She has been here before. 

It is clear from the unease and disquiet in her eyes that she is terrified. Adelaide’s terror of the “to come” derives from a knowledge: the certainty of an incalculable encounter that is coming. She tried to evade her past and this encounter, living her life in deferral.  She has carried with her a knowledge of the tethered as one of the tethered: each self has an other to which they are bound. They live only in separation, the one buried beneath the other, until Adelaide’s return to Santa Cruz. At the encounter with the other and the self, one must die, neither can live with the other: only one has the possibility of survival. Peele attempts to undermine what we conceive of as natural, given, authentic, or organic. Adelaide, as one of the tethered, adapted to the world above ground, moving from the silence of aphasia and learning to speak. To Peele, we can learn ourselves otherwise and there is a certain demand for vigilance within ourselves. The question, then, is why America. Perhaps the most obvious response is the false narratives of progress we place our unyielding faith in. We believe in a teleological end, a grand movement towards absolute knowledge and improvement which is all but mythological. History, if anything, an affirmation of placements and displacements of racism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, etc. We believe ourselves to be the one above while we ourselves be acting as the one below. Peele’s film speaks most to our responsibility to the other which begins with the most uncanny other: the one which has the greatest proximity to us of which we know nothing, who deposits a memory in Us that refuses to be forgotten.