You’ve probably heard all kinds of theories regarding Jordan Peele’s Us. Well, he’s finally letting you know, from his own mouth, the message behind the movie.
In a featurette titled “The Duality of Us,” Jordan Peele talks about his fear of doppelgangers — apparitions or doubles of a living people.
“Throughout mythology, doppelgangers often represent bad omens, or a foreshadowing of one’s death,” Peele mentions. “So I just wanted to sort of pinpoint and work off of that extremely primal fear.”
But also…the movie was about “privilege”…
“One of the central themes in ‘Us’ is that we can do a good job, collectively, of ignoring the ramifications of privilege. I think it’s the idea that what we feel like we deserve comes, you know, at the expense of someone’s else’s freedom or joy. And the biggest disservice we can do as a faction with a collective privilege, like the United States, is to presume that we deserve it, and that it isn’t luck that has us born where we’re born.”
“For us to have our privilege, someone suffers,” Peele elaborates. “That’s where the tethered connection, I think, resonates the most is that those who suffer and those who prosper are two sides of the same coin. You never forget that and we have to fight for the less fortunate.”
And if you remember from the movie, whatever those above ground experience, it came at the cost of “the Tethered.”
