It’s us.

*CONTAINS SPOILERS* If you’re planning on watching Us and haven’t gotten around to it for some odd reason, exit this window and make time for the less than two-hour film, available to rent on Prime. Find a willing friend if you’re too scared to view it alone. Then come back for a read.

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I love horror movies. I’ve fallen in love with them the way Belle fell in love with the Beast. Her amygdala may have been screaming at her to ditch crazy old Maurice and run back to her little town and her books, but she decided to stick around at the moribund old castle and learned a lot about herself and her captor. In the process, she fell deeply in love with the side of the Beast that required a little more understanding and time to appreciate. Beast didn’t make a great first impression, and neither did horror for me. I used to have a few tricks that made them bearable, such as pushing my glasses down my nose so I couldn’t see clearly or the more obvious tactic of ducking under a blanket and plugging my ears. Horror movies made me think and feel a way I didn’t want to be, so I avoided them when I could.

I made the choice to take a course called Horror during the fourth summer session of my grad program in Vermont because horror as a genre terrified me. I like to think I’m brave enough to invest in getting to know the things that scare me, and that’s a much easier mission to set in motion while sitting safely in front of a computer screen during course enrollment, still months away from actually taking the course. When the time came to face the horror, I felt a lot less brave. The remote setting in Vermont made for a prime location for a summer of reading and viewing carefully selected literature and films that spanned King to Hitchcock, haunted houses to small town massacres and everything in between.

The brilliant professor Tyler Curtain, who came to the mountain from UNC Chapel Hill with his two beagles, taught this course, and he opened with a discussion of how horror functions in the world of art. He introduced me to the concept of affect, a psychological term for the underlying experience of emotion, feeling or mood. These internal experiences can be physically felt and observed via facial expressions and bodily gestures. Horror elicits this mind-body connection in which the two function together without the express will of the conscious, and when aware of this affect response, we can train ourselves to observe how our minds and bodies experience the art of horror and to analyze the meaning in these experiences.

Think of the last time you experienced a jump scare. You may have flinched or screamed when an unbidden face suddenly loomed in a dark window or showed up in the mirror behind the unwitting soon-to-be victim. This is the apparent, physical affect of fear. Our conscious self is not giving the go ahead for either mind or body to react in this manner, and, frankly, it may be ashamed of the mind-body duo’s extreme response to an unthreatening trigger, but we experience it as though it were real when we let mind and body rule our reality. The experience can be cathartic when we allow these dips into the illusion of fear but don’t forget to resurface in the now, but it’s the stuff of nightmares when we remain in the depths of created terror.

I didn’t figure this out right away or even by the end of my summer there. We had to read and view on our own time for class discussions, and during our viewing of Ari Aster’s Hereditary, I had to put physical distance between myself and the screen by standing in the far corner of the room to feel safe enough to continue watching. I would have just shut that movie off before it was halfway through if it had been up to me, but it was homework.

Curtain’s curriculum included the first of Jordan Peele’s horror films: Get Out. I’ve seen all three, and this one still tops the list in my opinion. Well done horror films facilitate some serious introspection, and Peele’s films lead to the unsettling truths that horror is not some foreign force wrought of ungodly origin, though it may appear that way. Rather, true horror is something born of ourselves, intensifying in its terrifying power so long as our attempts to deny and avoid this truth persist.

Us accomplishes this philosophy clearly in its very title. Yes, we’re watching us. A little on the nose, but it’s all right there before you even begin to analyze why it works. Peale wrote this movie inspired by a number of ideas, and central to his creation was the primal fear of the doppelganger self.

Doppelgänger, anglicized as doppelganger, is the German word for double goer, and has a mythology rich with horror. In folklore the doppelganger was the evil twin or spectral counterpart whose appearance was a harbinger of some horrible misfortune. Even Abraham Lincoln reportedly viewed his doppelganger before serving his time as president, and we all know the fate he came to. Whether you believe it or not, the idea of seeing double when seeing self is unsettling to say the least. Maybe for the same reason that we can feel alien in our own bodies at times. When our mind, body and spirit are one, we are at peace and in the now. But when there is some internal disconnect there, we feel off and out of control. Seeing a doppelganger is a physical representation of that feeling of disconnect. The sight of a doppelganger facilitates the experience of seeing us being outside of and other than ourselves.

