Jordan Peele's "Us" and Contemporary Social Protests

by Gabriel Alejandro

By now you must have seen or read it: Jordan Peele’s latest cinematic venture is a masterpiece that involves a doppelgänger trope to speak about the darkness within us, allegories of racism, metaphors of unfettered inequality that span through numerous social classes and races, family dynamics, and much more. Nevertheless, there is one aspect that has been, at least to my knowledge, largely unexplored, and that is the film’s commentary on the state of contemporary social protests. If one were to apply the film’s violent-but-ultimately-futile portrayal of a subaltern’s uprising to recent social struggles, one would find parallels in regards to their beginnings, public coverage, and inevitable normalization. And it is precisely this idea, the one that contemporary social protests have been “tethered” to past models which are destined to fail, that the film warns us against repeating.

Through this perspective, Us is a film about the tethered, a group that was made to live underground in the shadows of an upper society. After a number of decades experiencing subhuman conditions, they decide to make the upper society aware of their existence through violent and then “peaceful” means. The symbolism behind both group’s physical settings are meant to state the obvious: the society that lives above is better off than the one below. This is evidenced when Adelaide’s doppelgänger explains how, when the upper society ate, played, or did anything good, all the lower society had was a degraded version of it. The underground society was deprived of better quality of life because their plight was invisible to the upper-world dwellers.

It is important to note that many —if not, every— cultures have an underground group or various, depending on the case. These change according to temporal, social, historical, political, and even religious factors. Although the United State’s history has largely involved the African American experience as the subaltern, one should not restrict oneself to that sole interpretation for this film. Us’s portrayal of the disenfranchised can be a representation for many other experiences worldwide. Yet there is one element that still ties the film to the American experience and that is Red’s (Adelaide’s doppelgänger) idealization of  Hands Across America, a 1986 fundraising event that intended to help mitigate the rapid growth of homelessness and hunger in the United States. But as with many other initiatives that begin with good intentions, the end result left many with more gaps (pun intended) than the bridges it intended to create. 

Recent articles have resurfaced the contrasting opinions of Hands Across America thanks to Us. In The New York Times, Erik Piepenburg establishes that “By infusing Hands Across America with malevolent power, Peele is cinematizing one of the main criticism it faced in 1986: that it was a ‘superficial gesture that offered no long-term solution to poverty in the United States.’” Almost as an echo, Corey Plante writes in Invest that "Hands Across America essentially became a feel-good distraction for America in a time when homelessness was steadily becoming an epidemic thanks to President Ronald Reagan’s policies.” Both articles alude to the consequences of rampant symbolic gestures and superficial attitudes towards a problem that requires concrete action. More often than not, these types of initiatives place the actual problem in an abstract or unattainable plane and focus on the immediate satisfaction brought about the idea of helping others. In the case of Hands Across America, people paid a fee in order to participate and join hands with a person. After the event, there was no push towards policy change by lawmakers or the very same people who participated. Everyone felt they had already done what they could on the matter and even felt good about what little they had contributed.

So, how does this bode for the tethered and their movement? Well, the fact that Red wished to model their uprising after Hands Across America meant that her uprising would follow some of its ills. In regards to public perception, a similar “superficialization” of the tethered’s wishes was witnessed in the film. Soon after the attack on the surface world begins, Adelaide’s family turns on the news to find that there are other attacks happening nation-wide. While the news anchor speaks, Adelaide’s family notices that the information being shared is inaccurate and that no one else has noticed that these attackers are doppelgängers or much less learned where they come from or what their needs are. This scene can be taken as a allegory for what usually happens during instances where a subaltern or oppressed group decides to turn their concerns into action through protest. The surface-dwelling media can only grasp the shock and violence of the oppressed group’s immediate actions, but fail to deliver more in regards to the substance or needs behind them. If one were to take this into the real world, we would find striking similarities with recent protests such as Ferguson and Baltimore. In both cases, the actual concerns of the people where ultimately muddled by media coverage that decided to focus on the more striking aspects. This, in turn, distorted public perception and furthered the viewers' understanding from reality.

