Jordan Peele’s highly anticipated sophomore horror spectacle, ‘Us’ hit the silver screen this past week featuring themes of duality, systematic oppression, and freaking sick Black Flag t-shirts.
***MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD***
We enter in the ‘80s, coincidentally, the most definitive time period for classic horror films, and arguably the best decade for all things punk rock. A young Adelaide Wilson is walking with her bickering parents through a carnival. They walk by a long-haired carnie wearing a totally sick Black Flag My War shirt — freaking badass. I mean that album was released a couple years before this scene takes place, so we can imagine that this Carnie in particular must have been rocking out to it for the past year or so. Damn — he probably saw them with that lineup a few times too. Henry was at the top of his game.
One could argue that My War’s lyrics foreshadow the major theme of the film itself. Look up the lyrics and you’ll know what I’m talking about.
Anyway, Wilson’s Dad won her a Michael Jackson Thriller shirt, which is also sick, then she got attacked by her mirror-self in a Shaman-funhouse and passed out.
Flash forward to modern day; Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) is on vacation with her family, reluctantly agrees to go to the same beach she was attacked at to meet up with some friends. The Tylers (Tim Heidecker and Elizabeth Moss) and their twin daughters — one of whom is wearing another freaking Black Flag shirt! This one is just the logo, which is a total classic. Designed by Greg Ginn’s brother, Raymond Pettibon, whose main concept behind the logo was the antithesis of a white flag of surrender. Anarchy. Badass.
Adelaide freaks out on her son after he sees some scarecrow looking motherfucker in the sand and they all leave the beach to go home where they shortly thereafter experience a home invasion by their “tethered” selves.
The Tylers experience something similar. And guess what that twin is wearing again right before she gets brutally killed? A freaking Black Flag shirt! This time it’s featuring their 1980’s EP Jealous Again. Oddly enough, the album art for this is strikingly similar to the death of this same Tethered-Twin later on, when Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) bludgeons her in the temple with a golf club.
Us is a truly great contemporary horror that leaves a lot to be open to interpretation by the audience. Is it 3 Black Flag shirts? Is it two Black Flag shirts and one Dead Kennedys shirt? Or are the Dead Kennedys shirts the tethered-copies of the Black Flag shirts? Whatever it is, Jordan Peele is punk as fuck.
