On 25 May 1986, at the crest of a wave of optimism about philanthropy’s power to transform the world, 5.5 million Americans held each other’s hands to form a human chain that stretched across the nation. Having donated a small sum to charities tackling homelessness and poverty, participants stood in place, hands clasped, for about 15  minutes, before letting go.

The event, Hands Across America, staged a symbolic attack on one of liberal centrism’s chief nemeses: division. “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Abraham Lincoln famously declared in 1858, a reference to several passages in the New Testament that quote Jesus making the same statement. “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.” A song made to accompany the 1986 event echoes this sentiment: “Divided we fall. United we stand. Hands across America.”   

From a choreographic perspective, the event could be read as a defanged imitation, perhaps even a parody, of street protest. Where protesters walk side-by-side, chanting in unison, perhaps occasionally pausing to smash a window or spray graffiti, Hands Across America was strikingly devoid of motion. Centering around the childlike act of hand-holding, the act worked to create an image of the nation as one giant family.

Today, many will be familiar with Hands Across America through its appearance in Jordan Peele’s 2019 horror film Us, which opens with a shot-for-shot remake of an MTV advert for the event: “What has 12 million eyes, over 15 million fingers, and reaches from the Statue of Liberty all across the Pacific Ocean?” In asking this question, the advert inadvertently depicts the façade of American liberalism – and indeed the country itself – as a continental, spider-like monster from which there could be no hope of escape.

From this opening in the 1980s, Us follows its central character, a young black girl named Adelaide, as she undergoes a traumatic event at a seaside funfair in Santa Cruz, California. After wandering away from her parents into a hall of mirrors that promises the opportunity to “Find Yourself,” Adelaide encounters her own reflection facing away from her (a choreographic motif repeated later in the film). For this brief moment, Adelaide’s reflection recalls Handala, the figure created by Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali in 1969, now a globally famous symbol of the Palestinian liberation movement. Like Adelaide, Handala is a child; like her reflection, he faces away, so only the back of his head and body can be seen. Handala will not turn around until Palestine is liberated and those dispersed in the ongoing Nakba are allowed to return, making his appearance not only a symbol of Palestinian patience, defiance, and refusal to accept half-measures, but a reminder of the shame of the injustice of the world, so great Handala will not deign look at it.

But Adelaide’s reflection does turn around, an incident that leaves her so traumatised she is unable to speak. Instead, with the encouragement of a therapist, she expresses herself through dance. Later in the film, a now-grown Adelaide, her husband Gabe, and their two children, Zora and Jason, return to Santa Cruz on holiday, where they are brutally attacked by a foursome who look exactly like them. After a day at the beach, the family are relaxing at home when Jason enters the room and announces the arrival of the invaders with the blood-curdling line, “There’s a family in our driveway.” Gabe, initially dismissive of the danger they pose, observes: “It’s just a family. They’re probably the neighbours.”

What is the opposite of a family, of neighbours? Jason had answered this question earlier that day, after he briefly disappears on the beach and Adelaide tells him she was frightened that he had been “lost… or taken.” Fluent in the American national imaginary, Jason finishes her sentence: “– by terrorists or perverts.” Jason knows that it is terrorists and perverts who kidnap children; Gabe knows that families and neighbours pose no harm.

The people in the driveway, it turns out, embody the truth of all four of these guesses (family, neighbours, terrorists, perverts) as a singular, terrifying threat. They are the “Tethered”, shadow doubles who live underground, condemned to a half-life of imitative choreography echoing their upperworld counterparts. (As the Hands Across America theme song goes: “When he laughs, I laugh. When he cries, I cry.”) In the film’s climactic final exposition, Adelaide’s Tethered, Red, explains that “They” – an unspecified group, likely the US government – “created the Tethered so they could use them to control the ones above. Like puppets.” This Cold War-era project was abandoned, however, and “for generations, the Tethered continued without direction.” (Another choreographic motif.) “They all went mad down there.”

