Jordan Peele's Us: The end, explained. Beware of spoilers!

Guess what? The spoilers follow!

First of all: I'm going to give this article a title that looks like "WeEnds, explains "or"WeEnd, dissected ", and I should tell you right off the bat that I will not explain WeEnd. I can not.

Jordan Peele's second film has an end that dares you to bring what you think it. Hence the end of his first film, get out (for which he won an Oscar for the screenplay) was a series of puzzle pieces being put together, We ends in a way that causes infinite spreading of the film structure. Five different puzzles are mixed in the same box and you have at best only about 75% of the pieces.

But I found this approach incredibly appealing. The viewers who had left my screening the other night seemed very divided on the film – and its last-minute turn – but I pushed myself deeper and deeper because of this messy and glorious end.

So, let's talk first about what's going on in this end, how do we could read this, then try to find a way to synthesize all these ideas.

What happens at the end of We

We also breaks in a classic structure in three acts. The first act is a disturbing installation, first with a step back for our protagonist, Adelaide (Lupita Nyong & # 39; o), as a girl, meeting a mirror version herself, then to the early days a family vacation she spends with her husband (Winston Duke) and her children as an adult. The second act follows the actions of Adelaide and her family after being threatened by horrible double versions of themselves – played by the same actors – during a long and bloody night.

The second act – roughly the average time of the 116-minute film – is about perfect, the kind of perfectly planned horror comedy that we see far too rarely. And all along the way, Peele is sowing on exhibit, as when we learn that Adelaide and her family are not the only ones threatened by their doubles (called "attachments" in the film because they are tied up mirror them) by cutting the vicious murder of two of their friends (Tim Heidecker and Elisabeth Moss) by the friends'Double.

Part of this exhibition is clearly stated, as when Adelaide's double, Red, explains exactly who she is and who are his compatriots. Another exhibition is mainly implicit. (Pay special attention, for example, to those that the fasteners kill and that these just mutilate.) And still other things, it is probably that I read my own opinions in the movie.

Whatever the case may be, the third act begins when the family finally comes to light after killing two of their doubles, a third double falling all the way to the top of act three. The only remaining bond is Red, who runs away with Adelaide's son Jason (Evan Alex), and collapses with him in a gigantic tunnel complex that exists under the Santa Cruz boardwalk – and that's implied – all over the country.

The tunnels above all have the atmosphere of an abandoned military installation and they are filled with rabbits released from cages. (The rabbits are the only food the links have.) This vague military sentiment merges with something that Red tells Adelaide when the two face each other in what appears to be a classroom. The ties were created by a nebulous "them" to control themselves.

Claudette Barius / Universal Pictures

But the experiment was abandoned for unexplained reasons, leaving the ties underground, imitating each of our movements here, living in lives where they have no free will, lives entirely dictated by our choices. (The long exhibition monologue where Red basically explains all of this is the weakest part of the film and kills its momentum.This is also the case of the long exhibition monologue of get out!)

The status quo was maintained until Red and Adelaide met in their youth, and the two girls began a fight that resembled a dance but remained recognizable. (Peele subtracts this with images of teenager Adelaide – a great ballerina – dancing beautifully as Red replicates her actions in a strangely grotesque mirror under the ground.) Finally, Adelaide triumphs over Red and kills her. She finds Jason and gets out of the tunnels.

But above the ground, the many attachments came together to create a mirror of Hands Across America, the fundraising event of 1986 to raise awareness of hunger, which hit a 6.5 millions of people (almost all along). The presence of this massive chain of straps should allow viewers to get acquainted with the last turn of the film. An ad for Hands Across America is one of the last things that little Adelaide does not see before going to the Santa Cruz Boardwalk with her family. It's there that she meets Red and (the last scene reveals) is forced to take Red's place in the world of attachment while Red comes to us.

The film never clearly says it's a long-standing trauma that Adelaide resurfaces as she and her family head for the new post-apocalyptic landscape of the world. a world where apparently millions of people have been murdered by their doubles and a chain of these doubles across the continent, or if it's something that it has significantly avoided referring to all movies. You can argue for one or the other.

