A Psychoanalysis of Jordan Peele’s Us: The Unconscious, Misidentification, and Inevitable Return of the Repressed

Jordan Peele’s disturbing film Us brings light to a new horror: the darker version of ourselves. Originally, government scientists created the Tethered as a repressive state apparatus to control the masses above; they are a bodily manifestation of ideology and the hegemony’s attempt at asserting itself. However, after the scientists recognized they could not clone the human soul, they abandoned the Tethered in the tunnels. Owing to abandonment, the Tethered’s only exposure to society was through the scientists who failed to treat them as actual humans or members of civilization. As a result, the Tethered failed to develop an ethical imperative which resulted in no sense of community in the tunnels as well as a lack of sublimation. Thus, the Tethered operate strictly through primal drives — they act as the id. All of this changes when Adelaide encounters her double, Red, in a hall of mirrors and Red takes over her life leaving Adelaide to take Red’s former place among the Tethered. This exchange mobilizes Adelaide’s marshaling of the Tethered to the cause of revenge and her inevitable return to the upper realm. Peele’s Us utilizes the Tethered to unveil the horrors of the unconscious mind and creatively illustrates the mirror stage to show the necessity of exposure to the external world to develop the ego and superego and points to the inescapable return of the repressed.

In Parker’s “How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies,” he defines the unconscious as “something not just underneath awareness but utterly without awareness” (117). In Us, the Tethered exist in the tunnels below and out of the eyes of civilization. Much like the Tethered, the unconscious is something that an individual, or society, has no awareness of; it exists out of the reach of a person but remains connected to them through instincts and desires. After an adult Adelaide seeking revenge infiltrates the home of her double who has stolen her life, she states, “[t]here was a girl, and the girl had a shadow[; t]he two were connected, tethered together” (Peele, Us, 44:54). Here, Adelaide illustrates the connection between the conscious and the unconscious. The girl is a conscious being who is aware of her existence and has developed both ego and superego because of her ability to exist in society. On the contrary, the shadow — the Tethered — exists as a copy of the girl with no sense of consciousness; a literal dark embodiment of the person casting the shadow, thus, illustrating the relationship between the unconscious and one’s mind. Concerning her statement, Adelaide is the girl while Red is the shadow. Adelaide existed in society and was able to develop all three identity components prior to Red stealing her position above. In contrast, Red grew up in the tunnels and was unable to develop an ego and superego because she was surrounded by other Tethered who act through primal drives. While both the conscious and the unconscious embody different layers of a person, they remain intertwined with one another without direct awareness.

The unconscious also “consists of repressed drives” or instincts (Parker 117). In Peele’s film, the government scientists “created the Tethered so they could use them to control the ones above” but soon found their attempt unsuccessful (Peele, Us,1:36:42). The failure of the Tethered project illustrates the inability to control the id. The Tethered act purely out of raw instinct due to their abandonment which leads to a lack of exposure to the external world and failure to develop an ethical imperative. Furthermore, “repression can succeed in inhibiting the transformation of an instinctual impulse into affective expression” (Freud 127). In Us, scientists repress the Tethered by abandoning them in tunnels away from the external world. Consequently, the repression leads the Tethered to lack affective expression which prevents them from forming a coherent society that is essential for developing the ego and superego. Without both a coherent society and affective expression, the Tethered are never capable of performing sublimation; they cannot channel their drives into socially acceptable actions or behavior. Hence, the Tethered do not speak to one another instead they growl or yell, violently eat raw rabbits, and fail to exude control over their primitive bodily movements.

