CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/31/2024

Halloween reading

Horror fans, rejoice. Jordan Peele’s Us: The Complete Annotated Screenplay is out now from Inventory Press. The companion to Peele’s complete annotated screenplay for Get Out, this indispensable guide to Us adds alternate endings, deleted scenes, stills from the film and annotations by hannah baer, Theaster Gates, Jamieson Webster, Jared Sexton, Mary Ping, Shana Redmond and Leila Taylor. Annotating a scene featuring Lupita Nyong’o as Red, Webster digs into Freud and his concept of the uncanny. In part: “Looking at the word uncanny or unheimlich etymologically, Freud sees that it is created from heim (which means home or familiarity), but not in the sense of opposites of feeling at home/not feeling at home, but rather as one derived from the other, meaning that what is uncanny was once familiar, what we felt at home with, which has now become its Other, alien. … Importantly, there is new interest in the uncanny which seems to follow on renewed interest in the intergenerational transmission of trauma, in unconscious omnipotence, forms of radical alienation, questions about the limits of knowledge, and new forms of unconscious guilt and masochism. This has, of course, been important in colonial histories and the transmission of historical violence and omnipotent fantasies of generations past, and how these keep reappearing again and again. Stopping this intergenerational repetition of violence might mean having to confront what is the most uncanny in day-to-day life, hiding in plain sight.”