The film leaves you with the twist. Adelaide was red and Red was Adelaide, then they changed places as girls. Jason, in a way, seems to realize this in his mother's eyes, and he looks worried as we turn the camera leaning over the hills surrounding Santa Cruz, where a long chain of links, presumably from one ocean to another.

What does all this mean?

There is no one-sided meaning to the conclusion of Weand its beauty lies in the elasticity of its metaphor

Claudette Barius / Universal Pictures

One of the reasons get out Online theorists have so easily taken off because every element of it has been designed to add to the central revelation of the film about the white elderly literally possessing the body of young blacks. It was a powerful commentary on race relations, yes, but Peele hinted at allusions to the big turn of the plot. He had clearly reflected on all the details of the film world.

You can not really say the same thing for We. Whenever you think you have the movie pinned to say "it's about it!", It escapes you. His central metaphor of encountering a diabolical and diabolical twin of oneself can certainly be interpreted as a commentary on race, but it is also a pretty brilliant commentary on social class, capitalism, gender, and long-term effects. term of trauma and mental illness. You can probably add your own possibilities to this list.

All of these concepts continue to inform each other. If you want to read what happens to Red and Adelaide as a comment on how different traumatic incidents weigh on children's means, compared to children growing up with little money, this can support both an interpretation of the movie as being about mental illness and one where class is concerned.

What else, We does not seem to want to to read as social commentary in the same way get out was. This is the average time so much fun, precisely because it never stops to stop you and make you think about the deeper themes of the film. It's too busy killing the fasteners by chewing them in the engine of a boat.

Now, admitted, my experience of We was very different from a lot of people's experiences (at least people I talked to), because I guessed right from the first flashback sequence that Red and Adelaide had changed places in their childhood. I have assumed the film wanted to I had to understand that because it was essentially the only way the larger plot of the movie – the idea that everyone had a connection, and not just that particular family – could make sense. Something must have caused this breach in reality, and the connection between Adelaide and Red seemed to be the most likely culprit.

Still, it's really remarkable that the film works just as well as when you first discover its big turn, because Peele does a great job of teasing you to make you think maybe. do not have understand, or that the twist is something else. (get outafter all, this film does not really have a "twist", but a revelation that occurs before the end.)

Always: put the twist aside and take the red word to the red word regarding the origin of the fasteners. They have been experimented with a strange experience and it is now a kind of national identity, a self that is barely checked by all Americans. (At one point, when asked who she was and her family, Red croaked, "We are Americans," which is … right.)

The natural rejection of this situation is – it's absurd. By giving so much information but still so little, Peele creates a situation in which he feels he answers all our questions and simply does not do it. (On credit, as it should be: I like the precision with which the entire third act reproduces the experience of falling into a troubling Wikipedia hole at 3 am, until you find something to read about Hands Across America.)

And yet … it's the twist this absurd? I do not literally have a shadow, but there is another person in the country right now, who could I had my life and my career, but on the contrary, I had a less comfortable life, because he grew up with parents who did not have enough of a life. money to send him to the university, or because he had grown up with a race other than white, or because he was born a girl, or … fill the void.

To take the red word is to believe in an idea that may seem suspicious, but it is also an idea that drives much of modern society. Capitalism demands that we cling desperately to what we have, and the fear that a dark belly can steal all the little we have from us is always present.

Yet the very idea of ​​society means that we are all bound in one way or another and that the actions of those with power and money often make those who are not vicious, even though we never know how what we do affects our bodyguards.

And during all this time, "they", whoever they are, become more and more rich and more and more powerful.

Reflections on a universal reading of the end of We (with our apologies to Stanley Kubrick)

Claudette Barrius / Universal Pictures

But We is not really "about" capitalism, unless you (like me) want to read that inside. The film's metaphor is so elastic that you can easily read the film that says it's about climate change, the 2016 election or zombies. (In the scenes that take place in the underground complex in particular, Peele plays the familiar images of zombie movies, like legions of people lying around, shadows of a life they should live otherwise.) And I also want to clarify that if you want to watch We as a super fun horror comedy, it's absolutely possible, and you should do it.

But I think you can come to a kind of universal understanding of We, a film that explores in depth the content of the film while leaving room for the elasticity that allows you to read as much or as little as you want in its central metaphor. To get there, we have to look at the ice gallery that first brings together Adelaide and Red together.

