The Us curiosity train continues! Last week we held a Collider FYC screening at The Dome at the ArcLight Hollywood of Us with a post-screening Q&A with Jordan Peele. We’re going to share the full chat with you shortly, but right now we wanted to put the spotlight on one specific comment Peele made during the conversation. We’ve already shared Peele’s thoughts on what might happen to the Tethered after the events of the movie and how he thinks mathematics and/or fate can be applied to the rules of the world, but now we’re diving into the question, what were the Tethered busy doing down there on a day-to-day basis?
To recap a bit, if Red’s (Lupita Nyong’o) words are to be taken as the truth, the Tethered came from humans who figured out how to copy the body and thought they could use those copies to control those aboveground. The plan didn’t work and the Tethered were left directionless until a miracle occurred underground that showed the other Tethered that Red was different. At that point, as inspired by the 1986 public event Hands Across America, Red led the Tethered to plan an uprising that would conclude with them forming a human chain, presumably from coast to coast.
Peele spoke at length about how the connection between the Tethered and those aboveground is part scientific but also part poetic and how that leads to the inability to scrutinize certain parts of the mythology. Keeping in line with that, this is what Peele had to say about the day-to-day activities of the Tethered:
“The shorthand cheap version that I sort of would throw out as the general starting point guideline is, they’re doing what we’re doing but the scary version. Whatever that means, it’s the scary version. And the momentum that we’re trying to build thematically in the movie is trying to get to this idea that the version up here, the normal version, may be just as crazy as the below version even though we’re used to this kind of insanity. You know, our mania is in consumerism and one-upmanship, in cutting our faces open, going to amusement parks where we pay money to get in these devices where we scream. I wanted to sort of put this connection together [so], at the end of the film, you’re sort of left unsure who the scarier ones are.”
So maybe that doesn’t explain how the Tethered reproduce or where they got the scissors from, but it’s a concept that might make you rethink the things you do day to day.
If you want even more from our Q&A with Peele, you’ll get your wish because our next Us post will be the full video from the Collider FYC screening. If you’d like to check out some other Collider FYC Q&As right now, we have one with the team behind Portrait of a Lady on Fire right here and one with Greta Gerwig, Saoirse Ronan and Florence Pugh for Little Women right here.
