I first decided to watch Jordan Peele’s Us on a relatively bright morning … on my phone … while I was on an airplane. This is far from the best context to get a good impression of anything, much less a densely loaded horror film like Us. The fact that these opening moments stuck with me despite all of this makes it worth examining for this series on interesting introductions.
Here’s a link to the opening moments of Us — go ahead and give it a watch. I’m only going to be talking about the lessons we can learn from the first two and a half minutes, but feel free to watch the whole thing. I’m keeping this intro spoiler-free, but if you haven’t seen Us, you really should.
I could easily spend pages ranting and raving about how Us exemplifies the tendencies from last week: how the rhythmic sound of waves dominating the first few seconds are simultaneously made to allude to the rushing of subterranean subway cars, the eerily hypnotic scraping of porcelain from Peele’s previous film, and even possibly the dreamlike beauty of Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight; how the epigraph about “thousands of miles of tunnels beneath the United States” perfectly contextualizes the dark mystery at the center of the film; how the sound of waves (above us now) literally immerses audiences in the plot as these words rise out of the darkness to make themselves known; and how all of this foreshadows elements in the rest of the film …
In the interest of time, however, I want to focus on the next shot of the film: a slow zoom on a “Hands Across America” commercial playing on an old TV. As I see it, the staging of this scene embodies the next tendency for interesting introductions I want to look at:
3. An interesting introduction makes its audience start to think.
Initially, the “Hands Across America” commercial (sandwiched as it is between a news teaser and an ad for the Santa Cruz Board Walk) seems completely bizarre. This goes beyond circumscribing the film’s subject – it initially has no discernible relation to the plot at all. And that, along with the claustrophobic nature of the tight shot, gets viewers to start asking questions. Where and when are we? Why aren’t they showing the rest of the house? What does any of this have to do with a horror film?
The agonizingly slow zoom on the relatively static screen also encourages viewers to explore the objects in the periphery in a desperate search for meaning. Isn’t C.H.U.D. about subterranean monsters? Wasn’t there a part in The Goonies about abandoned tunnels? Taken together, the commercial and the props lying around give viewers plenty of chances to make connections and form theories from the scraps of information they already have. This primes viewers to start paying attention and later rewards them for doing so when the connections are made clear.
Attentive viewers may also notice something strange about the screen itself, especially in the moment between commercials: it contains a reflection. Maybe it’s just me, but this moment really gripped me, and I think I now know why:
4. An interesting introduction recognizes its audience.
When I watched this on the plane, it took me a moment to realize the reflection in the screen wasn’t my own, despite the impossibility of that angle or proportion from where I was sitting. I was so used to seeing my own reflection on screens — or, alternatively, not seeing direct reflections of this sort depicted in movies due to the need for hiding cameras and lighting — that I immediately identified with this double.
Uncanny doublings like this are, of course, depicted in Us to an obsessive degree – they are the engine that drives its horror. But to introduce the motif in this way is to show an awareness of the audience’s position, to reach out past the wall separating the world of the story from the real world and address the audience as they sit in their chairs. In some ways, this frames the text as a conversation between the audience and the director and — just like when you’re addressed by an instructor during lecture — it makes you pay attention.
Perhaps the biggest takeaway from these observations is simple: whether it’s through a seemingly off-topic anecdote that gets people making connections or through a conversational tone that addresses the audience as they are, interesting introductions grab your attention. The trick, as always, is how to achieve that in writing. If you’re stuck, maybe try writing an anecdote that is two degrees removed from your subject. The task of trying to connect to it, if nothing else, will give you a better idea of what you’re trying to say.
It will be interesting to see how all of this applies to video games — the medium which I am perhaps most familiar with — but I will leave that for next week.
John Sanders is a PhD Candidate in the Syracuse University English Department where he studies film, new media, and adaptation. He is currently working on a dissertation about digital and analog games based on literary works, and hopes that no one recalls his library books.