The Story of Hands Across America, the Failed Fundraiser Featured in Jordan Peeles Us
The nightmare begins. Jordan Peele’s Us opens with a sequence that seems deliberately designed to confuse viewers, or, at least, younger ones. On a vintage television, surrounded by VHS tapes, we see a promotional video for Hands Across America, an advertisement (and event) so fundamentally cheeseball, it almost seems like something Peele made up. But as with Gremlins 2: The New Batch, the truth of ’80s entertainment was stranger than fiction, and Hands Across America was very real indeed, a true relic of the era — in terms of both its aims and its failed ambitions.