Chained Lifestyle in "Us"
May 2020
Kelly Brennan
The 2019 horror/thriller movie by Jordan Peele entitled Us follows the story of Adelaide Wilson who, during her childhood, was confronted by her doppelganger inside of a fun-house. As an adult with her own family, she returns to the area and the Wilson family gets a rude awakening after our protagonist Adelaide feels as though someone has been following her her whole life waiting to destroy. The story shows the uncanny and scarily similar doppelgangers who have finally come to get their vengeance, the same one who Adelaide met as a child, who are there to kill the Wilson family and take over their life; the movie refers to them as the tethered. The tethered are essential for driving the plot of this horror narrative, but their presence in the movie is just as symbolic as it is structural. The tethered, who are adorned in red jumpsuits, live a chained, imprisoned lifestyle, as they are tethered to the world above. This imprisonment is meant to represent both America's past (as a nation built on slavery), and America's present (as a nation plagued with racial inequality). Peele uses imagery and symbols to show the truth about people of color in modern America, saying in a New York Times interview, “I’d never seen my fears as an African-American man onscreen in this way.”
The prison-like lifestyle that the tethered live to the world above is a direct connection to how many people of color feel in modern America. In his review on race within Get Out, Peele’s first critically acclaimed film, Nichols quotes Banaji and Greenwald saying, “implicit bias in the racial context comprises unconsciously held prejudicial beliefs against African-Americans by about 75 percent of white Americans” (224). People of color in today’s society are tethered to the mindset of the foundation of America which encouraged discrimination against all who were not White; many hold prejudices and judgments against people of color because of stereotypes and cliches that were founded throughout America’s history, even though they are completely nonfactual and discriminatory. Nichols also explains that the United States is viewed:
as a country largely founded on a crime against humanity, chattel slavery, which has spent much of its collective time trying to ignore that reality. [...] [He explains that the country has] fallen short of a full reparative act that would include both genuine governmental apology and material compensation for wages, property, and the loss of life. In the absence of genuine reparations for a shameful and murderous crime against an entire segment of the population, American culture is left with a toxic atmosphere that divides its citizenry. (227)
The imprisonment of people of color throughout America’s history dates back to before our country was founded. There has been discrimination and a chained lifestyle for people of color throughout our country’s history.
In Peele’s film Us, he challenges stereotypes by putting the tethered in red jumpsuits; these red jumpsuits jumped out at me while watching because of their similar resemblance to prison jumpsuits, making me think of the symbolism that the tethered have and what these red jumpsuits mean. Instead of making these characters criminals, and stereotyping people of color into what others believe they are, he challenges viewers by commenting through the jumpsuits that the tethered are prisoners to their world above, just as people of color are prisoners to their world of racial inequality. The red jumpsuits not only stand for being a prisoner and living a chained lifestyle, but also being a prisoner to the injustice that people of color have been experiencing for centuries.
“I’d never seen my fears as an African-American man onscreen in this way.” -Jordan Peele
Lisa Guerrero explains in her journal article, “Can I Live? Contemporary Black Satire and the State of Postmodern Double Consciousness” the facade that the Obama presidency brought to racial America and the show that Americans put on because of it:
“The year 2008 marked the first time in history that a black man was elected president of the United States. This event was celebrated by some as the definitive proof of America's racial progress and a clear fulfillment of its promises, and lamented by others as the beginning of the end of (white) American exceptionalism. Regardless of one's feeling toward Barack Obama's election, the racial symbolism was undeniable. Whether he was viewed as a messiah or a devil, his blackness served to wash away America's racial sins and deliver the country unto the promised land of post-race, where race would no longer haunt America's intentions and its institutions. If Americans had seen fit to elect a black man to run the country, then it must logically follow that the country was now beyond race. The nation no longer needed to be concerned with bearing responsibility for its racial pasts, its racial present, or racial presence at all: the absurd outcome of the ideologies born of the twentieth-century's colorblind racism” (268).
Clearly this is a myth: “The birth of this so-called post-racial age has been accompanied by an inglorious and aggressive rebirth of race-based stereotypes, racist lexicons, everyday racism, and violent racist acts” (Guerrero 269).
