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Jordan Peele's 'Us' - Everything Explained and Deeper Meaning
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- čas přidán 1. 04. 2019
- Jordan Peele's 'Us' - Everything Explained and Deeper Meaning
Chapter Times:
00:13 Intro
01:22 Plot Synopsis and Ending Explained
03:18 Reading the Twist and Trauma Theory
04:00 Foreshadowing the Twist
07:41 Sci-Fi Tropes, Postcolonialism and Post-Colonial Guilt
08:56 White Savior Archetype
11:04 'Us' as 'Black Cinema'
13:07 Is Jason a tethered?
15:37 Kitty/Dahlia - Why doesn't she kill Adelaide?
16:29 Jeremiah 11:11 What's up with that?
18:26 Mirroring and the visual motif of the Scissors explained.
19:06 Deeper Meaning - What, or who do the tethered represent?
19:35 Probably the right answer
20:14 Bad Answer
20:41 Good Answer
22:20 Further Racial Commentary
23:08 Problematising Black Masculinity
24:28 Reoccurring Motif's in Jordan Peele's work.
25:28 Outro
Resources:
Ash, Erin -- ‘Emotional Responses to Savior Films: Concealing Privilege or Appealing to Our Better Selves?’
www.berghahnjo...
Caruth, Cathy - Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History.
www.amazon.co....
Froude, J.A. -- The English In The West Indies [Remember this is explicitly an example of Colonial Racism and needs to be understood as such.]
www.amazon.co....
Lazarus, Neil (ed) -- The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies.
www.amazon.co....
Le Guin, Ursula - The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas
www.amazon.com...
Newman, Stephanie -- Too Afraid To Protest
www.writingong...
Rankine, Claudia - Citizen
www.amazon.co....
Rothstein, Richard - The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
www.amazon.co....
Sharf, Zack - Lupita Nyong’o Used Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Inspiration for ‘Us’ Doppelgänger Voice
www.indiewire....
Tarrant-Reid, Linda - Discovering Black America: From the Age of Exploration to the Twenty-First Century
www.amazon.com...
Touré - Who’s Afraid Of Post-Blackness? : What it Means to be Black Now.
www.amazon.co....
Victims of Crime.org - Black Children Exposed to Violence and Victimization
victimsofcrime....
Vera, Hernan & Gordon, Andrew - Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness
www.amazon.co....
Wells, H.G. - The Time Machine
www.amazon.co....
YouGov -- Statistics on Black American’s Fear of Police Violence
today.yougov.c...
Buy our artwork at Displate.com!
displate.com/d...
For a tutorial video for our intro effects check out this video:
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And follow @bloomandglare on Instagram.
Audio mixing by Christopher Hall.
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(Message me for contact information.)
i found it interesting how red always walked upright and poised to the point where she stands with her feet in fifth position. at first it reads as robotic but looking closer its all ballet movements.
The scene where the first flash back occurs you can see her lining up her toys in the formation of the hand holding and it’s ironic that the bunny is in the middle of it
Great spot Alannah! I need to rewatch this movie it's been at least a year!
Can't believe i found such a gem on youtube, this is the best explanation.
Dude I'm so sorry I haven't been able to go through your comments one by one yet (I've been out having a little drink ;) but it means so much to me that you're just watching my videos like..because they're my videos? I hope that makes sense. It's really awesome and I'm very grateful! More stuff coming very soon!
Praying for a Nope in-depth video from you ❤ you have such a keen insight to why certain media feels the way it does. Why we intrinsically connect with stories and imagery from things like Us and Herediatary. Love ❤
been going through your vids after the hereditary one, jordan peele is another fav director and this video was super great! i hadn't even considered the theory of jason being a full tethered as well, i could never really fully explain why he seemed so in-tune with them the same way adelaide was... definitely possible, but i also agree would need more evidence haha
something i find really interesting about your interpretation, is you explaining how adelaide didn't realize she was tethered/switched at birth until the very end. because for me, i had just always assumed she knew it the entire time, and was keeping it a secret her whole life. her saying at the beach house 'i cant be here' being a double meaning of her trauma as a child, but also the fact she does not want to get close to the place that she knows she committed a big atrocity. her watching and calming umbra as she dies, because she knows that child could have been hers. and her guttural roar at the end after killing red, as being sort of her 'release' of her trying to keep it all hidden away and secret
that was just my interpretation though, and i think it's equally plausible she didn't know until the end! i just find it funny that we both had instinctively different reactions to it
I think Adelaide knew she was the tethered. It was her fearing Red's revenge.
'Us' was an incredible film and your breakdown of it is perfect 👌
No it wasn’t. It was a terrible movie and anyone who thinks differently is so riddled with white guilt that they can’t even analyze a crap movie truthfully. This movie was garbage. Maybe if Jordan Peel actually made a good movie to go along with his social commentary blah blah blah.
