Us, who?
“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”.
(Jeremiah 11:11)
After a dreamlike debut, the American director Jordan Peele returned with an expected title which promised to stand worthy alongside his already legendary Get Out. Although tremendously pleased with his first work, the previews of Us warned me of a sinister complexity that seemed impenetrable (as all trailers should, right?); and 30 minutes was enough for the film to explain that my suspicion was justified. If the protagonists faced the bloody villains in the first quarter of the film, could this contact be Peele's true interest?
It is often argued that the traditional horror/suspense film narrative operates like the layers of an onion, similar to the stages of a riddle. As the story progresses, the questions raised in the introductory sequences are clarified. The ulterior revelation is usually accompanied by a confrontation with the protagonist's mortal enemy. In the case of Us, the director solves this face to face in the first half hour of the movie, so we should assume that his pretension transcends paradigms. And with an extraordinary polysemic overflow.
Lupita Nyong'o, Winston Duke, Evan Alex, and Shahadi Wright Joseph in Us (2019), a co-production of Monkeypaw Productions, Perfect World Pictures and Universal Pictures. Photography courtesy of Monkeypaw Productions, Perfect World Pictures and Universal Pictures.
I got 5 on it. The film unveils through a concept with which we are familiar; but that is anchored in a bold and staggered bet. It's tethered to the canon-twist logic. Examples? Canon: A wealthy family prepares to enjoy their seasonal vacations at their retirement home. Twist: The protagonist family drives a Mercedes-Benz, has a summer house in California and has recently acquired a boat, but is African-American. Canon: There is a supernatural element that has been chasing the characters since childhood and, now, in full adulthood, insists on martyrizing them, reappearing gradually. Twist: The supernatural element acquires full materiality in the first quarter of the film, assailing the intimacy of the protagonists and leaving concrete record of what its threat represents. Canon: The evil destructive force that comes from the antagonist is split, in a moralizing movement, from the intrinsic goodness of the characters, finishing off the plot in a final collision. Twist: The bad ones are us.
If a cinematographic work that has emerged on the comercial listings lately, obtaining from the mass public a reception as enthusiastic as saturated with hermeneutical questions should be pointed out, it could not be hesitated to propose Us in the final podium. I have inspected interpretations that make the film a fierce critique of racial oppression and segregation, others that perceive in Us the duality of the American Dream (standing applause for Wisecrack's analysis); there are also those that consider the film as a story about social mobility (contrasting the inspiring stories of a few against the factual possibilities of the majority) or about contemporary slavery (hence the protagonist, Adelaide —Lupita Nyong'o– , never gets to unchain/untether herself). I have chosen to take a little from all of them and do a hybrid reading in sociocultural key.
Evan Alex in Us (2019), a co-production of Monkeypaw Productions, Perfect World Pictures and Universal Pictures. Photography courtesy of Monkeypaw Productions, Perfect World Pictures and Universal Pictures.
Us is, at first sight, an x-ray of the open wounds of a nation; it could be asserted, as well, of a continent, or of the whole humanity. Superficially, one could argue that it refers to racial discrimination which, although concentrated in the United States, has become cystic in the West, adapting vertiginously to the particular junctures of history (the segregated population may not only be Afro-descendant, but also indigenous, asian, arabic, etc.); nevertheless, in that long human chain that recalls the Hands across America’s fiasco, it's noticed that the bodies that divide the geography of the United States are of all colors. It is a blood-transpiring white homeless male who has dared to initiate a symbolic movement (it is clear that everything germinated from Red, but he is the one who waits outside the house of mirrors). Therefore, without hesitation, there'll be represented the women systematically vexed by the patriarchate, homosexual teenagers who were spit in the face when changing clothes in the school locker room, trans people who choose life —although the chasm under the bridge or the bullet in the palate seems better company than the society that condemned them to the manure heap— the illiterate people, the landless farmers, the crazy, the sick, the abandoned children. However, to emphasize the dissociation that legitimizes a claim of such diverse origin, Peele requires a powerful and suggestive emblem, an icon of ruptures.
Jacques-Louis David, Les Licteurs rapportent à Brutus les corps de ses fils, peinture à l'huile, 1789.
