The 2010’s have seen a mainstream revival of horror films, and a significant portion of that can be attributed to Jordan Peele’s growing list of contributions to the genre. His most recent movie, Us, is a completely different beast to its predecessor Get Out, and yet Peele is still calling attention to the most disturbing parts of our society through pop culture references, hidden meanings, and visual metaphors. It would take more than one watch to pick up on every single one, but we can do our best to try and break down as many as we can right here.
1. What was the deal with the Tethered?
There are a few different ways to interpret what the Tethered represent, but the dominant theory is that they are simply who we would be if we lived without privilege. Peele posits that our circumstances create who we are, and without these external influences there is little that separates us. While living in their cramped, underground society, the Tethered are forced to mirror the actions of their surface-dwelling counterparts. Although this connection isn’t fully explained, we can assume there is some sort of supernatural business going on here that spiritually links them.
But as we can see, this mirroring isn’t a hard and fast rule that the Tethered are forced to stick to – it appears to be more of a psychological influence than a physical one. Though this sort of slavery isn’t ideal it is all they have known since birth, and challenging it is a jump far outside their comfort zone. It is a self-perpetuating form of oppression that the privileged can’t be bothered to improve, and the unprivileged don’t know how to fix. We consume products that we know were created in poor working conditions, but we also know that doing anything to change this would mean compromising our own privilege.
When Red finally mobilises the Tethered to rise up and overcome their circumstances this psychological link is mostly broken, though there are still traces of this slave mindset in their behaviour. Each Tethered echoes the movements of their counterparts in a more twisted fashion – Red glides gracefully through the space, reflecting Adelaide’s own history with ballet; the Tyler twins and their doppelgängers both have a strange fondness for cartwheels; and Pluto scampers around in a twisted refraction of Jason’s own childish hyperactivity. Even Kitty Tyler’s plastic surgery operations have left scars on her doppelgänger’s face, who cuts herself up in a hopelessly tragic attempt to make herself beautiful.
While the Tethered have mostly broken free of this curse, Pluto is the only one who still sometimes directly copies the actions of his counterpart, Jason. This comes to a head in Pluto’s death scene, where Jason figures out that Pluto isn’t quite as mentally developed as the others, and forces him to walk backwards into a fire. If we are going by the theory that the connection between the Tethered and their privileged counterparts is a psychological one, this would make sense as to why Pluto is finding it a little harder to shake it off – children are more likely to revert back into the habits they are familiar with when thrown outside their comfort zone, even if those habits are ultimately self-destructive.
2. What did those costumes represent?
The scope of Us is massive, so it is understandable that there might be some questions left unanswered, such as the origin of the red jumpsuits in the underground society. It is safe to assume that those decades Red spent organising this plot to rise to the surface also involved sourcing the materials to create the jumpsuits, but their literal significance is much less interesting than what they represent symbolically. Almost everything about the costumes is symmetrical, right down to the large scissors they carry, and yet the only thing that breaks this pattern is a single leather glove they wear on their right hand to prevent them from cutting themselves.
In one reading, the deep red of the jumpsuits could be taken to represent Adelaide’s own rage that she has harboured for all these years. However, what is most striking about them is their resemblance to the red outfit Michael Jackson wears in the music video for Thriller – an icon that is referenced on Adelaide’s t-shirt at the start of the film. And just like the Tethered, Jackson himself famously wore a single glove as well. What all this comes to represent is the duality of MJ’s own humanity in the Thriller music video, in which we see him transform from a regular guy into a monstrous creature several times, reflecting the ambiguity of Adelaide’s own human identity.
Our protagonist’s own choice of clothing is pure white, suggesting her own adoption of America’s middle-upper class culture. However, as her kill count increases and her clothing gradually gets soaked with the blood of her victims, the lines become a little more blurred. We start to see glimpses of her Tethered side in her behaviour, and the colour of her clothing reflects this development.
3. What was the point of Hands Across America?
The ‘Hands Across America’ iconography shows up frequently throughout Us, but the film misses out on a key point – the real ‘Hands Across America’ event was a total failure, with a number of gaps in chain, and its intended moral statement being a little hollow in the end. As one of her final memories before being abducted, Red used the event as a template for her own political movement to rise up against the privileged surface dwellers. But this time, the statement was paired with action – destroying those who unknowingly oppressed them. Not only this, but the Tethered’s physical act of joining hands across America was a proper success this time.
