When I first wrote about “Blade Runner 2049” (2017), I was concerned with the issue of what distinguishes humans from robots. I recast this question in terms of what makes us (anyone) human. No, it isn’t the status of our memories — real vs. implanted — but rather our capacity to imagine the mind of someone other than ourselves, to care about what happens to them, and to make choices on that basis. I called this capacity empathy. By empathy, I include the ability to engage in self-reflection (a form of self-empathy). I treat both as aspects of a viable inner life.

Now, however, I want to turn to the matter of memory — a more congested and contested subject for our time.

Cognitive neuroscience teaches us that personal memory is mutable, malleable, and hence unreliable. This is not a matter of individual brain function (as in Alzheimer’s) but a condition that applies to us all. The formation of memory involves neural network activity in our brains. To remember is to reactivate that network, which then attaches to new neural formations, related to the present moment.

As a result, we cannot recall an original memory intact, but only increasingly altered ones, over time. This theory violates our preconceived notions of memory integrity and recall, but once you get used to it, it makes sense. Intuitively, we know that our memories are not fixed, like photographs, in our brains. Instead, they change and evolve over time. We each harbor significant memories from our childhood, which seem to “explain” who we are to ourselves and to our intimate others. Yet, each time we recall or describe them, they take a slightly different form, depending on our subsequent experiences, understandings, and stages of life. Some details (especially ones of a traumatic nature) seem indelibly inscribed in our brains, but even these have a tendency to soften or mutate with the passage of time.

So who are we, and what is real?“ Blade Runner 2049” raises this question in a visual, dramatic, and philosophic way.

K has one memory from his childhood, which he believes to be “implanted,” an enhancement of robot construction that is explained in the previous “Blade Runner.” He dutifully relates it to his LAPD superior Sergeant Joshi early in the film.

In our first viewing, we take this memory (represented in visual narrative form) as both real and unreal. For K, it feels like his own, at the same time that he considers it a fabrication, designed to provide him with the illusion of being human. As if to drive this point home, Sergeant Joshi reminds K of his lesser status in the chain of being. When K muses that he has never before killed anyone who was born, observing: “To be born is to have a soul,” Joshi fires back: “You’ve been getting along fine without one.”

At this point, it seems that implanted memories relegate one to something close to animal life, lacking consciousness, much less conscience, or that phantom entity, a soul.

As the plot advances, K comes to believe that he might actually be the vanished son of Deckard and Rachael, who died in childbirth. As this fantasy begins to take hold, we cheer for him. Step by step, K finds his one childhood memory as proof of his having been raised in an orphanage to protect his birthright as the son of a replicant — a mystery no less sacred in this film than that of the miracle of Virgin birth.

A goal of Niander Wallace, the executive who heads the company that succeeds the Tyrell Corporation from the previous “Blade Runner” film, is to devise a female model who can reproduce. His continuing failure in this regard causes him to seek and hunt down the child born of the union between Deckard and Rachael. K, ordered to kill this progeny — who blurs the line between robot and human — comes to believe that he has been ordered to eliminate himself. He shifts from his role of hunter to hunted.

As if this plot were not complicated enough, K discovers that he is NOT the son of Deckard and Rachael, but a decoy designed to divert attention from the real child — a girl sequestered in a bubble designed to protect her compromised immune system. K’s search for his counterpart — she being real, he being something less — leads him into a magical field of memory illusion and creation. At first he takes his discovery of its creator Dr. Ana Stelline as validation of his childhood memory. She views his memory through a screen separating him from her shining bubble, and she weeps. In retrospect, we read this scene differently from the way that K interprets it — but this revelation is yet to come.

My point here is not who is more human than whom, but rather what is memory and how does it function in creating our personal sense of being individually alive and real?

K’s counterpart, Dr. Stelline, spends her time creating beautiful memories — her sole aim, it appears, in her lonely and restricted environment. For her, an invented field filled with foliage and insects is as real as a birthday cake surrounded by wide-eyed, happy children. Dr. Stelline, a new species of replicant, is a memory artist — a kind of neuro-filmmaker, who fabricates the stuff of internal reality that we consider essential to our sense of who we are. Having been born of woman, she rivals Wallace, who cannot create new life. Even more importantly, she (unlike Wallace) creates “souls.”

