You can be forgiven for being confused at the end of Us. The movie, like creator Jordan Peele’s directorial debut Get Out, is rife with metaphors — only in Us, the allegory is much more ambiguous. That’s partly due to the complicated relationship between the main character, Adelaide, and the mysterious woman, Red, who appears out of her past. (Both women are played by Lupita Nyong’o in an incredible dual performance.) If you’ve already seen the film then you know there’s a lot more connecting the two women than a mere case of stalking. But you might not have caught all the details — or how the connection between Adelaide and Red ultimately helps enrich the film’s overall symbolism. So let’s walk through it. Spoilers ahoy! There are three big clues that tell us about the women’s identities To break down the film’s ending, we of course have to reveal the giant plot twist, so here goes: When the two girls met in the carnival maze years ago, they switched places. The one from the Underground — attempting to escape from horrific enslavement down below — attacked and kidnapped the one from above, replacing her in her old life as “Adelaide.” The girl formerly known as Adelaide then grew up in captivity underground, becoming known as “Red.” Meanwhile, the new, replacement Adelaide apparently repressed her memory of what happened and grew up believing she was the real Adelaide. In the present day, Red has become the leader of the underground slave rebellion. All of this makes it difficult to say who is the imposter and who is the victim. And that’s the whole point. But before we think about that too closely, let’s look at the big clues we get that tell us what’s really going on. (Note: From here on out, we’ll call the original Adelaide “Red” and the replacement Adelaide “Adelaide.”) 1) For Red, the color red represents freedom and her memory of her old life The color red seems to be a powerful trigger for Red. The last thing she is eating before she’s kidnapped and taken to the Underground is a bright red apple. We’re given several prominent shots of it before she goes inside the maze — where one of the last thing she sees is a bright red “Exit” sign. She then is forced to trade places with Adelaide, who puts her own Hands Across America sweatshirt on Red and takes the other girl’s Thriller T-shirt instead. That Hands Across America shirt is another obvious link for Red to her former life above ground. The figures on it are also colored in red, which is why, when she eventually leads her fellow Tethered slaves to rise up, she has them all don the color red and recreate the image. 2) Red is the only one of the Tethered who knows English Though her voice is rusty from disuse, Red clearly speaks English — in fact she starts with the phrase “once upon a time,” which makes sense given that her last memory of spoken language most likely involved hearing children’s stories. But she’s the only one of the escaped Tethered slaves who does. She notes that the others have all gone mad from the deprivation of their lives below, in which they’re essentially forced (by powers unknown) to mimic the motions of living in a torturous echo of their above-ground counterparts. That manifests as a primitive form of communication that sounds like incoherent noise to us. But it’s an actual language; we see the slaves use it to communicate multiple times. For instance, when Abraham (Gabe’s double) is out on the boat, he hears a call from one of the other slaves in the distance, and calls out to them in turn. Meanwhile, Adelaide actually seems to occasionally lose her grasp of English as she gets closer to uncovering the truth. At several points, she seems to struggle for coherent language, and early on, she tells her friend Katie that she sometimes has trouble talking — which we realize she means literally. And, crucially, the moment she finally kills Red, she lets out a deep roar that’s similar to the primal calls of the Tethered — as if she’s remembered her first language at last. 3) “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” is a trigger for Adelaide to fully recall what she did Horror movie audiences love clapping when the hero finally defeats the villain — but that, interestingly enough, didn’t happen in either of my opening night Us showings, and an informal poll suggests audiences were more disturbed than happy about the moment when Adelaide finally defeats Red. This is probably due to the subtle clues we get that Adelaide isn’t entirely the victim. In fact, at one point, near the end, Adelaide is shown pursuing Red with a limp that precisely mimics that of Jack Torrance near the end of The Shining as he goes on his murderous rampage. But Adelaide doesn’t seem to know that she’s the kidnapper who originally grew up Tethered — that is, until the final moments of Red’s life. In the film’s climax, Adelaide has fatally wounded Red; Red uses her final moments to do something unexpected: She whistles. The tune she’s whistling is “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” — the last song she had stuck in her head before she was kidnapped. (The song also