Get Out & The Compulsory Murder Trope
Get Out was so, so good.
Last night before seeing it, we saw a preview for a movie in which workers at an insurance company are held hostage by somebody who tells them to kill 30 of their co-workers or else 60 of them will die.
It may have more substance to it than the trailer suggests, for all I know. But I immediately slotted it in the full-up category of movies with mostly white protagonists in which the premise is that — aw, shucks––these decent people (often good looking, very wholesome, yet also potentially sexy, teens) are put in a bad situation where, welp, darnit, they gotta kill people because of what is inevitably to me a cheap, cooked-books scenario. The twist & justifying principle of the killing is that the bad people aren’t real people, they’re aliens, zombies, vampires, werewolf, cyborgs. Or if they are real people, they’re tyrants/radicals/turncoats or mindless government (or insurance company) workers involved in an evil plot. I could make all of those links but I have to do some other work today, so. Either way, there’s a narrative that enables audiences to begin preparing for the protags to destroy those bad people. There might be a critique somewhere of the Lord of the Flies mentality in which civilized culture breaks down, but more often, these plots transpire in such a way that audiences REALLY WANT the protags to get over their trepidation and just fucking kill the bad people already.
To get them to that point, there’s a good deal of handwringing along the way — protags don’t know if those bad people are really bad and for a long time, the good kids think the baddies are people…and though there are arguments between the crazy unhinged guy the protags are friends with and the protag’s more superficially “good” representatives, the gang adheres to superficially good, earnest, and generally moral positions about not killing people. Until they can’t anymore. Which is usually maybe 45 minutes in.
Eventually, it’s revealed that the bad people are really bad people or maybe, hopefully, not even people anyway, and so the plot then shifts to the protags working through the issues at stake: “ok, we don’t want to kill but we HAVE to. Do we really have to? Oh, we do? Aw man! I don’t have violent or discriminatory impulses at all, but this situation just leaves me no choice. I mean, I could die instead, but no, we have to fight! For the sake of others or whatever. We must put aside our usual lack of impulses to murder and shoot the fuck out of everybody. Which we’re pretty good at, it turns out.”
Sometimes this happens over a few scenes, but usually it’s in a quick moment where the most virtuous protag doesn’t have time to think: her friends are about to get mauled and the audience is like “however are these attractive teens going to make it out of this certain-death situation?!” and then the bad guy is shot from behind, revealing a yellow-haired Jamie-Lynn with a smudged cheek and brastrap showing and a huge smoking machine gun in the screen-space he leaves as he falls. Or maybe it’s the righteous, scruffy brown-haired computer nerd, who says some Lord of the Rings shit as he uses a Gandalf staff to stab a vampire through the heart. “THOU SHALT NOT PASS!”
When this sort of thing is done, it’s righteous, necessary, and more importantly, worthy of absolution. I mean, did you see how bad the bad guys were? Let’s review for the audience’s assurance: we really, like totally, didn’t want to kill them at first because we’re totally good humans, but then we learned it was us or them and it was basically the point of the entire plot of this cheap but very-costly-to-make movie so we had to. HAD TO.
HAD TO!
I think Westworld is pretty good at holding up the entertainment value of gratuitous and consequence-free violence (consequence-free for the perpetrator, at least in the immediate story) for scrutiny. But most other shows and films bank on this entertainment value in a manner that is itself gratuitous, exalting in the prospect that compulsory murder is both a thing (it’s not a thing) and a thing people desire (now that is a thing). Indeed, these movies suggest that we’re all just one fictional danger-scenario away from getting our wish. And one thing that really sucks about this profitable premise is that a lot of people operate in real life as if that fictional danger-scenario is real; seeing brown people at a bar is enough of a reason to open fire on them. While most people would condemn this act in real life, they enjoy movies that forgive people for committing the same act. The way this absolution is managed is by validating the scenario that made that act a necessity and forcing audiences to think of the people willing to kill other people as otherwise decent human beings. Hollywood stars might condemn the NRA on Sunday night, but honestly, lots of movies act out the “a good guy with a gun” pretense. It’s probably no coincidence that they often project this pretense onto teens, and films for teens, whose stars are less likely to think critically about the problematic messages of dystopian YA fiction on screen.
