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 are distinctly physical: sex, sweat, shit.  These are taboo, unmentionable, subject to the cultural censors.  They inform what Julia Kristeva calls the abject, the experience of witnessing the other as part of ourselves, a breakdown of the boundary between interior and exterior.

            In Jordan Peele’s Us, an American family, the Wilsons, confront an uncanny expression of this breakdown in the figure of their exact doubles—or at least, exact in a physical manner, but far from exact in any behavioral or emotional sense.  While on vacation, these dark doubles—shadows, or “the tethered” in the world of the film—assault the Wilsons in their (second) house in Santa Cruz, interacting with them in ways that are by turns violent, playful, menacing, and even confused.  By the time the film nears its climactic conclusion in the form of an encounter between the family matriarch, Adelaide (played by Lupita Nyong’o), and her double, Red, in a strange, and strangely stark, subterranean space filled with wandering rabbits, audiences are aware that this disturbing episode extends beyond the Wilsons.  Indeed, it appears to be affecting families across America…

            Our perspective, however, is from the iconic Santa Cruz boardwalk, replete with carnival games and rides, and overlooking (you guessed it) the beach.  The Wilsons don’t go for family walks along the sand, but the beach is still their destination.  Patriarch Gabe Wilson (Winston Duke) makes a big deal out of visiting the beach—even guilting his wife into going by appealing to their children.  It’s the quintessential American vacation, trumpeted by Us as the place that all upper-middle class families want to take their kids.  And where do the Wilsons first come face to face with their tethered?  In their living room of course, in front of a fireplace, which has been started not by the Wilsons but by Jason’s double, Pluto (Evan Alex).  The literal and figurative center of hearth and home, the seat of American comfort and leisure.  This is where the abject seizes the Wilsons’ (and by extension, the audience’s) attentions.  This is where it speaks in the form of Adelaide’s double, her voice a choked rasp, the sound of stale air sealed within a tomb.

            There’s no doubt that the film exhibits a metaphorical structure that is quite on-the-nose.  The tethered are relegated to the underground, the veritable unconscious of the socially visible world.  They carry scissors as their primary weapons, symbolizing their eventual untethering.  A running reference throughout the film is Jeremiah 11:11, a vague biblical verse in which God promises to unleash an evil upon humanity “which they shall not be able to escape.”  If the aboveground world is civilization, the underground is its discontents.  It is easy to see in this structure not only a surprisingly basic psychoanalytic framework, but an equally basic commentary on class relations, the expression of a well-to-do society whose very freedoms of choice and mobility rest on the exploited labor of a toiling underclass.  Although this reading is certainly plausible, I want to suggest that it’s tangential to the film’s primary critical target: the American family.

            Families go through the motions in Us.  In the opening flashback sequence, showing Adelaide with her parents at the Santa Cruz boardwalk in 1986, her father takes swigs from a bottle of beer while her mother implores him to pay more attention.  It feels sadly familiar.  In a later sequence, revealing her family’s tethered in the underground, we see their doubles literally going through the motions in an exaggerated manner—her father-double’s arms flailing violently as his aboveground counterpart grooves to the music and rhythm of the carnival.  There’s something perverse yet revealing about this juxtaposition; rather than underscore the normality of social gestures, it reveals the already-uncanny dimension of familiar cultural behavior.  In other words, the normal begins to look weird.

            The most striking episode of this strangeness occurs when the Wilsons’ family friends, the Tylers, are murdered by their tethered.  Before the killings, we see the Tylers interact in a disaffected manner.  Husband and father, Josh (Tim Heidecker), bemoans having to investigate a mysterious sound, preferring to sit sipping whiskey while his wife Kitty (played wonderfully by Elizabeth Moss) is upstairs.  Their twin daughters (played by Cali and Noelle Sheldon) are a hilariously annoying post-millennial version of the Grady daughters from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), and the dialogue with their parents reveals a household disenchanted from the bonds of Cleaverdom: when told by Kitty to go back to sleep, one of the daughters replies “Just because we’re in our room doesn’t mean we’re asleep.”  “Then go back to your room,” Kitty snaps.  This conversation may be read as the inability of the Tylers to command their children’s respect and obedience; but this assumes that Us is interested in such an ideal vision of the post-World War II family.  Instead, the film depicts this transaction in all its banality; it’s just the way the Tylers communicate, even if Josh and Kitty’s marriage doesn’t appear to be in the best shape.  This scene is immediately followed by their abrupt and shocking murder, upon which the Tyler-tethered gawk and grin at one another in a parodic unveiling.

            The actions of the tethered aren’t the horrific opposite of their unknowing overlords’ behavior, but rather their dark reflection.  Gabe’s tethered (named Abraham) bellows incomprehensibly, mimicking Gabe’s own attempts at masculine homeownership (“If you wanna get crazy, we can get crazy!”).  Kitty’s tethered sits in front of a mirror, going through the motions of cosmetic care as though she’s trying to approximate them, imitate them.  The reason these behaviors seem so strange is that they’re so familiar.  This is the definition of the uncanny proper, as Freud formulated it in his famous 1919 essay: “The uncanny (das Unheimliche, ‘the unhomely’) is in some way a species of the familiar (das Heimliche, ‘the homely’).”  Importantly, Freud also identifies an element of concealment in the uncanny, something “that was intended to remain secret, hidden away, and has come into the open.”  Whatever the secret is behind the tethered, we never learn; Red suggests that it may have been a government operation to clone every American citizen, but the experiment failed to reproduce the soul.  It’s Peele’s throwaway explanation for a plot point that is, ultimately, irrelevant.  It doesn’t matter why the tethered are there.  What matters is that they are there.  We know there are tethered for (presumably) every aboveground person we see, yet the film chooses to focus on two groups of the tethered: specifically, the Tylers and the Wilsons.  Combined with Red’s disturbing answer to the question, “Who are you people?”—her reply is “We are Americans”—the film’s central subject comes into focus.

            The American family is an image that has been cultivated by decades of mass media circulation and consumption.  Although this image dates back at least to the rise of the baby boomer generation, it was sanctified by the mass media in 1973, with what French social theorist Jean Baudrillard called the “American TV verité experiment”: the airing of An American Family on PBS.  Originally intended to document the daily routine of an upper-middle-class family, the Louds, An American Family ended up documenting their disintegration.  When we consider the social dynamics of this situation—that the Louds eventually divorced after their private lives were invaded by television cameras—we realize that the series might have been more appropriately titled “An American Audience.”  An American Family reaffirmed the structure and sanctity of the family by unveiling its breakdown.  Viewers relished the comfort of their private lives by vicariously experiencing the entropy of familial relations through the television screen.  In other words, the Louds weren’t an example of American family living gone awry, but an exposure of the self-destructive tendencies buried within the family structure.

            Peele is well aware of media’s role—the role of television and cinema—in perpetuating the myth of American family life.  Us’s opening shot is a slow zoom on a living room television in Addie’s 1986 childhood home, as a young Addie sits on the couch watching commercials, including one for Hands Across America.  The import of this perspective comes in the breaks between commercials, when we catch brief glimpses of Addie’s washed-out reflection sitting on the couch, staring at the screen.  Who’s the subject here?  Is it Addie?  Hands Across America?  Television?  I think that the Wilsons’ youngest, Jason, gives us the answer: “It’s us.”  The opening shot establishes a complex perspective that rivals Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656), presenting a reflective surface in which we would appear if we were incorporated into the world of the film; and yet, the reflective surface is a television screen, implicating us in the structure of viewership.  Like Addie, we are viewers—but we’re Addie’s viewers, her audience.  Addie watches TV, and we watch Addie watching TV.  The screen implicates us.

            What we find onscreen in Us is a remarkably unremarkable American family.  Addie and Gabe appear (on the surface) to be in a loving relationship.  The family sings along to hip hop in the car.  Not only are the children appropriately annoyed with their parents—they’re also funny.  Peele gives us a variation on the 1950s American family, with one major adjustment: they’re black.  In many ways, race is secondary in Us.  Yet this racial choice isn’t unimportant.  If the film purports to be a rather straightforward and, in some senses, banal examination of social marginalization and exclusion, it undermines this examination by placing a stereotypical object of sociological study (blackness) in a position of social privilege.  The Wilsons may not be wealthy, but they’re comfortable enough to afford a vacation.  Peele appropriates a common symbolic narrative structure (the subterranean motif is as old as H.G. Wells’s 1895 novel The Time Machine) and throws it off-kilter by giving the Morlocks a seat at the dinner table.  The real Morlocks of Us are racially diverse, and include white people.

