Sunday 24 March 2019

Jordan Peele's Us, discussion and analysis (spoilers, lots of them)


Please don't read this unless or until you've seen the film. If you're in two minds about whether to see it or not, go watch it. Its great.




Coming out of the film, which I'll say off the bat that I really enjoyed for the most part, I had a lot of questions. I don't have answers to many of them and I reckon a second pass at some point in the future may help but for now this is just a collection of thoughts rather than my concrete conclusions.

So, the biggest question I had was, what the fuck did I just watch?

Well, the plot is pretty mental, but its not nonsensical either.

From imdb: "A family's serenity turns to chaos when a group of doppelgängers begins to terrorize them." Thats basically it, a creepy twist on the home invasion scenario, then we get into the second act wherein it turns out that this isn't just happening to the family we're following, there's some weird apocalyptic shit going down. Everybody has a double, who in the film are called The Tethered, tonight is the night of the untethering and everyone's other self is out to get them. The family survives after a certain amount of high-jinx and having to kill their other selves, presumably to escape, but everyone else is fucked.

So that's it, that's the story.

But what it this film about though? Jordan Peele has gone on record as saying that there isn't a single detail in the film that doesn't have some significance. This is no more a film merely about creepy dopplegangers that It Follows was merely about a demon or The Babadook was about a haunted childrens book. There's a lot here that demands to be unpacked.

He's also said that the film is about duality, and yes that is the core motif that holds the film together visually and thematically but that on its own doesn't say a whole lot.

Well I don't know about the rest of you but coming out of the cinema I was mostly confused. I was expecting it to be about racism in a more direct fashion. From the premise I thought the obvious place to go, would be internalised racism, an actualisation of the conflict inherent to W.E.B. Du Bois's concept of "double consciousness" which he discusses at length in "The Souls of Black Folk" - i.e. the idea that for a person of colour one must adopt an almost schizophrenic concept of the self, both being oneself in the world while always being conscious of how you're perceived by the dominant white society. That is kind of in there but its not the main focus (unless I'm missing something, I'm not African American myself so there's a fair bit in probably not getting) as I had been expecting it to be.

Since watching the film I've seen a few interviews with Peele and he's said categorically that that isn't what is about anyway. It seems to be partly inspired by his own personal fear of Doppelgängers. Which fair play, is a creepy concept and works well. But obviously it has been loaded with a lot of symbolism. There are a few lines in there that are clearly meant to be ominous. When asked "what are you" the Mother doppelganger says "We are Americans". Earlier in the little girl of the family says "oh yeah, that's right nobody cares about the end of the world". So there you have the notion of America literally tearing itself apart while the younger generations fears for the future go unheeded.

When you get past the home invasion stuff and realise that this is going on everywhere that seems to play into the notion of social upheaval, revolution that classic gothic trope of The Return of the Repressed. When you find what The Tethered actually are, this horrible dehumanising thing that's also necessary to maintain the world that we know, one can't help but think of the exploitative relationship between the 1st and 3rd world, the fact that the most basic decent standard of living that the least of us enjoys is predicated on unspeakable horror that's always just beyond our field of vision.

The whole thing as well of The Tethered in their own environment: human beings just mindlessly going through the motions without real choice or active thought, speaks to fears about the atomisation and alienation inherent to modern living too.

I think there's another level where this is about trauma and mental illness. Adelaide seems to be suffering PTSD, The final reveal the final reveal seems to speak to the idea that real trauma takes away a part of who you once were. Through the set up she displays depressive, paranoiac and magical thinking. Reading profound significance into coincidence is again something that is not uncommon in people with mental health problems. That the whole home invasion kicks off just after her having that conversation with her partner is not insignificant.

Is there a connection here between the personal and political? I feel like the answer is yes but I'm not quite sure how.

Now all of the elements above are in the mix but none of them are the focus of the film. So maybe that's fair enough. Get Out was very on the nose as to what it was about. This isn't but actually, its cool, it doesn't have to be. There's still a lot in there I don't get like what the significance of the Rabbits or the Scissors are. I look forward to hearing what anyone else has to say and unpicking the various threads that have been so deftly woven in there. And what's with all the Micheal Jackson stuff? Well, at least we have that from the horses mouth.

If anyone has any alternative takes or wants to expand on anything I've brought up I'd be really interested in hearing it.

Edit:

A couple of good analysis vids on the film up now on YouTube. I liked the RedLetterMedia one because the lads were pretty much spot on and my feelings about the film over all are quite similar both in terms of what I thought was good and was critical of. The ever reliable Wisecrack did some excellent work teasing out some of the complexities inherent to the imagery. The overall take which was that as a film it is purposefully oblique and multifaceted enough to be meaningful in different ways to anyone watching it is spot on imo.

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