What of mothers whose worst fear culminates in and as the image of homelessness, a particularly capitalist anxiety, amidst a high speed, digitally networked environment in which children must learn to navigate a neoliberal social totality involved in a constant state of re-form? What skillsets must a mother pass down to ensure her children survive when they are susceptible to radical and spontaneous shifts in value? Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) poses just such a question. The film follows a mother named Adelaide Wilson and her family on their vacation to Santa Cruz. In the night, they are confronted by a family of doppelgangers who live in an underground society that is tethered to the movements of those on the surface. As Adelaide’s children Zora and Jason enjoy access to decent schooling, investment in their hobbies, and time off in their family vacation home, Adelaide’s doppelganger Red lives in communal, prison-like accommodations where her children Umbrae and Pluto develop hobbies like violence and fire. The doppelgangers come to the surface in orange prison jumpsuits and collectively seek out their agency in an uprising called “The Untethering,” an act in which those below move into their counterparts’ homes to repress and replace those who live and work above them. To retain their status above, the Wilson family must compete with their likenesses one by one as they, themselves, begin to move up and down in social location—first occupying their friends’ mansion and later moving into the streets—as they try to escape replacement.[1]
            To better understand intergenerational passing and the mother’s role in that process within the neoliberal context, I look to a classic text as a foundation, Victor I. Stoichita book A Short History of the Shadow. The book traces the historical origins of artistic representation through the figures of the shadow and the mirror, figures that have evoked different social logics throughout history but also in different cultures. In both Greek and Egyptian culture, with their disparate histories and traditions, it was the figure of the shadow that came first and was originally conceived as primary to representation.  The Greeks, in particular, saw the shadow as the “other” of the body. The tracing of a shadow and the creation of an image functions primarily in Plinian myth—and in Western tradition—as a substitute for the loss of the material person that the shadow depicts. As an erotic act of substitution and, like the doppelgangers who desire to substitute for those aboveground and maintain the walls of the home that separate them, “the shadow’s resemblance (similitude) to the original plays a crucial role… the shadow is somebody’s image; it both resembles and belongs to the person whose image it is.” Importantly, however, the real shadow leaves with the person while only the trace of it from a specific moment in time remains on the wall immortalized in a way that can maintain an “upright,” lifelike position beyond the death of the physical body for those who consume the tracing and produce their own images in response to that figure as generations change.[2]
            In the myth of the origin of the image that Stoichita lays out, the tracing of a woman’s lover’s head without the rest of his body reveals that the image is not the body nor the shadow in an unmediated form. It is a projection that emanates from the woman as much as it contains a tracing of him, belonging in part to both. Through formal intervention, she imbues the head with more significance and edits his body out altogether as that which is repressive, defined as what is either devalued or omitted from the honorific image. It is this perfected image that she keeps with her when he goes. Finally, the woman’s father will complete the daughter’s fantasy by giving the tracing of the shadow physical shape in the form of sculpture that is molded according to the fantasy image.^[3] Together, father and daughter create a living double that can stand in the temple, even after the lover dies, symbolizing what is honorific for real men who mold themselves either in comparison or in contrast to that image, ensuring the image’s eternal reproduction through an exchange of bodies who accept or reject the fantasies of those who have come before them, distorting them further as they take and leave aspects from various images and construct their own collage, which constitutes an individual understanding of desire and threat, in turn. 
