Are you in the Sunken Place? The Tea on Get Out
Jordan Peele writes and directs his first feature film that psychological thrills audiences and drives a conversation about the real racism going on in America.
WARNING: Spoilers… duh
In 2012, on the night of February 26th in Florida, a bag of skittles and an Arizona Watermelon juice rattled around in a plastic bag as a 17 year old boy walked home from a 7-Eleven for the last time. George Zimmerman, a member of the community watch, saw Martin as he was walking home and deemed him as suspicious. After reporting it to 9–1–1, the dispatcher instructed him to not follow Martin. However, Zimmerman eventually took away Martin’s last breath with a single bullet. Trayvon Martin’s death broke the silence throughout America about the racial profiling and racism. Although it was 6 years ago, Trayvon Martin’s death broke the barrier and began the conversation about the lack of conversation about race in America.
Influenced by the psychological horror films such as Rosemary’s Baby, and The Stepford Wives as well as the political commentary regarding the #BlackLivesMatter movement during the tail end of the Obama administration, Jordan Peele, actor, writer, producer, and half of the comedy duo Key & Peele, began writing Get Out.
Get Out centers around Chris Washington, played by Daniel Kaluuya, an African-American photographer and his girlfriend, Rose Armitage, played by Allison Williams. Rose is taking Chris to her parents’ lakeside home for a weekend to meet her parents for the first time. Without telling her parents that she is in an interracial relationship, the Armitages’ behavior is over accommodating and nervous when they meet Chris. Rose’s mother, Missy Armitage, is a hypo-therapist and tries to ease the awkwardness of her daughter dating another man of a different race by offering to help Chris overcome his smoking addiction.
The typical American white liberal is depicted through the sly remarks of Rose’s father, Dean. Dean calls Chris, “my man!” and tells him, “I would’ve voted for Obama for a third term.” Dean also provides an antidote about his father, a track star who was proud to lose to Jesse Owens in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. As the movie progresses, Chris discovers disturbing and weird things about the family. For example, the family has two Black workers on their plantation-looking home and Dean says,
“Come on, I get it. White family, black servants. It’s a total cliché. Well you didn’t have to, believe me. Now, we hired Georgina and Walter to help care for my parents. When they died I just couldn’t bear to let them go. But boy, I hate how it looks.”
Throughout the movie, Peele subtly drops symbols that have underlying meanings and commentary about racism. Just to name a few,
- In the beginning of the movie a as some describe the “slave-sounding song,” it’s actually a Swahili song singing the phrase “Sikiliza Kwa Wahenga,” a phrase that translates to “listen to your ancestors, something bad is coming, run.”
After realizing the shadiness, creepiness, and weirdness of the Armitages, Chris tries to leave with Rose immediately. Attempting to leave with Rose, her family begins to pressure him as she struggles to find the keys to the car. Chris beginning to become more and more frustrated starts begging for Rose for the keys, Rose then revealing that she had them all along.
The climatic events that follow include Chris being put into the sunken place once again, taken into the basement under lock and key, and then being prepped for brain surgery. Chris and the audience then discover that the Armitages have been kidnapping black people and using them as hosts to vicariously keep their white family and friends alive by transplanting their brains into black bodies.
The Armitages and their clientele represent the hypocrisy of society and how black features are disgraced until they’re on white people. Features that were once considered apart of black culture and deemed negative by society such as Afros, locs, large lips, and large butts have now since been adopted by teenagers throughout America. Things that were once “unprofessional” or “ghetto” have been turned into “edgy” and “trendy.”
Peele uses the Armitage family to discuss the unspoken of narrative that blacks exist in America because they were useful for white men; historically for picking cotton on a plantation or more present day to how black athletes provide pleasure and entertainment to predominantly white spectated events.
In the ending, audiences sat at the edge of their seats as Chris was in the street choking Rose to death and the glimmer of red and blue lights flashed over his skin.
Rose began gasping and whimpering for help, assuming that it was the police. Peele’s subtle nod to how white women play victim and society automatically believes them.
Audiences expected for Chris to be arrested and convicted, just because of how it looked. The house was burning down, the evidence was gone, and a wealthy and white family all murdered. Then as the audience loses hope in the reality of the wrongfully convicted, the camera pans up to the car and it reads “Transportation Security Administration.”
Chris’s best friend, Rod came to the rescue and to the audience’s surprise, the black person isn’t the first to die in a horror movie.
The ending of Get Out added a lighter and happier mood, the DVD version released an alternate ending. In Peele’s commentary, he discusses why the original ending was switched out for a more positive one.
In the alternate ending, instead of Rod showing up, it was the actual cops. Six months go by and it cuts to a clip of Rod and Chris talking through glass, Chris convicted for the murder. Rod, being the best friend that he is, asks Chris to tell him as much information as he can remember. Chris, replying in a disconnected voice,
The alternate ending of Get Out depicts the reality of race in the judicial system as well as society. Despite Chris being the victim in the situation, he is the one who is convicted and left unheard. Peele describes how minorities feel in America by using a metaphor called the “sunken place.” The “sunken place” is a visual representative of how minorities are often times silenced in America by society and the standing institutions.
The alternate ending shows the dark reality of what it means to be a minority in America. Racial bias has fueled the incarceration system, the NAACP noting that, although African Americans and Hispanics make up 32% of the U.S. population, they compromised 56% of all incarcerated people in 2015. In an interview with ESSENCE Magazine, Peele discusses how by the time the movie was set to release, America’s conversation had changed and Peele felt like he needed to give a glimmer of hope instead of harsh reality to the conversation.
Get Out costed $4.5 million to make but made $252,434,250 in the box office. It earned a 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and then an Oscar in 2018 for best original screenplay. Peele’s use of subtle symbolism and metaphors in the movie expands audiences’ minds on what it feels like to be black in America and is why the movie is so successful. Peele attempts to start conversations and to make the audience understand that racism isn’t over in the 21st century. He aligns with the #BlackLivesMatter movement to expand beyond police brutality to diverge into the modern day “liberal” racism. The movie expresses the distrust of white America due to the desires to wanting to be black, the fetish-ization of black bodies, and the institutional repercussions of slavery. Get Out burns the truth into the audience, calling out how subtle racism can be but how predominant it is. Peele successfully challenges audiences by delivering the realities of racism through this psychological thriller.