K’s encounter with his hybrid “twin,” sends him on a deeper journey, not only to verify his birthright but also to find an identity of his own. His discovery disappoints him but also leads him to a different kind of realization. If not the messianic child of Deckard and Rachael, he has a mission that provides him with a sense of purpose in his brief existence. Saving Deckard’s life and delivering him to his daughter gives K the feeling of being human that he has sought. It no longer matters whether his memory was made up or real; it has guided his quest to its resolution.

K and his narrative of discovery are at the center of this film. As its trajectory unfolds, we become ever more invested in his fate. He is as “real” to us as any other character in the film and more appealing than most.

All of this, of course is an illusion — the film medium with its amazing array of narrative, visual, and sound effects, all of which serve to seduce us into a joint fantasy creation. In order for a film like this to succeed, it needs our willing suspension of disbelief — as any sci-fi narrative requires. But “Blade Runner 2049” raises an even more challenging set of questions for us as viewers.

What is memory? How does it look, sound, taste, smell, feel? Is it story-like, with a sequential narrative, or more like a dream, composed of flash images and verbal fragments? If memory is a brain-effect (composed of neural network activity that is constantly mutating), what can we know about ourselves, assuming that we count on memory to stabilize us in the midst of the cacophony of our daily lives?

There is a surreal moment, late in the film, where K/Joe finally locates the missing progenitor Deckard. In this lengthy sequence, father and putative son first try to kill each other, while nostalgic holographic images of Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and Marilyn Monroe appear and disappear before our eyes. The cultural past of Las Vegas, like some strange visitation from Stephen King’s “The Shining” suddenly materializes. How much more real are K’s or even Deckard’s memories?

What if personal memory is as profound, mysterious, and elusive as these fleeting holographs? What if memory itself is a holograph — a necessary illusion of being in order to make us feel real? If so, it is not memory per se that validates our humanity but rather the ethics that we create for ourselves and our relations with others, which we then enact in the choices that we make over the course of our lives.

# # #

Originally published at www.psychologytoday.com.

Source: IMDb: Public images Darkest Hour and The Post 2018

Watching “Darkest Hour” and “The Post” within a few days of each other made me think about the uses and power of language, one of the crowning achievements, we believe, of the human race.

We know, of course, that other species communicate complex messages among themselves — birds, chimpanzees, and humpback whales for instance — but we have not yet deciphered what they mean, much less how to carry on a cross-species conversation. Instead we congratulate ourselves on our unique ability to create diverse language systems, to invent alphabets, to inscribe records of our lives and civilizations for future generations, and to devise ever more efficient technologies of communication, e.g. the Gutenberg press, linotype, and now the endless forms of instant digital messaging.

One popular language app is called Babbel, riffing on the “babble” that describes our first attempts at speech and the biblical Tower of Babel, where the diversity of languages, frustrating inter-tribal communication, was (mythically) born. We are genetically programmed to learn how to speak but also condemned to failures of communication across cultures, nations, histories and civilizations — a linguistic Fall even more terrible than the loss of Eden.

I am stating the obvious: the use of words matters and how we manipulate or comprehend them can foster or frustrate our efforts to sustain a world in which we may all live and prosper.

As a lover of language, I was primed to appreciate “Darkest Hour,” which replays the turning point moment at which Winston Churchill rallied the heart and nerve of the English nation to oppose the Nazi invasion of Europe. Two of his most memorable speeches to Parliament frame this film: the famous “Blood, toil, tears, and sweat” peroration and his even more powerful cry to resist Hitler at all cost, concluding with the famous lines: “We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans…We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

“Darkest Hour” compels its viewers through the extraordinary performance by Gary Oldman, who impersonates Churchill so convincingly that I began to believe he was the man himself. Yet behind the scenes of Churchill’s personal transformation into the wartime leader of Great Britain is his humble secretary Elizabeth Layton, who transcribes his orally composed messages daily. These scenes demonstrate not only Churchill’s skill in spontaneous expression but also how great speeches get written — through continual rumination and revision.

The camera lingers on Ms. Layton’s nimble fingers, typing and retyping, sometimes ripping a page from her machine to toss it onto the floor. Those of us who grew up learning to type on manual machines will savor the way the freshly typed letters look, so forcefully struck that that they cause visible indentations on the page. The film wants us to appreciate the significance of individual words and the labor required to produce them. It also wants us to consider how the right turn of phrase can rouse us (even more effectively than rational argument) to action.

