Janhabi Mukherjee

Duality (doppelgangers, alter egos) is a common theme in thriller/horror texts and films. This goes as far (or further) back as the Victorian period (Dracula and Van Helsing as mirror images/Jekyll and Hyde), and continues today (The Nun, Valak and Sister Irene as foils to each other/the twins in Malignant).

'US' (2019) deals with doppelgangers – every citizen has one, and these 'Tethered' counterparts live in dire poverty in the tunnels beneath the city. They are 'savage' and 'monstrous', unlike their peers who live among us.
Peele's film has strong themes of class and social inequality.

The ending, however, reveals that the protagonist of the film was never one of 'us', but in fact a tethered doppelganger who had switched places as a child. Unlike the rest of the Tethered, she speaks and moves fluently, behaving 'civilised' as opposed to 'savage'.

There is clear commentary in this twist of how the environment and social upbringing of an individual can create a stark contrast in how their identity, behaviour, and habits are formed: The protagonist turned out so different from the rest of the Tethered, only because of the economic and social support she recieved as she was brought up.

How does this twist impact the themes of duality present in horror and thriller genres? Does it make us reflect differently on the monstrous villains we see in Michael Myers or Dr Hyde? Does it make us reconsider their motivations?
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde/The Unborn, for example, are strongly contextualised by economic and political commentary.

Orwell’s 1984 ends with an in depth record of Newspeak, the language imposed upon citizens by the novel’s fascist government.
Examples are:
1) ‘renaming’ words (such as ‘concentration camp’ being changed to ‘joycamp’)
This is interesting to analyse in light of the social theories which speak of how language constructs reality – if we refer to a concentration camp as a ‘joycamp’ for long enough, does that change the way we think of it? (eg. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which suggests that the structure of language shapes the speaker’s worldview or cognition/ Wittgenstein’s famous ‘the limits of my language mean the limits of my world’/etc)

2) reconstructing words to make them ‘noun centric’, such as eliminating the words ‘cut’/’cutting’/etc, and making them ‘knifing’/’knifed’ and so on.
Not only does this reduce the number of words we have at our disposal, it also limits the flexibility of language. To give a basic example, ‘cutting edge’ is an adjective that highlights the word succeeding it – ‘knifing edge’ instead places the focus on the knife. In due time, it is likely that ‘cutting edge’ as a concept itself may become obsolete in the absence of the word ‘cut’.
These ideas are relevant in most linguistic analysis, but there may be scope to analyse them in the light of current corporate and social structures. For instance,
– ‘Sending a message’ is a phrase that has largely given way to ‘inboxing’ or ‘DM’ing. Does this restrict the way we think of communication at large? Is there a potential future where written communication becomes unthinkable without monopolies such as Meta intermediaries? What of ‘Googling’ or ‘Xeroxing’ (instead of ‘looking for information’ or ‘making a photocopy’)?

– Do the words corporates use modify our understanding of social structures? When Facebook switches the name for a user’s personal page from ‘profile’ to ‘timeline’, do we think of the personal page as less static and virtual, more a tangible piece of our lives?

– Censorship in both mass media and private social media. Instagram and Google by default blur out posts containing certain words and images (‘Safe Search’) – there is little regulation as to what these words/images must be. Is the possibility that by routinely hiding these terms and visuals, the user’s reality is reconstructed to erase certain perspectives and realities?

Comparison between songs that are more recent and ones that are older throw up a large number of differences in terms of lyrics. One prime difference is that newer songs have an increasingly decreasing (heh, see what I did there?) number of lyrics.
Examples –
'You a Stupid Hoe', 'Turn Down For What', 'Now watch me whip, now watch me nae nae', 'I know you want me, you know I wan'cha'

Is this constant reduction in the number of words in a song a reflection on
a) Our memory – we can't remember words to songs anymore, or it seems like a waste of time to do so.
b) Our attention span has dropped so low, that we can't be bothered to listen to music that isn't composed of repititive phrases, we can't be bothered to exert the effort to figure out what longer, more extensive lyrics say.
c) Just bad taste.

Is it a combination of all three?
Is it a different reason altogether?
Is there a more complex reasoning behind this?