Film

Theaster Gates on Jordan Peele’s Us

Us: The Complete Annotated Screenplay, a new release from Inventory Press, pairs Peele’s critically acclaimed screenplay with in-depth annotations from cultural commentators such as artist Theaster Gates. In one of Peele’s iconic scenes, Gates outlines his personal reflections, exploring themes of identity and horror, and how the doppelgänger is used as a lens to examine the self and society’s deepest fractures

 

Act 3

EXT. BOARDWALK — DAY

Adelaide walks briskly down the empty boardwalk. A few bodies litter the ground.

EXT. BEACH BY BOARDWALK — DAY

In the near distance, a line of people hold hands, facing away from her. The line extends from the water’s edge to past the amusement park and into the distance. One of the men on the line is the man Jason saw earlier. He has the same face as the homeless man who was stabbed in the beginning.

Courtesy of Universal Studios.
Courtesy of Universal Studios.

Adelaide turns to the Merlin’s Forest entrance and walks inside.

INT. MERLIN’S FOREST — MIRROR ROOM — DAY

Adelaide walks into the dark maze. It’s the same as before inside. She retraces her steps from twenty-five years earlier. She finds her way to the same corridor where the attack occurred.

Courtesy of Universal Studios.

She walks through the dark opening Young Red came from. She finds a wall and pushes the surface, it opens a crack, and then the door swings open. A white rabbit hops out of the open door at Adelaide’s feet. Adelaide steps over the rabbit and cautiously into the empty dark space. NOTE (This is the location of Gates’ annotation)

INT. CONTROL ROOM — DAY

She’s ready to strike. Inside is a maintenance and technical control room.

At the end of the control room there’s a wall. She pushes it and it opens like a door revealing…

INT. ESCALATOR ROOM(TOP) — DAY

Courtesy of Universal Studios.

Adelaide gets on a downwards escalator.

INT. ESCALATOR — DAY

Adelaide stands and waits. She moves down through the darkness. Eventually she sees light below.

INT. THE UNDERPASS — ESCALATOR LANDING — DAY

Adelaide exits into a room that looks like a corner of an underground mall. She turns a corner into—

INT. THE UNDERPASS — MAIN TUNNEL — DAY

Courtesy of Universal Studios.

The tunnel feels like a publicly funded underground compound. The only beings are rabbits that hop around freely. All the doors are open.

Adelaide walks cautiously, stepping past and over rabbits, down the hallway.

INT. THE UNDERPASS — DAY

She passes the first open door. The cafeteria is empty of people. The rabbit cages are all open and empty. Adelaide keeps walking.

EXT. STREET — DAY

Zora helps Gabe hobble toward the boardwalk. Bodies are scattered. The sun rises. She holds her golf club and Jason’s geode. They get close to the boardwalk. An abandoned ambulance is parked in the street, its rear doors open.

GABE: Here. We can hide here. They got bandages and stuff. Mom knows what to do.

ZORA: Look. It’s the line.

Gabe does. Far head of them is the line of people holding each other’s bloody hands. The line starts at the shore and disappears through the city.

GABE: What is that, some kind of… fucked up performance art?

Courtesy of Universal Studios.
Courtesy of Universal Studios.

Zora looks at her dad like, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Notes from Theaster Gates

The bunnies, a sign of ongoing scientific experimentation and genetic mutation, are the first things we see as Adelaide descends the escalator to confront her double, Red, and where one of the engrossing complexities of Us takes place. We begin to understand that she has entered a world gone wrong, an industrial underworld of doppelgängers just below the house of mirrors. The bunnies have been released from their cages and the early reflections on this underworld are made more substantial because Adelaide is confronting her adult self. Adelaide’s doppelgänger, Red, speaks, explaining the scientific experiment, the underworld that mimics the things and people above, but in the experiment, those below become mad, unable to live true lives like those above. The doppelgänger says, “God brought us together that night,” and immediately after, we see the biblical quote Jeremiah 11:11, which states, “I am about to bring on them disaster that they cannot escape. They will cry out to me, but I will not hear them.” Adelaide confronts Red as a deconstructed version of “I’ve Got 5 On It” begins to play. This scene is core to my own reflections on Jean Paul’s interpretation of the word doppelgänger which means the one who walks by the side and usually denotes a double or an evil twin. In this scene, we later learn that through a very sophisticated turn of events, Red switches with Adelaide in the house of mirrors when they are young, leaving the original (Adelaide) in the underworld and Red to live in the world above. This turn of events forces me to think about the nature versus nurture debates and the ways the simulacrum within the Black filmic milieu creates its own horror and self-awareness.

When Adelaide’s son, Jason, announces to his parents that there’s a family in the driveway, it is the first moment we realize that Adelaide did not simply have a horrible encounter in her youth, but that her youth continued to grow alongside the family. Adelaide and Red become both synonymous and demonstrative of the ways in which the underworld changes the moralistic and sociological personifications of an individual. Red, who plays the role of the maternal psychopath, is, in fact, simply the by-product of the conditions of the underworld. Whereas Adelaide, who immediately after the switch at the house of mirrors was able to use silence to gain empathy, had the opportunity to understand the full family structure enough that the underworld could infiltrate the real world without any threat.

Theaster Gates is an artist and professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago.

Us: The Complete Annotated Screenplay is available to purchase here.