Jordan Peele did it again with another movie that’s just as entertaining as it is insightful. I saw the movie against my will. Not because I don’t like Peele’s work, but I am not a scary movie person. I’m insistent on not allowing certain images to enter my conscience that I don’t feel comfortable with seeing later. Scary, demonic and unsettling images fit within the bracket of things that I don’t want to recall later, but I had a group of friends that wanted me to go and refused to accept anything other than acceptance so I was forced to tag along.
Deeper than my dislike of scary movies, I wanted to support Jordan especially after seeing Get Out, which I also reviewed last year. I wanted to make sure to support the director in theaters and see how he would follow up such a powerful piece of art. Many people have said that this film isn’t as good, but I’d like to argue that it is just as entertaining and probably even more captivating. While this is placed into the scary movie genre it’s not necessarily a horror film. If you’re hesitant let me assure you that if I could handle it then you probably can. While I did find my self peeking between my fingers over my eyes in a couple of scenes, Peele’s main goal isn’t to make you feel grossly uncomfortable or disturbed, that would be too easy. While you may feel both of those things, Peele’s main objective is to make you question the American psyche. Which can be gross and disturbing, especially looking at our history.
Now here is where the spoilers begin…
Independent reflection lost innocence
The film begins in 1985 with a little girl, Adelaide Wilson played by Madison Curry, in front of a TV screen. The television flashes through a series of commercials, the last of which being a call for donations from a charity, Hands Across America, to fight against hunger. The campaign’s symbol was a series of red people figures standing hand in hand. Hands Across America was a real charity at the time with the goal of raising $100 million to fight homelessness and hunger in the country. The charity event’s organizer Ken Kragen, a Harvard business school graduate and music manager, partnered with celebrities like Bill Cosby and Oprah Winfrey to promote a day of action where donors would stand hand in hand across America at 3p EST for fifteen minutes.
While the commercial flashed passed Adelaide continued to play with her toys, she and her parents visited a theme park in Santa Cruz. Her parents went back and forth with one another until the father is left with his daughter while the mother leaves them to use the restroom. As the father is distracted playing whack-a-mole his daughter wanders off into another area of the park. She leads herself into the house of mirrors where she come face to face with a reflection of herself that she realizes isn’t moving. As she comes closer to it, it moves independently, it is not a reflection.
Her parents are now in therapy with their daughter, disturbed by the fact that she isn’t the same girl that was was before the incident, she won’t speak. The therapist Dr. Foster, played by Napiera Groves, encourages them that if their daughter is unable to use her words then they should try to engage her in another form of expression like art or dance. Her mother blames her father for losing track of her and she refuses to tell her parents what happened while she was lost.
This scene highlights the struggle that Black parents have raising their children in a world where the pressures of being young and black often outweigh the protection that black parents have the power to offer. The wack a mole scene metaphorically represented a father preoccupied with protecting his family from intruders, so consumed by his role as a protector and a provider that preserving his daughter’s innocence slips between the cracks.
The Untethering
Later we meet Adelaide as an adult, played by Lupita Nyong’o, with her own family who decides to take a vacation. While she seems distant at times, her husband Gabe, played by Winston Duke, is full of affection and humor. They have two children, a teenage daughter Zora, played by Shahadi Wright Joseph, and a younger son Jason, played by Evan Alex. While her family is healthy and happy, Adelaide seems to be overly anxious. We realize that perhaps she is suffering from PTSD when her husband decides to take the family to the same amusement park in Santa Cruz where she was lost as a child.
She refuses to share her anxiety with her family in the beginning. Like her parents at that time she in her husband go back in forth about the decision to go to the park until she finally relents. At the park they connect with another family on vacation, the Tylers, and while Adelaide talks to Mrs. Tyler she loses track of her son. The incident proves to be too triggering for Adelaide. After finding Jason her family leave the park and that night she tells her husband about the incident she had there as a child and pleads to cut the vacation short to leave the area. She’s disappointed by his not taking her seriously.
Later that night, the family come face to face with her fears, an identical family wearing red jumpsuits waiting outside without moving or saying word in response to Gabe’s wavering greeting. When the other red mother snaps her fingers they each creep into the surrounding darkness with their identical target in mind.
Once Adelaide’s family is captured, with her cuffed to the table in the living room they arrange themselves parallel to one another. The red mother speaks in a burdened, dry, cracking voice about the conditions of her life ‘tethered’ to Adelaide. She recalls her life as only a shadow from the food she ate (a complete diet of raw cold rabbit flesh) to the man she was forced to marry, none of it was her choice and it filled her with rage. She called this day, one she’d been preparing for, the untethering. The rest of the red family were silent until her son, woofed like a dog; her husband growled like a bear and their daughter stared with an eerie smile on her face. Adelaide questioned, “Who are you people?”
Her reflection responded, “We’re Americans”
We’re Americans.
With that statement I reflected on the the character traits of American that could be seen in this family. Was it their lack of compassion? Their savagery? Or maybe it was their dismissive silence in the face of devastation. This was the task that carried me through film, aligning the characteristics of this family with whatever Peele was trying to tell us about the American persona. Interestingly, red Adelaide’s determination to break free contrasted with her family’s blindly following the lead of what they’re told.
