In Which a Gentleman Talks About ‘Us’; With Fifty Words on ‘Climax’

This one gets pretty esoteric pretty fast – also, a warning that if you haven’t seen Us and you intend to, wait on reading this until you’ve done so.

Us is a movie that contains many ideas and can’t decide which of them it it’s about.

That statement may come across as unnecessarily harsh. This is still a more entertaining film than most movies I’ve seen so far in 2019 (an admittedly small sample size), and it contains a few moments of amazing cinema. For all that, none of it goes anywhere. What follows here will be less a review, therefore, and more a thematic examination.

Now, I may not be able to tell you what this movie is about, but I can tell you with some confidence what director / producer / writer / Hollywood-flavor-of-the-month Jordan Peele thinks that it’s about, because he tells us unambiguously in the title. The film is conceived of as a story about ‘us’ – ‘us’ meaning who we are as humans, presumably, but it’s also pretty clear that the ‘us’ is also meant as the ‘us’ of Americans. The ‘tethered’ – this is the term the film uses to describe its red-jumpsuited doppelgängers who live underground – are copies of human counterparts, so to look at them is in a limited sense to look at oneself. However, they are copies in a true Xerox-copy sense: reproductions, but flattened, losing some sense of the original. They retain some piece of the essence of their counterpart – in an early scene, they are described as “two bodies sharing one soul” – but for the most part, they’re mindless automatons.

There is, of course, a rich literary history around the idea of the doppelgänger, dating back to the twin-mythologies of siblings like Castor and Pollux, Romulus and Remus, and Ahriman and Ahura Mazda – to name a very few. I would include in this history the adjacent literature of transference of identity, which is how I would describe works like The Picture of Dorian Grey (wherein Dorian’s sins and physical dissolution are transferred onto his portrait) or Face/Off or even Mission: Impossible (wherein one person literally takes another person’s face and makes it their own, either temporarily or permanently; more on such stories below).

Broadly speaking, to my eye, there are three types of twinning narratives that predominate. (And of course, these distinctions are somewhat arbitrary and fuzzy and may at times overlap.) These are the narrative of substitution or replacement, the narrative of opposition, and the narrative of utility. 

Let’s look at the last of these first, because on the surface, it’s the one that ‘Us’ most resembles. In the narrative of utility, the twin exists for the purpose of providing some sort of service. Stories of this type generally fall more into the science fiction genre than the horror genre, because they usually rely on the twin as a recreated version of a person rather than as a pre-existing counterpart. Hence the twin in this case is usually a clone or a machine. The Island and Never Let Me Go are relatively recent examples; in these films, the ‘twins’ are clones who have been created so that their organs can be harvested. If you want to stretch the idea of twinning to its most tenuous, the replicants of Blade Runner can be seen to fall into the same category. They may not be direct copies of specific individuals, but they are imitations of humans more generally speaking (‘more human than human,’ as Tyrell describes them) who are created to do work deemed too dangerous for humans. The explanation for the existence of the ‘tethered’ in Us is more convoluted but at heart the same. The tethered (I’m dropping the quotation marks now) were created because their creators believed that they could be used to control their original counterparts, and then abandoned to wander the ‘below-world’ when this effort proved fruitless.

Thematically, these films usually explore questions about what it means to be human – is the clone just as human as the human that it copies? Or could the twin possibly be even more human? If Us asks this question as well, it does so via the twist at the end of the film. If that’s the movie’s central question, though, it takes a pretty circuitous route to arrive at the asking of it. We spend most of the film being led to believe that Adelaide’s childhood trauma arose from the simple sight of her tethered counterpart in the Santa Cruz house of mirrors. With the reveal that Adelaide is actually the tethered version, having kidnapped and then replaced her original, Peele suggests that the tethered and their originals can be interchangeable. How, then, can we distinguish the created as any less human that the creators?

