My elementary/middle school was a small Charter school on a Taco Bell parking lot behind a community center. At lunch we played double dutch with extension cords, recess behind a big rig parked in the lot where we gossiped about dirty books, did laps around the parking lot at Physical Education, and for lunch ate hot cheetos with chilli on top (against my parents wishes and knowledge). When my parents decided it was time for me to move on to a new school in 8th grade I was pleased and smug. I wore my new fancy private school shirt on the last day of charter school and paraded around the parking lot with pride. I could not wait to dip. I struggled at my new school at first; it was hard to make friends and I got made fun of for my clothes and the way I spoke. But after a year of catered Panera lunch and adjusting to the air conditioned buildings, upscale art courses and fully stocked library, I adjusted and made myself at home. Soon I forgot about my previous experiences and had a new standard for how I felt my educational experience should be. My new experiences became the norm and I never looked back.
These types of experiences are relatable to everyone especially people of color. Immigrants adjust to their new American lives as family and friends still live back in their homeland. Every black middle class person I know has those cousins they grew up with that at some point stopped coming around, or that their parents didn't want them to hang around anymore. First generation college students graduate and are now in a higher tax bracket than their parents. How many of those on the privileged side use their privilege to give back to other communities? How many new money rappers stay in the hood or move out to Calabasas. How many generations of wealth does it take to forget where you come from? I think about this often, especially when I hear privileged black people comment on the lower class of our very own communities. Rather than judge I prefer to realize that the only difference between me and them is one or more small opportunities. We can't control who we were born to and the circumstances of our environments.
*Spoilers Ahead*
As usual I am not here to write a traditional movie review play-by-play but rather talk my shit and facilitate a catalyst for an open discussion. That being said I deeply enjoyed the movie. When I walked out of the theater after watching, all of these varied thoughts came to mind that I felt I must immediately write down. For those who watched you know the big plot twist that had us all shooketh like the 93 LA earthquake at the end. To summarize quickly the twist was as follows: The good bish Lupita who we all thought was a regular degular family woman turned out to be the clone shawty and the clone shawty with the old man voice was THE ORIGINAL Lupita! I def peeped some of the foreshadowing at the beginning (as scary movies are my shiznayee and I am always pressed for the twist) but nonetheless actually seeing it happen in live movie history had me stressed and pressed. And it made me think. Who really was the good guy and bad guy? Do I blame clone shawty for taking her opportunity when it was presented? Would I have done the same? These questions ring in my brain as well as many more. What is really interesting about the ending is seeing that the once animalistic and savage Lupita,after some love, care, and money is able to easily adjust to society and become a loving and well adjusted human being, wife, and mother. Meanwhile... the once human non-cloned Lupita after years of isolation, abuse and simply having to survive is turned into a complete (God-loving) killing machine.
Despite Jordan Peele insisting this was a regular movie that just happened to contain a dark SKINT (lets not ignore this representation of a family without a light-skinned mother and daughter) black family, there were many aspects of the movie that to me mirrored the black experience and diversity in the community. One thing that had me thinking was the Howard Sweatshirt that Gabe wore throughout the film. Gabe although being black, attending an HBCU, having a beautiful black wife and family, still represented privilege in so many ways. He was in a sense the representation of what some call the “new black”; although he may be a part of an oppressed group and still have less than many (compare his house and boat to that of his white besties), he still views the world in a way that privileged people do. For example, when Gabe first sees the cloned family in the driveway and Lupita’s spidey senses are tingling, his fight or flight seems to have been left in that tiny bed he spread his large thick ass thighs on… but I digress. Ol boy spent so much time with his bougie neighbors he done forgot the first rule of blackness--the second you see something even slightly suspicious you make moves first and talk later. He all in the driveway talking about “showing someone crazy” and telling them he “called the police”. He mentioned the POLICE to a family of black people trespassing and they didn't budge? That's when he should have gotten a REAL weapon and started taking them down.
But the real thought provoker is the last scene where we realized that the Lupitas switched places that day at the carnival and the woman we had been routing for the whole movie was actually the “enemy”. This sweet, caring, timid mother strangled her doppleganger at all of 7 or so years old with a smile on her face, dragged that bih into the abyss, chained the child to the bed and left poor baby to rot in the underground tunnel. But by the point in the movie we realize this we are already emotionally attached to her and her family, and seeing where she came from I at least couldn't help but feel empathy for her and her choices. In the same way I felt for the original Lupita who knew exactly what she was missing above ground and in circumstances out of her control she ended up in Earth's version of hell, I forsure would have come back for my revenge too.
All in all I took the central theme of the movie to be privilege and how no matter how good of a person you may seem all of our privileges are often at the expense of another group of people we don't have to see or hear but know exist. So many of our flyest clothes are made in sweatshops by children in other countries that we can pretend don't exist simply because we don't see them. So many white people with generational wealth in this country gained that wealth on the backs of slaves and servants. Our housekeepers and nannies clean up after us and our bad ass kids and then have to go back to their households without seeing their own children and families all day. We walk through our college campuses everyday as we see and ignore the janitors cleaning up after us. We might hold empathy for those with less opportunity but how much do we do outside of feeling bad and continuing to bask in the light of our privilege. And if those who we ignore, shame and misuse decided to stop giving a fuck and revolt against us all, could we really blame them? I think what this movie asks of us besides being scared and entertained is to sit down and take a hard look at ourselves.