The Black Heroine in the Mirror: crossing the threshold of the specular image, the esoteric journey and the encounter with the annihilating I in Jordan Peele’s Us

Abstract

Using the conceptual framework of the mirror-stage established by Lacan to describe the initial anchoring of the subject, this paper seeks to interrogate the mirror as the locus of a secondary elaboration of the hero’s journey which follows its traditional articulation adumbrated by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. If the goal of the classic hero as Campbell suggests is to exit the nursery which represents the subject’s entrapment in Oedipal triangulation, this study posits that the successful selfrelease of the hero from the nursery simply sees him entering another nursery where the hero’s world is conceived of as a series of infinitely nested nurseries without exit. The mirror and its binding capture become the exemplary point of departure for the secondary elaboration of the journey for which, it turns out, the black heroine is the ideal adventurer. It is no wonder then that Jordan Peele’s Us is replete with mirrors functioning as cinematic signifiers for the portals effecting the subject’s displacement not towards an outer world of aggressive fathers and unobtainable ideal mothers; but, rather into a proximate encounter with the self, one precipitated by the mirror where the goal of the journey –the one that can only be revealed by the black heroine– is the apprehension of the “cipher of [her] moral destiny” and the unfathomable cartography of her true exit.