Family Matters: Creepy Kids, Inept Adults, and Jordan Peele's "Us"
*This post contains spoilers. I want to begin with a quote from Steven Shaviro’s 1997 book, Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction about Postmodernism : “Everybody wants the same cozy evenings by the fireside, the same long walks on the beach. But it’s all a facade. Organicism is a myth. Our bodies are never ourselves, our words and texts are never really our own. They aren’t ‘us,’ but the forces that crush us, the norms to which we’ve been subjected.” Shaviro is interested in postmodern culture, which in 1997 was all the hype: pastiche, textuality, affectless surfaces… the “cultural logic of late capitalism,” as Fredric Jameson has influentially claimed. But Shaviro is also interested in bodies, and the materiality of bodies. The body’s materiality and physicality exceed the command of the conscious, rational mind; more than that, the body’s materiality conditions the mind’s consciousness, its rationality. Yet we tend to repress those aspects of our being that a
