A Few More Thoughts on the Tethered (Us)

Like my last post on Us, this one is full spoilers.  Consider yourself warned.

Even in the first few days after I saw Us, when I was basically in an eternal state of waiting for my doppelgänger to steal up behind me and stab me in the neck with a pair of scissors, I still couldn’t stop thinking about how fascinating I found the Tethered to be.  Some of the specific explanations of how they came to be don’t entirely hold together, and once you start thinking about it too hard, the questions start piling up (if the experiment was abandoned, who was feeding all the rabbits?  Where did the Tethered’s clothes come from?  And so on.)  But the basic details of how they work are really interesting.  The idea of an entire “shadow” world happening underground beneath us, our likenesses carrying out grosteque facsimiles of all our actions above, is so unsettling, and the flashback scenes comparing what was happening both above and below the boardwalk are so effectively done.

Unsettling in a way you can’t quite look away from.  Because, for me, the most compelling aspect about the Tethered is that they’re so creepy and dangerous but at the same time so oddly sympathetic.  When we first meet the Tethered and Red (yeah, I know how tangled up that whole thing gets – the one in the jumpsuit) gives the description of what her life has been like, it’s full-on horrifying.  Her and Abraham being forced to have sex because Adelaide and Gabe were, getting pregnant whenever Adelaide was, having to cut Pluto out of her?  Horrific.  And seeing it play out in the flashbacks, even though the actions there aren’t nearly as awful as the ones Red describes, is just terrible too, because we see many of the Tethered in obvious distress but unable to stop.  As much as it’s obviously wrong to murder people with scissors, I can’t really blame the Tethered for having the desire to do it.  If that was my existence and I thought the only way to escape was to kill my “other self” up on the surface, I can’t say it’d be easy to dismiss it out of hand.

Red is the only one who can articulate just what she’s been through (and we later learn why that is, making what’s happened to her all the more monstrous,) but the others, as super-creepy as they are, have my sympathies too.  I feel for them all seeming so half-formed, each feeling incomplete in their own way.  Pluto is animalistic, growling and frequently moving on all fours.   Umbrae is mostly (entirely?) silent and has a permanent eerie smile.  Abraham vocalizes wordlessly, clearly conveying something, or at least attempting to.  They’ve never seen the sun, they’ve never had bodily autonomy and are scarred and damaged from the horrors going on below, and they’ve never had the chance/ability to communicate using language.  I find all of that so sad, and in this way, as much as I get why the Wilsons have to do everything they can to survive, there’s something mournful in the fact that it comes down to killing their Tethered to do it.

  

I want to spend an extra moment on Abraham here.  In my review, I mentioned how well the film does in its portrayal of Gabe, convincingly demonstrating that, even though this guy is the size of Winston Duke, he doesn’t know how to be a “big scary Black man” and his attempts to frighten the Tethered off are almost laughable.  With Abraham, the movie interacts with this stereotype in a different way but still subverts it, which I really like.  Big, towering Abraham with his vacant eyes and inexorable approach is a creepy image, and like I said, Red’s description of having him forced upon her when Adelaide and Gabe are having sex above is horrifying.  This image that’s presented of him is one of a monster, and it’s a particularly racialized one – again, the big hulking Black man who’s violent and rapes women.   It’s the image that once fueled lynchings and now fuels 911 calls and police shootings.  But in fact, because Abraham is a Tethered, he’s just as tied to Gabe’s actions as Red is to Adelaide’s (even more so.)  He didn’t force himself upon her.  He had no choice; he was powerless to stop it, and he doesn’t even have words to tell his story like Red does.  Little things, like the noises he makes or the way he stumbles as he walks, make me feel for him.  That moment when he plucks off Gabe’s glasses and puts them on his own face, perplexed and blinking at this new experience.  These things draw my sympathies to him, just as they do with the other Tethered, and I appreciate the care the movie takes in challenging that first vantage point it gives us of him.