The enemies with familiar faces
In Jordan Peele’s “Us,” a family must contend with their horrifying doubles
“Us” is a jumble of ideas, and they aren’t clear ideas. People will see in it what they like, and they will give it an intellectual coherence it doesn’t possess. But, really, the thing to like best about “Us” is its messiness. Writerdirector Jordan Peele throws a lot at his audience in this one, perhaps as a way of concealing his film’s true meaning from himself.
This is a more-serious work than his previous film, “Get Out,” and it’s a surprising departure. “Get Out,” though enjoyable, was almost too obvious in its intention, too transparent in its thinking. “Us” is wonderfully confused, a horror film that taps into unconscious terrors, within the audience and probably within the filmmaker, as well.
Lupita Nyong’o — she’s terrific in this — plays an upper-middle class wife and mother who, as a young girl, had something very weird happen to her. Inside a haunted house along the Santa Cruz boardwalk, she ran into her doppelganger. Instead of dismissing the incident as a hallucination or a mirror effect, she still thinks about it 30 years later. All the same, when her husband (Winston Duke) insists on taking the whole family for a long Santa Cruz weekend, she goes along
with it, despite misgivings.
Peele takes his time in these early scenes. He rolls it out slowly, introducing the couple’s bickering friends, Kitty (Elisabeth Moss) and Josh (Tim Heidecker). Kitty reveals that, like John at the bar in the old Billy Joel song, she believes she could have been a movie star. It takes a special kind of an actress who can say that and seem completely ridiculous, without us remembering, until later, that it’s an actual movie star saying the line.
And then the long night begins. Adelaide (Nyong’o) tells her husband that her uneasiness has become unbearable, that they and their two kids need to pack up and leave immediately. But it’s too late. The doppelgangers are standing outside the house — one for father, one for mother, one for sister, one for brother.
A word about the doppelgangers. They’re not monsters. They’re human. They live underground, and they’re described as shadow people. The implication is that everyone has one. And these shadow people are not nice. They’re feral. They’re wild, animalistic, irrational. And their voices are terrifying. Nyong’o and Peele come up with a voice for Adelaide’s doppelganger; a heaving, scraping, breathless sound that chills the blood.
As for what happens next, that’s best left discovered in the watching. But just knowing this much, it’s clear that Peele has hit on something that has wide metaphorical application. Some will insist on seeing “Us” as a movie about the American underclass. Peele probably wants people to think that, because at one point, Adelaide’s doppelganger says, “We are America.”
But that’s Peele playing to the crowd, trying to give critics and audiences a hook, some notion that there’s a higher social purpose behind the proceedings. But if you think it through, that interpretation doesn’t make complete sense. It’s good as an allusion, as an echo of a thought, but only that. Obviously, not every successful person has an unsuccessful doppelganger living in torment. Even if you take that to mean that every successful person has someone similar living in misery, that has no impact even as metaphor.
The doppelganger idea can also be looked it in psychiatric terms, that the doppelganger is the id, the wild, suppressed part of the self that lives underground, unseen. And again, that’s a nice idea to have floating around the movie, but it doesn’t quite line up allegorically, because the id is an unconscious motivator of human behavior, not something completely separate from the self.
Adelaide is Peele’s main character, the one that expresses his viewpoint and that, for all intents and purposes, is him within the story. And so, at one point, he has Adelaide go underground, into the tunnels. He has her, in a sense, penetrate the unconscious world, which is depicted as unreal, a pristine and barren place populated by fat and contented rabbits. It’s a brilliant sequence, in which she ultimately must do battle with herself.
So, “Us” is not about America, though it is, a little; and it’s not about the unconscious, though it’s slightly that, too. What it’s really about is a newly and phenomenally successful artist contemplating his own American story. It’s about the guilt that comes with success, as well as the horror that it might have gone another way and the fear that it could still go away.
Last time, Peele made a movie about the country. This time he made a movie about himself, and it’s even better.