The film ends on a significant moment of dialogue. A companion of Lord Halifax, the chief proponent of making peace with Hitler, asks in bewilderment: “What just happened?” Halifax, wryly accepting his defeat, observes: “He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.”

In the world we inhabit today, many do not think much of words — how they are delivered or how they might be arranged on the page, much less what they portend. That is the concern of humanists like myself who spend our days poring over ancient, medieval, modern and post-modern texts in ways that seem irrelevant to our market-based, technological society. If you want to get a job, so the mantra goes, don’t get a degree in the liberal arts, much less any field that focuses on language or literature.

“The Post,” which portrays a turning point moment in American history far less heroic than Churchill’s rallying cry of resistance to Hitler, is no less emotionally powerful nor less meaningful in its focus on the power of the word.

Here also, there is a loving attention to print technology. Few of us remember, much less care about, how the newspaper industry operated in the 1970s. I am so used to the ease of composition via laptop computer and related devices that I had to look this up. Linotype printing (now replaced by photo digital printing) involved the use of metal lines of type, which were entered manually by technicians — not unlike Ms. Layton — a method considerably faster than setting individual letters by hand, as the older Gutenberg method required.

Lines of type created by human hands were then transferred to machines that set them into metal frames that could be arranged sequentially for printing. The last scenes of “The Post” are devoted to a visual portrayal of the printing process. It was both a craft and an industry, involving a series of skilled operators from the point of reception from the editorial room to the newsprint product that was delivered to subscribers and to newsstands on the streets.

The chain of words, this sequence implies, like the chain of individuals who contributed to the revelation of a hidden or suppressed truth, is a wonder to behold.

From start to finish, “The Post” pays tribute to the power of the printed word — through the secret record of the Vietnam War commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, to the Xerox pages surreptitiously produced by Daniel Ellsberg, to the final newsprint copies and their national distribution. The behind-the-scenes human story of the release of the Pentagon Papers is full of drama and suspense, yet the outcome is what matters. “The Post” celebrates the power of words to change history.

Churchill’s command of the English language rallied his British compatriots to engage in a devastating conflict. The release of the Pentagon Papers helped the American people to end one.

“In the beginning was the word” is how the Gospel of John begins. “And the word was with God and the word was God.” How curious to identify God not with a state of being but with the power of the word. He/it, as many believe, created the entire universe and every form of life we know.

Maybe we should pay more attention to what we say and how we say it.

Originally published at www.psychologytoday.com.

Many good men I know find it hard to believe that sexual harassment is as prevalent as it appears to be. Why are they so incredulous? I assume it’s because they have not indulged themselves in this way, for which I commend them.

But there’s another obvious reason: women’s historic silence on this issue. Of course, we all remember Anita Hill’s testimony (1991) at the confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas as a nominee for the Supreme Court and the disbelief accorded her story at that time. The public shame she endured served as an effective deterrent to professional women for years to come.

Who would want to suffer such public scrutiny or humiliation? Not to mention the possible derailing and/or devastation of her career? Most ordinary women (myself included) would not.

Yet I recognized what she said in terms of my own experience, as I imagine many other women did at that time.

Women who entered the workforce in the late 1960s and after have all experienced some degree of workplace harassment, whether subtly suggestive, physically unpleasant, or coercive. Women of my generation shared our stories in private, warned each other about whom to avoid, and mostly, tried to laugh it off. What else could we do? In the absence of workplace procedures and state or federal legislation that would consider a complaint, we were legally orphaned.

And then there was the issue of power. The men who took verbal and/or physical liberties with us were our superiors, often our supervisors, who had influence over our employment. In my case, the suggestive comments made to me as an untenured assistant professor at a major research university in the midwest were made by associate or full professors, all of whom would vote on my tenure and promotion. I knew enough not to express overt anger, much less to “punch them in the face,” as one younger male friend offered as an appropriate form of rebuttal.

Few women are a physical match in an encounter with a larger, more powerful male. I’d suggest rather, that when push comes to shove, such a woman think of kneeing the guy in the groin — a tactic I learned in the 1970s from a 6’4” African-American male who taught a Women’s Self-Defense Class at my university. I am grateful that I never had to resort to such an extreme tactic.

But I was once assaulted in my early twenties by a “date” whom I did not fear until he pinned me down on his metal dormitory bed, trying to force me to have sex with him. I was saved by the presence of others in the vicinity, who would have intervened if I’d had the courage to scream. I didn’t, out of sheer embarrassment and my 1950s upbringing as a “nice” girl, raised to be polite and not to make a “fuss.”