Herein lies the film’s central message: it is not strangers (terrorists and perverts) who pose the greatest threat, and nor – contra the Bible, Lincoln, and Hands Across America – is the moral problem of an unjust world that it is “a house divided.” True injustice emerges from our enmeshment, from the fact that we are all tethered, unbearably, inescapably proximate to each other. According to Red’s explanation, the Tethered have their own bodies, but it was impossible to clone the soul, leaving the Tethered not empty automatons but spiritually conjoined with their counterparts above. Not so much a house divided as a house doomed to unity. Only when this enmeshment is acknowledged and refigured, so that the comfort of one is not the hell of the other, will anyone truly be free.

Us provides another turn of the screw, however. It turns out that when young Adelaide wandered into the hall of mirrors, it was not her reflection she saw but Red, who bludgeoned and kidnapped her, bringing her into the underworld and chaining her to a bed. The girl who returned to Adelaide’s parents was not Adelaide herself but Red, who took Adelaide’s place, literally wearing her shoes. This means that the film’s main character, the woman with whom the audience has been empathising, is in fact the purported villain – and vice versa.

One of Us’s main achievements is to split the audience’s sympathies so effectively. While it is hardly groundbreaking for a film to destabilise the hero/villain binary, the extent of Us’s anti-essentialism is striking. Revealing Adelaide to be Red profoundly unravels what Parul Sehgal calls “the trauma plot” at the film’s centre. Sehgal uses this term to describe contemporary narrative’s overreliance on the explanatory power of traumatic backstories, a habit that casts characters as essentially determined by the past. In moments, Us appears to conform to this trend, particularly when Adelaide, facing away from Gabe, tells him about visiting the Santa Cruz boardwalk as a child and seeing her doppelgänger in a house of mirrors. Yet it turns out that Adelaide was actually the perpetrator of the trauma of which the audience imagined her to be the victim, even as it is also obvious how she was destroyed by the hell-life into which she was born (and to which she refused to be condemned).

In this sense, Us has a choreographic approach to the problem of evil, focusing unflinchingly on acts rather than identities, and suggesting that an individual’s capacity for evil is greatly shaped by the shoes they happen to be filling and the forces acting on their body. Jordan Peele hired a dancer and performance artist, Madeline Hollander, to choreograph the movement in the film. Interviewed in ARTNews, Hollander explained that she “ended up going through the script and making motion-direction notes for almost every line.” The Tethered, who as a rule cannot speak, are recognisable by their awkward movements, a distinction theatricalised by the fact that each human and Tethered duo are played by the same actor. “Lupita moves very gracefully and quietly as Adelaide,” Hollander notes. “And then as Red, she retains this very erect, super rigid ballet spine, and she has a set of movements that are like a Pac-Man meets a cockroach with a book on her head.”

At the end of the film, we learn that the goal of the Tethereds’ uprising is to form their own human chain across the country in a bloody parody of Hands Across America. The plan mirrors the original event’s emptiness and futility; there is no indication of what will happen next, such that the eerie symbolism of the gesture stands on its own. On first witnessing the petrifying sight of the Tethered lined up, hand-in-hand, Gabe exclaims, “What is that, some kind of fucked-up performance art?” This moment is a typical Peele gesture, alleviating terror through comedy while entrenching it further by placing it into the realm of the familiar.

It is also an apt observation. Hands Across America might well be considered a form of performance art, insofar as the genre is associated with a general instability of meaning and purpose. The Tethered succeed in staging a violent insurrection – freeing themselves by murdering the humans to which they are chained – only to indulge in a choreographed gesture representative of the narcissistic emptiness of liberal morality. One could locate within this a critique of the limp, faux radicalism of performance art, but at the same time, it is also true that this action makes a real, brutal intervention into the world. Red calls her uprising “the untethering,” making the Hands Across America reenactment a retethering, directed away from the (now extinguished) human world, from America, and toward each other.