Let's rewind towards the end of the 18th century. Jacques-Louis David, right in the year when the Revolution explodes, created and exhibited at the Paris Salon his famous work Les licteurs rapportent à Brutus les corps de ses fils. In a monumental oil on canvas, he narrated the misfortune, then exalted as a moralizing legend, occurred in the family bosom of Lucius Iunius Brutus, founding patrician of the Roman Republic. Already the manuals and history books have been responsible for scattering interpretations and pouring detailed iconographic and stylistic analyzes on the painting, but nevertheless, what is the element that we intend to detach, clear and timeless, in order to be placed within the horror story that concerns us? Almost in the center of the composition, on a table decorated with a red-lit tablecloth, rests a basket with fabrics, a ball of wool and, barely appreciable, bright and sharp scissors. In 1789 it was a symbol, incorporated into the canvas by the hands of the most famous artist in Europe, which hinted at the effective consummation of the tragedy of a father who is able to sacrifice everything, even his own children, in order to match up to the expectations required by the civic virtue he cherished. In 2019, Peele draws on the same instrument's τέλος, reproducing its symbolic qualities that exalt it as the germ of every fracture of the social fabric, of the deep cut that cleaves with grotesque violence.
Peele's scissors, gleaming gold or dotted with blood and tears, also become a sign of dialectical operation in the course of the plot. If they evidence that all kind of exploitation (class, ethnicity, gender, etc.) is conditioned and determined by a dominant elite that lives beyond the borders set for the oppressed, far and high on the surface, where the breeze embrace the bodies and the sun caresses the faces (breakage factum); it is this same tool, which warns of the need that presupposes the status quo with respect to all the components of society, that is, the axial screw is, precisely, the one in charge of ensuring the contiguous fastening of the sharp blades which, in the end, finish up dismembering everything (binding factum). The ligatures of those primitive underground beings, cloistered in the thousands of labyrinthine kilometers of sewers in the world, represent the condition of possibility that familiarizes them with their divine-enlightened counterparts. The symptomatology of hundreds of rabbits with irritated eyes should alert, on the one hand, of the ominous reaches of genetic manipulation (cloning) and, on the other, of the infinite range of possibilities that arise when we throw ourselves blindly into their burrows.
Richard Diebekorn, Scissors, oil on canvas, 1959.
For the connoisseurs of scabrous and bleak topics, there's a Jungian wink that Jordan Peele directs to the initiated audience, reiterating the 11:11 transversality throughout the film as effective and grusly evidence of the notion of synchronicity (synchronizität). If the 11th is the penultimate station that announces the near completeness of every cosmic dozen, it is necessary to know how to get off the wagon when personal skills begin to be scarce. On the table I leave the concern.
Peele's sharp tool, with the weight of an old story enriched on coagulated blood puddles, reminds me of the compact and robust quality of the scissors that, after distancing himself from abstract expressionism, repeatedly represented —during the fifties and sixties— the American artist Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993). Regardless of the consideration in respect of the technique and medium, it can be said that Diebenkorn understood that the materiality of the instrument requires a certain attitude, a threatening disposition, à l'offensive. Lemons, added to the composition in at least a couple of works, embody the passivity of the organic victim before the passage of the cultural machinery. Still Life. Note that this transformation exercise, for Diebenkorn, is accompanied by complex processes of destruction and construction of meaning (reflection in a mirror) and significance (liminality of the position of the scissors or the lemon in relation with the underlying surface).
Madison Curry in Us (2019), a co-production of Monkeypaw Productions, Perfect World Pictures and Universal Pictures. Photography courtesy of Monkeypaw Productions, Perfect World Pictures and Universal Pictures.
Under a certain perspective, it is the same inaction to which the slave-replicas of Peele's underworld are forced, stripped, in the first instance, of language and, therefore, of every human condition (life in its most radical sense). If the hierarchy of the foucaultian power-knowledge relationships, warned of the complexity that articulates any contingency of even reaching a social position as the owner of a legitimate and, therefore, true discourse; is it worth commenting on identical-to-us beings, to whom the possibility of saying a word has been systematically inhibited? If they barely manage to growl and shout unintelligibly, at least for our culture, they are no-thing. However, Red, the heinous villain who seeks to subvert the rigid determination of all privileges, has managed to maintain her ontological statute, because she clung —with all her might— to the concise childhood memory of a language that, decades later, seems to be weightless and restricted; but which is enough to get going a revolution. Do we execute Adelaide on the fusillading wall for wanting to escape from that prison of iterative babbling and vexatious spasms, or do we condemn Red to be hanged for pretending back what rightfully belongs to her? Can Adelaide be judged selfish as she escaped from the underworld just as a child? Does Red's awareness “destined” her to lead a massive political project, which would allow the reactionary defense to be equalized and try to correct the structural inequalities of society? Are we still looking for good and bad, guilty and innocent? Let's evoke, again, its new immortal monologue: Once upon a time, there was a girl and the girl had a shadow...
Notes:
David's oeuvre is currently on display at the Musée du Louvre, Denon wing, room 702. I’d like to thank the museum for authorizing this use of image.
In the same way, thanks to the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation for authorizing the use of image of his famous oil on canvas.