Film Review: Us
Jordan Peele in the realm of the Unseelie
Please note that the following post will contain discussion of major plot points in the film Us. If you have not watched the film, and would like to do so in the future without spoilers, you can stop reading now.
In 2019, I was still in law school. That summer, I completed an internship where I had tremendous fun — and hopefully, did some decent work along the way. I had the chance to reconnect in person with an old friend whom I’d missed very much. I bought merch from a webcomic artist that I’d been following for many years. I participated in a nationwide citizen science project. There have been ups and downs to all parts of my life, and there were things from that time that were not perfect. Still, compared to the COVID-19 pandemic and all that followed, 2019 felt (to me) like an oasis of tranquility. "Which exactly are the halcyon days of my youth?" Calvin asked his father in a classic installment of the newspaper comic Calvin and Hobbes. "I believe they're awarded retroactively when you're grown up," his father replied.
By that standard, there is no question in my mind that 2019, particularly the latter half, was a long, extended halcyon moment.
But I digress. I mention all this merely because in 2019, I was still in law school, and I distinctly remember going with some law school classmates to see the film Us in theaters. I saw a lot of movies in those days. Jordan Peele was pivoting to become an impressive writer/director/producer of horror films; Us represented his second major foray into the genre.
It was a damn fine film. I’m not one who usually goes for horror, and I still thought it was damn fine.
I also remember a tremendous revelation that occurred to me in the film’s climactic scene. To me, it seemed blindingly obvious. I’m sure I made for an amusing sight, gesturing wildly, excitedly explaining my conclusions to my classmates, not helped by the fact that I’d ordered Cheetos-flavored popcorn at the movie theater. (What is life, if you ignore the chance for new experiences?)1
Maybe I’m just pulling nonsense out of thin air. I’m not under the impression that Jordan Peele himself had any of this in mind when he was writing the film. I may well be the only person who came up with this particular theory.
First, some background.
In 1895, in County Tipperrary, a man named Michael Cleary murdered his wife Bridget.
Or maybe he did. Whether or not she was dead before he immolated her body is unclear. Cleary himself held that he’d not harmed Bridget, but merely a changeling who had taken her place; a court convicted him of manslaughter.
The sincerity of his belief has been since questioned. Sure, she was sick and the folk knowledge of changelings may well have been around in those parts of Ireland at that time. Certain folk beliefs regarding the fair folk persist to the present day. But changeling myths are more about children, usually. (Of course, there are any number of stories about “changeling” children documented to have been accidentally or intentionally killed. Somehow, the Cleary case gets all the attention, mostly because it happened relatively late.)
In European folklore, a changeling was a child-substitute, one of the favorite tricks played by those of whom it is not lucky to speak. They would enter a human household and swap a child for one of their own. The existence of a changeling child could be easily detected by one who was wise. Changelings, as everyone knew, were peevish, ill-tempered creatures, in sharp contrast to the peaceful babies they replaced. Growing up, they tended to be strange, slow to speak, unusual in manners. They may have been fascinated with counting and other peculiar tasks.
Scholars seeking rationalization of folklore have, of course, suggested that the “changeling” myth likely arose from superstitious populations seeking to rationalize a child with certain conditions. Autism, of course, is the primary candidate (though there are many others which may have contributed to the myth). Autistic children tend to be visibly different in obvious ways (stimming, for example, and fixation on certain tasks).
I recall reading somewhere, years ago, about anti-vaxx parents, and how many of them become convinced of this (dangerous and erroneous) belief because their child began acting visibly autistic sometime after the first round of childhood vaccinations. The vaccines, of course, should be deployed as early as possible, to minimize the time that a child is vulnerable to pathogens. Still, it is notable that a lot of anti-vaxx parents report that their child is “normal” for some time, but then suddenly…changes in a way that they don’t like. And, because these parents are just a little less mentally stable than is desirable among parents, they start casting about for a rationalization. Just like the parents who became convinced that their child was a changeling — and began undertaking often-dangerous rituals in order to “bring their child back” — so too do anti-vaxx parents endanger their children, convinced that something, somehow, has stolen their healthy little child.
If I sounded sarcastic just now, it is because I intended to be sarcastic. I have strong feelings about how certain people treat autistic children, in part due to the experience of certain dear friends of mine, but also because I am certain that were I born three hundred years ago, I would have been a changeling child, and would have gone to work as a miller’s apprentice and spent my days happily counting out grains of wheat. I was not born three hundred years ago, of course, and so I edit Wikipedia and write unremarkable poetry.
Wasn’t this supposed to be a film review?
The film Us begins with young Adelaide (our future protagonist) wandering away from her parents at a carnival. She appears fascinated by the ocean at night, the waves lapping at the beach, and there is a moment of dread that she will wander unsupervised into the ocean and drown.2 But to our relief, she turns away. Instead, she wanders into a spooky carnival funhouse, with an array of magic mirrors and other such illusions.
Something happens to her. And afterwards, she is so traumatized that she regresses verbally, which her parents fight about, though she eventually grows up about as normal as one could expect.
