Jordan Peele (2019)

For those who’ve seen Jordan Peele’s Get Out, the title of his new film immediately suggests a pun – if you capitalise the second letter.  The pun is confirmed soon after the horror story of Us gets going.  In the California beach house where they’re staying, a family – a thirty-something, middle-class black couple and their two children – are terrorised by four extraordinary intruders.  ‘Who are you people?’ asks the bewildered paterfamilias.  The answer he gets is, ‘We’re Americans’.

The prologue of Us is set in 1986.  A television screen shows a series of commercials, including one for the forthcoming ‘Hands Across America’ benefit[1].  Peele then takes us into an amusement park on the promenade at Santa Cruz.  With both her parents (Rayne Thomas and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) otherwise engaged, a young girl called Adelaide (Madison Curry) wanders off in the direction of the beach, noticing on the way a skinny, bedraggled man (Alan Frazier) holding a notice that reads ‘Jeremiah 11:11’[2].  Adelaide approaches a building emblazoned with an invitation to ‘Find Yourself’ and goes inside.  It’s a hall of mirrors, deserted except for her.  She’s frightened by the place even before she encounters a girl there who is the image of herself – but not a mirror reflection.   A brief follow-up sequence makes clear that Adelaide, though soon reunited with her parents, has been seriously traumatised by the experience.

Three decades later, Adelaide Wilson (Lupita Nyong’o) is travelling with husband Gabe (Winston Duke), daughter Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and son Jason (Evan Alex) to their holiday destination, a beach house that belonged to Adelaide’s recently deceased mother and is close to Santa Cruz.  Why the mother kept a property near the site of her daughter’s childhood trauma isn’t clear but Adelaide is very reluctant to return to the sea front, when her husband suggests they do so.  He gets his own way, though:  Gabe is easygoing and humorous but also determined to impress the Wilsons’ friends, Josh and Kitty Tyler (Tim Heidecker and Elisabeth Moss), and buys a small boat with that end in mind.  The Tylers have twin teenage daughters (Cali and Noelle Sheldon) and the two families meet up at the beach in Santa Cruz.  On the way there, the Wilsons’ car has to stop as a man is carried into an ambulance – we’ve seen him, and the notice that he’s clutching, before.  Arriving on the promenade, Adelaide is confronted by the ‘Find Yourself’ building still in situ.  A little later, she suddenly realises, during conversation with the tense, maritally dissatisfied Kitty, that Jason has disappeared, and she panics.  Jason soon reappears but, while on walkabout, saw a man in a red jumpsuit standing in the sand.   Blood is dripping from the hands of the man’s outstretched arms.

Back at the beach house that evening, Adelaide tells Gabe, for the first time, about what happened in 1986 and that, throughout her life since, she’s had a growing fear that her double will track her down.  As the bedroom clock shows 11:11, the lights go off in the house and Jason comes to tell his parents there’s a family of four in the driveway outside.  When Gabe asks them to leave, they silently stand their ground before breaking in and attacking the family.  Each of the intruders wears a red jumpsuit and is the physical counterpart of one of the Wilsons.  Only one of them – Adelaide’s doppelgänger, known as Red – is capable of language, though she speaks with difficulty, in an eerily guttural voice.  It’s she therefore who delivers the ‘We’re Americans’ punchline.  Red also tells the tale of a girl who lives a happy life while her shadow self suffers.

The Wilsons, it transpires, are far from the only American family with doppelgängers who want to kill them.  These entities are products of a government experiment, launched as a means of controlling people but abandoned before completion.  (In terms of both purpose and process, the experiment is described only vaguely.)  The alter egos, aka ‘the Tethered’, are consigned to a life underground, where they survive on raw rabbit and without health care, literally going through the motions of mimicking their overground counterparts’ behaviour.  Until, that is, Red organises their escape into the world above, where the Tethered evidently can act autonomously.  In the 1986 episode at the start, young Adelaide is wearing a Michael Jackson ‘Thriller’ T-shirt and there’s a succession of scary masks and zomboid images in what follows.  With the recent Leaving Neverland furore still fresh in my mind and Get Out at the back of it, I started wondering if Michael Jackson, the world’s most notorious skin-whitener, was somehow going to emerge as the villain of this film too.  He doesn’t, however, and the story, as a political allegory, is suggestive rather than specific.  Although their name may hint at physically abominable aspects of slavery in America, the community of the Tethered is not mono-ethnic.  The idea of a deprived, subterranean constituency bursting vengefully into reality is, almost needless to say, potently topical but Jordan Peele doesn’t elaborate the analogy.

