10 Movie Messages Everybody Misunderstood

2. It's About Class, Not Race - Us

What Everybody Thinks

Before Jordan Peele's new horror film even hit cinemas, there was a general expectation that the film would, like Get Out, be concerned primarily with race.

Once Us was released, there was much discussion online about its true meaning, with some contending that due to its depiction of a marginalised group of people living underground - the doppelgängers known as the Tethered - it absolutely must be an allegory of the underground slave railroad, and therefore strictly concerned with race.

But thankfully, the truth is much more interesting than that.

The Real Message

Peele himself put it best - "It’s important to me that we can tell black stories without it being about race...After you get over the initial realization that you’re watching a black family in a horror film, you’re just watching a movie. You’re just watching people. I feel like it proves a very valid and different point than Get Out, which is, not everything is about race."

Us is really a movie concerned with class and socio-economic status as opposed to race, as best indicated when Adelaide's double Red (Lupita Nyong'o) introduces herself and her family as "Americans."

Adelaide and her family are nice, well-to-do people spending some downtime at their lush family beach house, while their Tethered equivalents are literally beneath them, forced to live underground with the rest of their "kind" (who, by the way, are a racially diverse bunch).

As such, the struggle of the Tethered is one of both literal and figurative upward mobility, to get above ground and take a more respectable place in society at any cost. And this is precisely the dynamic encouraged by an uncaring government - fight amongst yourselves and see who comes out, yes, on top.