Resonance is a pleasure that the movie delivers after you leave the theatre, after it has already delivered shudders, gasps, and laughs in about equal measure. That's as Peele intended. To Ailsha Chang of NPR, Peele said that horror and comedy both aim to get "a visceral, uncontrollable reaction from the audience. These are not genres that can end with just silence" (NPR, March 22, 2019.
The story is a family vacation comedy gone awry. At a lake house near Santa Cruz, the Wilsons find themselves under attack from a family identical to them in red jumpsuits, only speechless and implacably bent on murdering their doubles. The Wilson father "Gabe" (Winston Duke), confronting the strangers holding hands in his driveway, sounds like any ineffectual sitcom dad making a threat when he waves a baseball bat and yells in a high voice, "You want crazy? I can give you crazy!" After several gory encounters with doppelgangers, Gabe warns his wife "Adelaide" (Lupita Nyong'o) to hush, or she'll "scare the children." "Too late," says teenage daughter "Zora" (Shahadi Wright Joseph); "Too late," echoes her kid brother "Jason" (Evan Alex).
But resonance is Jordan Peele's gift that keeps giving after we leave the theatre. When Gabe asks "Who are you?" to the invaders, Adelaide's double "Red," the only one of them to speak, squeezes the reply out of her throat with apparent effort, smiling, "We're Americans!" The incongruous response gets a laugh in a crowded theatre. Along with the handholding, her response reminds us of the "Hands Across America" campaign that we saw advertised on a TV screen during the movie's prologue, set in 1986. That cheerful ad urged Americans to join hands in a human chain across the continent to demonstrate our unity in diversity.
Peele twists that idealistic campaign with the notion that America underground is crossed by a network of tunnels -- plausible, when we think of depleted mines, abandoned military bunkers, never - completed transit projects. Because of a traumatic incident in 1986, Adelaide has known from a young age that her double exists underground. What "Red" explains boils down to the idea that Adelaide Wilson, enjoying a successful life and loving her family, has forgotten all about her double, who lives a parallel life of deprivation in a shadow community underground, "tethered" to her, seething with envy.
The scenario echoes H. G. Wells's The Time Machine. When Wells in 1895 extended his vision of England's social stratification eons into the future, he imagined the Eloi, beautiful and useless, lolling about sunny fields at leisure during the days, but preyed upon at night by the Morlocks, who emerge grimy and hungry from underground mines and factories.
If Peele intends a statement that we and the affluent Wilsons are Eloi, then their neighbors the Tylers put an exclamation point on it. Lolling about the beach at mid - afternoon, Mr. and Mrs. Tyler (Tim Heidecker and Elisabeth Moss) are already three glasses into their wine and complaining about each other. He's into boasting about his expensive purchases; she's vain about "some work" done to her face; their teenage twin daughters instantly disdain the Wilson daughter's clothes.
The doppelgangers' red jumpsuits suggested factory workers to my friend Susan; convicts, to me. Either way, they lead their parallel lives underground, seething with envy, awaiting their chance to take over.
The idea is mine, but not mine alone. A search for "Peele" and "eloi" brought results:
Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair likened the film to “The Time Machine” by H.G. Wells, describing “Us” as “a vague statement on inequity and class struggle, framed as a sort of unconscious Eloi vs. Morlocks system of oppression,” while the writers at Yahoo Movies pointed out that the items used to slay the Tethered — among them a golf club, a piece of geode art and a boat bought in an impromptu splurge — “are all upper-middle-class status symbols.” (Kyle Buchanan, New York Times, March 26, 2019)
Peele himself leaves interpretation wide open. In his interview with NPR, he says, "I think a lot of people are catching onto the fact that there's a lot of United States/American imagery in this. And the duality of this country and our beliefs and our demons, I think, is on display. But I think 'us' is bigger than that." He continues,
I think one of the reasons this movie has an expansiveness is because "us" is subjective. Everybody thinks of the term "us" in different ways — it can be "us" the family, "us" the town, "us" the country, "us" humanity. I think in the simplest form, the very nature of "us" means there is a "them," right? So that is what this movie is about to me, is that: Whatever your "us" is, we turn "them" into the enemy, and maybe "we" are our own worst enemy.
Peele's script and direction give us more cultural resonances to appreciate:
- Religion: "Jeremiah 11:11," scrawled on cardboard, appears in the hands of a shaggy white guy in 1986 and again much later. The number alone fits the twin theme of the film, pairing pairs; the words of the Bible verse tell warn of impending doom. Then, Adelaide's double "Red" says that the two of them share one soul, and she claims that God set her aside, drew them together in childhood, and made her a leader. My friend Susan thought of a Moses, leading his people to a Promised Land that he never gets to see.
- References to other horror movies: Tunnels, baseball bat, bloody twin girls, all recall The Shining, a favorite of Peele's; the name "Jason" and the mask on his double "Pluto" recall slasher heroes of the 1980s, while Pluto's burn - disfigurement recalls "Freddy Krueger"; and the final image of the film recalls the original ending of Hitchcock's The Birds, deemed too grim to get past the censors.
"There was a real need to convey the tortured emotions of those characters because they are us, and yet they're angry and mistreated," Abels explains. "So the score is a balance, I think, emotionally, between sheer terror and a sort of despair and empathy with what they're going through."So Us is thoughtful, with cultural resonance that make it "about" many things. But don't let that scare you: it's fun.
For the main titles of Us, Abels wrote a nonsense-language anthem for a chorus of children and adults. "The anthem really represents the spirit of the Tethered, and the uprising that they're about to stage. There's a group of people, and they're organized, and they're angry," he says.
The score for Us plays with the duality and mirror imagery in the film. Abels paired normal instruments, like a solo violin for the young girl, Zora... with much more abnormal ones, like a cimbalom for Zora's Tethered counterpart, Umbrae. (Interview with Michael Grieving, NPR, March 25, 2019)
P.S. As the credits rolled, eerie music in the background, I was startled when a large man all in red rose up behind me. I asked him if he'd selected the bright red sweater and pants purposefully for this movie? No, he laughed, "I'm going home now to burn them."
Us (2019) Jordan Peele, director
Michael Abel, music (read/hear NPR story)
Principal Cast: Adelaide Wilson / Red ... Lupita Nyong'o
Gabe Wilson / Abraham ... Winston Duke
Kitty Tyler / Dahlia ... Elisabeth Moss
Josh Tyler / Tex ... Tim Heidecker
Zora Wilson / Umbrae ... Shahadi Wright Joseph
Jason Wilson / Pluto ... Evan Alex
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