The Tethered’s uprising is a result of misidentification during the mirror stage experienced between Adelaide and Red during their youth. According to Lacan, the mirror stage is a moment when a child sees themselves in the mirror and identifies with the reflection, recognizing that the coherent being in the mirror is them. Through this moment, the child feels a sense of consolidation of the self. However, the mirror stage in Us is far more complex because Red is not an infant when she sees herself for the first time, and her reaction after identification is substituting Adelaide’s life with her own. While at the carnival as a child, Adelaide wanders into a hall of mirrors with a sign that states “find yourself” while pointing to the entrance. Upon entering the hall of mirrors, Adelaide sees her reflection in the mirrors but continues into the maze because she has already undergone the mirror stage. Unlike Adelaide, the double, Red, has yet to experience the mirror stage and upon seeing Adelaide becomes aware of her existence and the Ideal-I. Red’s idealization of Adelaide and the desire to steal her life conveys Lacan’s point about the desire to reach this form of the self, though it is impossible. He states, “[t]he important point is that [the Ideal-I] situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction, which will always remain irreducible for the individual” (Lacan 1112). After recognizing that Adelaide lives the superior life, Red replaces her role in the surface world and lives her entire life attempting to reach this version of herself that she believes is ideal. Despite Red’s newfound guidance from the ego and superego from exposure to the external world, she does not fully escape her true identity: a Tethered. Red’s shortcoming of existing as a truly civilized being is due to misidentification in her mirror stage. Red mistook Adelaide to be the Ideal-I when she was not; Adelaide never was the ideal version, or coherent version, of herself that Red originally thought. As a result of initial misidentification, Red’s performance and strive toward reaching this Ideal-I only illustrate the unhappiness and failure in her attempt — an individual can never achieve the most coherent version of the self because it is a construction made through the mirror stage. The final scenes in the film unveil the impossibility of reaching the Ideal-I. While Red and Adelaide begin to fight, the differences in their behavior reveal their true identities. Adelaide moves with grace, patience, and skill which illustrates her as a coherent being much like those who live above. In comparison, Red begins to revert to her primitive drives from her time in the tunnels; she growls, screams, and moves without any purpose other than violence, thus, demonstrating her original identity as a Tethered and failure to reach the Ideal-I.

The return of the repressed — the uprising of the Tethered — becomes possible through Adelaide’s difference from the Tethered. Adelaide states that “[a]t the end of our dance, the Tethered saw that I was different. That I would deliver them from this misery” (Peele, Us, 1:40:13). Due to living in civilization, Adelaide already developed an ego and superego which separates her from the Tethered who never developed an ego or superego. Through Adelaide’s guidance, the Tethered become self-aware and recognize their experiences of abuse from scientists abandoning them in the tunnels. This newfound self-awareness allows the Tethered and Adelaide to create social formation through collaborative planning to overtake the lives of their double. Additionally, Adelaide also creates social formation among the Tethered through a reenactment of the Hands Across America campaign. The 1986 campaign was “a 4,000-mile-long chain of Good Samaritans standing hand in hand…[and] tether[ing] themselves together to fight hunger in the United States” (Peele, Us, 1:47). The reenactment of Hands Across America campaign at the end of the film displays the Tethered’s sense of community and solidarity. Furthermore, the purpose of the uprising for the Tethered is to take the life of their double and fulfill their desire to live in the surface world where the id, ego, and superego exist. However, the return of the Tethered is a return that never was for themselves but rather for those that live above; they are taking over the idealistic life and consciousness of the civilized population after remaining in the dark all this time. Although Adelaide appears to create social formation to help the Tethered overcome their abuse and abandonment, she does not act purely in the interest of the Tethered: she wants revenge. Her desire for revenge and attempt to murder Red expose Adelaide’s conforming to the id. The unconscious that Adelaide repressed in her time above returns because of her time in the tunnels surrounded by the Tethered who only operate through the id. Red also experiences a return of the repressed when she begins to revert to the drives of the Tethered as she fights against Adelaide in the tunnels. The identity Red performs in the external world becomes secondary as her repressed drives return to survive against Adelaide. The Tethered, Adelaide, and Red all demonstrate the inevitable return of the repressed. By the end of the film, everyone experiences the dynamic of the return of the repressed because of the uprising of the Tethered.

Peele’s 2019 film Us exhibits the complexity of the three elements of identity and the impossibility of separating the id from the ego and superego. In the film, the Tethered are living entities operating through the id below a civilization that fully functions with the ego and superego. The separating of the Tethered from the rest of civilization demonstrates the repression of the unconscious. However, the return of the repressed will always come back just like the Tethered and Adelaide, further demonstrating the inability to separate an element of the identity from the rest. Within the film, Red’s misidentification of Adelaide as the Ideal-I makes the return of the repressed possible. Through misidentification, the striving toward achieving this version of the self becomes pointless as it is impossible to become an entity that never truly exists. The original and repressed parts of an individual will continue to return from repression because one can never fully restrain and diminish them; the return is inescapable.

Works Cited

Freud, Sigmund. “VI. The Unconscious (1915).” General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology, Collier Books, New York, 1963, pp. 116–150, https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Freud_Unconscious.pdf.

Leitch, Vincent B., et al. “Jacques Lacan.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 3rd ed., W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2018, pp. 1105–1117.

Parker, Robert Dale. “5. Psychoanalysis” How to Interpret Literature, 4th ed., Oxford UP, 2020, pp. 114–150.

Peele, Jordan. Us. Universal Pictures, 2019.