In 1986, the Hall of Mirrors presents a stereotypical painting of a Native American who is at the top of his entrance. Art is offensive in the same way as any unconsciousness. Nobody cared who could be hurt by this painting. They just went from the front and painted it. Peele is not digging one of America's original sins, as he alluded to slavery. get out, but the evocation of a terrible genocide is at least The.

In 2019, the Ice Hall was awkwardly converted into a room for Merlin the magician. The interior is the same. Most of the outside is the same. But the painting of the Indian has been replaced – not particularly convincingly – by a Merlin painting that, apparently, has just been mounted over the ancient American Indian. It's a very good joke, honestly; it is a way of saying how modern America is willing to hide the horrors of its past in the name of simply inventing another story.

This is also the key to a more universal reading of the film. The Hall of Mirrors was built in the first place as a distillation of tropes around a racially charged stereotype. It is not because it is now apparently Merlin that it does not mean that it is no longer built around these darker ideas. You can not simply erase the darker past by putting a nicer face on it.

America (well, it's like 99.9999% white America) likes to pretend that it's a country with no dark history, that its self-proclaimed exceptionalism makes it free from all that is too dark. But of course, that's not true. The ice room was built with a Native American at the top because anyone who built it could be reasonably certain that no one would care if it was offensive. Those who could the care is mostly sequestered on reserves or died several generations ago. And you, if you are American, live on the land on which you live because They are dead.

(Box: This could also be a very elaborate riff from Peele The brilliant, another horror movie that is sometimes read by some of its regular fans because of America's general inability to cope with the genocide that lurks in its root system. Peele at been dressed like The brilliant& # 39; S Jack Torrance during the press tour …)

Now, let's consider Hands Across America. Movement made fundraising for hunger – about $ 34 million – but a large part of that was absorbed by operating costs, leaving $ 15 million to pay back to the real cause. This is not a radical change, but it is a drop in the bucket of the problem of the fight against hunger. Is there anything more American than thinking that you have solved a problem by creating a gigantic show that accomplishes less than you think? Again – something dark is covered with something shiny, and we celebrate the shiny surface.

We to make me think of a book I read recently. In The city in the middle of the night, the new novel by sci-fi author Charlie Jane Anders, the protagonist, Sophie, meets members of an extraterrestrial species whose telepathic links mean that they are essentially obliged to remember everything that had happened, going back to their distant past. Even when a member of the species dies, his memories are kept by those who knew them, and these memories become part of the collective consciousness.

Anders not only shows how difficult it could be for those who do not feel comfortable in the collective (those who face enormous emotions they need to understand in private, for example), but it also strongly opposes the long memory of this species to that of humanity. Sophie bears the burden of decisions made millennia before her birth, back on the gigantic spacecraft that brought her ancestors of the Earth on this new planet. These ancestors were shaped by the decisions that you and I currently make, even though we are shaped by decisions made hundreds of years ago, and so on. And many of these decisions are now half-forgotten dreams.

It's hard to really handle that, maybe almost impossible. Sit down and think about all the ways in which you are a product of human history, float in the immensity of time and space, rather than becoming someone else. who can take control of his life and make a difference, discouraging. So we try to ignore all of this. We put up some Merlin paintings that were once Indian, and we smiled and said, "It's better." But the painting is still there, under the surface. If the extraterrestrials Sophie meets in Anders's novel are doomed to memory, we may be doomed to forget that we are more powerful than we are simply because we are alive.

That's why, in my opinion, Anders's novel and novel We I spoke so deeply. Trying to escape from the past, is to try to escape. But trying to escape from the past is also deeply human, because to progress, we must find a way to excuse, forgive or ignore our own mistakes, lock them up in a basement and to hope we will not do it. Do not stay attached to them forever. But what an idiot race?

And this reading of the end of the film, which has always been about risk of ignoring truths that bother you when you look in the mirror, is an example that unites all other possible readings of the film. Race, sex, class, trauma – they are all covered by the idea that you can have a good life, be a good person while unconsciously causing so much suffering.

All this to say: when Jason looks at Adelaide late in this film, seeing for the first time the true self of his mother, he does not realize that it is red, or that it is Adelaide, or anything of the kind . He realizes that she is and has always been both.