Identity and the Power of the Past
I had an interesting and rare experience last weekend. I saw two films that were dramatically different from each other and yet shared a common thread that also fell in line with some of my own recent thoughts. The two films were Captain Marvel and Us. Now, if you’ve seen either film, or even the ads for either film, you can clearly see how different they are. One is a classic superhero origin story and the other is a horror and suspense thriller. Yet, they both have a central idea at their core that they share. In both films, there is a female protagonist struggling with fragmented images from her own past and if she can put the pieces together, she might just be able to solve the central problem of the story and figure out who she really is. It was astonishing to me that I would randomly choose such different films and that both of them would tread such similar ground. I enjoyed the juxtaposition and the exposure to similar themes in each film got me thinking about my own identity and how it started to change last year. Granted, my experience was not as cinematic as those depicted in Captain Marvel and Us...but such real-life journeys rarely are. Spoilers to come so read on with caution.
In Captain Marvel, the lead character of Vers begins the film as part of the Kree nation on the planet of Hala and is a trusted member of their Starforce. However, she has dreams of a woman she doesn’t recognize and a place she can’t remember having been. Later, when she is is captured and brain probed by the Skrull forces they are fighting against, it is shown that at some point she was once a human living on Earth and was an Air Force fighter pilot. When she finds herself stranded on Earth after escaping the Skrulls, she begins to relentlessly pursue the Skrulls who are hunting her because she wants to know who she is and where she comes from. Similarly, in Us the lead character Adelaide has fragmented memories of meeting and being attacked by a double of herself while visiting the boardwalk at Santa Cruz beach. When she is grown and has a family of her own, they find themselves back in that same area on a vacation. She is anxious and on her guard, seeing threats and strange coincidences everywhere. When her evil doppelganger shows up with a family that matches her own, Adelaide finds herself fighting for the lives of her family while confronting the shadow version of herself.
In both films, piecing together the fragments of the past are crucial to understanding the events of the present and both films are about discovering the person you truly are under all the everyday masks we put up. For Vers, she learns she was and still is Carol Danvers, a human woman and one of the best pilots of the Air Force. She also learns that the Kree have been manipulating her memory in order to get them to fight for her, because she holds power within her that they want to utilize to destroy the Skrull - who turn out to be merely refugees wanting to escape the Kree. In the end, realizing her humanity is what saves her from the oppression of the Kree and helps her to realize her true potential. For Adelaide, she learns to stop running from her fears and to confront them. She becomes a vicious killer in the process, willing to savagely brutalize her enemies in order to protect her family. She also knows, deep down, that she is not the real Adelaide - she is the doppelganger who switched places with the real Adelaide when they were children and met for the first time. Thus, she enabled the horrific events of the film to take place. Both women, by the end, have worked through their memories of the past to create their new identities for the future and both have come out the other side fighting.
When placed side by side, the films paint a compelling picture of what it means to know who you are and what you are capable of. The majority of us will never be put through the harrowing experiences that these women have gone through, but we are often put to the test in our lives and knowing who we are can help us get through those daily trials. You have to know where you come from to know where you are going and you have to think about who you were to discover who you are in the here and now. That isn’t to say that there aren’t other compelling themes within each film (The importance of being human/not putting up with mansplaining in Captain Marvel and issues of erasure and duality in Us) but I’m a sucker for vastly different films that somehow align on a deeper level. I think also that the theme of figuring out who you are from who you were is something that I’ve been dealing with personally going into 2019….so I might have been relating (and possibly projecting) a little bit. Even still, identity is powerful and without our pasts our identities cannot be fully formed. It’s through our individual experiences and our responses to those experiences that we create the person that we are in the present.
In Captain Marvel, the lead character of Vers begins the film as part of the Kree nation on the planet of Hala and is a trusted member of their Starforce. However, she has dreams of a woman she doesn’t recognize and a place she can’t remember having been. Later, when she is is captured and brain probed by the Skrull forces they are fighting against, it is shown that at some point she was once a human living on Earth and was an Air Force fighter pilot. When she finds herself stranded on Earth after escaping the Skrulls, she begins to relentlessly pursue the Skrulls who are hunting her because she wants to know who she is and where she comes from. Similarly, in Us the lead character Adelaide has fragmented memories of meeting and being attacked by a double of herself while visiting the boardwalk at Santa Cruz beach. When she is grown and has a family of her own, they find themselves back in that same area on a vacation. She is anxious and on her guard, seeing threats and strange coincidences everywhere. When her evil doppelganger shows up with a family that matches her own, Adelaide finds herself fighting for the lives of her family while confronting the shadow version of herself.
In both films, piecing together the fragments of the past are crucial to understanding the events of the present and both films are about discovering the person you truly are under all the everyday masks we put up. For Vers, she learns she was and still is Carol Danvers, a human woman and one of the best pilots of the Air Force. She also learns that the Kree have been manipulating her memory in order to get them to fight for her, because she holds power within her that they want to utilize to destroy the Skrull - who turn out to be merely refugees wanting to escape the Kree. In the end, realizing her humanity is what saves her from the oppression of the Kree and helps her to realize her true potential. For Adelaide, she learns to stop running from her fears and to confront them. She becomes a vicious killer in the process, willing to savagely brutalize her enemies in order to protect her family. She also knows, deep down, that she is not the real Adelaide - she is the doppelganger who switched places with the real Adelaide when they were children and met for the first time. Thus, she enabled the horrific events of the film to take place. Both women, by the end, have worked through their memories of the past to create their new identities for the future and both have come out the other side fighting.
When placed side by side, the films paint a compelling picture of what it means to know who you are and what you are capable of. The majority of us will never be put through the harrowing experiences that these women have gone through, but we are often put to the test in our lives and knowing who we are can help us get through those daily trials. You have to know where you come from to know where you are going and you have to think about who you were to discover who you are in the here and now. That isn’t to say that there aren’t other compelling themes within each film (The importance of being human/not putting up with mansplaining in Captain Marvel and issues of erasure and duality in Us) but I’m a sucker for vastly different films that somehow align on a deeper level. I think also that the theme of figuring out who you are from who you were is something that I’ve been dealing with personally going into 2019….so I might have been relating (and possibly projecting) a little bit. Even still, identity is powerful and without our pasts our identities cannot be fully formed. It’s through our individual experiences and our responses to those experiences that we create the person that we are in the present.
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