invokes the slaves’ ascent to freedom by “crawling up” the water spout, i.e. the sewers, to their escape.) The moment Adelaide hears the song, her face changes and she immediately tries to silence Red, even though Red is already dying. As she brutally snaps Red’s neck, her expression becomes almost gleeful, and she lets out the aforementioned primal scream that turns into a laugh. But this moment of awareness is immediately followed by denial. When she rescues her son, Jason, she tells him, incredibly, that now things will be just like they were before. If that line sounded hopelessly naive or misplaced — after the mass slaughter of what appears to be millions of people across the country, clearly nothing will be the same — that’s because it was born out of Adelaide’s desperate personal desire to forget what she’s just remembered: her own past. And that’s a huge theme of Us, overall. The movie constantly reminds its audience that America’s story is one of history perpetually being forgotten or overwritten, like the genocide of Native Americans, whose iconography gets briefly appropriated and then hastily remodeled for the maze that starts the story. Characters frequently speak of forgetting things; Adelaide’s entire character is rooted in forgetting. The ones who don’t have the luxury of losing their memories are the ones who remain Underground. (“I never forgot you,” Red tells Adelaide.) That’s because not only are they forced to live out approximations of “real” life without any agency over their own bodies or identities, but they are the only witnesses to their own misery and enslavement. In Red’s world, a good memory is the key to escape. But while Red tells Adelaide that the two of them are special, Us takes care to undermine our expectations in order to make a cold point that none of this is special at all — that what’s important is how ordinary the underground slaves are. In fact, they’re just like us, because they are us. Us sets up the idea that the Tethered are Others, when they’re anything but Through their sheer weirdness — their scuttling movements, their violence, their primal language, their creepy smiles, and their apparent lack of purpose beyond “killing everyone and holding hands a lot” — we come to think of the Tethered as Others early on. They are monstrous, and their physical resemblance to those above ground only establishes an uncanny valley that makes them that much creepier. That assumption — that the Doppelgangers are different, shadow figures — helps cement the audience’s belief early on that Adelaide must have successfully escaped from the carnival maze. After all, compared to Red, she’s so fully human, so powerfully emotive, so loving and caring — right? So the revelation that she was born in the Underground is jarring to us for multiple reasons. Not only does it make us think differently about Adelaide herself, but it forces us to reconsider our views on the rest of the Tethered. They’re clearly every bit as human as we are — capable of living fully self-actualized and happy lives above ground. And this is where Peele’s metaphorical work really pays off. Because once we start thinking about the Underground as an allegorical space that represents dehumanized and marginalized bodies, then suddenly “we” are forced to contend with the troubling idea that perhaps the only things separating “us” from various “thems” — society’s countless marginalized communities — are chance and privilege. And even this isn’t enough to ever fully sever us. We are all, as the movie repeats, tethered not only to each other, but also to the sins of our country’s past and present, to the people and cultures we have tried to erase and diminish. And that connection leaves its traces, even when we try to deny it. Perhaps this is what makes the movie’s final scene so harrowing. Even though Adelaide has protected her family and escaped the danger Red posed, she now has to contend with the reality of what she did to Red to begin with. And what’s even more significant is that her son, Jason, now seems to know it, too. As we all know, the sins of the past are passed down to our children — for them to perpetuate, learn from, or deny in turn.<doc-sep>Us (Photo: Universal Pictures) Us is the type of film that rewards those who keep their eyes Peeled. Like Get Out, the 2017 Oscar winner that established writer-director Jordan Peele as a visionary in the realm of genre filmmaking with something to say, his sophomore effort Us is brimming — no, overflowing — with foreshadowing, visual cues, Easter eggs, references, symbolism, callbacks and hidden meanings. It also leaves us with plenty of questions. Like does Us, which follows a family of four to their beach house where they terrorized by their red-clad doppelgängers (aka the Tethered), share “the same universe” as Get Out? There are clues that it might. Here’s what we’ve spotted so far. Warning: Major, MAJOR spoilers ahead. 