Get Out (2017)
Jordan Peele’s debut film caught me completely by surprised. Buoyed by the (at the time) unanimous positive reception of the film, I decided to watch the film blind, eschewing my habit of reading reviews and listening to podcasts about a film before watching it myself. Ignoring the “spoiler culture” debate, I can say that the film’s “surprise” really did catch me off guard and perhaps made the film a more heightened experience than it would have been had I knew about the premise beforehand.
With that in mind, I’ll do something that I haven’t really felt the need to do and leave a big SPOILER WARNING line break here on the off chance that you might want to watch the film and discover its premise on your own.
Given Peele’s pedigree as a creator, perhaps it’s not surprising that he would make a film that touches on and satirises the supposed “post-racial” landscape of a post-Obama America, and in some ways the film might have worked much better in the alternate reality where Hilary Clinton won the election and liberals were busy congratulating themselves for electing both the first Black president and the first female president. In the world we live in now, where demagogues rule the political class and have effectively divided the citizenry into an us versus them mentality, many of the film’s satirical moments take on a darker tone.
The opening scene of the film is reminiscent of a sketch from Key & Peele:
A young Black man, Andre, is walking in what is seemingly a white neighbourhood when a car begins to tail him. Trying his best to avoid a confrontation, he turns around and walks in the other direction, only to be assaulted and subdued by the driver of the car. I don’t know if Peele wanted the audience to think of his previous sketch during this scene, which similarly reproduces the fear that Black men must have of being seen as suspicious simply because of their race, but while the sketch ends with a cute visual gag showing us the only way Black men can deescalate a conflict (by essentially being white), the film leaves us with a sense of dread and uncertainty as Andre is dragged into the trunk of the car and driven away. Little did I know that this opening is a set up for a reveal that could top any K&P sketch.
After the cold open, we are then introduced to the main character of the film, Chris, and his girlfriend Rose. We see that they are in a picturesque, loving relationship that is threatened by the fact that Rose’s parents do not know that Chris is black. But this tension is quickly diffused by Rose, as she points out that her father would have voted Obama for a third term if it were possible. On the way to Rose’s childhood home, a white police officer seemingly harasses Chris but is quickly rebuffed by Rose, who essentially accuses the police officer of perpetrating implicit racism.
It’s meant to be a celebratory moment — for the audience it reaffirms the belief that resistance is the best way to confront racism, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that while Chris is willing to comply with the police officer’s demands, Rose is the one who chooses to stand up to this petty harassment. It certainly helps that Chris tells Rose that he found it “hot” when she defended him from the cop, confirming that as voyeurs thrust into this interracial relationship, we should feel good about these two characters and what they represent in 2017 (particularly in light of Loving (2016), the film that chronicled the life of Richard and Mildred Loving).
We’re meant to find Chris’ meeting with Rose’s parents awkward, particularly because their family has two Black servants named Georgina and Walter, but the film really turns when we first meet Rose’s brother Jeremy. When the family sits down for dinner, Jeremy sizes up Chris and begins to describe his physical features. It’s a conversation that’s off-putting, because Chris is trying to be polite and the rest of the family is trying to play off Jeremy’s blunt examination of Chris’ body. At this point we’re still meant to think that the family is embarrassed at their son’s behaviour because it’s inappropriate, when in reality, it’s because Jeremy is dangerously close to revealing their family’s true purpose. It’s also the first hint to the audience that there is something wrong with this domestic scene, as the scene ends with Jeremy trying to put Chris into a headlock, reminding us of the opening sequence when a masked assailant choked out Andre and kidnapped him.
This turn is when the film begins to dole out its absurd premise and also begins to make the audience raise questions about the so-called post-racism society that the election of Obama was supposed to represent. We get a quick hint that the Armitage family’s “progressive” views on Black bodies derives from admiration when we learn that Rose’s grandfather failed to qualify for the 1936 Olympics because he lost a race to Jesse Owens. This loss triggered an obsession for the Armitage patriarch — rather than react negatively to losing to a Black man, we learn that he admired the physical superiority of the Black body and wanted to find a way to claim it for himself.
The film plays on the scientific racism that still pervades, if the recent Charles Murray controversy is any sign, our society today. While various racists used the scientific method to claim the superiority of the White body over the Black body, with phrenology being one of the big examples of how science was perverted to make racist claims, Get Out inverts this trope by having the all the white characters in the film declare the superiority of the Black body. It is a play on race that is meant to offend the very people it is meant to preach to, because these characters are the definition of East Coast liberals. Billy Hawkins “The Black Student Athlete: The Colonized Black Body” writes:
The Black Body has always been valued in this society for its physical abilities. The main reason so many blacks are now located outside their native lands is that they were needed for physical labor in the early United States. Blacks were not sought to take part in the intellectual development of this country; their existence in the United States was strictly for the physical devel- opment of this country (e.g., working in the cotton, rice, and tobacco fields). (33)
And this is very much how the people in the film situates Chris and the other Black characters in the film — they are valued only for their bodies because of their perceived physical superiority. With this outlook on race in mind, we find out that the Armitage family has used science for their own nefarious purposes, not to find a way to denigrate and reject Blackness, but to subsume and consume it. For this family, and their (mostly white) friends, Black bodies are desirable because of their physical strength, and are sites for colonization.
