Jordan Peele’s simple Get Out was a revelation when it premiered on screen in 2017. Peele was well-known as one of the most popular comedians thanks to her blockbuster show Key and Peele, but nothing in her past indicated she had a knack for horror stories. “Us” is an incredible, disturbing, but well-planned video that stirs the audience politically and socially, with a constant message about how black and white Americans engage and symbolic support aimed to make viewers of any colour roll. Sadly, this happened as we were laughing at Peele’s terrible joke. In the United States, there is a lot fewer recognizable area, which creates stress due to the situation’s enormous unpredictability (da Silva, 2019). The French Revolution and many of the protests we witness now in modern American culture were sparked by disparities in income and access to resources.
“Us” is a horror picture based on a domestic violence drama. Yet, the similarity reminds us that “The Godfather” is a crime film and “2001: A Space Odyssey” is a science fiction novel. The film’s applicability is unrelated to whether or not its rules are fulfilled; what matters is that Peele uses tropes and horrifying precedents to focus his film on pop culture rather than those roots. “Us” is a film that immerses itself in pop culture with the aim of self-examination – and self-examination – its theme being, to a significant degree, cultural knowledge and ignorance—the terrible political and moral side of symbolic thinking facts (da Silva, 2019). The protagonists are confronted with something they do not comprehend and do not know how to combat. As the story progresses, the stranger and wilder it becomes, with Peele deferring the revelations until the film’s last minutes.
“Us” is split into two timelines at first. A small girl visits the Santa Cruz beach boardwalk in 1986, as the advantages of Hands across America appear, and faces a scary round. Adelaide Wilson remembers this meeting as a terrifying experience as an adult. When her husband Gabe writes about a vacation that takes her back to the same beach, she starts to have negative memories (Fair, 2021). The dreaded dopplegängers of Adelaide, Gabe, and their children Zora and Jason appeared nowhere, clothed in red jumpsuits and brandishing brilliantly coloured checks. Everything that comes out of it, from where it comes from to what it wants, comes as a series of shocks that happen faster than words can describe. The social metaphor in “Us” is not as apparent as in “exit,” but it’s still there. Peele said the film was about America’s irrational fear of outsiders in a post-game Q&A at SXSW. “We’re at a point in history when we’re terrified of someone else; whether it’s an unknown assailant who will kill us and take our jobs or a political party we don’t live near that voted differently (da Silva, 2019). We are all about pointing fingers, and there’s a suggestion that the monster “Us” should have a look at our faces.
Another key metaphor emerges in the narrative as the analogy is realized, as Adelaide and her family face their warped mirror selves. It is a message about income imbalance and how easy it is to be ignorant of riches and comfort while others suffer and go hungry (Oswald, 2019). Adelaide and her family and their friends, the Tylers, live in similar opulence and are free to resolve minor difficulties such as whether Jacob can find a working magic show or whether Gabe’s new boat is large enough to accommodate the entire family. Regardless of how they arrived on this earth, they ignore the deep-seated pain of those around them. “Us” has the ring of a modern shock. A drop follows the first panic into calm and familiar settings that bring the characters to a halt, a sequence of simile scenes and false alarms, and a rapid spike in stress (McGowan, 2019). Leadership can be perplexing and monotonous, especially if the audience learns nothing new about the characters other than Gabe’s disinterest in Adelaide’s prior pain and Zora and Jacob’s strained relationship as the actual shock of change arrives quickly; maybe it’s amusing – until it isn’t. When the two look and act like animals, especially in their limbs, Peele points out that they still have an undiscovered personality that gives them terrible sadness (McGowan, 2019). When Adelaide, shocked by their arrival, asked one of them what it was, she replied, with a rictus grin, “We are Americans.”
In summary, the film depicts a civilization divided into haves and have-nots. While one caste enjoys their life and has agency, the other is doomed to wander through tunnels. It’s a remark on the rich vs the poor, or whites vs minorities. The writer has been tight-lipped about any “Us” movie explanations, which is part of the fun of delving into the film. While there are numerous metaphors drawn from this film, it ultimately boils down to who has and does not have the privilege. The French Revolution and many of the protests we witness now in modern American culture were sparked by disparities in income and access to resources.
References
da Silva, J. B. (2019). Living in the Sunken Place: Notes on Jordan Peele’s Get Out as Gothic Fiction. Lublin Studies in Modern Languages and Literature, 43(2), 125-133.
Fair, D. (2021). The Other Is Us: A Critical Analysis of Race in Jordan Peele’s Us.
McGowan, T. (2019). Two forms of fetishism: from the commodity to revolution in «Us». Galactica Media: Journal of Media Studies, 1(1), 63-87.
Oswald, V. (2019). Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key. The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc.
Peele, J. Film Review: Us.
van der Elsen, M. W. J. (2020). Educating America on Race: Absurdist Humor as Critical Public Pedagogy in the Works and Performances of Kara Walker, Dave Chappelle, and Jordan Peele.
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