The croaky voice is likely because she was choked during her initial abduction, damaging her vocal chords. I also thought the red jumpsuits, "Americans" line, and Us->US(A) link was possibly a reference to the underground growth of the MAGA movement, and how it pulls out the baser version of people. Coupled with the handcuffed Adelaide coming down into the underground riding a golden escalator, strongly mirroring how Trump first announced his 2016 run. It also tracks with how MAGA had run rampant and burst out from the shadows onto the surface in a political show (culimnating in the Trump election).
That reminds me of what Hillary said, referring to Trump supporters as "...a basket of deplorables."
You really think Jordan Peale, regardless of his political affiliation, would taint his artistic work or lower his standards by inserting political innuendos? You've got quite an imagination, I'll grant you that.
@@MelindadelosSantos yeah, being patronizing is gonna get your point across
when i first watched the movie, i honestly thought this was a metaphor about racism, the tethered being black people and the “normal” people being the white people. (common theme with jordan peele’s movies, get out was glaringly obvious and nope shares similar themes as well). the reason i think this is because they are doppelgängers or the same, the same reason we fought for our civil rights; because like the tethered, we (black people) are human too.
i think red in the getting them to do the hands across america recreation is reminiscent of how civil rights leaders would preach about how we need to be unified to stand up for our rights, the same way the tethered want to be counted as real people (their right) instead of being abandoned after a failed experiment. some of the tethered choosing to unalive their doppelgängers is also reflective of the black people who chose to stand for their rights by being violent and unaliving their white oppressors.
idk though it’s been a while since i’ve watched this, will definitely be watching it again tonight thanks to your beautiful breakdown.
I can see that take but considering the fact that everyone in America has a doppelgänger and the film goes out of its way to portray the lives of the rich (Adelaide, the family she grew up in and her current husband, there’s generational wealth clearly denoted and displayed). I think it’s more of a commentary on class and how, like it was said in the video, attaining a certain level of comfort as a minority or oppressed person (race, class, ethnicity, etc.) can make it easy to forget who we are or who our ancestors were and what they had to go through to get to the comfort we enjoy. Plus black peoples and white people aren’t the only ethnic groups in America and there are so many layers of differing experiences that complicate everything
I'm here late, just watched the movie. Your channel deserves much more views!
Very interesting. I just thought she did remember but was lying. And that she was afraid the og Adalade would come back to get revenge.
nice video! I looked up so much videos after I saw this movie cause there was something I wasn't getting haha
We like to go as in depth as possible round here. It's a really deep movie I had a *long* discussion with my friends before producing this. Thank you so much for watching!
I finally watched this movie and I'd like to just touch on a couple of things I observed.
This film heavily reinforces the importance of art to the survival of humanity which I 100% agree with. Art is a necessary tool in human life and is used to bring our ideas from the conceptual level to the perceptual level. The character Red does this in the movie through the use of her dance. Through her dance she's able to communicate with the other tethered without actually speaking to them.
The other tethered can see and understand her pain while watching this beautiful interpretive dance and it immediately becomes a leader-like figure. Red makes real change by conveying ideas through her art and she battles conventionality with her ideas.
So the tethered are following Red now but Red still embraces the idea that their suffering comes at the hands of the productive. This misunderstanding leads to Red's revolution of killing the rich for there "sins" of being materialisticly focused/driven and abandoning morality. (Punishing the Jews for worshipping false gods/idols is what the whole Jeremiah 11:11 verse is about which goes hand in hand with materialism). Red seems very driven by faith and makes multiple references to having revelations by God that guide her actions which is significant to her motivations.
So this movie, to me, highlights the duality of both reason and faith being harbored in the minds of people and how it can lead to us being torn on which way to commit. It's the classic mind body dichotomy argument in philosophy where spiritual values MUST conflict with material values. Because, after all, how can one be moral AND rich at the same time, right? The two states are at odds with one another.. Well, not really but I won't get into that now.
So, if I had to guess when exactly this tethered experiment originally took place I'd say it was when Franklin D. Roosevelt instituted the New Deal. The government succeeded in shackling our productive individuals to our non productive individuals to create an entire class of people who can survive, albeit with very limited choices, without being a productive member of society. This is truly an example of altruism, a morality that makes others the standard and devalues the individual, put into a policy form that forces society to comply with what it deems as moral. To the extent that we embrace altruism, or OTHER-ism, is the extent to which we are our own worst enemies. Our politics are just a consequence of the morality we embrace as a society and it's all too focused on groups instead of the individual.
