The Sunken Place

My Year in Review (2018)

When we blindly expected everyone’s experience to be like ours — OR — When no one cared what our expectations were.

If you haven’t seen the movie, Get Out, this station shouldn’t be a spoiler. You likely are aware that the film is both a really well done horror movie while also echoing a very revealing and subversive message. It’s the meaning behind a certain scene that has gained lots of attention.

Read the following before watching the clip

“No matter how hard we scream, the system silences us,” says Get Out director Jordan Peele. “The sunken place is this metaphor for the system that is suppressing the freedom of black people.”

Jordan, the idea of the sunken place in “Get Out” has already entered the lexicon. Like, immediately, we were talking to people and “Oh, I really went to my sunken place.” And you sort of know what that is. Where did that idea come from?

Peele: You know when you’re going to sleep and it feels like you’re about to fall, so you wake up? What if you never woke up? Where would you fall? And that was kind of the most harrowing idea to me. And as I’m writing it becomes clear that the sunken place is this metaphor for the system that is suppressing the freedom of black people, of many outsiders, many minorities. There’s lots of different sunken places. But this one specifically became a metaphor for the prison-industrial complex, the lack of representation of black people in film, in genre. The reason Chris in the film is falling into this place, being forced to watch this screen, that no matter how hard he screams at the screen he can’t get agency across. He’s not represented. And that, to me, was this metaphor for the black horror audience, a very loyal fan base who comes to these movies, and we’re the ones that are going to die first. So the movie for me became almost about representation within the genre, within itself, in a weird way.

Watch the clips

“Now you are in the sunken place.” The words seem to reverberate, don’t they? Haunting. Maybe these words recall your own experience in being silenced, of being unrepresented, of being in a “sunken place” — hopeless and helpless.

REFLECT

Sit in this moment recalling your lack of freedom. Or maybe this scene is jolting you awake to the experience of friends or others unlike yourself who have been bound in some way, not free to speak or act. Sit in this moment with eyes open.

Howard Thurman, a leader in the civil rights movement as an educator, a theologian and a philosopher describes the options of resistance and non-resistance of the minority in view of the dominant group.

“Under the general plan of nonresistance one may take a position of imitation. The aim of such an attitude is to assimilate the culture and the social behavior-pattern of the dominant group. It is the profound capitulation to the powerful, because it means the yielding of oneself to that which, deep within, one recognizes as being unworthy. It makes for a strategic loss of self-respect. The aim is to reduce all outer or external signs of difference to zero, so that there shall be no ostensible cause for active violence or opposition. Under some circumstances it may involve a repudiation of one’s heritage, one’s customs, one’s faith.” — Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited

Write a sentence prayer in response to this station

(Example: ‘Let 2018 be another year where the voiceless find a hearing; and the bound might find freedom.’)

The next several articles will include the content from the two evenings we prepared/encountered over two Sundays as a community. But you can download the full PDF.