1. There’s a double meaning right there in the title. There’s the literal sense: “It’s us,” Gabe Wilson (Winston Duke) says when he first recognizes the strangers to be doppelgängers of themselves. Add periods to the title, though, and it becomes “U.S.” As Peele told Yahoo Entertainment (see interview below), “There’s a double meaning to everything… This movie’s about duality.” He also revealed the story was heavily inspired by the state of the country, apparent in the film’s dialogue when Adelaide’s twin Red (Lupita Nyong’o) tells her, “We’re Americans.” 2. About that VHS collection. Peele doesn’t waste a single frame before dropping some Easter eggs. In the opening shot, Young Adelaide (Madison Curry) watches a “Hands Across America” commercial on a television set in a classic ’80s console. It’s 1986, we learn. Adjacent to the television are a few VHS tapes, including The Goonies (1985) and C.H.U.D. (1984), two films about, well, undesirables living underground. (As Peele told Polygon, C.H.U.D. was actually directed by his first girlfriend’s father, Douglas Cheek). Goonie Mikey is later quoted when one of the doppelgängers proclaims, “It’s our time now!,” one of three Corey Feldman connections in the film. Another tape is The Man With Two Brains (1983), which Peele told Uproxx sets up a thematic connection: “The idea of two intelligences sharing a soul in a way.” It also works as a wink to Get Out. Story continues 3. Why “Hands Across America”? (And the movie’s hand-holding motif.) Peele has been straightforward about why a cheesy, only moderately successful ’80s charity campaign would serve as such a main thematic thrust for his new horror film. He came across the commercial on YouTube, and it creeped him out. “I just had this feeling of dread watching the amusing, bright optimism on display,” he told Polygon. Beyond the commercial and T-shirt Young Addie wears, there’s plenty of other hand-locking on display in the movie. Several pictures in the beach house show happy people holding hands. Later, when Addie is being held down by her doppelgänger, her head is next to a jar of chestnuts with a nutcrackers-holding-hands design. There’s also the political symbolism of human chains, which have long been used in protests — like Martin Luther King Jr.’s march in Selma, which at one point we see a photo of in the film. 4. The meaning and reappearance of 11:11. When Young Addie passes what appears to be a homeless man on the boardwalk, he holds up a cardboard sign scrawled with “Jeremiah 11:11” on it. For those who skipped Sunday school, the King James Bible verse reads: “Therefore thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will bring evil upon them, which they shall not be able to escape; and though they shall cry unto me, I will not hearken unto them.” The prophet is essentially admonishing people for worshipping false gods and warning that they will be punished for it. Clearly a tease of the chaos to come. Later that night, grown-up Adelaide looks at the clock and it’s 11:11 — just before the doppelgängers are spotted outside their beach house. (Related: Doppelgänger Addie believes she is being tested by God, and refers to “finding her faith” the night she hatches her plan). The numbers are also mirrored in a Black Flag T-shirt in the form of four vertical blocks that resemble the numbers. Also of note, according to the film’s credits (or at least IMDb), the actor who played the homeless man is Alan Frazier. His “normal” character is credited as “Alan,” while his doppelgänger is “Jeremiah.” 5. The stranger on the beach. Speaking of our old friend Jeremiah, the man creepily hanging out on the beach with blood dripping from his glove in broad daylight had to be the homeless man’s (Alan’s) doppelgänger, who’s just murdered him and thus why we see the man being carted out on a stretcher bloodied and dead as the family arrives at the boardwalk. The reason why Peele hones in on that hand? (Besides the creepy blood droplet?) He’s ready to join some others in Hands Across America. (Image: Universal Pictures) 6. The spider-verse. Young Addie whistles “Itsy Bitsy Spider” to herself as she’s walking around the carnival. Later, in the beach house, we see a real spider crawling by a plastic toy spider. 7. “Find yourself.” That’s the tagline on both the past and present versions of the beach funhouse, even as the names change. Young Addie enters and literally does that. 8. The candy apple. There has to be something about that candy apple Young Addie takes into the carnival funhouse, right? Or somethings, like a throwback to Snow White’s poisonous apple just as she’s about to go all “Mirror Mirror.” It also very well could be another biblical reference, with Eve eating from the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil and thus getting expelled from the Garden of Eden (life as she knows it). (Image: Universal Pictures) 9. Everybody wants to be somebody else. This is another theme that’s prevalent, particularly in the first act. Gabe wants to be more like his more successful or at least wealthier friend, Josh (Tim Heidecker). Addie laments that she could have been a dancer. Kitty (Elisabeth Moss) got plastic surgery and says she could’ve been a movie star. Zora (Shahidi Wright Joseph) doesn’t want to be a track star. And