Each of the family members split off from one another during their individual battles with their shadow and after narrowly escaping with their lives they fled to the home of the the Tyler’s who they’d spent time with on the beach earlier that day. Mr. Tyler answered the door with an unsettling smile and invited them in, but after seeing his wife dead on the floor they realized that this family too had evil red who’d murdered them. It seemed like they were not the only target and there was an entire shadow population that they would have to fight off and avoid. Adelaide suggested an escape to New Mexico, but her husband was content with barricading themselves in the Tyler’s home. She refused saying, “They know everything about us, they are us and will find us if we stay here”.
As she alluded, the family did find them. Adelaide’s son was kidnapped and she was coaxed back to the theme park in Santa Cruz where abandoned vehicles and dead bodies littered the landscape. Realizing that Adelaide knew exactly where to find her son after he’s kidnapped by her shadow, we finally learn what happened to her in the house of mirrors as a child. Adelaide courageously rode an escalator underneath the park to an underground subway station crawling with white rabbits. This was an experimental underground site that had been abandoned, this is where the shadow people lived prior to their red suited scissor rampage.
There she met with her reflection who stood before a chalkboard in a classroom using her scissors to cut up red pieces of paper. She explained in her burdened dry voice that she had been chosen by her people to lead them after shadowing Adelaide’s ballet performance. As the leader she devised an elaborate plan that not only included killing Adelaide as apart of the untethering, but along with that she facilitated an entire art illustration arranged among everyone participating in the untethering from her community. She modeled her art after a the symbol from the commercial in the beginning of the film. This inspired their red outfits, their choice of weapon and their finale posing stance.
Themes of American Tragedy
The movie ends with a line of shadow people standing hand-in-hand in their self-identifying red jumpsuits lined up across the plains, through the waters and over the mountains as the scene panned out. The scene is a direct play on the commercial in the beginning for which the charity Hands Across America seeks donations for fighting hunger and homelessness in the United States. While the event that occurred in the 1980s had 4,924,000 participants with $15 million raised (with $8 from Coca-Cola alone), it failed to raise even a quarter of their $100 million dollar goal. The charity event took millions of dollars to promote with a staff of 400 people working for nearly a year, similarly to a political campaign, in order to get people to get out and hold hands.
People criticized the amount of resources that went into the day of action that took no real action against hunger at all. Citizens, celebrities and political figures like then president Ronald Reagan, were given the opportunity to participate and feel like they were taking a stance for people in need when no real action had been put in motion. In stark contrast, Reagan’s policies criminalized homelessness and restricted resources offered to the poor by decreasing social welfare programs, an era often referred to as Reagan’s War on Poverty.
The over-marketed charity event that took place was a reflection of how we serve marginalized communities in the United States. We fight hunger by literally fighting against those who are hungry. We kill off those who are in need by denying them access to the resources that could alleviate their oppression. Our strategy to supply the elite with the funds to take care of the problems of the poor, by organizing charities to redistribute the funds, are absurd seeing how we could just provide those funds directly to those suffering from poverty. The funds and services that they need in order to be uplifted are corrupted by our filtering them through higher powers. We’ve seen this in countless situations where charities take on the task of providing for those in need and hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars are leached out of the pockets of the poor as a result.
As Americans we are self-identifying, money-hungry, capitalist, consumer minded power seekers by nature. Our entire culture is made up of the idea that our money determines our inspiration. We are inspired by the hope of profit and gain. We have a culture that values money more than Mommys and dollars over dad’s. We separate families who don’t have the funds to pay for another option, from our prisons and detention facilities to the lack of jobs being offered to those residing in low income communities. As a child even I lost my father to Detroit’s economy crisis. No one would hire him close to home so he was forced to move across the country.
Our main takeaway is the understanding that the shadow people were content with their lives underground. They didn’t mind the chaotic life that they lived in the subway station and didn’t care about the food that they were restricted to eating or the destitution of their environment because they didn’t know any better, they also had no way to voice their concerns but Adelaide’s shadow did which is why she was entrusted as their leader. She knew another life existed and led her people towards the over-world.
In contrast, while the over-world people had all of the choices, resources and freedom they were too distracted to realize and take advantage, settling for what was around them even in instances where they weren’t satisfied. It was the wandering eye of the young girl that connected the two worlds, someone with a clear head who wasn’t distracted, bickering or content with the conditions around her. She was curious enough to press on, even in her fear and anxiety. Today we are destroying ourselves with the chaos and distractions. We’re hell bent on it.
Jeremiah 11:11
I want to end with my understanding of the relevance of the scripture that young Adelaide sees displayed on a cardboard sign at the beginning of the movie which reads,
11 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.
It’s essential that we understand the context surrounding the scripture in which God’s people, who he’d freed from a life of slavery in Egypt had turned their back on him. Jeremiah was a prophet through which God warned his people that if they turned their back and did not follow him that they would bring evil upon themselves for which they would not be able to escape. The under-world shadows were the evil tethered to the over-world people who’d lost their way in their distracted misguided ways. Their own evil would be inescapable, a shadow that pursued them relentlessly to their death.
Another work of art by Jordan Peele.