            I refer to Greek mythology because Us is structured according to a specific cultural logic. When the Wilsons ask who the family of doppelgangers are, Red replies, “We’re Americans.” The film is concerned with revealing the shadow archive that undergirds neoliberalism, which hails from Western tradition and spreads throughout the globe as a product of colonization and neocolonization. Pliny’s story is itself a mythic distortion of the original Egyptian tale, but the statue was a substitute for either a God or a dead person in both cultures in which the image, now a materialized three-dimensional double constructed to exist in the world through a combination of mimesis, projection, and mediation, occupies an enduring site of worship in a way that physical man could not.^[4]
            Stoichita’s comparison of this account with Plato’s cave and his other writings explain a slightly different relationship to the shadow within Western tradition, however. In The Republic, “the scopic desire in the simile of the cave, precedes, represents, indeed symbolizes the desire for knowledge… the Platonic scenario is the philosophical inventing a culture that, for centuries to come, was to be oculocentric” where hunger and thirst become a secondary concern to that of the search for truth within the image, and reflections of sound on the cave wall seem to simply reinforce “the primitive illusion of a visual order.”^[5] The shadow becomes a phantasmic thing that obscures light and “represents the stage that is furthest away from truth.”^[6] It is marginalized compared to the truth that one can glean in looking in a mirror or a reflection in water (though, this situation still lacks “truth” in this account), from that of looking upon reality directly and, finally, from looking upon the light of the sun itself. In their relationship to imagery, these traditions have viewed the shadow as the figure of the other who obscures truth—eventually a figure of rivalry—and the mirror as the figure of superficial resemblance, that which plays at the real thing, separating these two figures into distinct functions in true Enlightenment fashion.^[7]
            The competing cultural logics of mirror and shadow are paralleled in Us, which uses these figures as major narrative tropes to grapple with the structural shift of neoliberalism through the microscopic lens of the subject as they make sense of shifting social relations within a heterogeneous, fragmented neoliberal totality in which spontaneously generated audiences possess different valuations due to widely variant patterns of perception. In particular, the film addresses the issue of navigating a world where marginalized populations are increasingly finding their oppressors may look just like them and come from similar backgrounds. In doing so, the figures of mirror and shadow in Us continue to reference their typical usage within Western culture while mapping the slippery and untrustworthy nature of those figures, emblematic of the reform logics that undergird a neoliberal form of capitalism. 
            In response to the speed in which replacement can occur, Adelaide must teach her family to instinctively and efficiently repress the other whenever and wherever they emerge, which can become difficult when that other can unknowingly substitute for family and friends should they adopt the appropriate gestures and aesthetics. Jason’s identification of his own mother as the other at the end of the film and his impulse to cover his face with a mask in response to her look therefore marks the successful passing of neoliberal desire.[8] From this perspective, a successful instance of mothering under neoliberalism must be staged through opposition and suspicion, rather than assimilation of prior values, to acquire the appropriate vigilance to respond when former allies are suddenly othered (and vice versa) but also the increased capacity for individuation and differentiation required to stand out within an oversaturated mediascape. 
            In the final confrontation between Red and Adelaide in adulthood, however, Red evokes another possibility for relating to the other within a neoliberal totality—instead of merely replacing each other as the newest sign of value in different times and spaces—when she says, “I never stopped thinking about you, how things could have been, how you could have taken me with you.” This statement articulates a desire for a differently conceived form of collective revolution that leans toward incorporation as the primary strategy, rather than repression, and was ignited by the initial exchange. She imagines a world where they leave and live together, yet this desire has since been replaced by an alternate one that is produced through the same conditions of withholding that Adelaide initially endured. After years spent in repression, Red now calls for the untethering, stating it is “our time to replace you,” which no longer rings of a desire for collective escape but instead charts a desire for the replacement of those who reside in the upper echelons in lieu of systemic overhaul. It is at this moment that Red understands Adelaide more intimately than ever. They share each other’s desire once Red believes she is special, sent to free those who live underground, and feels more certain of her own agency and resistance than ever before. Yet she has lost her desire to leave the situation together, a desire that would legitimize her difference from Adelaide. 
            Through Jason, the film fosters an expectation of a return of the repressed in which the perception of otherness remains a structural necessity for neoliberal reproduction, despite the ease and speed in which protagonists and antagonists may perceptually swap places, often becoming allies or enemies on a whim. Like the doppelganger, Jason is created to mimetically look like Adelaide and may have taken the doppelganger’s prior position at the end of the film, becoming the other’s son where inheritance can be ideologically and gesturally determined in addition to instances of passing that remain based on physicality and blood as in a more classical, representational form of desire. Framed this way, conflicts with the other become a necessary site of reproduction where each side battles it out for a framing of events that can momentarily stage a satisfactory sense of heroic conclusion for the self and dominance over the other, a conclusion that can never settle and must instead remain open-ended to constitute a neoliberal structure that maintains a classical desire yet can direct it in any direction on a whim as in a just-in-time mode of production. 