Jason (Evan Alex) wants to be a magician. Or maybe Chewbacca. He also wants to be a dog owner, asking for a pet in the film’s first act. And his doppelgänger acts like a feral dog. 10. Our very first look at the “shadows.” In what might be the most perfectly executed foreshadowing imagery the film has to offer, we get an overhead shot of our family of four on the beach… their shadows looming adjacent to them in the sand. Of course we have no idea at this point that they mirror the four doppelgängers directly beneath them. As Peele told Fox’s Kevin McCarthy, the shot was captured entirely practical thanks to “good old-fashioned sunlight.” (Image: Universal Pictures) 11. The early line of dialogue that gives it all away. “Being here, I don’t feel like myself,” a stressed-out Addie tells Gabe when they arrive at the beach house. BECAUSE SHE’S NOT. 12. Why “I Got 5 On It” is so important. First off, it’s one of the best raps songs and weed anthems of the ’90s, but that’s neither here nor there. But you knew it had to be important the second Peele opened the film’s first trailer with the Luniz hit. And turns out the car scene provides a huge clue. Notice the moment where Adelaide turns to her son and snaps, telling him to “Get in rhythm”… yet is completely off the beat. Knowing what we eventually find out about Adelaide, was this because she literally has no soul? (Props to this Twitter user for sniffing out the fact that this was a clue the day the trailer was released.) Peele’s composer Michael Abels then brilliantly flips the song into a full-blown horror score when it’s reprised in the third act with Adelaide and Red underground, a cue to make us think back to that moment in the car. Another interesting theory that’s been floated out there: Peele may have chosen “I Got 5 On It” because it’s about only being able to pay for half of a dime bag, or as @RemyLeBarr noted, “So he’s got ‘five on it’ and his friend has the other half. An Easter egg to the dichotomy of their doppelgängers?” Remember what Peele said about duality. The way @JordanPeele & crew flip The Luniz "I Got 5 On It" into a horror score is just genius. #UsMovie pic.twitter.com/bNkKJ8uS5r — Kevin Polowy (@djkevlar) March 16, 2019 13. The Frisbee landing. Addie is a ball of stress when she returns to the beach where “the incident” took place when she was a girl, and there’s one moment in particular that freaks her out. A Frisbee flies into their orbit and lands on a beach towel next to them. Not only does the disc land perfectly onto one of the circles on the towel’s pattern (likely a misdirection with Peele distracting you from the real coincidence), it’s also emblazoned with the emblem from the Michael Jackson “Thriller” T-shirt she wore that night as a girl. 14. About that “Thriller” T-shirt. It’s probably not a great time for a Michael Jackson tribute. If you’ve braved Leaving Neverland, it’s hard to believe you could ever listen to MJ again given what the film reveals about an alleged pattern of child sex abuse. But the fact that Young Addie wears a shirt from the singer’s seminal Halloween pop classic is another way of Peele telling us, “Us is a horror movie.” It’s also Feldman connection No. 2, given how close the actor was to the singer. Peele, meanwhile, has called Jackson “the patron saint of duality.” And underground, the Tethered move around like zombies. (Image: Universal Pictures) 15. The Lost Boys connection. Babies from the ’70s and ’80s surely know what the Santa Cruz boardwalk is most famous for in movie lore: It’s the setting of The Lost Boys, the 1987 teen vampire thriller starring Kiefer Sutherland, Jason Patric and The Coreys (here’s your third Feldman connect). But did you notice it’s actually being filmed there during the early scenes of Us? As Peele confirmed to Uproxx, when Adelaide’s mother Rayne (Anna Diop) says, “They’re shooting a movie over there by the carousel,” it’s meant to be The Lost Boys, considering the flashback sequence is set in 1986. 16. The Friday the 13th character name. This one is pretty on-the-nose: The son’s name is Jason, and both he and his doppelgänger Pluto wear masks like that murderous hockey goalie Jason Voorhees (Jason a Chewbacca mask, and Pluto that creepy white compression mask). (Image: Universal Pictures) 17. The Jaws T-shirt. This one is less so an Easter egg or reference than it is a tribute to one of Peele’s heroes, Steven Spielberg. After the release of Get Out, Peele told me that of all the people raving about his directorial debut, the one that geeked him out the most was Spielberg, who sent Peele an email complimenting the film. Peele tapped into his new Mutual Appreciation Society to ask Spielberg for permission to use the Jaws T-shirt in Us. The fact that Jason wears a Jaws tee to the beach and in a horror movie is also a bit ironic in a wear-the-band-shirt-to-the-concert sort of way. That battle between Gabe and his doppelgänger Abraham in the lake, however, feels very much like a man vs. shark Jaws-like showdown. 18. The Shining twins. The decision to give Kitty and Josh Tyler twin girls (Becca and Lindsey, played by actual twins Cali and Noelle Sheldon) has to be a wink to Stanley Kubrick’s pair of scary-ass sisters in The Shining, especially considering that was one of 10 movies Peele asked his cast to watch in preparation (along with Dead Again, The Babadook, It Follows, A Tale of Two Sisters, The Birds, Funny Games, Martyrs, Let the Right One In and The Sixth Sense) so that they would have a “shared language” while filming Us. How deep is Peele’s love for The Shining? He cosplayed as Jack Torrance for a recent round of interviews. Jordan Peele out here literally dressed as Jack Torrance. pic.twitter.com/TD5D9J2n3E — a common dog name (@MaxCorn) March 20, 2019 19. The Twilight Zone inspiration.<doc-sep>
