Us — A movie we should all watch
*** Potential spoiler alert ***
A few days ago, I watched Us — the second movie by Jordan Peele. As I did not particularly enjoy the first one, Get Out, I was reluctant to watch this one. I am happy I did. It is a great movie. It is a mature, substantial, and complete piece of work that can be read at many different levels and is also an exceptionally entertaining movie.
Us is the story of a middle-class family consisting of Adelaide, a young adult lady in her thirties, her husband, and their two children. The movie starts off with their decision to go on vacation in a quiet seaside town. However, Adelaide is upset with this prospect because, as we discover with a series of flashbacks, this town is the place where she had a mysterious and horrible experience when she was a kid. Clearly, you know right away that something coming from this obscure past will soon break the peaceful life of this family.
So far so good, right? This sounds like a good starting for a horror movie, that kind of already-seen that is quite reassuring. However, as the story progresses and the tension rises, you feel immersed in multiple levels of reading — supported both by an elegant attention to details as well as by more blatant aspects (the almost caricatural conversation between Adelaide and her friend on the beach will remain unforgettable to me).
To make it short, the story is about people of the “shadow” (doppelgängers that each one of us has) rising against their wealthier and more perfect alter egos of the “light” to free themselves from the slavery of living just as a function of their duplicates. Or something like this.
So, one possible interpretation of this movie would see the doppelgängers of the shadow as the poor people living in the shadow of richer societies as they find their way to be seen and rebel against their oppressors. Or another interpretation would see them as representing the most hidden part inside each one of us as it strives to be heard. These and other possible interpretations are all powerful and deep narratives, the kind of narrative that glues you to the screen above and beyond the meaningless killer-beyond-the-curtain moments that many other horror movies have.
I liked this movie so much and for so many reasons that, a few days later, I was still thinking of it. But I felt that one of these reasons was worth sharing in a blog as a personal reasoning about movies and entertainment that Us has inspired like no other film has done before.
A particularly unique feature of this movie is that for the first 20 minutes or so, there were only actors who happened to be black people. There were also some white actors in the movie, but they were not that many, appeared later, and were way far from being protagonists.
However, while one could adopt many different perspectives about this movie, I can hardly think of one that is necessarily about blackness or being black. After all, as we discover while watching, the same horrible things are happening to white people, including another family that we have already met at the beginning of the movie as friends of the protagonists. This movie speaks to social classes, for example, way more than it speaks to race in itself.
To be more precise, what I mean is that if one would replace the black actors with white actors or actors of other ethnicities, the plot would still hold, and the movie would still be an exceptional movie. For sure, the fact that the protagonists are instead black people adds to the movie and to its narrative additional layers that maybe I cannot fully appreciate. I am not American. I am an Italian woman who has recently immigrated to Canada. Thus, I guess that my perspective is limited in relation to all the nuances at which this movie can speak to (and of) the American culture. After all, when I was a kid in Italy, the TV showed every day at least an episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. And yes, believe it or not, I grew up with the idea that the typical American would be rich, tall, and black.
But going back to Us, the idea of a mainstream movie almost entirely casted by black people in which the plot had nothing necessarily to do with being black deeply impressed me. I found it to be a compelling and groundbreaking operation signaling a huge opportunity for change in the mainstream movie industry.
In many other American movies that I can think of, when black people are protagonists, blackness is relevant to the storyline. For example, the story might explicitly be about discrimination against black people, or maybe more subtly about poor people — and the protagonists “happen” to be black because they are poor. I can easily think of exceptions, like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, but they are rare and often disconnected from real life. After all, Will’s family is too rich to be perceived as real.
Although race, class, and civil (in)justice interconnect in the American culture in a unique way, American movies remain the mainstream for many other cultures, including mine, that are deeply rife with American movies and shows. Even when they have the best intentions of denouncing racial discrimination and civil injustice, movies about black people often pass the idea that black people are somehow a special social category. As such, they are spoken of only as representative of that category — that is, they are the protagonists of a movie only when their blackness is relevant to the storyline.
This can be said of many other underrepresented groups, with which I can even connect more directly. For example, I am a woman, and although I have recently seen more and more often some new ideas out there, I am always impressed with how often a story that has a woman as a protagonist is related to the advantages and pitfalls of being a woman. And of how often a plot around a woman includes a love story. As another example, I am disabled, and I still have to start to be impressed in any negative or positive way by a movie that has a disabled person as a protagonist and does at least try not to wrap the story around disability. Sorry, with the exception of Skyscraper — but I am not sure that movies with The Rock count.
This is not to say that there is something wrong with novels or movies about race, gender, or disability. Great artworks that identify contradictions and injustice in this world will always be fundamental to keep thinking alive and elicit societal change. But this aboutness often signals the operation of a dominant culture and rarely the first-person perspective of a black person, a woman, or a disabled individual. To counter this dominance, it is certainly important that more and more novels and movies about underrepresented groups are written by members of those groups — something that is not that obvious, as it is unfortunately known.
But another important thing is that members of those groups write novels and movies that just depict the world — anything in the world — from their point of view.
Expecting that all one has to say relates to their race, gender, or physical ability depends on the assumption that one is special because they are a representative of that social category. But that social category is often special only in the eyes of the people outside of that category. After all, if I am special as a woman, it is only so in the eyes of a man, and if I am special as a disabled person, it is only so in the eyes of non-disabled people. Like any other human being in this world, many unusual events or inspiring thoughts might occur to me that are instead not related to my gender or physical ability. In fact, I still have to read a novel or watch a movie by a non-disabled person that is about how cool it is to be perfectly physically able.
And this is what I found in Us. A movie that has black people as protagonists. Ordinary people, a middle-class family with whom many others could identify. This operation could appear simple but is instead crucial. More movies like this are needed to create a collective, mainstream imagination that sees people of certain social categories as universal examples, and not as something special that can be spoken of just as representative of the category that is that special only in the eyes of someone else.
Again, for sure there are many reasons I cannot fully grasp for why Jordan Peele chose to write this particular movie in this particular way. But this is the small and special reason why I personally think this is a movie we should all watch. Because I am now dreaming of a movie in which the protagonist is an Asian, lesbian, disabled woman, and in which the plot has nothing to do with race, homosexuality, physical ability, or gender. Ah, and possibly written by an Asian, lesbian, disabled woman.
Written in August 2019.
