Freud's Uncanny & Jordan Peele's "Us"

Gianni Eason

In his essay “The Uncanny”, Freud explores the ideas of horror and fear in general, and boils down human fear response to a reaction to the uncanny. He explains the uncanny as not the entirely unfamiliar but, a feeling of recognition paired with unwelcome. The uncanny then becomes that which we know and are familiar with but, just slightly off, so that we are left hesitant and uncomfortable. He then applies this idea to fear as a whole; the reanimation of the dead, the living doll, the ghost, or the haunting of a childhood home. In every way, horror continuously returns to the uncanny to create imagery that is compelling and familiar, but every so slightly changed in that it triggers caution.

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Jordan Peele has taken the idea of the uncanny to its absolute limits in his film “Us” (2019), in making the monster not a close reflection of life but, the absolute doppelgangers of the characters in the film. The idea of the doppelganger has been featured before in the horror film to represent the uncanny, probably most recognizably in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” (1980), with the iconography of the twins. This unsettling reference to “The Shining” serves as an inspiration to Peele with many references to the film such as the aerial shot of the family car approaching the home and the actual twins who speak in synchronized lines.  

Duplication in “Us” can be attributed to many different interpretations. When Adelaide’s tethered responds to the question “who are you?” with the simple “Americans”, there is a clear interpretation of the “monster” as ourselves. This interpretation challenges the viewer to confront not the fear of a tethered murdering them, but their own capability and complacence in the horrors of everyday life. This can also lead into interpretations based on socio-economic inequality. In Adelaide’s tethered’s monologue, she mirrors Addy’s life experiences with the painful realities of her own, like performing her own child’s birth or being forced to live underground and eat rabbits live. An obvious allusion from this can be made to the struggles of those in poverty and how they are forced to “live underground” even though they are literally “Americans” exactly like “us”. For the purposes of this class, I think a connection can definitely be made to race.

The Black experience, especially in America, can in many ways mirror that of the tethered. While white Americans have had the liberty to exist in life normally, many Black Americans have been forced to work harder and struggle in darker ways to still be left to the underground. With this interpretation, I have further theorized that Adelaide’s tethered can be symbolic of Black assimilation to white life, when given the opportunity, Addy’s tethered switched places out of necessity and assimilated to life above ground, in the ways that many Black people have found assimilation as our way “above ground”. Because of our constant othering in our own environments, we as Black people have become the American uncanny

“Us” represents a theme that we have discussed in class in very metaphorical and interesting way in that retribution becomes a looming attack. Just as we’ve discussed in class, many times white fear of retribution manifests as projection and paranoia. Adelaide is the character personification of fear of retribution. She is entirely paranoid of even going back to Santa Monica as a whole out of fear that her life on the other side will be reversed, a clear representation of white fear of Black retribution. Adelaide’s tethered, or I guess the real Adelaide, harbors many of the angers for past trauma that Black American’s hold today. These repressed and literally buried realities ultimately reach the climax of the uprising of the tethered and the “untethering” or unchaining of the tethered. While the untethering and uprising are extreme fears in the film, when applied to the tethered as just “Americans”, it actually doesn’t seem that unreasonable. Without going to far into a reach, I think that the linking of the tethered at the end can even be related to community and coordination that the tethered, or perhaps Black people, have that the people above ground did not.