In addition, one can also find commentary on the longevity or effectiveness of contemporary protests. As we saw before, Hands Across America offered no long-term solutions and served more as a  temporary distraction from hunger and homelessness. In that respect, we can infer that the second part of the revolt, the part where the tethered hold hands and spread across the nation, will end in a similar manner. Red’s revolution, although justifiable, seems to have no real concrete goal besides public recognition. Once they begin linking to each other, the violence stops and all that is left is a symbolic gesture for the cameras to see. This is seen in the ending of the movie, as we see miles and miles of tethered joining hands together with helicopters flying above them. These helicopters are not piloted by under-worlders, they are above-world military and, probably, some are even recording the images for others to see. If we continue comparing this to recent events, we notice that, after a protest’s shocking beginnings, what follows is an idealization of the issues that are brought forward. People and policy makers begin discussing the topics in a distanced and idealized fashion, putting off any real talk of solutions. The whole event then becomes swallowed by the 24-hour news cycle until it is replaced with whatever comes next. This will be the sad fate of Red and her tethered’s uprising.

Aside from it all, the film also reflects an over-encompassing notion of what happens when we model our social movements after others from the past. Time after time, we see how, after a protest breaks out, opinions from the right and left sides of the political spectrum race to compare it to past movements. For example, whenever a racial struggle breaks out, the Civil Rights Movement of the sixties is brought forward. People from the right conjure up Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolence approach to condemn the initial shock and violence while people from the left remind everyone that, in moments of radical change, violence has made its presence to some degree. This conversation just steers the people’s attention in the wrong direction. The possibility of working towards a solution is replaced with historical debate, another distraction from the actual problem that only benefits a news channel's content. The final result is, again, not that different from what we have seen in recent years. A problem comes, is televised, is normalized, and then quickly forgotten.

Many of you may ask for a resolve to this cycle of indifference. Peele does not really present a definitive answer, but he does offer us a symbol. The pair of scissors, the weapon of choice by the tethered, acquires much more significance in this aspect. While for Red and her movement it represented attaining disconnection from their upper-world counterparts and from the capitalist tradition of subjugated groups, it could also very well mean that we must untether our narratives of social struggle from those of the past in order to create new, more effective ones for the future. Perhaps this would be a first step in ending the cycle of indifference. 

Cited articles:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/movies/us-hands-across-america.html

https://www.inverse.com/article/54329-us-hands-across-america-engages-with-dark-hypocrisy

The Sacrament: Movie Review

 by: Gabriel Serrano Denis

Well, I got something to say
I killed your baby today
And it doesn't matter much to me
As long as it's dead

    -Misfits, Last Caress

     Economic crisis, religious fundamentalism, political corruption and social unrest have always been the source from which the deformed manifestations of horror cinema feed and nourish themselves. From Don Siegel’s “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956), through George A. Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” (1968), to David Cronenberg’s “The Fly” (1986), paranoia and fear (of communism, counterculture, and AIDS) acted as the catalysts for the iconic creatures that still haunt and remind us of the political and emotional turmoil of their times. These “real” horrors, like the teenagers running from the monsters with chainsaws and knives of the 1980s, have forced American citizens to make terrifying decisions at their own peril decade after decade. Most recently, in 2011, a man called Richard Beasley posted a job advert on Craigslist in search for a watchman for his Ohio farm, offering $300 a week and a trailer home for free. Dozens of desperate workers suddenly stripped of their comfortable middle-class status applied for the job, only to be shot dead upon arrival by Beasley and 16-year-old Brogan Rafferty. An American Dream shattered, characters in search of betterment, a flash of hope, and the sudden, arbitrary destruction of life in the guise of salvation; the fundamentals of horror filmmaking.

     Following this tradition, contemporary horror auteur Ti West has successfully bred horror narratives from the initial conflicts of economic struggle and social detachment. In both “The House of the Devil” (2009) and “The Innkeepers” (2011), it’s the phantom of capitalism that leads the way into an inescapable menace, slowly building to a supernatural explosion of terror and hopelessness. The former presents a penniless college student accepting the eerie request to babysit an old couple’s ailing mother for $400 only to be sucked into a satanic ritual at the end of the night. The latter takes us into the Yankee Pedlar Inn, a haunted hotel at the end of its run, and its two remaining employees (about to be made redundant, futureless) who are desperate to capture some actual paranormal phenomena before the hotel closes.