Fast-forward some decades. Adelaide is grown up, married, has two kids. Her family goes on vacation. They’ve got a nice little cabin, and friends in the cabin next door, and oh yes this is the place where Adelaide went on vacation back when she was a kid, years ago.
Bad things start happening. The family is terrorized by a group of doppelgangers who resemble distorted versions of them. These doppelgangers are (mostly) incapable of speech, but Adelaide’s doppelganger explains that they are the Tethered, replicas of humans who live underground. There’s a lot of nonsense about government experiments and control and stuff but the “explanations” here are frankly nonsensical and can be safely discarded; even in the universe of the film, they seem unlikely to be factually accurate. Rational explanations of spooky events are rarely satisfying, after all.
Adelaide kills her doppelganger and escapes with her family. However, it is revealed at the movie’s end that “Adelaide” was the doppelganger all along. She had knocked out her human counterpart, that night, and taken her place. This is why her “Tethered” equivalent was able to speak; that was the real Adelaide, who had been born on the surface.
Adelaide — or the doppelganger whom we have been following since the early scenes — finally remembers this at the movie’s end. Adelaide’s son is the only other character who maybe also figures things out; it’s notable that he himself seems to have inherited some of his mother’s characteristics.3 Her son is less talkative and throughout the film is often wearing a Halloween mask — he’s literally masking. He maybe figures out what’s going on; his mother smiles at him. And the family leaves town, having survived the night, as the other Tethered enact their plan to —
Oh, right. I forgot about the rest of the movie, with the stuff the other Tethered are doing, and also the weird references to how the government created them to maybe try and control the surface world.
I genuinely — this isn’t a cop-out — think you can ignore most of the bullshit. It’s just fever-dreams, dreamt up by the “real” Adelaide growing up underground, losing her sanity.
What’s important is that Us — intentionally or unintentionally — is a modern retelling of the changeling myth. Adelaide, as a child, displays a number of classically autistic traits, culminating in a sudden (and inexplicable) regression in her ability to communicate. It is eventually revealed that she was replaced by a doppelganger — in a theme park attraction that was literally named Merlin’s Forest — and that’s why she’s like that. Many of the unfortunate “changelings” were subject to violence; in the movie, the changeling Adelaide ends up killing her human self.
But America isn’t the right place for the old changeling myths; there are no tricksters living in the forests who might steal a human child. America doesn’t really have that. What America does have are government conspiracies. The Tuskegee syphilis experiment, MKUltra, and a host of others. (And MKUltra was specifically a clumsy attempt at mind control, wasn’t it?) If an American parent suspects that someone has harmed their child, they’re not going to blame the paranormal; they’re going to blame the Men in Black.
That might explain the Tethered, a little bit. They’re not an actual government conspiracy; successful government conspiracies tend to have fewer moving parts, and more concrete ends, not just existing for existence’s sake. The Tethered represent the collective unconscious of legions of deluded parents, those whose beliefs align with people like RFK Jr. and Alex Jones, the parents who are convinced that their autistic child wasn’t this way naturally (because that would mean loving them for who they are) — that someone, anyone, changed them somehow, made them something other than “normal.”
I don’t think Jordan Peele meant that explicitly. He sure didn’t say anything like this in any of his press tour interviews. I think he might have just tried to make a straight-up horror film.
Maybe. Or maybe not. Because his other films do, in fact, have significant and immediately obvious messages, usually along a socially conscious bent, and so I’m skeptical that he randomly made one film that’s just scary stuff happening with no subtext. And for the record, I’m all for socially conscious messages, but I’m well aware that there are wingnuts in many political flavors. I’ll never forget going into a small bookstore and seeing, on the one shelf, books about how redlining and exploitation have shaped American neighborhoods to the present day — and on the other shelf, books from Louis Farrakhan about how vaccines are the devil.4
I’m not saying that Jordan Peele thinks that autistic people come from underground, either. Please don’t get me wrong. If I’m right in my interpretation, then I think it’s neat someone decided to explore the psychology of the “vaccines cause autism” types in a fictional context, one that clearly ties that kind of lunacy with the lunacy of medieval changeling myths. Being a parent does not dispell all delusions. Some delusions — particularly related to parental expectations — are particularly long-lived, and potentially dangerous.
Will it ever end? Maybe someday — when parents accept their kids for who they are without having to invent fantasies for why they were deprived of their perfect hypothetical child — when people like RFK Jr. and the board of Autism Speaks5 are dead and gone — in short, when sanity prevails.
That might not happen for a long, long time. Now there’s a horror story.
The popcorn was awful. I ordered it multiple times that year, when I went to see movies.
I will point out in this footnote that there are reportedly higher rates of drowning among autistic children, caused by a combination of fascination with water and a tendency to wander.
Though the exact causes of autism are incompletely understood, it is known to be highly heritable.
In the middle, between those two polar extremes, were books on Kemeticism and how Washington, D.C. was built with secret Egyptian magic. Harmless fun, really.
The damage done by Autism Speaks is too vast to be listed in a footnote, but they are one of the more dangerous “charities” currently operating in the United States.