            The original scene in the funhouse marks the site where a desire for a different relationship between the two characters was still possible. At this point, it was not yet defined by the affective shock of replacement and the revenge narrative that begins the shift from a classical organization (separation) into a neoliberal structure (reform). The possibility to desire differently is seemingly located in the child’s relationship to the mother and their newly ungrounded and untethered relationship to the home—as the environment that surrounds them and habituates certain modes of perception and expression as common sense—in intergenerational passing.        While the opening scene at the fairground is suspiciously devoid of harsh shadows in the opening, the bright beach scene in the present day is plagued by them. In this scene, there is another moment of recognition between self and other, this time between Adelaide’s son and a homeless man. Instead of cutting from one face to the other where self/other appear as if they are isolated and arrested on different sides as in the mirror, the camera instead slowly pans around, revealing the homeless man on the other side of the beach within the same shot in which Jason looks at him. Jason moves in closer, intrigued by the man’s strange movements as he stands in a T-formation like Jesus on the cross.
            But Adelaide perceives a threat where Jason does not because she’s lived underground and knows desperation incentivizes capitalist violence to survive. As someone previously in intimate proximity with the materiality, experiences, and affectations available within the underground social location, Adelaide must now “cut” in afterward to teach Jason to rationalize his encounter with the homeless man as a threatening one when he doesn’t share her painful experience. Adelaide mediates the pain of repression by grabbing and yelling at him, providing a mirror moment that contains a narrative image of the man’s violent nature as an erotic substitute for the real thing—like the daughter’s tracing of the shadow in Plinian myth. If the other fails to feel like a threat, it must be simulated through mirror-like mimesis to constitute a pattern of experience without any direct contact at all, thus passing down the sensory experience that is forged in pain/otherness/withholding while preserving the child’s safety when the connective point that joins the subject with the “shadow” of the other is no longer available. 
            Adelaide’s desire to keep her son safe, here, manifests clearly within the context of neoliberal reproduction and its relationship to viewership as the desire to prevent him from experiencing homelessness, which figures the logical endpoint of an alternative desire.[9] Both Jason and the homeless man leave the situation unharmed but also, noticeably, without a cut between the two characters that would sever the mutually encapsulating image, even as the framing shifts weight away from Jason, as someone who is allocated much more time and attention throughout the film, and toward the location of the homeless man who comes to the front of the image. As the dynamic that cannot be directly depicted on-screen, the pair leaving the situation together marks the threat of homelessness as the driving force that keeps neoliberalism running. 
            The threat of homelessness incentivizes neoliberal subjects who develop a different strategy toward ascension than classical pathways. Like the classical subject, the neoliberal subject must continue to assert the value of their image and capabilities in relation to and in competition with an-other but through the lens of “the new,” in which those who devolve into religious psychosis, from this reformed perspective, justify their homelessness as deserving due to a failure to update with the times. While the neoliberal child may endlessly exit into yet another family’s house (of images) and potentially take on their perspective and framing of events, this is not the primary anxiety for the neoliberal mother, as adopting different ideological content does not pose a threat to the child’s capacity to compete. As the family endlessly changes social locations and ends up finding a “home” that is more conducive to neoliberal fluctuations in the mobile technology of the car—which continues to offer a view-point and a clear sense of boundaries that separates the looking subject from the looked at as they continuously move locations—at least they’re never ungrounded, untethered, without the safety of the “cut” that separates us and ours from them and theirs. While the protagonist and antagonist may perceptually swap places, the cut is what neoliberal forms of perception continue to offer in every update, the iconic scissors that Red brings with her in the uprising, a cut that will continue to be used even and especially when the child swaps families.            