This colonization is where the horror element of the film is situated — the Armitage family has discovered a way for white people to literally colonize Black bodies by putting their brains into the bodies of the various Black men and women that Rose and Jeremy have kidnapped. The reason why this revelation isn’t seen as farcical is because of the prescient and very real issues that America faces today. Racism and the exploitation of race isn’t “over”, and we don’t live in a “post-racist” world. In a way, it’s a natural evolution of George Yancy’s discussion of the Black body in his article “Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body”:
Within the white imaginary, to be Black means to be born an obstacle at the very core of one’s being. To ex-ist as Black is not “to stand out” facing an ontological horizon filled with future possibilities of being other than what one is. Rather, being Black negates the “ex” of existence. Being Black is reduced to facticity. (237)
The Black body, and what it means as a political and existential entity, is tied directly to how it is viewed by a white body, and the idea of a white consciousness invading and colonizing a Black body is the epitome of rendering Black consciousness invisible.
It’s why I think this film was created in anticipation of a Hilary Clinton win, because it would have served as a stark reminder of why Americans shouldn’t just pat themselves on the back for voting down the racist fear-monger. In this hypothetical reality where we are living under President Hilary Clinton, the Black Lives Matter movement wouldn’t have simply folded and disappeared into the ether of liberal good intentions. The issues that Black Americans faced in 2016 would still confront them in 2017 and the Armitage family is meant to remind us of how dominant whiteness still pervades the halls of power.
Of course, in the context of a Trump presidency, the satire found in the film re-configures itself. For example, there’s a scene where Chris’ friend Rod tries to go to the police to report Chris’ disappearance. He runs down the entire story about how this crazy white family has hypnotized and kidnapped Andre, Chris, and potentially many other Black people, only to be laughed at by the cops listening to his story. It’s important to note that the cops are Black as well, so it’s not easily read as simply a take on how white police officers treat Black victims. Instead, this scene reads as a condemnation of authority and power, particularly when we see the various abuses of power perpetrated by the White House in the last month. Rod is forced to take matters into his own hands and save Chris himself because he realizes that the system that is supposed to protect him is actively working against him.
The fact that the film works in either political context is what makes me appreciate its satire. The film reveals a sad truth about race in America that is both timeless and apolitical, making us understand how far we still need to go as a society before we can look back and see this film as completely absurd. When you think about the greatest piece of satire, Swift’s A Modest Proposal, the idea of turning Irish babies into food in order to solve poverty is makes as laugh now. But when the Irish were denigrated by the British in the 18th Century, one can only imagine how the political elite would have received such a scathing attack. Maybe we’ll look back on Get Out and laugh at how simple-minded we were as a society, although hopefully it won’t take us a hundred years to reach that point.
Indeed, the film’s ending warns us against seeking an immediate catharsis. We are meant to feel a sense of elation as Chris single-highhandedly kills off each member of the Armitage family, building to the catharsis of Rod’s appearance at the end of the film when he comes to rescue Chris. But while Chris is safe, the problem that the film raises isn’t still lingers in the air. We don’t know if the horrors that the Armitages inflicted on their Black victims are ever exposes, and the kidnapping of Andre remains an dangling thread that is, at least in the moment of the ending, simply ignored. The movie certainly has a “happy ending”, but the question is, “happy for who?”.
It would be amiss of me to not mention the other interesting qualities of the film. First and foremost, I appreciate that the film trusts and allows the audience to figure out the premise by giving them clues that look obvious in hindsight. For example, there’s a scene where we see Walter sprinting the grounds of the Armitage home in the middle of the night for no real reason. But when you learn that Rose’s grandfather put his brain inside Walter’s body and remember that he was a sprinter who admired Jesse Owens’ body, his late night sprinting makes sense. The grandfather is flaunting the fact that he has successfully colonized a Black body and is as good, if not better, than Jesse Owens. There are many moments like this in the film that let you piece together the “gimmick” long before it reveals itself.
The small moments of the film expose bigger questions about the racial politics of America beyond the ones raised above. When Rose disarms Rod by telling him that she knows he wanted to have sex with her, we see that racial fetishization isn’t as easy as normative whiteness trying to consume Blackness. Rose knows that Rod desires her, perhaps because of her face, and he himself is unable to escape her accusation and can only respond by retreating from her.
There’s also another moment when all the white “guests” invited to the Armitage home to inspect Chris is disturbed by the introduction of a Japanese man named Hiroki Tanaka. The film could have simply left it at “white people want Black bodies”, but the introduction of a Japanese character who bids on Chris’ body complicates this simple Black-White dichotomy that exists when we talk about race in America. In terms of the power exchange found in the racial politics of America, where do Asians fit in? Are they the colonizers or the colonized? The film doesn’t answer this question, but I appreciate that it at least raises it.
