Us The Tethered & Underground Tunnels Explained
Us: The Tethered & Underground Tunnels Explained
Contents
Jordan Peele’s psychological horror Us centers fear of doppelgangers. The Tethered and underground tunnels haunt audiences, but what exactly are they?
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As a horror creator, Jordan Peele seems to love dense symbolic elements, which is particularly noticeable in his 2019 hit Us with its red-clad Tethered and web of underground tunnels, both of which are rather complex aspects of the film.
The movie follows the Wilsons, an average middle-class American family: Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o), Gabe (Winston Duke), and their children Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph), and Jason (Evan Alex). Their seaside vacation is brought to a screaming halt by the arrival of the Tethered, doppelgänger versions of themselves with a single murderous goal in mind. The complex social explorations within Us matches the societally-driven commentary in Peele’s critically-acclaimed debut Get Out, solidifying the comedian’s legacy as a skilled director of horror.
The audience’s first brush with the Tethered comes early in the film, when a young Adelaide wanders off from her parents into a house of mirrors at a Santa Cruz fairground and encounters her doppelgänger. Years later, Adelaide is brought face to face with this fear once again. Red, Adelaide’s doppelgänger, with a voice like rusted nails, tells her family a story about who they, the Tethered, are. The mortal threat of these strange enemies is confirmed in a later scene when the Tyler family, friends of the Wilsons, are brutally murdered by their own doppelgängers. Peele masterfully crafts an antagonist that sticks in audiences’ minds even when the movie is long over, which made it a prime candidate for a themed maze at Universal Studios for their 2019 season.
The Tethered Are Us All Along – Here’s Why
From a literal story-telling standpoint, the Tethered are a failed and forgotten government cloning experiment. From a figurative standpoint, the Tethered represent that fear of the overlap between identity and identical, the base level fear of a doppelgänger. Their exact place in the world is complicated, spouting many fan theories. They exemplify the question the movie asks throughout: who is us? Moreover, if there is an “us”, there must be a them. While their initial appearance is “other” and terrifying, leading the audience to empathize with the “normal” familiar Wilson family, at no point does the movie firmly place them in the “them” category. As the movie wraps up to an end, a twist reveals that Adelaide was Red’s doppelgänger all along. The triumph over Red was a triumph by a clone, the protagonist that has been the audience’s window into the world. Inspired by The Twilight Zone, season 1, episode 21, “Mirror Image”, an episode about doubles (Peele himself rebooted the sci-fi thriller series earlier this year), Us uses the Tethered to force audiences to examine where their sympathies lie, and why.
Us’ Underground Tunnels Are Dark Shadows Upon Which Societies Are Built
The political commentary in Us dredges up the secrets America, particularly middle-class America, seeks to ignore. Hidden under the world the audience recognizes is an intricate web of tunnels where the Tethered are condemned to suffer. Their voices are unheard by those living the lives they wish they could have. In her story, Red describes the Tethered as “shadows”, eliciting images of shadowy unspoken truths that get to go ignored by those with the privilege to not know them. Even the names of the doppelgänger children exemplify this: Umbrae, from the Latin for shadow, and Pluto, the Roman god of the Underworld. Being underground makes the tunnels the literal foundation upon which the world is built. The prosperity of some is built upon the suffering of others. While both Us and Get Out deliver complex social commentary through symbolic metaphors, Us is different in how it focuses on the broader system. Passivity and ignorance of suffering are not enough to protect the characters, or the audience, from whatever might come lurking from the shadows.
Link Source : https://screenrant.com/us-movie-tethered-underground-tunnels-explained/
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