Peele’s follow-up to Get Out has been keenly anticipated and, in ways that matter, hasn’t disappointed.  Us opened in cinemas across the world only last week and has already taken approaching $175m (it cost $20m to make).  The critical reception has been largely positive:  the Rotten Tomatoes fresh rating currently stands at 94% from over 400 reviews, which include some lavish praise.  More than that, there’s a great deal of interest online – from the video gaming website Gamespot to The Washington Post (‘Let’s tackle 11 lingering questions about Jordan Peele’s latest hit’[3]) – about what the movie means to say.  I feel a spoilsport in admitting I find some of these Us interpretations more engaging to read than the film is to sit through.  Get Out was a strong and, in my experience, an unusual horror movie:  the horror derived more from the story told than from visually explicit detail, which Peele used sparingly.  The balance in Us is very different.  Once the horror is underway here, it doesn’t really stop – as a pessimistic state-of-the-nation metaphor, perhaps it can’t really stop.  The result, though, is monotonous mayhem.  The protracted struggle between the Wilsons and their doubles took me back to watching Jurassic Park.  I wanted the raptors to go away not because they were alarming but because they became boring.

Us prompts plenty of questions, some of which Peele answers through the revelation late on of what happened when Adelaide first met her replica in 1986.  In the hall of mirrors, Red knocked Adelaide unconscious, left her trapped in the underground complex and took her place in normal life.  Adelaide, in other words, actually is Red and vice versa (I’ll continue referring to them by the names of who we think they are for most of the film …)  This at least explains why Red, unlike the other red suits, has the power of speech.  It possibly explains too why Adelaide didn’t fight too hard to prevent the trip to the beach at Santa Cruz or react to the sight of the Jeremiah man in the ambulance.   There was still plenty I didn’t understand, though.   For example, since there’s no suggestion that Gabe, Zora and Jason have had a prior experience comparable to Adelaide’s, how do they accept as unquestioningly as they seem to do that their attackers are their shadow selves?   (Thanks to watching lots of other horror films?)  Or is the idea that they’ve all at some point in their lives been taken over by their dark sides?  That, though, would de-answer the question of why only Red can speak – and it isn’t the implication of the worried look Jason gives his mother at the very end, when her true identity has been revealed to us (though not to Jason).

The Washington Post piece quotes Peele as follows:

‘I’m trying to serve whatever your appetite is, but ultimately I’m trying to give enough context to be able to discuss and hypothesize about more.  When it’s all wrapped up neatly and perfectly, it alleviates the fear.  I don’t want to do it.’

That’s his creative right and reactions to Us confirm his sound audience-pleasing instincts:  the appetite to ‘discuss and hypothesize about more’ seems to be verging on insatiable.  Peele isn’t so ready to acknowledge, though, that eschewing ‘neat’ storytelling is also a means of letting him do what he wants – and, more often than not, of helping him achieve increased instant impact.

Some of that impact, in retrospect, feels a bit of a cheat.  The Tylers and their daughters are murdered by their doubles (not a great tragedy:  the family, being materially privileged and white, are revolting anyway).  The Wilsons, having slain (in the case of Gabe) or seen off for the time being their own nemeses, then kill the Tylers’ killers.  In the short breathing space that follows, they turn on the television to discover that murders by the Tethered are taking place across America, with the murderers joining hands to create a vast human chain.  Peele shows part of the chain and shots of the carnage though he gives no indication of what action the civil or military authorities are trying to take in response.  He then reverts to concentrating on the Wilsons for another set of violent showdowns with their remaining doubles and the Adelaide-Red reveal – until the film’s closing, aerial shot:  the Hands-Across-America-type chain of Tethered stretches over the landscape.  This would actually have a stronger sinister charge if Peele hadn’t shown the chain previously.  The final image’s chief effect is to remind you of Gabe’s earlier, amusing and reasonably accurate description of the red brigade as looking like ‘some kind of fucked-up performance art’.

The acting in Us isn’t the kind I much care for – simply because the performers are interpreting characters almost continuously in extremis.  That said, Lupita Nyong’o plays the protagonist with authority.  It makes sense too, given who she really is, that Adelaide, from an early stage, sometimes has a distinctively unhuman, doll-like look.  The grounded-in-reality Winston Duke complements Nyong’o well.  The film’s unsurprising but accomplished music is by Michael Abels.

26 March 2019

[1] According to Wikipedia:  ‘Hands Across America was a benefit event and publicity campaign staged on Sunday, May 25, 1986 in which approximately 6.5 million people held hands in a human chain for fifteen minutes along a path across the contiguous United States.  Many participants donated ten dollars to reserve their place in line; the proceeds were donated to local charities to fight hunger and homelessness and help those in poverty’.

[2] ‘Therefore thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will bring evil upon them, which they shall not be able to escape; and though they shall cry unto me, I will not hearken unto them.’

[3] http://tinyurl.com/y432gb94