“Like many a Good White Person™ might say when confronted with the responsibility of righting systemic racism - the humans are asking: Why should I have to be punished for something I didn’t even know about, let alone do?” Brooke Obie wrote at Shadow and Act. Though we initially side with Adelaide and her family as they fend off seemingly unprovoked attacks, the plight of the Tethered proves persuasive, too. Still, when it comes to the issues of privilege that can undergird structures of racial inequality, “Us” offers plenty to chew on. Given the trenchant way that Peele tackled race relations in “Get Out,” it may be tempting to peer at “Us” through the same lens, even though the filmmaker has said that this entry is not explicitly concerned with those same themes. Many pundits read “Us” as a socioeconomic satire, where the financially comfortable characters find themselves attacked by the Tethered, who stand in for those less fortunate. “Peele piles on (and tears off) the masks and the metaphors, tethers the past to the present and draws a line between the Reagan and Trump presidencies, suggesting that we were, and remain, one nation profoundly divisible.” “In ‘Us,’ the appearance of unity - in a nation, in a person - doesn’t last long before being ripped away like one of the movie’s masks,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The New York Times.
Asked who they are, Adelaide’s doppelgänger provocatively replies, “We’re Americans.” Still, for as much as we learn about the Tethered, it’s tempting to read even more into what they may represent. The project was shuttered, but the abandoned Tethered lived on in underground tunnels, gnawing on raw rabbit flesh until they could emerge and enact a bloody revolution. Peele calls these doppelgängers the Tethered, and he provides ample exposition about who they are and what they’re up to: Decades ago, a powerful cabal created duplicates of every American in a failed attempt to exert some sort of control over the populace.