In Us, one of the first scenes in the film is a shot of a white rabbit in a cage, which zooms out to show a whole wall of rabbits in cages. Within these cages, there are only a few brown or black rabbits. I think that the rabbits have a symbolic meaning to them: not only are they almost all white, connecting back to the racial inequality in America, but they also stand to show the tethered-like representation that they have to their human counterparts that they live amongst. Dr. Kinitra D. Brooks, the author of Searching for Sycorax: Black Women’s Hauntings of Contemporary Horror, tells TIME magazine, “I think it deals with this idea of the shadow self, and what sort of instincts that brings out. It’s the idea of facing your clone, your tethered, your doppelganger and the will to live, to survive, with the family as each of them face and kill their own Tethered.” So, not only are the tethered living a chained, prison-like lifestyle, but the rabbits are also unable to live freely. Perhaps we can interpret this as the “inglorious and aggressive rebirth of race-based stereotypes, racist lexicons, everyday racism, and violent racist acts” (Guerrero 269) that people of color are forced to live through every day; they are unable to live freely and are tethered to these racist tropes, just like the rabbits.
In this movie, Peele redefines stereotypes and challenges prejudices. Sarah Nevin Welsh writes about stereotyping that:
to be stereotyped—to be treated as an object instead of a person, to be grouped as an undifferentiated, essentialized, and dehumanized other—is a painful constant as a person of color. Stereotyping occurs both among the less self-aware and the blatantly prejudiced, manifesting itself in a variety of ways. (520)
In modern America, although we are not actively enslaving people of color, we are still leaving them in this tethered lifestyle that is prison-like because many cannot change the prejudices they feel towards people of color. Americans still fear people of color, stereotyping them into all being criminals even though that is a myth. Commenting on Jordan Peele’s style of addressing the racial inequalities in his movies, Nevin Welsh writes that, “in a ‘social thriller’ society is the villain. Despite the long history of white violence against black America, black violence against white people is still seen as taboo” (524).
Gabrielle Bruney for Esquire Entertainment comments on stereotypes by talking about the horror film stereotypes for people of color:
The usually short life spans of black characters in horror films is a well-known punchline: the black guy often dies first, if he’s lucky enough to make it into the movie at all. [...] Us, is important in its own right as something even rarer—a bloody horror romp that forces audiences to physically identify with black characters.
Peele fights against this stereotype by making the white family in the film die first, and the protagonists that are black are the only ones who make it to the end of the movie.
This movie is full of symbolism, double-meanings, and interesting juxtapositions; the way that Peele comments on race and the discrimination held against people of color (past and present) through these usages of symbolism is revolutionary. He carefully placed these little hints throughout the movie and commented on these topics subtly and elegantly. The film Us is a must-see and must be dug into deeper to find the true meanings behind these symbols.
Work Cited
Bruney, Gabrielle. “With 'Us,' Jordan Peele Forces Audiences to Feel Black Characters' Pain.” Esquire, Esquire, 27 Mar. 2019, www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a26950006/us-jordan-peele-black-character-dies-first-analysis/.
Buckley, Cara. “‘I’d Never Seen My Fears as an African-American Man Onscreen.’” The New York Times, 6 Dec. 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/06/movies/jordan-peele-get-out-african-american-biracial.html.
Guerrero, Lisa. “Can I Live? Contemporary Black Satire and the State of Postmodern Double Consciousness.” Studies in American Humor, vol. 2, no. 2, 2016, pp. 266–279. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/studamerhumor.2.2.0266. Accessed 21 Apr. 2020.
Lang, Cady. “The Reason Why Rabbits Show Up in Horror Movies Like Us.” Time, Time, 28 Mar. 2019, time.com/5559750/us-movie-rabbits-meaning-bunnies-in-horror-films/.
Nevin Welsh, Sarah. “Archetype X: Visible and Invisible Otherness.” Psychological Perspectives, vol. 61, no. 4, Oct. 2018, pp. 517–528. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/00332925.2018.1536510.
Nichols, Bryan K. “Get Out: A Study of Interracial Dynamics in an Unrepaired and Unrepentant America-A Modern Day Racial Horror.” Psychoanalytic Review, vol. 105, no. 2, Apr. 2018, pp. 223–236. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1521/prev.2018.105.2.223.
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