But anyways, after these socialist policies were enacted these newly "tethered" individuals are left without any clue about how to pull themselves out of this poverty and are even fed the narrative that they are predetermined to be failures and unsuccessful. It's all outside of their control, they are primarily a product of their genetics/environment. This inevitably leads to the resentment and blame of the more productive in society and a desire for change in the form of a violent revolution. A revolution where the productive are punished and the government, in the end, actually gets what they wanted all along which is way more power to centrally plan in an even socialist society. Red is finishing what the government started essentially.
As for symbolism with the color red on their jumpsuits, aside from the connection of the little people being red in the advertisement for hands across America, I'll just copy something I found on Google because I think it fits perfectly here:
Red symbolizes energy, passion, strength, courage, physical activity, creativity, warmth, and security. It is also associated with aggression. In healing, use red to bring warmth and burn out disease.
The more I think about this movie and the conversation about celebrity cloning, I feel more and more this is a message for a specific audience. Especially with the tethered message at the end which seems to be around unity amongst the tethered. They are the real victims in the story since their lives have been stolen yet we have adapted to the fake person. It will be very interesting to see how we deal with the truth when the truth is exposed.
I've been wondering about the real meaning of this movie, and not just the plot. I feel this film is definetly saying a lot, and that being said, I agree there is a message for a specific audience
If you're talking about slavery I agree
The movie is a reference to the black experience in a world controlled by whites & how we have to it in to their ideal of an acceptable individual.
Yep exactly that was my first thought when I watched this movie Jordan Peele is a modern Stanley Kubrick.
What a great analysis - really enjoyed Jordan Peele and his interesting films, but your analysis was spot on! Super interesting and I loved your commentary
This movie, which I haven't seen yet btw, reminds me of parts of Michael Harrington's 1962 book 'The other America'. Harrington did not believe those who lived in poverty had free choice.
He wrote "The drunkenness, unstable marriages, the violence of the other America are not simply facts about individuals. They are descriptions of an entire group in the society who react this way because of the conditions under which they live... The other Americans are those who live at a level below moral choice, who are so submerged in their poverty that one cannot begin to talk about free choices... Society must help them before they can help themselves."
Harrington thought the impoverished were not at fault for anything they did. They're merely reacting to their environment. So the only people with any control would be the well-off, or the rich and the middle class.
I believe Red's ultimate goal that is signified by the hands across America is to tether EVERYONE in an attempt to create a socialistic society.
I think it's significant that the tethered are a product of government intervention and seeing that socialism and communism are the ultimate forms of government control. The poor are tethered to their middle class counterpart because the tethered live off of the middle class' tax dollars. Entitlements like this come at the cost of choice, however, so the tethered are severely limited to how they can live.
The reveal of the switch at the end is probably either encouraging the idea of determinism and how environment and genetics shape us entirely OR is the opposite view and is trying to shine a light on free will and ability to change one's circumstances through one's own choices. Because if they are truly the same then the key thing keeping the tethered down is the institution that allows them to survive off the backs of others objective achievement in reality by redistributing wealth, ie welfare programs that help perpetuate a cycle of helplessness that spreads throughout a community or even ethnic group.
I'd have to see the movie to get a better idea of what's going on, I could be way off.
Btw you mention America as hyper-capitalist when it is in fact a mixed economy with both capitalist and socialist elements. To the extent that this nation, or any nation for that matter, flourishes is the extent that capitalism is embraced and practiced. The socialist aspects turns the government into institutionalized gang warfare where special interest groups, businesses, catastrophizers, etc all lobby with the government for our tax dollars.
Or in the case of businesses they lobby for regulation that helps them destroy their competitors. People call it crony capitalism but it's a power that the government wouldn't even have to grant in the first place in a real capitalist society. Governments only role would be to protect individual rights and get out of the way of progress.
And everyone CAN succeed without it being just the status quo. We're all different so we will all have differing levels of productivity no matter what and we'll have different life goals in general. Maybe my career i choose for myself gives me more of a spiritual value than it does material value and I'm ok with that.
People can all succeed they just need to stop comparing themselves to others all the time and think that they're owed someone else's level of success. It's secondhanded and only leads to the resentment of the good for being good.
Extra: Ok, I just watched an interview with Jordan Peele where he said he thought the duality of the hands across America stunt summed up America perfectly to him. As in its an empty gesture that seems great and is done to alleviate any feelings of guilt one might have for being successful.
Taxes, to me, give off that same vibe to me where people will brush off the needs of others, or what some would call their moral duty, by saying "Hey, I pay my taxes." The taxes are what tethers the productive to the non-productive. But here it's the other way around.
If that's the case does the cutting of the tether represent killing the rich? When I say kill the rich I mean to create a utopian society of equals where there are no rich. An idea that's not "tethered" to reality very well. 😆
I believe Adelaide knew the whole time that’s why she gets so weird about going to the pier because she knew it was only a matter of time before Red found her or her children .
