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.

Spoilery Thoughts on Us

In keeping my review of Us clean of spoilers, there was only so much I could say about it.  So, here am I again to discuss a couple of the movie’s finer points in more detail.  Definite spoilers ahead, starting now!

First of all, maybe it's just me, but it felt like the trailers didn’t show much of Winston Duke after the initial “they look like us” meeting with the Tethered, so I had Gabe pegged as the most likely to be killed in one of those early “we’re not messing around” deaths.  As such, I was so tense whenever he was in danger and was pleasantly surprised when he made it through the whole film.  Considering the fact that he gets his knee bashed in early on, it’s impressive that he manages to survive.

Gabe escaping death is surprising, and really, the whole family’s survival seems a little incredulous at first, like protagonist plot armor.  With Kitty, Josh, and their daughters, their Tethered creep silently into the house and instantly kill him.  Stab in the neck, stab in the back, stab in the gut – no muss, no fuss.  But with the Wilsons, their Tethered are forever taking their sweet time, toying with them when they could just kill them.  Pluto sits in that closet with Jason waiting to see his magic trick, Umbrae stands on top of that car and then just stares at Zora, and Abraham puts Gabe in a bag and drags him onto the boat.  You don’t really doubt that the Tethered ultimately plan to kill the Wilsons, but they drag out that plan in a way that the rest of their kind don’t.  The Wilsons are an exception – even when they go to Kitty and Josh’s house and wind up having to fight the Tethered there, Adelaide is taken by them, not killed.  Kitty’s Tethered in turn threatens Adelaide with her scissors but never uses them.

This might feel cheap, a way to prolong the terror and let the heroes cheat death, not just by being brave, resourceful, and determined, but by continually getting chances that the other characters aren’t given.  However, it never gets eye-rolly for me, because these moments are accompanied by others that signify something bigger is going on here.  Red is the only Tethered that can speak, and at times, as terrified as Adelaide is, she seems almost familiar with Red – when Jason traps Pluto in the closet, Adelaide hears the Tethered boy’s shouts and tells Red, “That’s yours,” as if they’re two moms hanging out during their kids’ playdate.  At critical moments with both Umbrae and Pluto, Adelaide is ever so slightly maternal with them, quietly soothing Umbrae as she dies and trying to talk Pluto down from lighting up the car.  Kitty’s Tethered looms over Adelaide, getting her scissors right up in Adelaide’s face, and then she abruptly stops, carving along her own jawline instead.  Something is up with Adelaide, and because of it, she and her family are given, time and again, these seconds of reprieve in which they’re able to escape death.

There were different points of the film when I pondered the possibility of Red and Adelaide having switched places when they met as children in the house of mirrors (in part because I was aware that we hadn’t seen the shot from the trailer of little Red choking little Adelaide.)  Then towards the end, when Adelaide starts grunting/making animal sounds as she finally kills Red, I wondered briefly if Red’s consciousness passed into Adelaide’s body.  So, when that final flashback came, revealing that the girls had switched all those years ago, the Tethered child trapping her twin down below and returning to the surface on her – her parents think she’s unable to speak because of the trauma from being lost at the carnival – I was surprised, but not surprised.  After all, if I’d been supposing it as a possibility, it was plausible enough.  For me, the only place where it really strains credibility is in the scene in the “classroom” where Red gives a long exposition about the Tethered.  Why would she tell Adelaide all this when they both know Adelaide is really one of the Tethered?  But it fits in well enough with everything else, and it brings up interesting ideas about environment and opportunity, that the “soulless” Tethered child thrives on the surface, becoming Adelaide in her own right, while the trapped human underground, becoming Red, regresses and plots revenge.

Best of all, I find that this swap provides the justification for the “plot armor.”  It’s why Red is different, less half-formed than the rest of the Tethered, why she’s even able to form the plan for all of them to come to the surface and kill their counterparts.  It’s also, in my mind, why killing the Wilsons is more complicated than killing anyone else.  Josh and Kitty’s Tethered kill functionally, without thought or reaction, but for Red, this is personal.  It’s a reckoning.  First, there’s the fact that this is definitely revenge on Adelaide for switching places with Red and leaving her down there (“you could have taken me with you,”) and Sweeney Todd will readily tell you that good revenge can’t be rushed.  And Red has plenty of rage to direct toward Adelaide.  After all, Adelaide is the only person on the surface who already knows about the Tethered and knows what happens to Red down below with her every action.  But at the same time, having experienced what it’s like to live as one of the Tethered herself, I imagine Red does have at least one small flicker of sympathy for Adelaide’s childhood decision to switch places.  I mean, she has to understand the feeling of being willing to do anything to get out of there, no matter what. 

