The USA in "Us"?

Envy, Resentment - Oh, My!

Intended or not, Jordan Peele's Us (2019) subtly rejects the politics of envy by highlighting the fact that the socially and economically aggrieved may know what's owed them but may very well lack the capacity to build anything. 

The film begins with an affluent African American family heading on vacation to some locale near Santa Cruz, CA. Despite the mother's early childhood trauma, the family appears to be the very picture of the American Dream: wealth, status and a couple of relatively normal kids. Alas, all is not well in Paradise. It turns out that each member of the family has his very own doppelganger dressed in red coveralls and armed with shiny, soon to be glistening, scissors. 

The paired families consist of Adelaide-Red (mom), Gabe-Abraham (dad), Zora-Umbrae (sister), and Jason-Pluto (brother). After letting themselves in (against the will of the Wilsons), Red laboriously and laconically lectures everyone about how (1) each is tethered or connected to the other, (2) life is really bad downstairs in the underworld, and (3) some human though certainly not humane power has made each sunshine suburbanite paired  to a downcast, demented demoniac. 

The good news is that the Fabian Four are "Americans"; the bad news is that momma bear has been hearing God's voice (this usually does not end well in a horror movie) and the voice tells her that happiness and freedom can be obtained only by slicing and dicing their betters (Red calls this "untethering" but the less morally obtuse might just term it "murder"). To go from bad to worse, it turns out these folks who self-identify as Americans have no desire to pull themselves up by their sandal straps but to prosper by displacing-by-death the very decent and upright people who made America great.

I'm reminded here of some of the words found in the title track of Black Sabbath's Heaven and Hell (1980; twenty years young this year): 

Do me a wrong, you're a bringer of evil.

The Devil is never a maker.

The less that you give, you're a taker. 

Like the Devil, these dread doppelgangen build nothing, life lifelessly and are propelled by rage's resentment. Not an attractive group.

Cheers, I owe you!

Are the gated communities of America's rich, prosperous and famous made possible because of the suffering and degradation of a permanent underclass? Did Gabe attend Howard University on the back of Amblin' Abe? Did Zora's neglect of cross country running and love of electronics make Umbrae the fleet-footed loonie she became? 

Peele does not provide answers but his film illustrates nicely is that without a positive proposal for living life, one can easily fall into comparing one's life with that of others and grasping for the Good at the expense of another. In biblical language this is called covetousness, and it leads only to resentment, envy and pain. And perhaps a raw rabbit or two.