     As with the classics of horror mentioned before, West taps into basic social and economic distress to pit his characters against oppressive forces all too familiar to the working class people (a wealthy couple taking advantage of a poor college student; the inability to escape from the confines of financial crisis). However, West is not interested in making larger points about American society with these films, despite the pertinence of his characters’ inciting conflicts. Though forced to act within such culturally significant situations, West’s characters experience their horrifying ordeals on a more personal and emotional level. With his new film, “The Sacrament” (2013), West not only delves into a fact-based narrative, but he grounds the horror in reality, directly addressing everything wrong with the current cultural zeitgeist in the process. Unfortunately, the biting social consciousness and the hollow characters through which it’s supposed to materialize don’t seem to have much of a point.

     In “The Sacrament”, produced by horror filmmaker Eli Roth, a Vice magazine journalist and his cameraman (AJ Bowen and Joe Swanberg) travel with fashion photographer and co-worker Patrick (Kentucker Audley) to an undisclosed country in search of his sister (Amy Seimetz), now living in a commune known as Eden Parish and run by a mysterious figure only referred to as “Father”. Based largely on the Jonestown Massacre of 1978, the film follows the newsteam as they are welcomed into Eden Parish, despite some minor altercations with armed guards at first, and slowly discover the true nature of “Father’s” paradise.

     The first miscalculation on behalf of the filmmakers comes in the form of its found footage aesthetic. Though more a “faux documentary” than an actual found footage film, the approach to the material nonetheless feels wrong and distracting. By striving for an extreme sense of reality, the film does well to justify its beautiful cinematography through its suggestion that an actual, professional journalistic photographer is at the helm. However, this does not justify the fact that the footage is so calculated and logically edited. With films like “Rec” and “Cloverfield”, though obviously constructed to a point where the narrative makes sense, the jumbled and chaotic nature of capturing live footage remains intact, and thus adds immediacy to an already tense situation. With “The Sacrament”, one can’t help but feel that it should’ve been shot conventionally. In a scene where Sam (AJ Bowen) sits down to interview “Father” (Gene Jones, ironically), his cameraman Jake frames up on Father and then goes to Patrick (with his handy DSLR hanging by his neck) and asks him to film Sam’s reactions from the opposite side. This totally unnecessary scene only serves to distance us from the sense of reality the film has worked so hard to achieve. It merely justifies the opportunity for West to play with the shot/reverse shot in the edit and thus only stays in the mind as a necessity of the filmmakers rather than a natural occurrence within the world of the film.
  

   Tyler Bates’ score also works against the filmmakers’ intentions as it permeates the entire film, leaving no doubt that something terrible and ominous is lurking within the commune. Since the film is presenting itself as a fake documentary, it makes sense to have a score, but then what does constructing the film as a documentary add to the overall impact of the story? It seems to me like it detracts from the overall experience as it is pretending to document something so similar to an actual controversial event. As such, the filmmaker’s distinct vision and take on the subject remains lost in the attempt to comment on reality and horror. With a subject and approach like this, where the story unfolds in less than two days time and the veracity of the horror is central, a bolder approach would’ve perhaps been ideal. As I was viewing the film I couldn’t help but think how certain moments would’ve felt had the score been entirely removed, if the camera had not captured many of the horrific moments, if we had heard or imagined more than what we actually see, if the camera wasn’t always on and thus harder and more jagged cuts would’ve signaled the passage of time and would’ve created immediacy. But then, it’s obvious that West wanted to experiment with the found-footage aesthetic by blending it with his particular, dreadful approach to horror.