            What Peele has done in Us is deploy race not in a way that reinforces somewhat conventional models of social critique—for example, African Americans as the social underclass (one need only think of Ralph Ellison’s invisible man, narrating his experiences from a cellar).  Rather, Peele has positioned his black characters purposefully in order to a) reject the stereotype of African Americans as a social underclass, and b) unveil the binary structure that informs our practices of social critique, and that breaks down when presented with alternative circumstances.  This isn’t to say that African Americans haven’t been the victims of systemic hardships since the institution of slavery, but that critical models of identifying victimhood sometimes fall victim themselves to stereotypical expectations.

            All this is to say that Us can be read as a film designed to withstand sociological critique, and that it is so designed in order to pull the viewer’s attention away from race and to the film’s more central institution: family.  As far as American history is concerned, the family has been one of its elemental ingredients, part of a long genealogy that extends back to the organization of the seventeenth-century British bourgeoisie.  German philosopher Jürgen Habermas credits the emergence of the public sphere with the expansion and publicization of the bourgeois household, an opening of this traditionally private space to social interaction.  The foundations of modern democratic society can, in many ways, be linked to the evolution of the family.  The traces of this evolution are largely buried in Us (no pun intended), but its ramifications can still be felt throughout the film.  Peele undermines the patriarchal structure of family life (apparent in both seventeenth-century British society and 1950s America), giving us images of impotent and embarrassing father figures.  Their first night in the vacation house, Gabe attempts to position himself seductively on his and Addie’s bed, to humorous effect—“trying to look as sexually inviting as a bourgeois paterfamilias can,” as Eve Tushnet writes.  Later, when the Wilsons’ tethered show up, Gabe is the first of the family to be rendered immobile, unable to defend his family despite comedically desperate attempts.

            Us’s subversion of the modern family might be cliché, but it’s also surprisingly sharp.  There is no comfort to be found in parents: Gabe is quickly indisposed, and Addie turns out to be not the person we think she is.  The film’s point is less a politically charged critique of the patriarchy than it is a darkly funny attempt to dissolve the hierarchical relations that have organized family experience for centuries.  It doesn’t deliver vengeance upon Gabe (although Josh may be said to get what’s coming to him), but merely insists upon his flattening.  He’s no more capable than his children are of fending off the doubles from the underworld.

            The film sticks its critical knife into the idea of the family early on, but the final twist of the knife arrives with the final turn of the narrative screw (and here’s the major spoiler): Addie is in fact not Addie, but her subterranean double who attacked her in the beginning of the film.  All along, viewers have believed Us to be a vindication of the powerful mother at the expense of the impotent father—but Addie was always-already a replacement.  She gave birth to Jason and Zora, but her motherhood is revealed to be somehow essence-less.  If the tethered truly do lack a soul, then her motherhood isn’t innate to some fundamental core of human motherhood; it’s something she learned.  At this point, viewers and critics are free to propose a number of ways to read Addie’s ersatz quality: that all motherhood (indeed, parenthood) is learned, not something that springs up from within us; that love toward our children can’t be truly understood until one has children; or, if one wants to get biologically deterministic, that the protective instinct is more ruthless in mothers than in fathers.  The list can go on.

            I see all the aforementioned readings as simplistic efforts to reconcile a narrative that wants to leave its audience far more uncomfortable.  The final shot of Addie and Jason locking eyes, Jason glaring at her, isn’t one of familiarity and safety, but of ambiguity.  If Addie’s motherhood is sincere—that is, if she has learned true fondness and affection for her family—this sincerity doesn’t seem to have conveyed itself to her son.  His look isn’t that of a child secure in his mother’s care, but of a subject suspicious of his overseer.  He doubts her motherhood, doubts its honesty.  As viewers, I’m sure that most of us like to think that sincere parenthood is easily communicable; whether one gives birth to or adopts a child, the genuine concern for that child shines through a parent’s words and actions, leaving no room for uncertainty.  But Jason is uncertain.  He sees her not as a mother, but as a mother-thing, to invoke an early short story by Philip K. Dick.  He sees her not as someone who has learned motherhood, but imitates motherhood.

            This is, I want to suggest, the deep, sociological, and darkly comic horror of Jordan Peele’s Us: that our families might be faking it.