Like the use of scissors, it’s a strong metaphor that manages to represent both duality and individuality, depending on how you look at it. You can see the number repeated on clocks and even on top of the ambulance the Wilsons escape in, but Jordan Peele’s shot compositions even hide objects and frame things in a way that represent the number if you’re looking hard enough. One of the most notable appearances is on the vagrant’s sign from the beginning of the movie, which references the bible verse Jeremiah 11:11, which reads “Behold, I will bring evil upon them, which they shall not be able to escape and though they shall cry unto me, I will not hearken unto them." - in other words, it’s a pretty bad omen for us surface-dwellers. What Does Jeremiah 11:11 Say?One of the trickier aspects of the movie to figure out is the serendipitous occurrence of the number 11. And it reinforces the metaphor Jordan Peele spends so much of the movie discussing - that suppressing and forgetting about any group of people in our culture is to hold ourselves back, both in terms of growing our community and in terms of keeping our moral fabric strong. It really defies the idea beaten into the Tethered that they have no souls, they just haven’t had a fair shot. Red showed the world that if given the opportunity to succeed, anybody can rise to the occasion. The film ends on a powerful shot of the Tethered hand-in-hand above ground - showing that the Tethered were able to accomplish what their counterparts above ground couldn't. But at least Hands Across America left us this weird music video featuring C-3P0 and Robin Williams. Kind of tough for millions of people to hold hands over hundreds of miles of such challenging topography. It only raised about $15 million - roughly the same amount it cost to stage - and was hampered by the fact that America is, you know, home to deserts, mountains and rivers. Cool, right? Yes, but the event was kind of a bust. Inspired by the celebrity activism of the ‘80s (such as Band-Aid, Live Aid, and Farm Aid), this massive undertaking by the organization USA for Africa was meant to raise upwards of $100 million to fight homelessness and hunger by having six million people - who would pledge $10 or more to participate - form a coast-to-coast human chain, holding hands from New York to Long Beach, CA. And what was it all for? TO GET HANDS ACROSS AMERICA RIGHT, DAMNIT! “Hands Across America” was an actual event that happened in 1986. They surface en masse, and the suggestion is that what’s happening to the Wilsons is happening to countless families. What Was "Hands Across America"? And even though she dies doing it, Red gives the Tethered that opportunity. The Tethered version of the Wilson family in Us. Adelaide went on to have a full and happy life (well, until the events of the movie) - seeming to prove one of this movie’s central arguments - that forgotten and marginalized members of a community can succeed if they’re only given the opportunity. We see a great example of this in the dance flashback, where Adelaide is able to dance as expertly as Red. ![]() ![]() And after she gets to the surface, Adelaide thrives. The Adelaide we spend most of the movie with was born a Tether and trapped her counterpart in the tunnels beneath the boardwalk when the opportunity arose. ![]() And how was she able to do that? Because Red is the real Adelaide, the one that went into the funhouse back in 1986, when the movie opens. Red is seen by her fellow tethered as a Messiah of sorts because she’s able to exert free will, and delivers on that by being the one to lead the tethered to the surface. The only exception to this dynamic that we know of, are Adelaide and Red. You see, it ended up being the Tethered who were susceptible to being puppeted by their natural-born counterparts. But things didn’t go as planned - big surprise for such an outlandish plan. Red, Adelaide’s tether, explains that the dopplegangers were an abandoned experiment commissioned by some unknown group (maybe the government) as a way to see if the population above ground could be controlled by puppets below. What Are the Tethered?Before we get to the meaning of Us’ final scene, let’s talk about the movie’s antagonists, the Tethered. We’re going to dig into the movie’s ending, and some of the symbolism throughout that can help us decipher it, but of course, to do that, we’re going into FULL SPOILERS. Us is a twisty, turny nightmare that advertised itself as a home invasion movie featuring some dastardly dopplegangers, but as we’re quickly learning when it comes to Jordan Peele movies, it ended up being a lot more than that.
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