If you were among the scores of moviegoers who helped push “Us” to a record-breaking $71.1 million debut over the weekend, then now you know: The real villains in Jordan Peele’s smash horror hit aren’t quite who — or what — they seem. Warning: The following includes spoilers for the new horror film “Us.” Fans making sense of the twisty ending of “Us” are busy decoding its dense array of symbolism, from all those white rabbits to the number 11, which pops up in multiples everywhere from the Giants game on TV to the ominously referenced “Jeremiah 11:11” Bible passage portending destruction, scrawled on the homemade sign of a local beach bum. Peele’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning directorial debut spins an even more ambitious yarn than “Get Out,” in which an African American man (Daniel Kaluuya) found himself fighting his way out of The Sunken Place, a subconscious prison borne of toxic white liberalism. In the spooky prologue to “Us,” 9-year-old Adelaide Wilson (Madison Curry) visits the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk one night in 1986 with her parents only to wander off alone into a funhouse of mirrors — where she comes face to face with her own evil twin. Fast-forward to the present. The now-adult Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o), still haunted by that night, sees her greatest fears come to life when she and her family — husband Gabe (Winston Duke), daughter Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and son Jason (Evan Alex) — are attacked by doppelgängers in red jumpsuits who appear in their driveway, armed with brass scissors. The Wilson family doppelgängers: (from left) Abraham (Winston Duke), Umbrae (Shahadi Wright Joseph), Pluto (Evan Alex) and Red (Lupita Nyong’o) in “Us.” (Claudette Barius/Universal) The best monster movies ... allow their villains to have these different layers. You are meant to be terrified ... but also to relate to them on some level. Jordan Peele, writer/director of “Us” But as the film unfolds, what writer-director Peele reveals of the scope of their plans and the world of “Us” becomes even more terrifying, tragic and pointed. The doppelgängers hunting the Wilsons are part of a much larger movement of bloodthirsty invaders dubbed the Tethered. The Tyler family, white friends of the Wilsons, have their own demented doubles. So too, it seems, does everyone in town. These attackers have suddenly appeared out of the depths to launch a brutal, bloody mass invasion, and there is a very specific motivation behind their madness. But why? Adelaide, played masterfully by Nyong’o, harbors her own childhood traumas and secrets; deep down, she’s always known this day would come. As the Wilson family is terrorized in their own home, Adelaide demands to know just what these shadowy invaders are. Her Tethered twin, the maniacal matriarch Red (also Nyong’o), replies with a deranged half-smile: “We are… Americans.” Ahead of the film’s release, Peele, Nyong’o and Duke tiptoed into spoiler territory with The Times, discussing how their cinematic Rorschach test asks moviegoers to morally recalibrate their own perspectives after they leave the theater. Influences Madison Curry as the young Adelaide discovering the terrifying world of the Tethered in Jordan Peele’s “Us.” (Universal Pictures) “I wanted to make a monster movie, and in the best monster movies, the Universal monster movies, they allow their villains to have these different layers and to be multidimensional,” said Peele. “Frankenstein, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, even [David] Cronenberg’s the Fly — you are meant to be terrified of these things, but also to relate to them on some level.” Peele says “Us” was inspired by the division and xenophobia he observed in post-election America and the notion that “the feeling that we all feel we are the good guy in our own story prevents us from facing our demons.” Smashing box office records upon release and nearly doubling analysts’ opening weekend projections, “Us” left audiences buzzing after scoring the best first weekend for a live-action original since 2009’s “Avatar.” And while you might still be scratching your head over exactly how the sci-fi rules of “Us” work — Who was controlling whom during that fateful ballet performance? Where did the Tethered get all those scissors, anyway? — its core themes haunt long after the credits roll.