I’d never heard the word “rape,” much less understood what it meant, but was desperate to escape. I did, but I feared that he would pursue me, which he did, calling me a me “witch” and telling me that what happened to girls like me was that they “got their heads chopped off.” This sounds extreme, I know, but it actually happened. I got away from this guy but was terrified of him for months afterward.

If you want to read a fuller account of this story, you can click here where I describe my experience in more detail.

What prompted me to write about this long-ago encounter was the debate about the prevalence of sexual assault on the university campus. I’d been teaching a memoir writing class that year, in which I gave my students the option of writing either a research paper on the books we read or to compose a personal memoir. They all opted for the memoir assignment.

One young woman wrote about her experience of “friend rape.”

She’d known this guy for some time and trusted him but he forced her into sex, saying that she was used to this, so it was no big deal. It is true that she was sexually experienced but she did not consent to this encounter. What she did as a result was (to me at least) remarkable.

She went to her brother and confided what had happened. He believed her, recruited a group of his friends, and went to the perpetrator’s apartment. Together, they beat the s — t out of him.

There was silence in the room as my student read her story and then what I can only describe as exhilaration from male as well as female students. She’d balanced the scales without resorting to the tedious and mostly ineffective justice system. Good for her!

I am telling you this now not as an instruction for how to handle sexual harassment, much less rape, but rather to point to an example of female heroism, to which I was a personal witness. Unlike me in my early twenties, my student (also in her early twenties) took action.

So, too, are the women who are coming forward to “out” the men in power who have taken liberties with their bodies: groping them, forcibly kissing them, and sometimes worse. Those who give their names and/or consent to being interviewed are walking in the footsteps of Anita Hill, who broke the workplace silence for us all.

One more thing: When a man categorically denies the allegations of such women, it is the women whose words are questioned — not those of the men. Hence, or so it seems, the willingness on the part of some to support a credibly accused sexual harasser like Roy Moore (and our own President) over the testimony of the women who describe in detail how they suffered at their hands.

#MeToo

(Author Note: I am aware that this is a controversial topic and am willing to respond personally to anyone who chooses to comment.)

Who is afraid of nuclear war? I am.

I haven’t been so afraid since I was a kid growing up in St. Louis in the middle of the Cold War arms race with the Soviet Union when the nuns in school showed us how to “duck and cover” in the event of a nuclear attack. We were taught to hate the Soviets and to fear their treachery.

In my neighborhood, there was talk of constructing bomb shelters in our backyards — too small to accommodate everyone and too expensive to build. But I worried.

We did have a basement, and maybe the tiny fruit cellar (which had no windows) could be converted to a shelter? But what would we do for food and water? And what about going to the bathroom — the kind of thing that a sensitive eight-year-old girl might think about? We had a toilet in the basement, but it wasn’t in the fruit cellar. If we ventured out of our makeshift shelter what would happen to us? Would we be destroyed by nuclear fallout or radiation?

And then there was the Cuba missile crisis in the early 1960s when I was a sophomore in college, and we narrowly averted a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union.

And then there was the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s and 1970s, in which the use of nuclear weapons on the part of the US was seriously contemplated.

And then there was President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars,” program in the early 1980s, which seemed to escalate the out-of-control nuclear arms race.

Born in 1942, before the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I grew up in the shadow of nuclear war. I’ve managed this fear — especially in times of détente and the landmark INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces) Treaty signed by President Reagan and Secretary General Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 — but have never been entirely free of this anxiety.

It did abate after the fall of the Soviet Union and lessened a bit further when the Iran nuclear deal was signed by Iran, the United States and other members of the United Nations Security Council in 2015.

But the specter hasn’t left.

Not only does the United States no longer fear the growing power and influence of Russia under the regime of President Putin, but President Trump seems to absolve him of any or all possible wrong-doing when it comes to the U.S.

Yes, Trump’s aides and family members held meetings with Russian intermediaries during the lead-up to the election, and yes they discussed “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, but hey, no big deal. As for evidence of Russian attempts to meddle in the 2016 election (via computer hacks and fake ads placed on social media), that’s just a hoax.

Our president is cozying up to Russia while escalating a war of words with Kim Jong Un (whom he once declared that he would be “honored” to meet in person).

Here’s the thing.

