The Revenge of the Serves: The Wounds of Neoliberalism in Jordan Peele’s Us (2019)

This chapter offers an analysis of Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) by framing the film as an allegory of neoliberalism and its accompanying dynamics of class violence and inequality. Much as Peele still relies on the blend of racial politics and horror tropes initiated in his instant classic debut Get Out (2017), I argue that his sophomore film deploys staples of the horror genre such as the doppelgänger, the monster, and the home invasion to reflect upon and critique inequality, systemic violence, and class oppression in contemporary America. I perform my textual analysis by placing emphasis on how dualities, symmetries, and parallelisms make up the aesthetic and thematic basis of the film. Drawing on a critical framework of Marxist authors and trauma studies scholarship, I try to ascertain how the dual dimensions at the core of the film, as well as its use of horror film strategies, address and foreground the wounds wrought on the social fabric of the US by neoliberal politics.