“Us” examines the American fear of the marginalized “other” rising above oppression

This piece contains spoilers.

At first, Us appears to be a typical horror film about an American family whose beach vacation goes horribly wrong. By the end, however, it’s clear Jordan Peele’s latest social thriller is actually about Americans who live in the shadows of people who disproportionately enjoy the privileges of the American Dream. Us not only imparts an eerie warning about the repercussions of idly living a life of privilege as people suffer beneath you, but takes the warning a step further by showing what can happen when the “outsiders” the privileged are so afraid of letting in, the people who have been pushed below and ignored, finally force their way in — and do so with a vengeance.

Us opens on Adelaide Thomas, a young black girl who wanders away from her parents at a 1986 beachside carnival in Santa Cruz, California. She comes across a funhouse hall of mirrors; the words “find yourself” are painted above the hall’s entryway. Upon entering the funhouse, Adelaide does indeed find herself — or at least a girl who looks exactly like her, but who lives on the other side of the final mirror in the funhouse. The scene cuts to a traumatized Adelaide, whose parents have found her and are taking her home. She refuses to say a word.

Decades later, Adelaide — now Adelaide Wilson — returns to the beach in Santa Cruz where she had attended the carnival with her parents, this time with her husband and two children. At the family’s beach house, Adelaide’s son notices another family standing outside their home. After the husband tells the strange family to leave, they break into the house and reveal that they are doppelgängers of each member of the family. They are all dressed in red and each has their own pair of golden scissors.

When the husband asks what the doppelgängers want, the mother, referred to as “Red” by the other family members, explains in a strangled, rusty voice that her family has lived beneath the Wilsons’ their entire lives, doing exactly what they do, tethered to them like shadows. Just like shadows, they had been left behind in the dark. While the family above got to experience love and happiness, the other family had to eat raw rabbit meat and have their actions controlled by their doppelgängers above. Although they are officially known throughout the movie as “The Tethered,” when asked who they are, Red boldly replies, “We are Americans.”

The Wilsons continue to fight for their lives as they realize their own “tethered” family are part of a nationwide epidemic of killer shadows trying to murder American families across the country. After Adelaide stabs and kills Red in a final battle, the opening flashback to 1986 reappears and reveals that the young Adelaide we first met never actually left the funhouse of mirrors. Adelaide’s shadow strangled her, dragged her to the world below, and left her there so she could replace the real Adelaide. Red was not only the person we considered the “real” Adelaide all along but also the determined organizer of a movement she refers to as “the Untethering,” in which the people on the bottom collectively rise above to claim better lives.

While Get Out touched upon the exploitation of black bodies, Us offers something even more thought-provoking: America’s genuine fear that the victims of its past will come back to haunt them. We often hear about the immigrants who are supposedly coming to kill, rape, and deal drugs in the United States — our own president has repeatedly referred to Mexico and others as the country’s enemies — and the poor, black criminals who kill white people. But in reality, the groups America has continuously posed as minorities to fear are actually those that the nation has historically oppressed. Although no one alive today ever participated in slavery or stolen Mexican territory, Americans have subconsciously played a part in the perpetuation of the oppression of these groups, and it often goes unacknowledged in conversations about crime rates and poverty. Like the “tethered,” minorities in the United States are always positioned below other, more privileged Americans and denied the unearned advantages granted to those they are forced to shadow. Unlike Get Out, Jordan Peele’s second horror movie calls on not just white audience members, but all Americans to consider their role in this conflict.

In a political and social era in which people have the opportunity to both dive into and tune out of the topics of identity and oppression, contemporary social thrillers like Us provide the perfect opportunities to ask important questions in a way that breaks through the monotony of our screens. The social thriller challenges us to ask ourselves what this country is really, truly afraid of and why we need to be afraid of it in the first place. Through the Tethered, Peele evokes the same emotions white and/or wealthy Americans are taught to feel about minorities: Although they are just as human as the privileged, they are unfamiliar. They are on what we consider to be “our” property. The Wilsons don’t know what they want, so like many Americans do toward immigrants, they assume they are there to take their money or their lives.

Peele actualizes these fears on screen, displaying the murderous rampage of the doppelgängers in gory detail. However, when viewers learn that the Adelaide we have been following throughout the film is also one of the Tethered, they empathize with her for trying to escape an otherwise miserable life. The audience also feels bad for Red, who we now understand was fighting not only to reclaim the life she once had but also for the freedom of all of the Tethered.

Peele provides his American audience with an exaggeration of their biggest fear and then humanizes the antagonists, forcing us to recognize the history that contextualizes these fears as well as realize that the idea of these marginalized people being murderers is just as fictitious as the plotline of a Hollywood movie.