Unfortunately, the logic of that message is undercut by the way the film’s narrative is structured. Other than Adelaide, who has replaced her counterpart, the tethered retain only a shadow of the essence of their originals; Red, the original that Adelaide replaced, specifically notes that the tethered recognized that she was special and not like them, which is why they followed her in her effort to attack the ‘above-world.’ We can extrapolate from Adelaide’s experience, perhaps, that the tethered possess the capacity to develop into a fuller humanity if placed in the right context. After all, Adelaide wasn’t able to speak when she first entered the above-world, but by the time we meet her as an adult, she’s no less complex and developed than any of the people that surround her.

Going down this path, however, opens yet more questions. Why was Adelaide, alone among the tethered, able to meet her original and escape? Having never been outside the below-world, how did she know that a better life awaited her if she left it? Why do the tethered, after their apparent liberation, continue in some situations to need to mimic the behaviors of their originals? There may be logical answers to these questions, but it speaks to a significant weakness in the story if an audience has to find a way to convince itself that said story makes sense.

If the narrative of utility challenges our ideas about the essential nature of our humanity, the narrative of replacement strikes instead at our understanding of our identity. In these stories, twinning may be a localized plot device (face replication in the Mission: Impossible films; Polyjuice Potion in the Harry Potter novels and films) or may be the central component of the plot (Louis XIV’s identical twin in The Man in the Iron Mask), but it always involves the replacement of one character by another who looks and sounds exactly like them. In the form of the divine taking human form, this is an ancient trope. The Iliad features numerous episodes of gods and goddesses adopting human form in order to fight alongside the Greeks and the Trojans, and it is the adoption of Achilles’s identity by Patroclus that leads to his death and thereby sets in motion the sequence of events that will lead to the poem’s climactic battle between Achilles and Hector.

In the world of cinema, the replacement narrative and the opportunities it presents for twists, turns, and the manipulation of audience expectations have resulted in a wealth of movies that feature it. In fact, we got one just a couple of weeks ago in Captain Marvel, which features the shapeshifting alien race of the Skrulls. (I didn’t write about the movie because it is very bad in a very uninteresting way.) Captain Marvel makes extensive use of all the possibilities that this type of twinning offers – from being able to show Brie Larson beating up an old woman (because it’s not really an old woman, it’s an evil alien masquerading as one), to of course having the boss of a main character have been replaced by an alien, to tests of identity that the film turns to comic effect.

Unsurprisingly, the most interesting recent big film that makes extensive use of the replacement narrative is a Christopher Nolan movie. Indeed, it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to argue that the moral implications of the replacement narrative are the entire point of The Prestige, which hinges on the difference in how its rival magicians, Angier and Borden, use twinning to achieve their greatest illusions. To briefly recap the plot of the film: after initially working together, the tragic death of Angier’s wife turns Angier and Borden into bitter rivals, and they engage in an escalating game of brinksmanship to gain advantage over each other. When Borden develops an illusion in which he seems to transport from one part of the stage to another, Angier becomes obsessed with replicating the trick.

The reveal in the film’s final minutes is that Borden had an identical twin all along (which sounds ridiculously unlikely writing it here but is pretty well-executed in how it’s executed), and the identity of ‘Borden’ was shared by the twins; the illusion worked because they maintained it, at great personal cost, in every aspect of their lives as well as on stage. Angier succeeds in replicating the trick through technology, building a machine that creates a duplicate Angier – while the original Angier falls into a tank of water that locks and drowns him. Angier’s version of the illusion, in other words, requires replacing himself at each performance and murdering the new-redundant original. For both Borden and Angier, twinning enables their success, but at great moral cost; while other examples of the replacement narrative may not suggest the moral cost and monstrosity of The Prestige, they always turn on how twinning enables deception.