Anyway. There are so many more interesting things about Get Out to talk about, so it’s weird that I feel the need to write about this one element…but last night watching this film it struck me as having a more more complicated relationship to the phenomenon that I’ve just described than any other film I’ve seen and I wanted to try and figure out some things about it.
Movies can make audiences want a white teen to shoot an arrow at a fascist leader who is responsible for her sister’s death and the deaths of other little children. But even if a movie can make me want a black man to kill white people who are sick and evil predators, it can’t make me forget that this is a black man committing a crime and it will REALLY have to defy reality if it wants me to believe he will not be convicted for it let alone absolved.
And, it also can’t make me forget that a black man who murders a white family is another narrative that, for a really long time, white audiences — of movies and life — have both readily consumed and desired.
When a cop car pulls up amidst the requisite carnage near the end of Get Out, the optics of that are both terrifying for the immediate implications and soul-crushing reminders of a real America in which, outside of OJ Simpson, a black man is unlikely to be exonerated in a murder trial.
That a decent person has to kill somebody, essentially the same over-done moral quandary I described up front, has ceased to be horrifying in films with young protagonists, even relatively diverse ones, because those other films work so hard to make sure that audiences understand that the white-ish protagonists are heroes for finally committing their violent acts. But with the not-as-young black protagonist in Get Out, the horror remains horrific: no matter how you slice it, these white people have manipulated this man’s actions, forcing him into committing acts that go against his instincts (compliance, patience, and even over-passivity, which his captors ensure he feels guilty about), and that, despite their roots in self-defense, are intentional violent crimes. On an individual level, this is disgusting: if one is really, really against killing, a person who pauses over a dying animal and connects that suffering to the suffering of a loved one, it doesn’t matter if it was justified. On a societal level, it’s also disgusting. In a world in which white people are allowed to prosper and do terrible things with impunity, can their black victims ever claim to be standing their ground? After all, the people this man has killed aren’t aliens or zombies; they may be inhumane as hell, but they’re definitely human. The acts are not hard to justify, but perhaps they are harder to glorify.
In this way (and in many other ways), Get Out re-enacts the extreme violence of slavery, a long history of violence that white people have enacted upon black people, both in direct ways and by inciting a retaliatory violence in black protagonists that, historically, might hurt individual white people but then is used by other whites in power to keep black people down. Get Out really has to handle the moral problem of killing movie antagonists carefully, then, because Chris’s every action is over-determined. And though his actions are never not re-actions, because of that very fact, they risk meaning something else. Peele handles this problem deftly, not least by giving the film’s antagonists a few different forms in the allegorical construct of a white family, and this construct allows Chris’s responsibility for each person’s demise to vary. It is also noteworthy that Chris’s escape includes some of the old familiar tropes in which a decent person has to grapple with whether to kill people who are essentially zombies — and Chris’s rational identification with these half-alive beings means that the “it’s them or me” narrative doesn’t so easily apply.
Chris does emerge from the backwoods of the North as a hero; though I can’t project its reception for all audiences, I can say that last night we all applauded and cheered when he began his bloody journey out of the basement. And it was clear that everyone there saw him as being every bit as justified in killing white people, even more so than most movie protagonists for whom murder is compulsory. But his recourse to violence is not a just valid response to the injustice of what he’s endured, for the fact that a non-violent person is forced to commit violence is yet another kind of injustice.
I can never end anything like this with a good or solid point, and so many things keep coming to mind about it (OMG the Jeffrey Dahmer stuff — so much to say!) that I just want to see it again and write and write more. But this was already more than I usually write about modern stuff. So I’ll stop.
Get Out was so, so good.