In her canonical 1997 book Scenes of Subjection, the literary theorist Saidiya Hartman launched a shattering critique of the uses of empathy in white abolitionist rhetoric. Hartman quotes a letter written by the white abolitionist John Rankin to his enslaver brother in which Rankin inserts himself, his wife and children into the place of an enslaved family in order to trigger empathy. “When I fancied the cruel lash was approaching my wife and children, and my imagination depicted in lively colours, their tears, their shrieks, and bloody stripes, every indignant principle of my bloody nature was excited to the highest degree.” The word “excite” had a less exclusively positive connotation in the nineteenth century than it does today, but nonetheless spoke to a kind of activation and arousal, in this case of both the mind and bodily matter. While ostensibly serving as a politically mobilising act of persuasion, it is clear that the thought experiment is actually a kind of self-indulgent fantasy. For Hartman, Rankin’s words illustrate the self-serving nature of empathy. “Empathy in important respects confounds Rankin’s efforts to identify with the enslaved because in making the slave’s suffering his own, Rankin begins to feel for himself rather than for those whom this exercise in imagination presumably is designed to reach.” Hartman emphasises that the attempt to extend humanity to the enslaved actually ends up reinforcing a sense of their objecthood, because empathising with them necessitates projecting Rankin’s own white humanity onto them.

In an interview with the New York Times, Peele echoes Hartman, arguing that Hands Across America disturbed him by transparently operating “more for the people who are holding hands to cure hunger than for the people who are hungry themselves.” The profound disjuncture between Hands Across America’s choreography (holding hands in a symbol of unity) and its purported purpose (to alleviate poverty and hunger) makes this perspective difficult to dispute. A staggering wilful naivety is required to identify division as the cause of poverty and hunger. (Unsurprisingly, the Times itself falls into this trap. The interview with Peele opens with the claim that “in this divisive American moment [Hands Across America] sounds utterly bonkers,” as if the event can be understood and dismissed by the ring of its ideological pretext. “Unity” will evidently have to be wrenched from liberalism’s cold, dead hands.) Further proving this point, Hands Across America ultimately raised only a puny sum for charity, far less than the organisers had anticipated.

Perhaps the most significant form of political action depicted in Us, however, is neither the mass killing of upperworld humans nor the performance art of Hands Across America, but the act of hostage-taking. In this sense the film recalls the tactics employed by the radical white abolitionist Benjamin Lay, a Quaker dwarf who dedicated his life to terrorising enslavers via antics that managed to be both highly theatrical and materially consequential. Like the Tethered, Lay was recognisable by his distinctive habits of movement. In his biography of Lay, Marcus Rediker observes that “Part of Benjamin’s guerilla theatre was his distinctive appearance.” Lay had dwarfism and a condition called kyphosis, which caused a visible curve in his spine. Rediker quotes a Quaker who knew Lay recalling, “A habit he had contracted, of standing in a twisted position, with one hand resting upon his left hip, added to the effect produced by a large white beard, that for many years had not been shaved, contributed to make his figure perfectly unique.”

After learning that his neighbours, a Quaker family, enslaved a girl, Lay lectured them about the evil of slavery, “emphasising that it separated children from their parents.” When this did not provoke a response, Lay abducted the neighbours’ six-year-old son and held him hostage in the cave where he lived, “entertain[ing] the boy all day inside, out of view.” Eventually confronting the distraught parents, Lay told them, “Your child is safe in my house […] You may now conceive of the sorrow you inflict upon the parents of the negroe girl you hold in slavery, for she was torn from [her family] by avarice.” If, as Hartman argues, the thought experiment of empathy proves self-defeating, an alternative arises via the practical, forced empathy of hostage-taking – a tactic chosen by Lay and, hundreds of years later, by the Palestinian resistance in Gaza.

Us begins when young Adelaide is kidnapped by her double, who makes them swap places. Here, like Lay, little Red literalises the thought experiment of putting oneself in another’s shoes, as if taking the idea of empathy to its extreme logical conclusion. The gesture works, but too well – the human girl who wakes up cuffed to a bed in the jerky, mute world of the Tethered eventually comes to see herself as one of them, to the point that she organises an insurrection to bring about their freedom. As Adelaide gradually assimilates into the human world, attaining the trappings of the good life (husband, kids, beach house), she remains terrified of the possible reencounter with her doppelgänger who will take it all away.