It all adds up to this intense link between them that can’t just be severed quickly.  Whether it’s to savor her revenge or out of hints of sympathetic understanding/kinship, Red can’t merely dispatch Adelaide and be done with it.  And since she’s the one directing the others, that connection extends outward.  Just like we see these hints of maternal compassion from Adelaide towards Umbrae and Pluto, Red probably recognizes that Zora and Jason are, in a way, half-Tethered themselves.  And so, her Tethered children aren’t so quick to kill Adelaide’s.  (I dunno about Gabe – he maybe gets a minor pass just for his romantic connection with Adelaide, or being Zora and Jason’s father?  No part of him is Tethered, but the whole rest of his family is.)  It’s why Kitty’s Tethered threatens Adelaide but never actually stabs her – on some level, she recognizes that Adelaide was like her once, and that seems to hold her back.  I’m still thinking about the implications of the Adelaide-Red twist, but this aspect of it is something that I really like.

Us (2019, R)

I’ve been waiting for Us since it was just “Jordan Peele’s next movie, starring Lupita Nyong’o and Winston Duke,” and the closer its release got, the more psyched I became.  The first trailer was so good that I spent the next couple days nervously closing my curtains.  When it came out last week, I contemplated going opening night but, considering said reaction to the trailer, I decided I’d be better off waiting until I could see it in daylight, so I caught it that weekend.  Even despite my precautions, it still took me a few days before I stopped leaving all my lights on and holding my breath whenever I rounded a corner/entered a room while I was home alone… :shudder:  For today, I won’t spoil anything that you can’t see in the previews, so expect another, more in-depth write-up or two on this movie another time.

In many ways, the Wilsons are an ordinary family on an ordinary vacation.  They have a summer home by the lake, and dad Gabe cheerfully makes plans for a drive to the beach in Santa Cruz.  However, mom Adelaide had a traumatic experience there as a child, and she’s on edge, constantly looking over her shoulder.  Her fears come to pass that night as the family is beset by a group of eerie doppelgängers who break into the house with the aim of doing their lookalikes in.  Led by Adelaide, the family fights to survive the night.

As I said, I’m avoiding spoilers today, so there’s not a whole lot more I can say about the story.  The themes it explores are interesting, touching on several diferent ideas without definitively spelling out any one-to-one “doppelgängers=X” analogy.  It goes to some unexpected places, not all of which are quite slam dunk developments but which I’m still pondering and unpacking.  The creep factor is up to here, but, while the film is definitely violent, it’s not super-high on gore, which I appreciate; a lot of the most vicious blows are filmed either with the camera on the perpetrator (rather than the victim) or from a distance.  Like Get Out, it demonstrates a great command of mood and atmosphere, and Peele knows when to break up the tension or lure us into a false sense of security with some moments of humor.

Anything with “evil twins” that has the actors playing dual roles is going to draw attention to its acting, and that is very much the case here, deservedly so.  All the actors do a terrific job differentiating between their characters (and one another – each doppelgänger is “off” in a similar, but not identical, way.)  Like many others, I discovered (and loved) Winston Duke through his performance of M’Baku in Black Panther, and it’s great to see him play two such different characters here.  I really enjoy Gabe’s warmth and corny dad jokes, and I like seeing his determination to stand up to the doppelgängers, even as it’s clear that this is like nothing he’s ever done before – “big scary Black man” is such a readily-available image to conjure, especially for a man of Duke’s size, so kudos to the film (and Duke) that it gets us to genuinely laugh out loud at his early attempts to seem intimidating.  Both actors playing the younger Wilsons, Shahadi Wright Joseph as daughter Zora and Evan Alex as son Jason, also turn in strong work, and Elizabeth Moss is effective in a supporting role.

But this film turns on Lupita Nyong’o’s twin performances, and she’s stunning.  Her work has impressed me in pretty much everything I’ve seen from her, but here, she’s given so much to sink her teeth into.  Adelaide is such a layered character, and her doppelgänger is by far the most complex.  I can’t say enough good things about how awesome she is here, and I’m thrilled to see her playing the lead in a film so worthy of her talents.

Warnings

Violence, strong thematic elements, disturbing images, drinking/drug references, and language.