In an interview with NPR, Peale touches on the terror one can feel from looking in the mirror:

It makes you question your identity. You know, the one thing we can count on in our own consciousness is that it's ours, and this place in the universe is ours — the one thing that we can know for certain. And when that is put into question, it's just this existential crisis. Now, throughout history the doppelganger mythology exists. And what I think it represents is this — is everything that we don't face in ourselves. It is a representation of the guilt, the trauma, the fear, the hatred that might be buried underneath layers of pleasantry. All that stuff that we don't deal with: When it comes out, it'll come out in crazy ways. …

That’s what this movie is essentially about. By stifling it or trying to avoid it, we turn the part of “us” that scares us into the enemy without realizing that we are the monsters we’ve villainized. We create horror.

I think this fear of looking in the mirror also stems from a deep sense of self hatred, a feeling not foreign to anyone who’s ever struggled with a form of addiction. Looking in the mirror ignites discontent, loathing, disgust, and all the terrible ways we feel about ourselves when our minds are not healthy and connected. And it’s scary to feel this way and to know that someone feels that way about us and to sit with the fact that that someone is us. It can feel at times that we are not ourselves, that we’re hating someone who is a stranger, but seeing ourself in the mirror forces us to accept that the stranger is the closest thing to an identity we have. We would rather look at anyone but ourselves and our self destructive thoughts and habits, and the mirror forces us to look anyway.

I can acknowledge that my addictive behaviors and thought patterns constitute the worst part of me, and they were undoubtedly the part of me I didn’t want to address or acknowledge. This part of me many refer to as the alcoholic self, but it’s so much more than a self who is addicted to alcohol. That self emerged slowly, feeding on any instances of trauma that led it further and further from the innate sense of connection we’re all born with.

Peele portrays the inception and growth of this self in the prologue scenes of Us, which take place in 1986 at a boardwalk fairground by the beach. Young Addy, whom we first see from behind as she faces away from the camera, is with her parents and doesn’t speak in the entirety of the prologue. We follow her through the motions of trailing after her parents and taking in the happenings around her. We find that they’re there to celebrate her birthday, which is a fitting occasion since the particular events of this night lead to the birth of her true life horror. While her mother goes to find the restroom and her father, who’s definitely under the influence of more than a few beers, is distracted by one of the fair games, Addy drifts off through the night toward the beach. Holding her big red lollipop in a way that pays homage to the red balloon motif in Stephen King’s It, she wanders along the sand until the lights from a funhouse called Merlyn’s House attract her attention. She drops the lollipop and enters the building beneath the illuminated sign “FIND YOURSELF”, an apt message for a house of mirrors and for a child just setting out on path of self discovery. Inside, Addy becomes lost and disoriented by the mirrors that block her way with her own reflection as she attempts to return to the door she entered. The mirrors add an element to her plight that a normal maze would lack. She has stumbled into unfamiliar territory, trapped with herself in the hall of mirrors, a fate that deepens with her thwarted efforts to escape as she runs into herself again and again. She finally sees one reflection unlike the others, and this one is familiar to us because it’s the same perspective we had of the Addy facing away from us when we were introduced to her. This time, Addy appears to be looking at a backwards version of her own reflection, an unsettling phenomenon. And the scene cuts out.

This opening establishes the theme of identity that is central to the film. Us presents the struggle of finding ourselves and living with both the light and the dark sides of ourselves and others in a world that doesn’t allow easy access to the kind of honesty and vulnerability necessary for self discovery and true connection. There are endless ways in which we find avenues to avoid true confrontation of self. Substance abuse, materialism, consumerism, pride and prejudice, eating disorders, pursuits of fame or entertainment, etc. Anything that allows us to deny parts of ourselves, to create a persona we think is preferable to our truth.

