you can "unknowingly be causing so much suffering" is what will maybe most stay with me about the film.

Addendum: la_dissonance linked to "Jordan Peele's 'Us' is a Commentary on Double Consciousness" (originally this Twitter thread).

Imma quote from the Twitter thread:

To me, Us has to be in conversation with Get Out because for his sophomore effort, Peele has immediately returned to this theme of imposters.

It’s not enough that you’ve been killed...like normal.

Peelian horror requires there to be a death of your very identity.

[check out the Tweet for an excellently paired pair of images -- one from each film #horrifying]

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Now, as mentioned, I think Us is about a lot. But, it seems clearly about repressed identity.

When we first meet Red, she gives a speech about how hard her life has been, how she’s waited for this. Adelaide asks who her and her family are and Red responds

“We’re Americans.”

+

This caused many people to consider the political import of that statement.

For me, it made me think of Langston Hughes’ poem: I, Too.

It’s a poem so plainly about the black experience in America, and Peele’s wink at it seems so clear to me.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen when company comes.
But I laugh and eat well and grow strong.

Tomorrow, I’ll be at the table when company comes.

Nobody’ll dare say to me, “Eat in the kitchen” then.

Besides, they’ll see how beautiful I am and be ashamed.

I, too, am America.

There's a lot of other smart stuff in there

It reminded me so much of Ralph Ellison’s narrator in Invisible Man.

We find the narrator underground struck by double consciousness.

That circus. That glass.

[Tweet includes relevant screencaps]

but the "I, too, am America" reference really gut-punched me (and I think is another one of the thoughts about the film that will really stick with me).

Addendum2: I would be very off-brand if I did not talk about the biblical reference. One article which asserts that "Our ugliest history is coming for us." did the work for me:

Us warns that a destruction of biblical proportions is coming, and it started inside our own souls

Of all of Peele’s deliberate choices, the doubling motif is the most important. It furnishes the impetus for the plot, but it shows up in other ways. A man shows up on the boardwalk in both 1986 and the present day holding a cardboard sign, on which is written, in crayon, “Jeremiah 11:11” — “Therefore, thus says the Lord, Behold, I am bringing disaster upon them that they cannot escape. Though they cry to me, I will not listen to them.”

The verse’s significance is more clear if you look at it in context, just as the movie only makes full sense with knowledge of America’s history-phobic culture: We prefer to forget the parts of our history that make us uncomfortable. In Jeremiah 11, God is speaking to the prophet Jeremiah about the covenant he made with the forefathers of the people of Israel when he brought them out of slavery in Egypt. The nation, God says to Jeremiah, has “turned back to the iniquities of their forefathers.”

Later in the passage, Jeremiah realizes the people are plotting against him, because they don’t want to hear this message. The nation has forgotten God and its history, and God has decided to give it over to destruction.

That’s an obvious warning for people who’ve forgotten their country’s history of oppression and bloodshed. What Us suggests is that, if we are headed for destruction, the destroyers won’t be invaders from the outside — the “other.” They will be, well, us.

Obviously, there’s no clear doubling theme in the verse itself (though God repeats the same warnings several times, almost verbatim, in the chapter). But Peele got a little lucky with the reference: 11:11 is, itself, a double of doubles. To make sure we get it, he repeats it on an alarm clock screen just before things start to go very wrong in the movie. And there are other doubles all over the movie: window reflections, twins, mirror images, and, of course, the doppelgängers themselves.

Addendum #3: I think the first couple pieces I read were by white folks, and I'm glad to be reading more thinkpieces about this film written by Black folks.

Someone at The Root notes (perhaps tongue in cheek, perhaps not), in "A Thinkpiece About Thinkpieces About Us":

Good black films can’t be about regular black people. For a black film to be a critical darling, it must be centered in whiteness. The pain, the heroism or the story must be relatable to white people. The film must have a white savior or teach us an existential lesson about the universality of mankind. Black people are only seen as human when they are suffering from black shit (slavery, oppression or injustice).

Back to thinkpieces, from ShadowAndAct: The author says the twist was telegraphed in the trailer -- "She's snapping on the one and the two and the three and a half. Adelaide is a fraud."

Excerpts:

But--like many a Good White Person™ might say when confronted with the responsibility of righting systemic racism--the humans are asking: Why should I have to be punished for something I didn't even know about, let alone do?! Judgment is not always about what you specifically or even consciously do; it can also be about what you should have known, what you didn't do, and what privileges you received at another's expense.

[...]

Adelaide confessed to Gabe that she thought about her shadow self all the time, but what about the others? If she did ever think of the Shadow People, it wasn't enough to stir her to action on their behalf.

Shadow Adelaide knew what it was like for them down there: the lack of agency, the lifelessness, the torture of being an abandoned science project. She may, in fact, be the only one in Santa Cruz who did know (though whoever constructed that funhouse has some explaining to do).

She sided with the privileged a long time ago when deciding who actually deserves humanity. Perhaps she reasoned that she was just smarter than the other Shadow People; she pulled herself up by her bootstraps! Made her own way out of hell. Why should she be responsible for the lives of the Shadow People she left behind? It's a common thought process when people move up a rung or ten on the privilege ladder. Comfort trumps revolution.

[...]

Instead, she walked through life like Angelenos walk through Downtown LA, over the legs of the homeless who sleep in tents on the side of the road. We all know it's unconscionable, that the existence of homelessness is an indictment on us as a civilization. But still, we carry on, peripherally aware of the Skid Rows of the world, the uninsured ill, the systemically disenfranchised--until, of course, they say or do something to make us look up from our phones and be on our guard. Then, we can't ignore them, so we clutch our purse, move quickly aside, maybe even call the police. But like Elizabeth Moss's character learned the hard way (in one of the most iconic uses of NWA's “Fuck The Police" to date!): the police aren't coming to save you, Sharon. It's time to settle up.

[...]

Shadow Adelaide didn't realize it when they first got to the beach, but the creepy man with the Jeremiah 11:11 sign from Real Adelaide's childhood might have been the first to fall in the revolution. He was dead on a stretcher in an ambulance and very bloody, like a victim of a scissor stabbing might be. But Shadow Adelaide and the human family drove on by to enjoy their day at the beach. The son Jason didn't realize that it's the Shadow Jeremiah 11:11 man he sees on the beach, victorious, wearing a trench coat over his revolution red uniform, standing right where Red told him to stand, in front of the infamous boardwalk funhouse. Blood dripping down his fingers, his hands are outstretched, waiting for more Shadow People to join him. He must realize he jumped the gun, though, because soon he disappears and Jason is left to wonder what exactly he saw.

A writer in The Atlantic talks about how the face of horror tends to be white (e.g. the iconic shower scene in Psycho) and how Jordan Peele is changing that:

The greatest effect of Peele’s work as a director so far has been to subvert the mainstream offerings of horror, which themselves were originally subversive. It might be, then, that Us’s most powerful mode is as a meta-satire. The film confronts the genre with a Hadean version of itself, this time possessed by disinherited Others with an intent to dismantle. This new self—composed of a growing collection of diverse talent embodied by Peele and his production company—resembles the old. It shares a soul, to quote the film. The tropes and the basic structures employed are similar. The genre is still horror. But instead of Janet Leigh’s scream, the representative image is of a black face, looking to the void.

Comments

[seascribble]

Those articles make me wanna see this movie so bad even though Zira says I shouldn't.