I half agree, I think she forgot because it was so long ago. Maybe she thinks it’s a dream, but I think subconsciously she remembers it. Something weird happened at the pier.
Jordan Peele's films also have an underlying of esoteric narrative(as do many films including Star Wars)and allegorical in relation to Babylonian and Kemetic ancient mythology. As well with concepts relating to Hermetic belief systems and societal conditioning. That man is definitely one of many masters of The Craft.
Allegedly! Everything stated above is alleged. Research is a doorway
I don't agree with you about this not being about slavery. I think it's the idea of how a slave might treat their modern counterpart. Say adelaide was originally a slave. How she would want to escape to even betray her other self. Why should she care about her in the face of survival? Just how the slaves who were allowed to be servants and live in the house could at times have little care or issue oppressing other slaves in the face of being allowed certain privileges and luxuries. It could be about how slaves would see modern black people as vain and materialistic and wish to take their place if given the chance or at least partially about that.
Strongly disagree unless you’re thinking of slavery in much broader terms. Like slaves to materialism (or something like that) because I truly don’t think this had anything to do with literal slavery. But that’s the beauty of art. It’s open to interpretation. ❤ God bless.
Nah bro
@@ascent8487 It actually did.
There’s no way that it’s not at least partially about slavery white Americans seem to forget that slavery only ended in 1865. The civil rights didn’t happen until 100 years later it’s almost like the US is built on slavery. Oh wait the US was built on slave labor not just from Black people, but Chinese and others, but yeah,you just want to watch horror movies about the black experience and pretend it’s just about monsters and has nothing to do with race
I responded to one of your comments on an Aesop Rock song and look forward to a breakdown of it that you said you might do.
I'm interested to watch this breakdown but haven't seen the film yet. I will be back as soon as I do, I'm just curious to know why critics were so harsh on this film
Any thoughts?
Wow thankyou so much - that Aesop video is definitely on my list. His music is incredible and yet I meet so few people who've heard of him!
I do go over a little bit why critics had a problem with this film in the video but I'd say the best and briefest explanation is that it's extremely confronting and it's not particularly positive, which runs against the grain of what most critics would like it to mean. More specifically a liberal notion of 'what blackness should be'. Something that Jordan Peele seems to fight against with everything he makes. It's stark, hopeless and honest in how it depicts and explores disenfranchisement and it points a lot of subtle fingers at where that is coming from in America and this is bound to ruffle some feathers. I would absolutely suggest watching it when you get a change. 'Get Out' too if you haven't also!
Thanks so much again for visiting off the back of that comment that really means a lot!
Novum my absolute pleasure mate! It seems we share similar tastes in both music and cinema so I will be subscribing and visiting more often. Believe it or not I just finished watching it and enjoyed it very much! Great breakdown as well, spot on.. look forward to more content from you. Feel free to hit me up with music and film recommendations.. based on what I've seen from you so far, we've much in common. I've got one for you actually. Two actually, when you have time - and if you haven't already - eatch:
Triangle & Coherence .. both great films I think you'd appreciate. Real mind benders. Chat soon, bud..!
i always figured part of her voice being jank is because fake adelade choked her out. prolly a combo of a few things
noice
"Your success damn near guarantees the failure of someone else."
This is economic illiteracy. The idea that the economy is a zero sum game where someone must be losing for someone else to win is fallacious.
No he's kinda right though
@@BagelBagelB1 How?
The last samurai was an actual story that happened
lol yea this dude has no idea what he is talking about. The last Samurai is not at all about a “white savior” can’t tell him that though I’m sure
Imagine drawing a white guilt narrative into your analysis of this film
any analysis of media that mentions star trek discovery in a positive light is easily one of the worst analyses ever produced, but since ive seen your newer stuff i'll just assume this was either a late april fools joke or you saw something in this movie no one else did and failed to communicate it here.
Star Trek Discovery is garbage. I do not remember what I said in this video but I will come clean and say that there was a point right at the start of Season One when I believed it was a good show. I was quickly proven wrong on that front!
@@Novum_YTahh, glad to hear it. would love a video on peele's nope so that i leave a mean comment on that as well. cheers mate
@@god47398 I also was super disappointed by Nope and I will generally consume just about anything with Aliens in it gleefully!
Plenty of people 'choose' to be oppressed in the current era because oppression or claims of oppression is our most valuable cultural currency.
Gloves worn by the tethered may be a refrence to black panthers, not sure. Pretty sure that has mo deeper significance other than de facto segeagation tends to keep african americans disproportionately poor, this movie is still about class.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Olympics_Black_Power_salute