The main premise of the film is set in Addy’s adult life; now Addy Wilson, she has a husband and two kids of her own, and her family has returned to the same beach town in which the traumatic events of the prologue took place. Even from our introductory moments with them, we get a good read on each of the family members. Addy carries the secret of her childhood trauma, which she has not shared with her family, and the weight of it clearly functions as a wall between her and the others. Gabe, her husband, is a bit of a goofball and just wants to keep up with the Tylers, an insufferable, wealthy family he emulates. He doesn’t seem to have a grounded perspective of reality. Their teenage daughter, Zora, isolates with her headphones, emanating a too-cool-for-you vibe. Their son, Jason, is perceptive but anxious; he is attracted to magic, carrying around a lighter from a trick he once knew and wearing a mask most of the time. Jason’s mask, Zora’s headphones, Gabe’s ambitions of comfort and wealth, and Addy’s secret-keeping make it impossible for them to actualize as individuals or as a cohesive family. Addictions of every kind present this same dilemma. They are masks for our insecurities, distractions from our disenchantment with life, obsessions with what we don’t have, and often the heaviest of our secrets.

The family spends a beach day with the Tylers on the very same stretch that Addy encountered the house of mirrors as a child. She is tense and anti-social when Kitty Tyler, played by Elisabeth Moss, attempts light conversation. Addy says that she’s not good at talking, which reflects the crippling affect of her long held secret. She can’t be herself or connect with another human because she’s hiding herself and because Kitty only wants an illusion of connection in her booze-soaked conversation about physical appearance. The Tyler parents appear drunk in every scene including this one. Addy panics when Jason wanders off at one point, and the terror she experiences prompt her to open up a bit about her past later with Gabe.This is the beginning of some real connection between the two of them because Addy has taken a step in sharing her real self with him. She speaks of her lingering fear of the girl she encountered in the house of mirrors, admitting that she feels as if she is still coming for her, getting even closer now that she’s back at the beach.

This haunted past and the anxiety Addy lives with because of it echo the way in which addiction progresses. Triggered into development by trauma, slowly progressing and intensified by a revisiting of the old trauma, at some point it becomes impossible to be kept in the dark. Addy’s past is something she has tried to keep from her family at the cost of isolating herself in her anxiety, but she is finding now that there comes a point when she can no longer hide or lie about it.

Moments after she opens up a peek into her past - only a small percentage of the full truth - Jason announces the presence of a family in their driveway. A family, as Gabe observes, doesn’t strike fear into them because they too are a family, a unit of four connected by blood and love. But they too are a family only in appearance since each of them lives with the addictive habit that keeps him or her from fully connecting with the whole in a genuine union.

The intruding family, who are soon recognized as a threat, proceed to surround and break into the house, a suspense-ridden sequence that culminates with both families seated in the living room across from each other, eerily mirroring each other. Jason states the obvious fact that no one wants to hear: “It’s us.” They are forced to sit and look at their mirror image, at themselves, which they have avoided really doing for a good time now. Like most characters in the film, and like many of us who turn to substances or other distractions for relief, they have been looking at everyone and everything but themselves and so have allowed the doppelgangers to live and grow unchecked, free to grow stronger and to ultimately find their ways into the lives of those they mirror.

This strange family is in fact a distorted version of the Wilson family, each counterpart even played by the same actor. They are a sneering, smiling, ravaged bunch. The only thing perhaps more terrifying than seeing yourself in exactness standing (or sitting on a living room couch) in front of you might be seeing that self smiling knowingly right at you. That self is you somehow, and yet that self knows something you don’t and is smiling with that arcane knowledge. Seeing their doppelganger selves is so disconcerting because they are seeing a part of themselves that they are familiar with in appearance, but that they know nothing about internally.

This living room scene is fantastic because it encapsulates that feeling of dread we know all too well when we’re forced to sit alone with ourselves in the time before we found a solution. The Wilson family cannot recognize that they are linked to these strangers and want more than anything for them to just go away; it’s the same with that feeling of discomfort or ennui we have in those lonely moments.

Being with ourselves and really looking at ourselves is a reckoning with the fact that there is something in ourselves that we don’t fully grasp and can’t control. It’s a threat to our livelihood that is very much alive and intent on remaining alive. That’s how addiction lives in us. It is a part of us we know is there and us but that we don’t want to associate with or know, and it’s a part that will do anything to survive even at the cost of our own lives.

