Thread by @OsmanLadan

I have no authority and no paycheck for this but #UsMovie touched a lot of deeply personal reference points and I don’t want these weird feelings inside me.
******Spoilers follow

There were so many perspectives on realness: reflection, shadow, mimesis—even creatures/things get twins (spider, rabbit, ambulance). By the time we see how the Tethered (They) live, we have many signals to think about who lives vs who performs a life

Yes for the glory in watching Adelaide as a little black girl pursuing an adventure (tho ill-advised). She GETS INTO trouble, doesn’t EMBODY it: one way that black horror is liberating. But I didn’t need to remember Alice in Wonderland and that creepy ass rabbit!

The Wilson kids’ sleepy complacency in beginning (compared to their all-night wakefulness by the end). They have a middle-class freedom and yet the little boy Jason, who struggles to “focus,” cannot remove his mask when the “white day is done”

The distraught, disheveled appearance of the black Tethered; the Wilson family recoiling. It reminded me of Mike Tyson calling Don King “the true n*gger,” and what we fear becoming or revealing

Red was a Kara Walker silhouette come to life: her jerky motions, her swiftness, her glee and her silence, her cries. And the empathy pangs that Lupita faced off with a stunt double, simulated violence on her likeness 😢

The black Tethered appear and make declarations, taking their time and space, yearning to cut the bond between them. The white Tethered slaughter and chill, do cartwheels. They seem to want what’s on the surface. A quiet convo about who can afford leisure, who leisure is for

I appreciated the race/inter-class tensions btwn the Wilsons and Tylers. There was a clumsy but chilling moment when Dahlia (white Tethered mom) puts on Kitty’s lip gloss and self-mutilates, mirroring Kitty’s cosmetic procedure. I wondered how Peele understands beauty performance

#UsMovie depicts the west’s terror of the savage and the jungle inside, described best by Toni Morrison in Beloved. Her brother Baldwin also reminded us America NEEDED a n*gger and so invented one

The metaphor of dance, of Adelaide/Red’s more intimately connected bodies was perfect: a swift shadow is harder to outrun. Reminded me of Pina Bausch’s tether in “…como el musguito en la piedra, ay si, si, si”

s/o to the Fates btw ✂️ snipsnip

Later, Jason cannot take his mother’s blood-soaked hand. The victory is muted by the slaughter and by what he knows. Can we ever face America’s bloody trails, unmarked graves, forgotten tunnels, and endless overwriting of indigenous peoples?

I’m uneasy with the western sensibility that there must always be a They and that the They gains freedom through violence; must assert Their symbolism via violence. // The surface dad, Gabe Wilson, calls the Tethered’s actions “performance art,” which—

As an immigrant, allusions to borders, cages, and institutionalized existence were so emotional. Do Lupita’s characters embody the message that a Them can never become an Us? And...can the immigrant ever be a “real” American? 👀

Ooh and wee that the protagonist demonstrates how the Us can be radicalized by oppression. The Us is violent in expectation, in a sense of deserving. Injustice is an affront to them even though the beauty of their lives arrives via (& in spite of) destroying others

Lol the whole cast of #Us when @JordanPeele had them drop it, pick it up fast, and scamper for weeks: