The True Horror of Assimilationist Politics

Rating: 9/10 (24 March 2019)

Us is a profound and brilliant political fable, one that not only speaks to the controversial legacy of the 1960s civil rights strategy, but can also be generalized into an anti-assimilationist critique of respectability politics and a structuralist analysis of the social subject.
Obviously, the film's catastrophic event is a metaphor for revolution - the lowerclass getting organized and overthrowing the existing social order by murdering the upperclass. But what makes this film interesting is the plot-twist towards the end, where we find out that the woman who fights for her family is actually from the underworld, and that Red is actually the little girl from the surface world who got dragged down into the underworld by her counterpart and went insane.
This is precisely the central tragedy - and the true horror - of this film: the woman from the underworld who fought her way into the surface world supresses the memory of where she comes from and ends up fighting to preserve her upperworld social order instead of fighting for the liberation of her people.
On the flip side, the girl who got dragged down into the underworld went insane, but because she experienced the upper world, she was the only one who knew what had to be done - organize the formless masses of the underworld and revolt.
The behaviors of these two individuals are both determined by their new-found class positions - the lucky member of the oppressed class who assimilated into respectable society, instead of trying to liberate her people, ends up maintaining her upperclass social order; whereas the upperclass individual who got dragged down, instead of trying to get back into her upperclass position, became the leader of rebellion.
This structuralist analysis of the social subject highlights the tragic and horrifying reality of assimilationism. According to the assimilationist strategy, the answer to oppression is to join the existing social order and try to gain respect from the oppressors. In the context of the civil rights movement, the assimilationist answer to racial oppression is for black people to become respectable by white society - by becoming professionals, well-spoken, adopting white bourgeois lifestyle, etc. In the context of the lgbt movement, the assimilationist answer to heterosexist patriarchy is to assimilate into straight culture - by adopting the bourgeois nuclear family, by gaining access to the institution of marriage, by leading a professional middle-class lifestyle, etc.
In contrast, the revolutionary, transformative, or separatist positions refuse to assimilate into the existing oppressive social order but instead aims to either overthrow, radically transform, or create a separate social order from the status quo.
What Adelaide embodies is the grim reality of the American dream - invisible lower class people (from the Third World) who fought their way into respectable society, became the lucky few who made it, and end up as the most ardent fighters for the deeply oppressive and exploitative capitalist imperialist social order.
The film, however, ends with optimism and hope - the ignorant and privileged social order is overthrown (albeit with few surviving reactionary elements), the wretched existence of invisible lower class people were liberated, and the emancipated people all held hands in unity, symbolizing the triumph of a new egalitarian social order.