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 Twilight Zone and Kennedy-era Optimism: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Sixties

by Gabriel Alejandro

"Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation"—a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself."
-John F. Kennedy inaugural address (January 20, 1961)

     The fifties’ last couple of years witnessed a shift in perspective that contrasted with the doom and gloom that had plagued the U.S. since the end of World War II and its subsequent lead-up to the Cold War. The transition peaked when a young Irish Catholic was nominated for the presidential ticket by the Democratic Party and later won the 1960 elections. A Harvard graduate, John F. Kennedy represented a “warmer” alternative to a nation whose domestic dispute resembled its foreign one; cold.

      One of the main objectives in Kennedy’s domestic agenda involved the reconciliation between the arts and politics, a relationship that the past decade had thoroughly tarnished. Hollywood Blacklisting and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch-hunt had pushed many entertainment workers into exile during the forties and early fifties, leaving those who stayed behind without stable employment and in fear of persecution. But now, gone were the days McCarthyism and the House of Un-American Activities Committee, and in their stead were Kennedy’s youthful and progressive prospects. This meant that every writer, actor, director, producer and composer could venture freely into their craft without worry of whiplash by the government which, in turn, had set a precedent for the American audience:

     He [Kennedy] was…the first presidential candidate to mount both a literary and a television 
     [emphasis added] campaign for the office, the only one comfortable in both media, and 
     the perfect man for a time when Americans were teetering on a balance point between image and
     word. (Thurston Clarke, Ask Not, 2010; P. 115)

Television, a medium that had been persecuted for its then-rapid widespread and informative capabilities, was becoming more and more common in every household. This, along with a young president’s embrace of the medium, catapulted the industry’s creativity into experimenting with never-seen-before themes and techniques.

      One program in particular that emerged during this era was Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. Originally presented as a fantasy/science fiction anthology series, The Twilight Zone constantly touched on subjects that reflected the worries and aspirations of the times. The show’s first episode aired on October 2, 1959, three months before Kennedy began campaigning for the primary elections (January 2, 1960) and was cancelled in late January 1964, less than three months after his assassination (November 22, 1963). But the program’s five-year-run would be enough for it to leave its mark in television history. By exploring different aspects of the human psyche such as that of a soldier’s during war, the possibility of life in other planets, and giving new angles to historical events, The Twilight Zone ventured into territory that would have been deemed unsuitable for television would it have aired some years earlier.
 

      In “Where Is Everybody?,” the first episode that formally aired under The Twilight Zone brand name, we meet an amnesiac Air Force pilot roaming in a deserted town. After much scavenging and self-questioning, the man finally collapses after running from a shop and into a street crossing pole. We then see that the man is not really in a desolated town but in a test chamber, and a group of military personnel observes the unfolding of his delusion. He is a test subject in a moon trip simulator, completely isolated in a town was just an illusion. After being carried out by medics, he gets a glimpse of the real moon and says, “Hey! Don’t go away up there! Next time it won’t be a dream or a nightmare. Next time it’ll be for real. So don’t go away. We’ll be up there in a little while.”

      Aside from the nuclear tension that characterized the Cold War, the space race against the Soviet Union comes in close second. This competition would not have only granted technological supremacy to its victor, but it would have also awarded ideological superiority to the winning nation. The U.S. audience had been fantasizing about space travel since the early years of film and television. But for a while any public “space talk” was avoided amid fears of Russian spies acquiring classified information. That lasted until May 25, 1961, when Kennedy, before a joint session of Congress, gave his "Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs” speech in which he urged the Nation to set the goal of “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” A year later, on September 12, 1962, he gave another speech, later known as the “Moon Speech,” at Rice Stadium in Houston, Texas. This time he expressed how the trip to the moon would spur an aftermath of technological innovations similar to previous achievements such as the printing press and the steam engine. Even though the goal was set to be long-term (before the end of the decade) and the Russians had the advantage, the Nation had been rallied up and felt that the task at hand was within grasp for the first time.

      Other well-known episodes from the first season such as “Time Enough at Last” and “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” (both airing between November 1959 and March 1960) also carried the spirit of the epoch in more than one form. In the first one we meet Henry Bemis, an avid reader surrounded by uncultured people. He is an admirer of Robert Frost (who, coincidentally, recited a poem during Kennedy’s inaugural) and is mocked by both his boss and wife for his passion for literature. The subject of anti-intellectualism was well-known at the Kennedy camp. A lover of words and history, Kennedy believed past administrations had strayed from establishing an intellectual core and compensated by opening the doors to intellectuals in his administration. Furthermore, in “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” the topic veers from current or future events into the near-past. Maple Street is your typical 1950s portrait of an American neighborhood until bizarre incidences take place after a shining object is seen in the sky. Since the residents do not know the cause of these occurrences, they begin to single out each other by creating conspiracies fueling the idea that a monster dwells among them. It is a clever reimagining of Communist paranoia and its blind fervor that stalked the government under Senator McCarthy. The episode ends with a conversation between the culprits, two extra-terrestrial beings who observe the events from afar, when one says: “… I take it this place –This ‘Maple Street,’ is not unique?” To which the other one responds: “By no means. The world is full of Maple Streets. And we'll go from one to the other and let them destroy themselves. One to the other...One to the other...One to the other...” (The “monsters” in the title referring to human beings instead of actual monsters or aliens).

      In conclusion, one could spend countless pages and ink counting the parallels between history
and fiction in every Twilight Zone episode. For many, Kennedy embodied the spirit of the people which sought to distance itself from the practices and ideologies of the past. This resulted in a large manifestation of arts and academic work in government affairs and vice versa. The constant mirroring and exposure of political subjects in television and movies resulted in the “de-stigmatization” of some elements but also in the further expansion of others. In one hand, the possibility of reaching the moon and its advances was tangible; but on the other, the bomb and other scare-tactic representatives were still ever-present in every household. Nonetheless, this did not halt the television and film industries from maintaining the flux of interesting proposals throughout the decade. And even though creativity persisted, the early sixties’ optimism, along with Kennedy, ceased on November 22, 1963.