Us: Maybe Donald Trump will just replace all of us with doppelgangers so he has control
With Us, Jordan Peele (“Get Out”, 2017/2/26) treats us again to horror satire over, in part, obsession with race, and this time we get a zombie apocalypse. The title does refer to the idea of a tribe.
I’ll mention a couple of personal contexts. In 1986, in Dallas, I had befriended a flight attendant named Rodney Ayres who had recovered miraculously from Kaposi’s sarcoma, and, temporarily resurrected, was very active in helping organize the Hands Across America even in Dallas. I remember the morning on Turtle Creek. But Rodney would pass away late in 1987, and I would find his quilt on the Mall in Washington DC in 1989. Rodney just might have become a partner, if history had gone differently.
Then in March 2017 I visited the Infinity Mirrors exhibit by Yayoi Kusama at the Hirschhorn of the Smithsonian in Washington DC. There was an interesting encounter on the Metro riding in to town that I won’t get into here. But the mirrors ties into a concept in this film.
In the prologue, a young Adelaide Thomas (Madison Curry) has watched the promo for Hands Across America on a TV of the day, before visiting an amusement park in Santa Cruz with her family, and going into a hall or mirrors, where she sees herself get duplicated.
In the present day, Adelaide (Lupita Nuyang’o) takes her family to a beach resort in Santa Cruz, with some degree of apprehension. Soon after their arrival, the family is confronted with doppelgangers of themselves dressed in red. It gets violent, as it does with a white family in the next condo that has a similar incident.
At this point, it’s important to note that the script is filled with clever metaphors and lots of abruptly moving dialogue setting up the horror to come.
In time, we find out that the whole country is overrun with doppelgangers, created by the government and kept tethered in underground tunnels to control the population (like this is what Trump would do). Maybe a biological strangelet could really do this.
In the end, we see the doppelgangers doing a hands-across-the coast range mountains.
There are plenty of movies about the doppelganger concept, like The Double (Jesse Eisenberg), Enemy (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Another Me. Check the “body snatcher concept” label on my Blogger. Or watch Invasion of the Body Snatchers (made three times). And Judas Kiss, remember, has a gay man in love with a copy of himself 15years younger on his alma mater campus.
Name: Us
Director, writer: Jordan Peele
Released: 2019/4
Format: 2.35:1
When and how viewed: Angelika Mosaic, 2019/4/23, small audience
Length: 116
Rating: R
Companies: Universal
Stars: ****_
Trailers: Enemy
The Double
Another Me
(Posted: Wednesday, April 24, 2019 at 10 PM EDT)