Us

(SPOILER ALERT!)

Me: Just saw Us

Me: I liked it. How did you interpret?

Aarón NYC: Black.

Aarón NYC: He just wanted to make a horror thriller with blacks where the white Familia dies.

Aarón NYC: ✊🏾

Aarón NYC: It’s Jordan tryna emulate Ta-Nehisi Coates  alla Eight Years in Power. What you think?

Aarón NYC: I’m actually talking about it now with the people I saw it with. You think the son was also switched?

Me: I liked it. I thought it was a critique of neolibralism. And I don’t think the son was switched but that it is suggested only cinematically, perhaps by accident due to the film’s psychological dimension, which is that which is hidden behind/revealed by the mask.

(the magician of the family who can see through the veil)

Me: On a side note, Lupita’s  doppelganger was campy AF.

Aarón NYC: Elaborate on neolibralism.

Me: Oh, capitalism wins, the neutralized message of unity born in the later half of the Cold War, on television like MTV and shit. It produced a society incredibly complacent in their liberalism. The commercial is now what USAmericans really believe and they function as such.

Aarón NYC: Whatttt?

Aarón NYC: All of that.

Aarón NYC: Break down. I need to share, and be able to.

Me: Lol okay, give me some time, it’s a lot to text.

Aarón NYC: Nah nigga I need a 1,467 word synopsis. Layman. Lay it down.

synopsis 

A film as polarized as USAmerica’s public. Us and them. I expect polarization at the least due to technical execution, a potentially baffling surrealism. Despite the camp aspect it felt creepy as hell, psychological like Get Out, though I’m not one to compare. Ideally each piece of art is new and brings something else to the table. The narrative of this one felt dramatically different from Get Out, and much softer handed, a series of ideas introduced without any heavy push in one direction, leaving you lost in this absurd scenario where our “evil” doppelgängers replace us. Mind control, the American dream, complacency etcetera, and that creepy Hands Across America reference, media manufacturing consent. This invasion of the body snatchers is a violent war of ideology. It’s the diseased underbelly of Fukuyama’s End of History. It’s Hillary Clinton’s rainbow coalition, it’s…

…a sinister twist to Ronald Reagan’s magical 80s message of world brotherhood. The Soviet Union fell in the late 80s around where the movie opens. Capitalist realism began to set in and complacency followed. Symbolically the “man made” machine of mind control built in an underground lab, got out of our control, and so ideology functions.

Above the underground layer, Peele cleverly portrays a literal carnival of consumption as we exist within the spectacle, consuming for the thrills and distraction, the ‘illusion of having’. An environment that ensures one never questions the true cost of their privilege. The film takes a cynical view of “our” Cold War victory. The dream comes true in the form of a nightmare. It’s not a criticism of “charity”, but rather a critique of that system which sustains poverty’s existence, while our moral conscience can be relieved with a small donation. One which does nothing to challenge the existing system.

One of the most prominent symbols of the film were the scissors, which according to this dream interpretation site symbolize some kind of unity. This clearly fits the “hands across America” logic, though perhaps it ties into the other major symbol of the film, the mask. As in the binding of “spiritual” and physical, a matter of reintegrating what we hid from ourselves. In the symbol of the mask I see a disunity. A cut within the psyche. The son’s mask (referenced above), is the true mask within which relieves us of the tension between the horrors we do on the outside and our “innocent” inner world. As Zizek puts it, the mask in-genders a third reality, that of “pure subjectivity“. Here we find the ‘abyss of the other, our neighbor. So before we hold hands, remember….

Aarón NYC: Fuck Hillary nigga. You know I don’t fuck Hillary. She ain’t tryna make America great again. Also you’re a few words short.

Me: Lol yes, 1666%. I would never fuck Hillary, or Bill for that instance.

Aarón NYC: I fucked with Bill because I saw him at CSI once. His face was red as the devil’s dick. Whole speech he looked like he just stepped off the plane from a sun burn.

Me: Lol both Us and Get Out threw jabs at the neoliberal establishment, though more subtle in Us.

Me: Also the father of the film was Peele lol, Speaking of doppelgängers, he clearly wrote his “comic persona” into the film.

Aarón NYC: Damnnnn, just realized that. You right.

Aarón NYC: I don’t fuck with Bill though because I feel he ‘s part of some pizzagate shit.

Aarón NYC: Also they’re recording this convo now that we said that.

Aarón NYC: 🙊

Me: Sht, illuminati.

Me: They ignore conspiracy theorists though, you know that.

Me: THEY think we’re the ones with the secret organization. It’s “us” and “them” type politics. Assassins and templars.

Me: Respect to Assassin’s Creed for portraying Marx. That’s revolutionary in itself.

Me: Peele is a clever mf. One day he might appear in an Assassin’s Creed game as an Assassin, who know’s what’s history from the future.