In coming to strongly identify with the dispossessed among whom she is held hostage, the story of the girl who becomes Red has a canon of counterparts. For centuries, Europeans have been fascinated by narratives of their own abduction by racial others – whether Ottoman soldiers or Indigenous peoples in the Americas. These captivity narratives proved especially titillating when they played with assimilation and conversion.

Still, most captivity narratives produced by Europeans aimed to reproduce racial stereotypes and sensations of exotic terror, making it difficult for them to convey what it would really mean to come to identify with hostage takers. In North America, many settlers who were kidnapped were in fact taken as children and assimilated into Indigenous families via adoption ceremonies. (This practice was often a response to the loss of relatives caused by the war, disease, and territorial theft brought by colonisers.) For many, assimilation meant loss of their mother tongue and contact with the communities from which they were taken. Among those whose experiences were recorded after a return to settler society, their stories were often distorted to reflect stock narratives and stereotypical perceptions of Indigenous peoples. 

And yet, a message can be detected in the fact that many kidnapped settlers who were “liberated” by their European kin refused to go back. Among those forcefully returned to their families of origin, still more fled to return to their indigenous families, sometimes making one escape attempt after another. These acts of flight, rather than any fictionalised record, are the best indication of how captives felt about their condition.

In Us it is an act, not speech, that most effectively delivers the film’s climactic message. In a dramatic scene, Adelaide and Jason confront the remaining survivors of their doppelgänger family. Jason realises that his double, Pluto – who shares Jason’s fixation with fire – will copy his movements, allowing Jason to control him like a puppet. Concentrating hard, Jason takes a few, careful steps backwards, compelling Pluto to imitate him, stepping into a roaring blaze. (Cued, yet again, by the theme song  of Hands Across America: When he laughs, I laugh. When he cries, I cry.)

Watching Pluto walk backwards into a fire that will burn him alive breaks something in Adelaide. Her identification with the human world – which until this point has been unremitting, a necessity given that her family do not know she is secretly one of the Tethered – suddenly wavers. She stares at Pluto, face frozen in anguish, and emits a mournful, desperate, “No.” The film slows to a near-stop, infused with suspense over whether Adelaide will switch sides yet again, deserting her human family to rescue the Tethered boy who would have been her son. While Adelaide is suspended in time, dumbstruck by the agony of her choice, Red appears, and – moving like lightning – silently abducts Jason.

This virtually wordless scene is the film’s emotional climax. Through movement alone, it stages a wrenching meditation on kinship, surrogacy, and retribution. Theories of family abolition often seek to highlight the extent to which the premium placed on biological relation is deeply ideological. Statistically, no one is more vulnerable to abuse than when they are inside their own home, at the mercy of their kin. From this perspective, the nuclear family itself is a kind of hostage situation, one from which few are ever rescued. At the same time, a growing chorus of voices from the adoptee and donor-conceived movements express a howling anguish at their separation from their biological families, emphasising such alienation as a profound, irreparable wound. Such arguments take on a particularly acute urgency in the case of transracial and transnational adoption. In a recent viral TikTok, a transnational adoptee from China using the handle @slovenly.switchblad3 sobs into the camera: “I can’t believe I was trafficked to this horrible country. I am not an American.” (There is an inverse echo here of a line in Us, when Gabe asks the Tethered family who they are and Red replies, “We are Americans.”)

Is the form of grief that Adelaide expresses when she watches Pluto step into the flames the throb of biological affinity, a buried parental instinct that unexpectedly bursts forth? Or is her sudden empathy for Pluto instead a recognition of his unjust abjection, a reminder of the dispossession that persists for others while Adelaide herself could escape? No clear answer emerges. Although her entire life has been directed toward securing a place for herself in the human world, it never becomes completely certain that Adelaide has abandoned her allegiance to the Tethered. In one of the film’s final moments, as Adelaide’s family drives to Mexico in an apparently successful escape from the Tethered’s uprising, she and Jason look at one another. Their mute exchange conveys, clear as a bell, that Jason knows his mother’s secret – and that he is hostage to it. Adelaide returns Jason’s disturbed gaze with a smile containing a subtle, eerie wildness. She is a stranger to him, and she is his mother, and there is no escape. In this sense, they are like any other family. .