In Us, it is both Adelaide and the audience that are deceived as to her true identity, since Adelaide has seemingly forgotten how she came to be in the above-world – remembering only the trauma of seeing someone who looks exactly like her but not the action of kidnapping and replacing her. (This plot point becomes more and more absurd the more I think about it – like, did original Adelaide not put up a fight at all? And, once handcuffed to a bed in the below-world, how did she not starve to death? Also, who cleans up corpses in the below world? As with Get Out, the answer is to shut up and not pay too much attention to it so that you don’t have to deal with the fact that none of it makes very much sense.) The reveal feels hollow, because it doesn’t much change how we read the movie. In other words, it’s a surprise, but since the act of replacement took place so long ago and not in the course of the story unfolding onscreen, it’s more of a data point than cause for reinterpretation of anything that we’ve seen.

That said, if you squint hard enough, you can see where the replacement narrative might bring the film as a whole closest to some kind of thematic unity. If we read Us as a narrative about the wages of sin, with the tethered invasion of the above-world the retribution for Adelaide’s taking the place of Red, there’s a plausible line to draw from Adelaide’s first-act sharing of her fears with her husband Gabe, to Red’s dying assertion that Adelaide ‘could have taken [Red] with [her].’ I can’t say that that feels like it bears any relation to my experience watching the movie, though; if it is what we’re supposed to walk away with, it lands with a thud. Like, so much of a thud that it took me four days of trying to figure out what the movie was supposed to be about to come up with that as a possible answer.

The last of my three narratives, the narrative of opposition, is also the most obviously allegorical and archetypical. These are narratives in which the twins spring from the same ground and exist in opposition to each other; in these stories, the twins are enemies and exist as dualistic inversions of each other. It’s easy to point to the religious manifestations of this narrative. Ahura Mazda and Ahriman, Lucifer and Michael – I don’t know enough about comparative religion to propose others, but I’m confident that others could be had. In the movies and literature, this pretty much amounts to the ‘evil twin’ trope that we all know and love. (This probably can be extended to movies and books that are based around a character’s having a murderous alter ego, with Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde being the ur-text of this genre in terms of popular consciousness.) The narrative of opposition holds a mirror up to a character to show him or her the truths about themselves that they would rather not confront. Thus the twins are more like manifestations of one being than separate beings.

I don’t think this trope requires all that much exploration, because, while it’s thematically rich, it’s also very familiar and doesn’t reside very far beneath the surface. For the purposes of this essay, it also feels the least relevant to me. For all that the tethered are supposed to be ‘two beings with one soul,’ Peele’s rendering leaves them without the depth or complexity that would suggest there’s anything to be gleaned from them. If they represent a reflection of anything, it is a reflection of what evils we would be capable of if we were mindless automatons commanded to murder people and then form a gigantic human chain across the country. It seems clear that the tethered want to be human, to achieve what they lack and what Adelaide has already achieved. (At least, that was how I read the strange scene where tethered-Kitty examines Adelaide’s face and then begins to cut her own, as if she intends, Eyes Without a Face-style, to peel if off and replace it with Adelaide’s.) But, since they haven’t achieved it yet, they are throughout the film little more than drones carrying out Red’s evil plan. The terror and discomfort of the narrative of opposition, meanwhile, is that the twins equally complex, equally viable, equally complete – in other words, equally us. Whatever the title says, the tethered in Peele’s film remain forever a them.

So, where does that leave us with this film? To my view, Us tries to draw on all three of these structures but doesn’t commit itself to any of them. It feels to me like a pastiche of images – the red jumpsuits, the house of mirrors, the shears, the wall of caged rabbits – that stuck in Peele’s mind and that he wanted to thread into a narrative. Unfortunately, he started making the movie before he had figured out how the various pieces would together. Basically, I see the failure of this movie as a failure of development. There’s a lot to work with, but the execution isn’t there. A loyal producer should have told Peele that he needed to go back and do a few more drafts of the script before he could send it in to the studio. 

Fifty Words on Climax 

Climax is the new film from Gaspar Noé, the French director best known for Enter the Void and Irreversible. If you’re familiar with those films, it won’t surprise you to learn that Climax is:

a)     Not a pleasant viewing experience;

b)    Formally daring and superbly crafted; and

c)     Completely insane.