For much of the film, we don’t know much the purpose of the alternate selves other than that they are intent on destroying their counterparts and taking over their lives. We see a bit of this in the Tylers’ home when their doppelgangers arrive and execute a quick, ruthless bloodbath. At one point, Kitty’s counterpart smears lipstick over her mouth into a hideous red smile, symbolically usurping the lifestyle of her materialistic body match while Kitty lies gurgling from a slash to the throat, dying slowly on the floor of her home.

Later in the film, we receive a more informative account of the situation from Addy’s replica, Red, who gives a haunting monologue; she reveals that these doppelgangers, called the tethered, were originally created as part of a plan to control society. Two bodies, but only one soul, tethered together and linked for eternity each to occupy their respective realms. As Red narrates, we revisit the fairground scene again. This time the montage of fair scenes is intercut with scenes of the tethered going through the same motions as their doubles but in the context of the tunnel world. The tethered contort through strange enactments of the same motions as their doubles, grimacing while their counterparts smile. The pairing of these scenes forces us to see what it looks like to go through the motions of life without a soul, and we realize the horrific reality that the tunnel world is really our world with all the light and love extracted.

You can watch this clip here: Red reveals the history of the tethered

Red explains all this as she stands before a chalkboard in an empty classroom in the tunnels. The setting suggests that societal education is gravely lacking in introspective practices, teaching us to be in a physical world of facts but failing to educate us on true connection and self-awareness. Education on anything from literature to mathematics is dead without feeding the soul as well as the mind. So many of the most brilliant artists have suffered incredibly from addiction or other serious mental disorders, and so many have died because of it too. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin, Heath Ledger, Dylan Thomas, James Joyce, Edgar Allan Poe. The list goes on in aeternum. No one can say that these minds were not educated in their own right, even those lacking degrees. But there was something missing that they tried to fill with their writing, their music, their substances of choice. Many of the most genius, creative minds seem to have made some Faustian pact in which they surrendered to the tyranny of alcohol or drugs for the sake of their art. This kind of living in bondage came at a cost. That much is undeniable.

The tethered represent a whole society raised in bondage and without any connection to soul. They have lives and associations with one another based on the lives of their doubles, but there is no meaning to their existence. No living thing, no matter how miserable, can resist the offer of a better life over no life at all. This is the single motivation that drives the tethered to leave their tunnel existence in an effort to usurp the livelihoods of their doppelgangers who live in the light beneath the sky.

The tethered ones aim to destroy because they have no concept of connection. Each tethered self sets against his or her respective doppelganger, and this becomes a persistent theme of the film: destruction of self. In the chaos of fearing for their lives, the humans follow suit and prepare to destroy their tethered selves as well. Though they may not set out intentionally with this specific goal, each member of the Wilson family ends up destroying the tethered who are warped versions of themselves. The horror here isn’t that murder is necessary for survival, but that both the humans and the tethered believe that one of them has to die for the sake of the other’s life, a belief that launches all knowing parties into gladiatorial combat to the death. Those unaware of what is happening die from sheer ignorance, and those in the know die because they fail to kill.

This pertains to addiction in the sense that the tethered, like our addict selves, are completely selfish and operate with a survival mindset. They must at all costs preserve themselves, and not necessarily as a unit. We don’t see much love between them, though there is definitely loyalty.

Interestingly, when Umbrae and Pluto (Zora’s and Jason’ tethered doubles, respectively) are dying, Addy exhibits grief at their demise. She soothes Umbrae, whom she finds snarling like a wounded animal in her death throes. And she even protests as Pluto walks himself into the flames that devour him. Her mourning of these deaths, even though they are the death of her children’s tethered and seemingly necessary to the survival of her own family, suggests the pain that inevitably accompanies losing a part of ourselves that we’ve come to know as central to our lives. Early sobriety feels very much like a grieving process for a former self, and it is. And like Addy as she feels the conflicted grief at watching these tethered children die, we don’t know if we should be feeling such grief at the loss of our lives with alcohol. It’s a loss nonetheless and one that deserves to be nurtured and seen.

