Mirror Image

Rating: 8/10 (27 March 2019)

Writer-director Jordan Peele's prior picture, "Get Out" (2017), didn't get enough credit for its cinematic allusions and how they doubled the social commentary on race that grabbed most of the attention. Like "Us," Peele's follow-up film, it was about doppelgÃ¤ngers, about an idyllic world above and a horrific "sunken place" below, there was the metaphorical animal motif (deer in "Get Out" and rabbits in "Us"), and there was a haunted artist. In "Get Out," the protagonist was a photographer, who was desired for his artistic eye. Here, "Us" features a dancer who is envied for her freedom of expression and movement. Somewhat the inverse of "Get Out," however, the socio-political message of "Us" is submerged, while the artistic, including cinematic, references are lifted to the surface.
Some are so conspicuous they are worn on the characters' t-shirts: Michael Jackson's music video "Thriller" and, while at the beach no less, "Jaws" (1975). On the boardwalk, a reference is made to "The Lost Boys" (1987) being filmed, and there are others, intentional or not (I'm not sure whether anyone anymore is intentionally imitating Hans Zimmer's horns from "Inception" (2010), but they keep coming back, including in the climax here). As in "Get Out," TV plays an important part, too, especially for narrative and cultural context. There's the "Hands Across America" event, as well as some VHS tapes beside the TV of movies that some astute viewers have pointed out bare important themes upon "Us." One of them that, at first, doesn't seem to share any similarity to Peele's horror piece is "The Right Stuff" (1983). (Another recent movie, as an aside, that I've seen to contain a similar reference to the same film but for, assuredly, different intent is "Captain Marvel" (2019). Go figure.) Like the hand-holding charity event, or the declaration herein of "We're Americans," the copy of the patriotic "The Right Stuff" seems to hint at the underlying agenda of "Us"--and reminding that the title's letters also stand for "U.S."
I'll leave it to others to decipher that message, which although less succinct than that of "Get Out," seems to be of the muted and downtrodden "other" below "us" above who are occupied by keeping up with the Joneses (as best represented here by the Tyler family, and Gabe Wilson's jealousy of their material possessions) and the general hubris of the "us versus them" mentality at all, and others can investigate the relevance of the Biblical verse "Jeremiah 11:11." I'm more interested in the allusions that double, or reflect, the allegory. Plus, I think it's apt that "Us" focuses more clearly on the surface with those material references; after all, arguably and at the risk of cynicism, even "Hands Across America" was better at selling t-shirts than it was raising money for charity, let alone alleviating any of the social problems it, or "Us," for that matter, raised.
Live-action motion pictures themselves have always been doppelgÃ¤ngers--reflecting us back to ourselves and capturing the essence of the living and since dead. Narrative cinema (and, later, TV) caught onto the possibilities of this early on, including "The Student of Prague" films (1913 and 1926), partly based on the novels of E.T.A. Hoffmann, where the student is haunted by his mirror image (long before any "Twilight Zone" episode that inspired Peele was made). Although now we have digital processes and CGI, from the beginning, cinema was able to replicate what it had already replicated via effects such as superimpositions (a.k.a. multiple-exposure photography). Even the timelines in "Us" are doubled. And, then, there are mirrors and shadows, which are analogous to all of this, and like "The Student of Prague" and others before and after it, "Us" is full of shots of reflections and silhouettes. Moreover, the narrative's inciting incident--where the doubles meet--takes place in a funhouse of mirrors. Perhaps, Peele wasn't considering Hoffmann and the Germanic roots of dopplegÃ¤ngers. But, he surely had a couple oft-referenced pieces of English-language literature in mind with Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" novels. (Another aside and to highlight how common are allusions to these books, another recent movie I saw was "The Favourite" (2018), which also featured metaphor-infused rabbits.) Of course, the surface/underground dichotomy is already rife in symbolism, especially with the explicit religious allegory here, but surely it's no coincidence that the hole is entered through the looking-glass and is full of rabbits, nor that what is encountered below is the fantastic reversed, the shadow, or reflection of that above.
The slasher horror-film and other, general movie conventions that abound in "Us" may not always be as refined as in "Get Out" (and its humor hits more than its scares do). The exposition-bursting climactic twists especially have the feel of a James Bond villain explaining his elaborate scheme solely for the benefit or us, the viewers, as opposed to the more-eloquent use of TV for a similar (and, thankfully, simpler) purpose in "Get Out." But, again, as in "Get Out," the doubling for the control of and the appearance of the characters bring attention, as does the stylistic focus on mirrors and outlines here, to central concerns of film theory, including the cinematic gaze and character identification, and this is felicitously connected to its message--forcing one to look in the mirror, so to speak, and ask who is us?