            Throughout the film, Adelaide meets the other by formally positioning each character on the other side of the cut, thus embodying the psychological means of absolving herself from responsibility for the other’s position and imagining her continued success in fighting them off through the lens of individual merit. Adelaide could explain her fear of the homeless man to Jason through a narrative of self-preservation that mirrors her own but, without some aspect that differentiates her from him and those involved in the uprising, there is no case for the structure that allows her family to have food and shelter but also a second vacation home while he has none. In his appearance, the homeless man has blood on his hands. He looks like an exchange waiting to happen—just as Red and Adelaide both appear crazed when they make their respective appearances as the villain. In reproducing this mode of navigating the world, Adelaide logically finds herself on the other side of the cut when Jason looks at her through this formal device in the final scene in the car. She smiles in response. At least he’s not homeless. At least he’s tethered somewhere, to some cause that retains a desire for repression, a desire that will keep him safe via his propensity to spontaneously find and build walls out of whatever materials are available as he moves locations.
            Mirror and shadow in Western culture are therefore opposed in such a way that Us not only reverts but also contests—the closer one is to the other, the closer one is to the truth of the self—thus tethering the two functions together as a singular object in the form of the image, exemplified by the daughter’s tracing in Stoichita’s account. Neoliberalism is not a house of mirrors as in the opening scene in the funhouse, which notably represses the shadow-function and the projection that occurs therein but, rather, it is a house of images where the feeling that one has finally “left the house” but also “left the beach” at the end of the film both stage a conclusion while the mother and her children merely step into another framing of events yet to culminate.  
            In making this mistake, the family cannot leave the horror genre once Adelaide has stabbed Red and left her body in the basement. When Jason looks at his mother suspiciously in the car and re-applies his mask, it fosters a feeling of ambiguity that contradicts and contests the presumed closure of its own classical narration, engendering a competition between the formal logics of classicism and experimentalism inherent in the hybrid structure of the neoliberal totality itself. Even if Adelaide has killed her own double, there is this sense that the family has not actually left the situation for good, that a shadow of the event continues to follow them as they drive off toward the sun in the distance, a heroic image that must increase in intensity and scope to disappear an ever-growing shadow that only gets stronger and bolder in contrast to the strength of the light that projects it.  
            The optimism at the end of the film, then, narratively references the fantasy that Jason may return with an even greater collective force. Through Jason, the film locates revolutionary libidinal energies in some unrealized fantasy future, that is, through the excitement triggered by the catalyst that propels yet another narrative cycle. In returning to Jason’s curious and empathetic look in viewing the homeless man without boundaries together on the beach instead of the dual pain/pleasure, excitement/anxiety of amassing value by taking down the other, this first mode of looking would necessarily frame Adelaide in a less sinister light in this final scene, as someone who is fundamentally traumatized by extended withholding but certainly capable of learning different habits, desires, and rhythms if she were commonly exposed to them. This alternate mode of navigation (perception and expression) was simply never available to her as a commonsense logic when the world below has trained her to perform in the one above so well.
            We should not, then, assume that Jason has adopted a desire that can produce a different structure as he utilizes the cut in the end scene, thus deploying the same logic that he’s more proportionally been exposed to throughout the journey, which ends up drowning out the singular experience with the homeless man. Taking the framing given at the end of the film at face value would have audiences believe it may very well be possible for Jason to create a different world in the wake of his uprising and would not have them believe that another dynamic was and still is possible for Adelaide with her villainous smile in response. This framing signals the initiation of—and preemptively justifies—a chain of events that logically leads to another confrontation where the reproduction of neoliberal desire in the form of individual success/defeat continually defers the site of systemic change onto the children of the future while stifling the very possibility of its arrival in the transfer. Just as the city above extends the world below, demolishing the foundational structure that originally segments a house of images would not change the dynamic between the self and the other, even one who is no longer representationally predetermined but designated just-in-time, a horror that persists as these characters wander the streets outside.