“I found my faith and I found God”–Red
When I was younger, I used to sit next to my mom on the couch, and we would watch the five o’clock news together (it was not an exciting life, but it was my life). And if you have ever watched the evening news, then you already know that you’re not going to hear about how the handsome fireman rescued the cute puppy from the tree. In reality, you will hear about how it seems the world is falling apart.
But no matter how horrific the tragedies may have seemed, they never really bothered me. In the words of Heath Ledger’s Joker, “Nobody panics because it’s all a part of the plan.” As awful as it may seem, it didn’t really seem to matter when a kid my age died in senseless gang violence or when a suicide bomber killed a dozen people on the other side of the world. Of course, any decent person would agree that those are tragic occurrences. However, it’s difficult to truly identify with these faceless types of evil in the world.
After all, it’s those people who do those terrible things. It’s not us. Maybe our practiced indifference to the seemingly distant evil in the world gives us a buffer between the “bad” people and us. Maybe it makes us feel better by comparison to know that we would never be capable of such evil. Such cruelty.
But that doesn’t change the fact that we are.
*Spoilers start here*
Perhaps that is what is so horrifying about Jordan Peele’s Us. It’s not the obvious horror of seeing Lupita N’Yongo give one of the most disturbing film performances I have ever seen in Red, the doppelganger of her other character Adelaide. It’s not the gruesome, and in some cases, darkly hilarious violence that happens throughout the film (I will never look at the Beach Boys or NWA the same way again). Rather, it is the realization that just as the United States government apparently buried their logistically dubious “clone every American” experiment in the countless underground tunnels across the country, we too attempt to bury and hide our true nature from the world. It’s different when the evil finally has your face.
Essentially, the seemingly psychotic and bloodthirsty Tethered are a manifestation of what we truly are, our real selves that we so desperately try to hide. But try as we might, we can’t change who we truly are. Because of our sin and inherent depravity, we are lost, broken and unable to save ourselves — just like the abandoned and hopeless Tethered people who are doomed to live an eternal hell of mimicking every movement that their counterparts make above the surface.
And because of our own brokenness and depravity, we deserve hell as well. As Jeremiah 11:11, a verse that is used as a motif throughout the film, says, “Therefore this is what the LORD says: ‘I will bring on them a disaster they cannot escape. Although they cry out to me, I will not listen to them.’”
Yes, we deserve a hell that the Tethered already inhabited — unless we accept that we can never save ourselves, and we trust in the One who can.
For us, that person is Jesus Christ, who made a way to salvation for us that we could have never found ourselves. For the Tethered, that person is Red, the only one among them that was capable of saving them and the true protagonist of the film—their messiah. Just as Jesus came from heaven to show us the way to heaven, Red, the original Adelaide who had her life cruelly taken from her by her original Tethered, came from the surface and is the only one among the Tethered to know what “paradise” feels like.
At the end of the film, the Tethered all join hands across the entire country as brothers and sisters — a reference to the Reagan Administration’s failed “Hands Across America” campaign back in the 1980s — as they are all united as one by Red’s plan and sacrifice. Despite the bloodshed and countless jumpscares it takes to get to this moment, it is still a beautiful moment that reflects Christian unity in the atonement and sacrifice of Christ.
That is what makes Us a compelling and ultimately powerful film. It dares to say that perhaps racism, classism, climate change, partisanship and greed among other things are not what is truly wrong with our world. Those are just an extension of who we are. Maybe it’s just us.
And maybe, we can only save the world and ourselves by trusting in the only person that can.