So what does this represent? Well it is a pretty clear statement from the Tethered that they can’t be ignored any longer. They are here, and they’re not going anywhere. But it also signifies that when those living without privilege come together to work on something, it actually gets done. The original attempt at ‘Hands Across America’ was little more than a novelty event that didn’t really change much, because those involved were middle-class Americans who were largely unaffected by the social issues they were fighting. But for those who live directly impacted by these issues, the call for a solution is much more urgent, and so any attempts to mobilise large groups of people are generally more successful. Individually, they do not have the same level of influence as their wealthier counterparts, but in large numbers their power is overwhelming.
4. What was the experiment that went wrong?
The origins of the Tethered are barely touched upon, but from what we are told they were the product of a failed government experiment to replicate the human soul. Though the aim was to use these souls to control people, the result was simply the creation of human clones who are “tethered” to their original counterparts. They are trapped in a living nightmare, forced to mimic the luxurious lives of the people living above, but with crappier resources. When a human eats food, their Tethered consumes raw rabbit; when a child plays with a soft toy, their Tethered plays with scissors.
Everything is stacked against them. Even the escalator that connects them to the surface moves downward, making it harder for them to rise above their circumstances. The tunnels and the rabbits evoke an Alice in Wonderland ambience, but they also create this sense of being trapped underground, literally beneath their subjugators.
Peele could have easily created this society to be an alternate reality, but he purposely chooses to base it in our world, and make humans responsible for its creation and neglect. The indignation of the Tethered is terrifying, but in this context we can see how their retribution may even be considered righteous.
5. What is Jeremiah 11:11?
This bible verse comes up a few times throughout Us, but we never really get to hear the quote itself. So here it is, in full:
“Therefore thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will bring evil upon them, which they shall not be able to escape; and though they shall cry unto me, I will not hearken unto them.”
This can be read in two ways. In one interpretation, it is the Tethered bringing their vengeance upon the human race, and refusing to listen to their cries for help. In the other, it is humanity’s persecution of the less fortunate, and refusal to acknowledge their suffering.
11:11 also ties into the film’s symmetrical imagery, and appears a few other times as a time on a clock, as a score in a sports game, and on the t-shirt of one of the Tyler twins.
6. And where did that final twist come from?
Right at the end of Us, just as it seems everything has wrapped up, we are hit with one final shocker. We discover that after wandering around in the house of mirrors as children, Adelaide and Red switched places, so that the original “Red” continued to grow up in a world of privilege as Adelaide, while the original “Adelaide” was forced into subjugation as the new Tethered. This reveal makes sense of a lot of things we saw earlier on in the film, and for the sake of keeping things as least confusing as possible, from here on I am going to refer to the original “Red” as Adelaide, and the original “Adelaide” as Red.
When brought to a therapist following this traumatic experience, it seemed Adelaide was too terrified to speak. As we know now, she was really a Tethered who could not speak at all. Likewise, Red is the only Tethered who could speak, albeit with a croaky voice. And in the context of the twist, we can see now that when she was strangled into submission, her vocal cords were damaged.
This twist also explains why Adelaide seemed to care so much for the Tethered children. Though they were not directly her offspring, there was some level of empathy there, and perhaps even some guilt for not being the one to raise them.
Finally, this twist affects our understanding of the movie as a whole in terms of class relations and social mobility. Though they were born in completely different worlds, the switch changed the trajectory of both their lives. There was nothing built into the Tethered’s DNA that made them unsettling monsters – everything was a matter of circumstance. Peele suggests that when given the right opportunities, even those born right at the bottom of the social ladder can climb their way to the top, just as those at the top can be destroyed by having their privilege snatched out from beneath them.
Although this capitalistic structure is made to keep people in their respective classes, Peele speculates that it is not indestructible. Red was the only Tethered who knew the true extent to which people who live on the surface benefited at the expense of their suffering, and so her anger was driven by that added motive of knowing what she could have had, and what she had lost. She understood more than anyone else that to climb the social ladder, others must be torn down in the process. And while it is easy to accuse her of being evil for orchestrating this whole scheme, in the end we are simply left to ask ourselves – isn’t this what Adelaide did? Isn’t this exactly what we do every day to maintain our own privilege?
