This is Us

So US is a big hit, elevating Jordan Peele from promising novice filmmaker to budding cultural phenomenon; he’s going to be inescapable in 2019, with the newest Twilight Zone relaunch smartly dropping last month and a bunch of other TV projects with his name attached headed our way shortly. The dude’s even going to be in Toy Story 4. Whenever an exciting new talent like this flares up as fast as Peele has—yeah, he’s been around, but his directorial rise has been meteoric—there’s always that little shiver of trepidation that they’ll get a little too high on their own success and burn out before truly following up on the thing that put them on the map. With Peele that’s somewhat combined with the concern that he might spread himself too thin; just roll by his IMDB page and you’ll see he seems to be planning a career’s worth of creative work in the next two years. I guess that at least somewhat undercuts the first thing?

But US, at least, turned out to be a good movie, sparing Peele the fate of an overhyped one-hit wonder. The comparisons to Spielberg that have been tossed around lately are pretty baffling, but at least he’s avoided becoming the next M. Night Shyamalan.

(Speaking of other genre filmmakers, as a director, at least, the one I’m most tempted to compare Peele to is John Carpenter. Am I crazy for detecting echoes of Prince of Darkness in US? But anyway.)

As a movie, US is not particularly subtle with its central metaphor, but that’s not really a criticism; horror movies are allowed to blunt-force their way into whatever discussion they’re meant to be sparking, and US is still more subtle than Get Out, which may as well have come with a Greek chorus to explain its themes to the audience. (And that’s STILL not a criticism. Get Out would frankly have been a lesser film if it hadn’t yelled its ideas through a bullhorn. On top of everything else, it’s a movie for the Trump era.)

But US is a quirkier creature—even if its haves-vs-have-nots theme doesn’t take much sussing out, there’s more going on there that I haven’t seen anyone really engage with yet. (At this point, be advised that I’m basically about to spoil the whole movie, so turn back now and get to the theater if you haven’t gone yet.)

The idea of an evil twin, a changeling, a personified shadow, is obviously common enough, and fertile grounds for discussion; the class warfare aspect is, as I say, pretty obvious; even the idea of a vast evil mind-controlling conspiracy being developed in a secret underground complex that apparently spans the country, which Peele the writer amusingly breezes past at 60 mph without looking back, is basically a narrative device from we can extrapolate whatever details make sense to us. (I think one of the things I like best about Peele’s short career as a filmmaker so far is how unapologetically batshit and ornate his horror mythologies are, while still being quickly and efficiently outlined when they appear. It’s the essence of horror storytelling, really—casually suggesting something that sounds insane but which part of you has always suspected, deep down, to be true.)

But there’s another aspect to the film that’s been weirdly glossed over, possibly because it’s so much easier to talk about that other stuff, and also possibly because by the time it starts to really emerge in the third act the movie has got us surfing along with its own demented logic so we just nod along, going, ‘yeah, sure, ok’. And that is—

YOU GUYS THE VILLAIN’S BIG PLAN IN THIS MOVIE IS TO RE-ENACT “HANDS ACROSS AMERICA”

That’s pretty weird, right? I mean, it’s a weird movie but that’s *really* weird. And it’s not like there’s an obvious tie to the whole “evil twin” concept. The fact that the movie’s “about America” is there from the start (the title is a double meaning, folks) and there’s the neat use of paper-cut-out imagery, but otherwise—what is up with that, guys? Why is that the movie’s endgame?

Hilariously, there might be a key to this in an article about Peele that came out a few weeks ago and was circulated on social media, in which Peele talked about being offered a chance to go from writing for Fox’s attempt at a late night sketch comedy franchise, MADTV, to the big leagues of Saturday Night Live. His bosses at MAD wouldn’t let him out of his contract, and Peele supposedly retreated to his basement to “smoke pot and plan revenge”. His whole career since then, obviously, has been said revenge, and—

Look, I’m not going to say that US is literally about Jordan Peele’s psychic battle to escape from one sketch comedy show to another, more profitable sketch comedy show, but it’s there, encapsulated in a submerged theme that runs throughout the film. Lupita Nyong’o’s Adelaide is, for reasons that eventually become clear, a quiet, inexpressive woman. For most of the movie—assuming you haven’t guessed the twist—the assumption is that she’s still suffering from PTSD from her childhood encounter with her doppelganger “Red”. But of course Red *is* Adelaide, traumatized from her brutal, subhuman childhood and finding herself raised to what must seem like Elysian heights. She’s got everything she could ever want—why would she make waves? Why wouldn’t she try to blend in, go with the flow?

Her parents encourage her to express herself after her trauma by drawing, being creative. Ultimately she does find her creative impulse in dance—something that, it’s implied, Adelaide never would have done if they hadn’t swapped. But it seems to be something that she ultimately put aside to live the life of a well-off housewife. Elizabeth Moss’s character Kitty spells it all out when she sighs about how she could have been an actress, but, well. When you’re living a life of beachhouses and boats I guess you don’t have that drive, that hunger, to perform. To speak out. To make a statement.

Shoving that creative impulse down is probably unhealthy, right? I mean, you can’t just kill that part of you.

Ultimately the fact that Red’s plan is to make a statement—not to sneak in and switch places again, something that she probably could have done pretty easily, or even to foment a true revolution—is key here. Red’s not sane, and she seems to have given up on re-integrating with the upstairs world. She just wanted to do that one thing. To get people to notice her, however doomed—and the final shot suggests pretty strongly that the Tethered are doomed, in the way disruptions to the American status quo always seem to be. But before she goes out, she has everyone’s attention, and an army of loyal followers, something every artist dreams of, right?

So yeah: Us is a movie by a guy who’s found himself, miraculously, with a megaphone, and he is going for it.


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