     West’s films unfold with the slow burn of a bad decision coming into the foreground of consciousness, and this ties neatly into his care and attention to character and context. His films’ elegant and composed unraveling emphasizes mood and tension, very different from the commercial horror fare of visceral scares and buckets of gore. This elegance and careful planning of camera and blocking are present in “The Sacrament”, but it lacks the characters to sustain it. With “The House of the Devil” and “The Innkeepers”, West can withhold on the terror and the emotional payoff because we are following engaging characters with real, grounded stakes. Even as he sets up the conflict, the sense of dread is already present and building: something very bad is going to happen, it’s only a matter of “how” and “when”. But the “who” is already well established even before the dread starts to sink in. With “The Sacrament” all we have to invest in is the fact that Sam is a journalist and he wants a story. As he arrives at the commune, he suspects and doubts the validity of Eden Parish, confounded by the people’s complete willingness to live in such stripped conditions. Not only is this clichéd and contrived, but it also brings attention to Sam’s lack of personality. We don’t know what kind of journalist he is or aspires to be, only that he is a journalist and it’s his job to expose or find a story. We know that he has a wife and that she is soon to give birth, but this is a mere plot device that never heightens the emotional stakes. One even wonders why the film wasn’t centered on his friend Patrick, who has greater stakes in the matter and a conflict to resolve with his sister. As it is, West’s slow and calculated build-up to terror is wasted in the film, as we have no one to fear for.

 
     Despite all its flaws, the film is a natural product of its time. However, this relevance comes through in the sense that it explores the dangers of blind faith and extreme religious fundamentalism, and the untrustworthy American society from which it stems. Thus, the subject matter and realistic approach bring forth a film that speaks to a contemporary audience asphyxiated with school shootings, racism, homophobia, unemployment, poverty, international turmoil, mass murders, etc. All in all, “real” horror, not dependent on monsters or otherworldly manifestations to instill fear and shock. Sadly, the film fails to sustain its intent due to the lack of a distinct and personal vision concerning the idiosyncrasies of its subject matter. Though horrifying and shocking, anyone with a vague knowledge of Jonestown knows what’s coming. West structures his film smartly, withholding information and creating an atmosphere of uncertainty that leaves the audience anxious to know what it’s all building up to. But as the story progresses and every predictable beat is reached, it’s clear that West did not intend to alter or defy our expectations but rather to expose us to a “real” horrific event. And though horrific it is once it hits the screen (and it allows for some striking imagery), one can’t help but feel the lack of original thought, of a new lens through which to view the horror.

     Ti West has always been interested in people stumbling into horrifying situations. His characters enter unknown spaces in the hopes of finding something and end up being part of a grander, more sinister scheme. As an extension of his aesthetic and thematic interests, “The Sacrament” feels, in parts, like a genuine Ti West film. However, as a meaningful and powerful piece of horror filmmaking, West undoubtedly lost his way. In “The House of the Devil”, West opens his film with text detailing the influence of Satanic cults in the 1980s, where the film is set, finishing off with: “The following is based on true unexplained events.” So, as we follow the main character as she hears strange sounds in the house and slowly realizes what she’s gotten herself into, we know she’s the prey of a Satanic cult. In a Ti West film, the “what” is always spelled out for the audience. The “how” and the “when” are prolonged, withheld, manipulated, built up until they can’t contain themselves much longer. What’s missing from “The Sacrament” is the relevance of this build-up, the reason why we stick until the orgasm of terror pops up, the point of it all. This is partly because the “how” is as obvious as the “what”. We know what the characters are dealing with, how it’s going to end, who is going to die and who is going to survive; there is nothing for West to play with. And without a strong central character for the ordeal to matter, we are left in the cold watching as the “reality” unfolds.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier- Endorsing Good Wars

By: Ricardo A. Serrano Denis

      Is World War II still the Good War? This was the title of an Adam Kirsch New York Times article exploring just that, the goodness of the Second World War. It came out in March 2011, when Iraq and Afghanistan had pushed Americans to question the extent of confidence a country could extended towards military might and strategy in the twenty first century. Militarism as a virtue, as a primary national value, seemed to be dwindling in representational prowess. The distance breached between morality on the home front and morality on the battlefield had broadened much to the disadvantage of war as an American ideal. Fighting in the Middle East made military conflict an impersonal experience, much detached from the cohesiveness of the American experience. More importantly, it became its own entity, with its own politics and its own history. In other words, it went opposite the Second World War’s route, that of war as the defining principle of American society. Kirsch will conclude that World War II will stay “good” so long as it stays living history. Living history, in turn, can instruct, it can still impart teachings of its own and tell people that there actually is a right way to conduct war. Of course, Kirsch explains that such histories need to take into account ambiguities and morally gray areas. But when memory is so highly elevated as to be considered near mythical, then, we have another thing entirely. War was “good” back then. Therefore, war can still be “good”. And Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) endorses just that idea.

