This is the first in my new series, American Gothic: Investigating Horror, Ghosts, Monsters, & Haunted Houses. Stay tuned for more…
After Jordan Peele’s movie Us introduces the Wilson family to its doppelgängers, the main character Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) asks her double, “Who are you?” The doppelgänger responds, “We’re Americans.”
The film opens on a note that has both psychological and sociological resonance: “There are thousands of miles of tunnels beneath the United States.” This factoid brings to mind any number of associations, ranging from the history of the Underground Railroad and slavery (the characters’ doubles are called the “Tethered,” after all) in the U.S. to the architectural structure of Freud’s notion of the unconscious.
Like his 2017 Get Out, Peele’s Us forces us to reckon with our shadow selves, the individual and collectives sins of both self and nation, the subterranean parts we’d rather shove deep down into the figurative underground. Peele’s theme is reminiscent of the plight of the nameless protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man, whom we meet while he’s holed up in an underground lair, feeding off the electricity of the upper, more privileged world, and meditating on his own history of cultural invisibility in that aboveground society. There’s a reason that postcolonial theory identifies oppressed people as “subaltern.”
As I watched Us this weekend, I also couldn’t help but think of W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness, which he described as,
“This sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife – this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.”
This is not to say that the treatment of African Americans is the only American sin that Us excavates. The funhouse in which Adelaide initially locates her doppelgänger (although, suffice it to say, this all turns out to be a more complex relationship than it at first seems) bears the not at all PC image of a Native tribal chief.
At the core of Us is another kind of doubleness—the American nightmare that lurks beneath the shiny visage of the American dream. As Ta-Nehisi Coates frames it so beautifully in his 2015 Between the World and Me (a book that serves as an excellent counterpart to Us all the way through, in fact), “For so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies.” Us literalizes Coates’s image of the upper privileged Dream that rests on the underground nightmare of so many other Americans.