Throughout the film, Peele incorporates references to the Hands Across America movement, which seems to be part of the tethered ones’ masterplan to take over the world of their doubles. Hands Across America was a charity movement in 1986 that aimed to link people hand in hand across the contiguous United States to raise awareness and finances for the hungry and homeless Americans. The tethered mimicry of this movement reflects the reality that without real action or empathy, participating in an event like this is primarily an illusion of contributing to some great cause, an illusion of real connection, when the physical action of holding hands doesn’t really accomplish anything. HAA represents this illusion of connection, akin to the same illusion of being part of something we can experience when drinking or using. That was some weird magic about drinking I never understood but sought after nonetheless: the feeling of connection it granted. I could be totally alone and not feel it under the spell of alcohol. While you’re in it, even if you know deep down it’s not the real thing, it’s so much better than the darkness of complete isolation, which you know is lurking just waiting to consume you. Without alcohol or another solution, there was just that darkness. Without the promise of Hands Across America, the tethered know they will be forever in the dark. Better to stand hand in hand with someone equally as dark and soulless as you than to forever ape the actions of living people in the tunnel world. They don’t see that they are only tethering themselves again by clasping hands in this way.

After Addy kills Red, she and her family pile into a stolen ambulance and flee the chaos. Peele’s big reveal comes in a final flashback to Addy’s1986 fairground experience, and the final piece in the unsettling jigsaw puzzle of her dark secret falls into place. We see the whole trauma of her childhood encounter and see how that trauma gained a hold in her existence, only growing stronger and more secure as a part of her identity with time. With this horrible knowledge, we watch Addy driving away with her family not to a happy ending but to something else. She looks at Jason, who also seems privy to the terrible truth, and she slowly smiles. Jason slips his mask over his face. And the family drives off before the scene cuts out.

As I said, it is not a happy ending. The four people in the car driving for their lives have not eliminated the problem of the tethered, they have murdered their other selves and left the remaining tethered holding hands in a vain attempt to have some kind of life. With them we have experienced the horror of encountering the darkest parts of ourselves at the risk of our very lives, but the solution to this threat was destruction and abandonment. As Addy drives her family to whatever awaits them next, she is not victories but running again. “I ran as fast as I could,” is what she tells Gabe of her very first encounter with her tethered as a child, and that is precisely what she has been doing the entire time she’s not focused on killing the other half of her.

Our relationship with our addict selves - the selves who need alcohol, money, drugs, possessions, or other temporary fixes to survive - mirror the relationships the characters in Us have with their tethered doppelgangers. They are linked in body but not soul; they are the same person and not at the same time, and each sees himself or herself in the other while knowing that the person they see is also a stranger. The addict self needs the mortal, transient substances that give the illusion of life to survive, and when fed they will continue to take whatever actions they deem necessary to survive, convincing the mind of this necessity and justifying thoughts and actions that jeopardize the existence of our true selves. We, as human beings, need a deep sense of real connection in order to survive and thrive. This connection exists at a spiritual level, but it requires unity of the body and mind with the spirit as well to be fully actualized. We cannot have this connection if we destroy the body and mind or deny the parts of them that do not fit in with our vision of a good, whole self. If we hide those selves and choose only to preserve and share the light parts of us, the parts that live under the sky, we fail to heal and grow as individuals cultivating conscious connection with ourselves, with others and with God.

Us demonstrates the horror of trying to live in ignorance of our whole self. Driving away with her three family members, Addy is still haunted by a darkness only she carries. If her son shares this knowledge, his mask represents his decision to isolate himself in the secret as well. The English grammar nerd is going to step in for a minute here. When Jason said “it’s us” early on in the film, he named the title of the film, but he also committed an error in language that merits attention. Colloquially, what he says is acceptable. But he’s not using the form of the first person pronoun that he should if he’s naming the subject of his thought. ‘We’ is the correct form; ‘us’ is the object form of ‘we’. We think, we feel, we do, we are. Things happen to us. People look at us. We are not us. In choosing to call the film Us, Peele (perhaps without meaning to) puts his characters into an inferior position, making them the objects of action rather than the agents in their own lives. True connection, as awkward as it sounds, would be “they are we” or “we are they.” “It’s us”, innocent in its socially accepted form, establishes the grave sense of disconnect that prevails from start to finish in Us. We can never be truly connected when we can’t understand us.