      Captain America means many things, but most of them rely on his war to make sense. The Second World War lives through Steve Rogers the same way Steve Rogers lives through it. It might make the character unstuck in time and it might keep him from being a more universal metaphor for war in America, but it keeps the war’s memory fairly grounded in what Kirsch referred to as living history. The character’s many discourses have been touched upon before. He upholds conservative politics, endorses a continued state of war, exalts ultra-patriotism, and survives as a testament to the goodness of the Second World War. These things hold true in the movie. 

      Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, Captain America: The Winter Soldier keeps with Captain America’s longstanding character conventions and gives us a fairly safe war movie. Rogers is now a part of SHIELD, just in time to watch it fall into the hands of HYDRA. In true sequel fashion, old enemies continue to haunt Rogers. HYDRA remains the Nazi stand-in par excellence (if HYDRA is not an offshoot of Nazism then nothing is), and is the main villain of the story. Captain America favorites such as Arnim Zola and obscure villains such as The Leaper pop up to keep true followers anxious for more. But it is the Winter Soldier that makes the movie stand above standard superhero fare. The character contrasts so starkly with Rogers that the whole HYDRA plot could have been scrapped so as to focus entirely on the Winter Soldier. In fact, the Winter Soldier is more a secondary story arc playing to the overarching plot that deals with war on a more general level. 

       The inclusion of the Winter Soldier could have been an interesting counterweight to the discourses of old residing in Rogers. The Winter Soldier, created by Ed Brubaker (who makes a blink-or-you’ll-miss-it cameo in the film) is revealed as Roger’s lost sidekick, Bucky. Brubaker broke one of the only rules Marvel comics resisted touching (only Bucky stays dead) to make Captain America face his war with an added sense of ambiguity that judges his sense of being as superficial and overtly simplistic. In the comics, when the long lost sidekick returns as a Soviet-trained super-soldier Rogers knows he not only faces Bucky but the war that turned him against America.

     Bucky’s Cold War turns history into a lesson that descends upon Rogers and lectures him on the darkness American history carried out of the Second World War. He distorts the idea of goodness in war by ridding himself of the conflict that grounded him in a bygone era that barely resonated later on. Captain America slept through the Cold War, conveniently frozen at the bottom of the ocean so as not to witness the United States fall into hysteria, anti-communist paranoia, and proxy wars that strayed farther still from the mythic principles of World War II. It was a time Rogers could very well find war to be at its most un-American. But the fact he slept through it meant his example, and that of the Second World War, did not shine bright enough to keep America from derailing into morally ambiguous territories. The Cold War could not be saved by the Good War because it was frozen in time, a memory that sought shelter rather than facing the realities of a world dictated by nuclear politics. So why not right that wrong with Captain America and a big silver screen production that pits him against a villain borne out of the Cold War?

     That Rogers faces the Winter Soldier can be seen as just that, an attempt to save the Cold War after the fact. Captain America, unfrozen, looks back into the history that pushes the Winter Soldier into the will of HYDRA and sees an opportunity to once again prove his war’s might can save all wars, turn them good. All throughout the movie the audience is subjected to scenes of Rogers visiting museum exhibits dedicated to himself, his old uniform in display. Once we see the old uniform standing above a display of the Howling Commandos, we know that, in the end, Captain America will revert to that uniform (not a suit) and go into battle as a World War II soldier first and a superhero second.

     It is never clear which war weighs more on the Winter Soldier throughout the movie. Arnim Zola is the Winter Soldier’s creator in the film, more a Nazi than a Soviet, but the movie does stress his secret Soviet assassin past. The fact Zola plays Winter Soldier’s Frankenstein keeps the character between wars. He is the darkness between. The thing war is capable of but should not be. Either way, it falls to Captain America to prove that his war, one no one questions as being his, can save both the day and the idea that war can still be a virtue if not a moral responsibility. And keeping to our expectations, the day and war is saved, and very convincingly. Captain America in his old uniform explodes on scene as a war god, the ultimate authority on militarism and how Americans should interact with its war powers. So, is World War II still the Good War? The answer is obvious if you are Captain America. Can War, in all its dimensions, be Good forevermore? Yes, but only if it follows in the footsteps of the Second World War.