JORDAN Peele the director of the 2017 film “Get Out” and the current 2019 film “Us” is onto something.
He had something going on about black identity and white envy in his film debut. The premise was interesting then - ageing white brains were transplanted onto young healthy black bodies in a dark suspense-filled thriller.
The film can be considered an oblique critique of how mainstream white culture has come to adore and celebrate black bodies, for instance, in the realm of sports but continue to place barriers for most of the colored population to meaningful participate in America's social and economic life. The disembodiment of white brains to be transferred to working class black bodies not only betrays a hidden white envy but also a subliminal fear of a future retribution based on color and class.
With “Us”, he continues with his investigation of black existence and its problematic relationship with whiteness, this time training his sights on a plethora of themes and issues involving the tension within and among differentiated black realities through a very interesting narrative ploy.
Consider this, government-created clones of every citizen are secretly hidden away in subterranean maze of tunnels under our cities. Apparently, the extracted DNA to create the clones still share souls with their original hosts and are therefore tethered to their principals aboveground. They were created and then later abandoned after the plan to control the real citizens through their proxies underground did not succeed.
The wheels of the plot gains traction when a black middle class family vacationing in their lakeside summer home is confronted by their underground proxies for the night of the “untethering” where the goal is to eliminate the principals so that the underclass clones can assume their existence.
Here is where the movie enters the tongue-in-cheek chainsaw massacre genre staged for the most part to mock and make fun of black middle class existence with their Mercedes Benzes or range rovers, power boats on the lake, and alexa-enabled music devices spewing gangsta hip-hop.
There are hardly any white people in this movie or if they are present have limited screen time and are disposed of accordingly by their proxies in an orgy of gore and murder. The film carries on with that black fantasy tradition present in a genre of black films where everyone is colored and middle class. But the ascent of the murderous black clone proxies from their subterranean prisons destroys this fantasy literally and figuratively.
This important dimension of the film delivers a powerful and jarring message. With every exceptional black person who has been allowed to partake of the middle class American dream because they are athletically-gifted, or are fitting examples of the success and justness of affirmative action, there are far more numerous among the black set who are frustrated and prevented entry into the exclusive club that is middle and upper class America. The tunnels and basements where these proxies reside are metaphorical representations of the poverty-stricken, drug-addled and desperate ghetto existence of the majority of the black population in America.
The continuous reference in the film to Jeremiah 11:11, a quote from the Bible, about the day of reckoning when the Lord shall ignore the cries of the damned is also revealing of the accusatory tone of the film. The accusing finger is seemingly pointed at sections of the colored population who have enjoyed white privileges as exceptions to the rule, when most of their kind are trapped in the social structural realities reserved for blacks.
The twist at the end drives further this point of betrayal that the film deeply contemplates upon. How do we deal with class betrayal and/or traitors of skin color who have ingeniously called upon their instinct of self-preservation to save themselves from the living hell reserved by the social system for their kind?
The film is about the contradictions of contemporary middle class black existence told from a smart and self-deprecating standpoint. But it also about all of us who, in the midst of great social suffering, endeavor only to save ourselves, and could not care less if our fellow human beings at the dredges of the social order continue to suffer because of our apathy and privilege.