Abstract
Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) is a philosophical and political film with themes ranging from the uncanny nature of self-identity to specific current political issues such as extreme inequality, the repression of history, and migration. It is also a jeremiad about class, in which a failure of ethics leads to a potentially apocalyptic insurrection. The hinge between the ethical and the political, and between love and justice, is the figure of the neighbor as portrayed in the Christian Bible and theorized in Kenneth Reinhard’s essay “Toward a Political Theology of the Neighbor” (2005). Through an early but crucial turn away from empathy, followed by the repression both of this turn and of the very existence of the oppressed, the film’s protagonist Adelaide, like the Priest and the Levite in the parable of the Good Samaritan, loses her status as neighbor and opens herself to vengeance. So too, the film implies, the US middle class has lost their status as “neighbors” and has hence left themselves open to the fearsome possibility of becoming the victims of a violent and nihilistic revolution.
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Notes
- 1.
Readers who want or need a plot summary of Us are referred to Atavia Reed, “A detailed plot summary for everyone too scared to see US,” at https://fansided.com/2019/03/26/us-detailed-plot-summary-ending/ (Reed 2019). Reed’s summary does not, however, describe the last long drone shots as the family drives south. These include an overhead view of the Tethered standing in a long line, side by side and hand in hand, across the landscape, reminiscent of the views of Americans participating in the 1986 “Hands Across America” event; and ultimately a view of what may be combat, as helicopters hover over a distant, smoking landscape.
- 2.
Usually but not always: sometimes the other is unspecified, or is an anonymous force against which “we’re all in this together.” That expression, however, though valid at times, can also be a way of minimizing the perception of difference in the interest of masking inequality or injustice. There is a sense in which “we’re all in this together” with regard to climate change: it affects the whole planet. But some of us are at once more part of the problem than others, and also more likely to be insulated from the worst aspects of climate disaster. If “we’re all in this together” is a way of arguing for disproportionate sacrifices from the disadvantaged, it becomes a way of reinforcing a hierarchical us/them binary and perpetuating injustice.
- 3.
In our introduction to the adult Adelaide, she is initially asleep in the family car as her husband drives them to their summer house. Janelle Monáe’s “I Like That” is playing on the car stereo. At the precise moment when Adelaide’s eyes pop open, the words of the song are “a walking contradiction” (Monae n.d.).
- 4.
See the last page of the New York State Office of Mental Health’s pdf listed in References (“A Guide for Supervisors: Discussing Race Issues in the Workplace” 2020).
- 5.
The reader should be advised that (to the degree that the two intentions are separable) my primary intent is not to use Us as a way of joining the argument on ethics and politics of which Reinhard’s “political theology of the neighbor” is a part, but rather vice versa: to use Reinhard, and through him Slavoj Žižek, Emmanuel Levinas, and others, for the purposes of analyzing the film. Were I to attempt a response directly to Reinhard’s argument, I would be tempted to claim that, even though he repeatedly insists on the “unbridgeable gap” between ethics and politics, Reinhard’s project is ultimately, as he says, to discover a space “where the one truth procedure passes into the other, love into politics or politics into love… the seam where the equality and sameness of the political encounters the singularity and difference of love” (2005, 64). In doing so, he is doing pretty much precisely what he has (in my view wrongly) declared to be impossible.
- 6.
- 7.
Reinhard and Žižek see this notion that politics results from a failure of ethics, a failure of (Christian) neighborliness, as an error. See Reinhard 48–49. My claim is not that the position implied in Us is philosophically correct, but that it is the film’s account of how Red comes to be as she is and do what she does.
- 8.
Although Red’s implicit politics seem to be consistent with the left’s version of class struggle, the notion of a group forgotten by the elite, excluded politically while oppressed and downwardly mobile economically, also fits with the right-wing populist view of the fate of under-educated white people (especially outside the big cities) in the contemporary US. This group are also perhaps the ones who have most visibly gone “mad down there,” among whom the most outlandish paranoid conspiracy theories have taken hold. We must remember that in the film the Tethered are not just those excluded by race or ethnicity: recall the quick and thoroughgoing slaughter of the Tyler family, the Wilsons’ white friends, by their brutal doubles.
- 9.
Of course, Bhabha famously goes on to point out the “menace of mimicry,” which “is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority” (Bhabha 2004, 126).
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Byers, T.B. (2024). “It’s Probably the Neighbors”: Identity, Otherness, and the Return of the Oppressed in Jordan Peele’s Us (2019). In: Gregorio-Fernández, N., M. Méndez-García, C. (eds) Culture Wars and Horror Movies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53836-0_8
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