“Us” is the famous comedian, Jordan Peele’s second film in which he travels down the dark road of horror. His previous work “Get Out” left audiences in suspense and in complete shock. The plot twists feel properly placed, and not just crafted to entice viewers. Peele has even been compared to Alfred Hitchcock, one of the most influential filmmakers in all of cinema. “Us” has caused audiences to rewatch the movie several times, while constantly second guessing or devising theories on the movie’s vital scenes. The films leaves you feeling astonished and second guessing yourself.
The film begins seemingly with the normal Wilson family consisting of a mother, father, and their two children. Their names are Adelaide, Gabriel “Gabe”, Zora, and Jason. They are played by Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Shahadi Wright Joseph, and Evan Alex, respectively. The family of four are traveling back to their vacation home in Santa Cruz, California. While on vacation, the mother, Adelaide, has been acting peculiar when she has flashbacks of her past.
It turns out that everyone throughout the United States have dopplegangers, known as The Tethered, that live below them in abandoned laboratories and tunnels. The living on earth have never even known about or encountered them. The Tethered are disregarded in all manners, but one of the most vital element is that they consist of all of the aspects of humans that are hidden within themselves. Everything each character has hidden or suppressed within themselves in emphasized within their Tethered version. By looking at through this psychoanalytical lense, I began to look at my autoethnography project from a different perspective.
My autoethnography project explores my fractured relationship with people in society, especially my peers, and how I instead began to depend on animals for comfort. I never once tried to address the situation as to why I never seemed to fit in with my peers, but covered and suppressed my feelings. This is what I believe led to me becoming a bit of a recluse and discouraged myself from socializing again. “Us” reminded me of my autoethnography in the way that Adelaide is constantly anxious about traveling back to Santa Cruz based on her past experience and even tries to stop her family from venturing back to the beach. She wants to suppress and completely avoid what happened to her instead of facing her problems.
Once Adelaide meets her Tethered version, named Red, is forced to face her problem head on. Red is symbolic for Adelaide’s issues and trauma that coincides within her after she travels to the Hall of Mirrors and discovers that the Tethered exist. She never addressed the issues of what occurred down there, but instead remains silent for multiple years and worries her parents. Adelaide uses ballet and dancing as a way to repress her emotions and feelings and in a sense lie to her parents about her emotional and mental progress.
I uncovered within myself that in the same way in which Adelaide used ballet to avoid her problems with discovering the Tethered, I have used animals and my relationship with them to avoid forming sustainable relationships with my peers. I was deeply hurt and possibly even traumatized by being bullied and ostracized. But instead of telling others or a parent for help I decided to mask the pain by developing relationships with animals instead.
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