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Claudette Barius Universal
Attention: you make Spoilers happy for .
You think you have a summer vacation relaxing with your fam There is a group of four people who look exactly the same as you and yours: in the shadow of the night, in the shadow of the night, in the shadow of your car. "All you are and all you have."
This is the nightmare of Jordan Peele's new horror film Us .The film is centered on the experience from the wealthy African-American Wilson family, their parents Adelaide (Lupita Nyong'o) and Gabriel (Winston Duke), along with their daughter Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and their son Jason (Evan Alex) .These doppelgängers – or Tethered, as Peele calls them – are the product of a failed US government experiment to create controlled human clones Now they have left their illegal communities and want to kill and replace their counterparts.
Claudette Barius Universal
Us is a film about the inheritance; who happens to be to us (our characters, our souls, the essence of who we are as individual and family units) as well as the legacy of the United States of America (United States of America). At present, the white worry and fear of people of color are glaring, as evidenced by Donald Trump's fixation on his border wall project and its terrorist events, such as the Charlottesville car bombing. In Us Adelaide and her family are faced with their discomfort and fear of versions of themselves stripped of all privileges. And when we discover that Adelaide is not what we think we are, it's actually one of the Tethered who has usurped his counterpart from the real world, it's hard not to realize that the country account his past crimes of genocide and theft of land. (We will refer to the first version of Adelaide that we meet everywhere under the term "Adelaide".)
Claudette Barius Universal
Peele said that he wanted to emphasize how much "we like to point fingers" and point out that "we are a nation … that fears others … and perhaps we are our own worst enemy. It's not just Adelaide who looks in the dark, shoulders stretched by the anticipation of the woman's punishment that she stole, but that of the United States.
The doppelgänger is a metaphor for horror so rich because it indicates how we define human beings and the borders of humanity. The appearance of such a being provokes terror, by confronting his own Other. The three iterations of Invasion of the Body Snatchers explore the idea of doppelgänger, using extraterrestrial pods to produce replacements. But Peele is most in conversation with the less known Jessabelle (2014), in which a young white woman, Jessabelle, discovers that she is the adopted surrogate of the half-black child that her mother has endured during an interracial affair. . The girl is killed by the woman's husband and Jessie is haunted and replaced by her racial and family doppelganger
Peele resurrects these complexities of race, bad, sin and theft. When they meet their doubles, the Wilson sit on their couch, incredulous. Jason says, "They are us." When Adelaide asks, "Who are you?", Red responds, "We are Americans" – and the public can experience its own thrills. The silence of the Wilson is a sufficient answer; there is literally no word to describe the horror of the other . The doppelgänger forces to look naked. What does it mean to be "we"? To be American? Who are we without the traps of capitalism, deprived of the "civilizing" traits of education and privilege? And above all, why is the purest form of ourselves so horrible?
Claudette Barius Universal
In Us Peele also maintains distinct and yet overlapping conversations with his black and non-black viewers. Black viewers can see themselves in red, because it embodies the revenge of the dispossessed, the deliberately forgotten, of those who have been used and abandoned so that the project of American civilization can succeed. Other spectators could identify with Adelaide, walking in life, terrified by the fact that the sins of the past are waiting for penance. The terror of the captives is their disruption, their way of piercing the lies that the Americans say they are going through another day. When it is revealed that Adelaide is the true villain of the story, it becomes even clearer: she spent the second half of the handcuffed movie, literally tied up.
What does it mean to be undecided? 19659027] Peele is a horror student who deliberately remixes clbadic clichés of the genre, mixing issues of horror, history, humanity and responsibility. CHUD (1984) and The People Under the Stairs (1991) both deal with entire hidden worlds occupied by non-human beings living just under our feet and bursting into the world without any excuse. above them. Us also contains explicit visual references to on Friday, 13 (1980), as when his imprisoned counterpart Gabriel, Abraham, comes out of the water – a moment reminiscent of the rise of Jason Voorhies. out of the water to drag the last survivor into the troubled depths of the Crystal Lake camp (itself a mirror of the lake in Us ).
Another clbadic horror trope is at stake in Us : The Last Girl. Horror Scholar Carol Clover defines the last girl as one who survives the badault of the murderer by eventually becoming herself – sending her away for her to live. The last girl is the heroine of the horror film; the public identifies with it and takes it to defeat the villain. But Adelaide is a different kind of last girl – she is not the one we thought we were. Victim and wicked, threatening and threatened, protagonist and antagonist.
Adelaide is a complicated villain: we understand her will to live, to privilege her self and to take advantage of this opportunity that could change her whole life. This empathy for Adelaide raises our own question: what does it mean to not know exactly who to talk to? What is the morality of our own decisions in the name of survival? Red – the true Adelaide – is justified as well by his anger as by his desire for revenge. But which side do we take?
The fact that we can connect to Adelaide – look through the mirror and capture the life we find so convincing – is testament to Peele's mastery. Our discomfort with the consequences of the choices we make is not only what makes the film so disturbing, but also the reason why viewers are pbadionately chatting on social media, addressing questions to their friends at 3 am and planning to see the movie again.
It is difficult to look in the mirror and We know it. Peele asks his audience to face ourselves in this dark hour, as a way to name the terror of America's past, but also of a present in which all us play a role.
Us is now in theaters.
Kinitra D. Brooks
Kinitra Brooks is currently a member of the Hutchins Fellow of Harvard University and is co-editor of the upcoming volume, The Lemonade Reader (Routledge 2019).
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