Every time Trump insults Kim Jong Un, Kim Jong Un insults him right back. The difference is that Trump mostly Tweets, while his security advisors attempt to pursue diplomatic options, consisting of rallying our international allies to increase economic sanctions. The problem with this approach is that Kim Jong Un doesn’t care about sanctions. His people have starved before for the sake of their national identity and “sovereignty” (a term that Trump has recently adopted to describe his “America First” policy), and are prepared to make such a sacrifice again.

Each time Trump escalates his rhetoric, Kim Jong Un takes another action — firing test missiles in rapid succession, flying two of them over Japan and now threatening to shoot down American missiles in international waters and to detonate a nuclear weapon in the Pacific Ocean.

Words — as silly and childish as they are — are one thing; actions are something else.

There was a moment this last summer while I was visiting friends in the San Francisco Bay Area when I was so frightened of this insane and unnecessary build-up of tension between the U.S. and North Korea that I turned CNN on first thing in the morning to see if we were at nuclear war.

President Trump begins his day as early as 3:00, 4:00, or 5:00 a.m., tweeting into the void. It seemed entirely possible to me that he might have fired off a nuclear missile to “totally destroy” North Korea while I was sleeping.

I live in Minnesota, which I doubt that Kim Jong Un would target first — were he to choose such a course of action. Rather, he’d aim for the densely populated West Coast: Seattle, Los Angeles, or San Francisco.

Not only do some of my best friends and colleagues reside in this “target” area but so do my daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren, who recently moved there.

We’ve been witnessing natural disasters — such as “the world has never seen before,” as Trump might say, in the last couple of weeks: Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Irma, the 7.1 earthquake in Mexico and Hurricane Maria. Isn’t this enough to elicit our empathy and humanitarian aid? Do we really need a nuclear war to top it all off?

I’m not what you would call a “praying” person, but I have begun to pray.

May President Trump develop an understanding that everything that happens is not about him.

May someone near President Trump persuade him to stop Tweeting inflammatory messages when he is sleep-deprived and alone in the hour of the wolf.

May saner heads — among Trump’s aides, family members, members of Congress, and yes, even the “fake” news media — speak up clearly, boldly, and with a proper sense of alarm.

May ordinary citizens (like you and me) arouse ourselves to action to avert this slow-moving disaster.

If Ronald Reagan (a man I deeply distrusted and did not vote for) could negotiate a nuclear arms reduction agreement with a historic enemy of the United States, surely Trump (or his surrogates) could at least give peace and peaceful co-existence a chance.

What is the alternative?

Duck and cover.

(Originally published on PsychologyToday.com)

In his March 15, 2017 interview with Terry Gross, Jordan Peele says that he wanted his viewers to get in touch “with the fears inherent in being black in this country.” The opening scene of the film, which shows a young black man walking alone at night in an upper middle-class neighborhood being assaulted and abducted by two men in a conspicuously white car, not only achieves this aim but also sets the tone for everything that follows.

As a viewer though, I felt my “whiteness” throughout. Let me explain.

One branch of my extended family tree owned slaves. They were the French fur traders who founded the city of St. Louis in 1764, a full century before the abolition of slavery and the end of the Civil War.

I was ignorant of this history until my mid-50s, when I conducted research on St. Louis in preparation for a book about the neighborhood where I grew up and how the construction of Interstate 70 in the late 1950s bisected it, dividing what had been a mixed community into black and white sectors. I thought of my book as a sociological memoir. But the more I learned about my slave-holding forbearers the sadder I felt. I abandoned this project from an acute sense of shame.

“Get Out” speaks to me personally for this reason. On my first viewing, I saw it as an allegory of slavery, but didn’t think I had anything original to say.

Yet the film haunted me, as horror movies are meant to do.

Spoiler alert.

If you have read this far, you have most likely seen the film. I can’t get to my point without describing the plot.

Not having read any reviews, I didn’t immediately clue into the “horror” aspect of the film. OK, I thought Chris’ girlfriend Rose’s gaze at pastries was “creepy,” but I then settled into what I viewed as an update of the 1969 film, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” (starring Sidney Poitier) in which an upper class white girl introduces her black fiancé to her seemingly liberal parents (played by Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy).

Things get a whole lot creepier as the movie unfolds. Rose hits and kills a deer on the way to her parents’ remote house in the woods, and her mother is a hypnotist who claims to be able to cure Chris of his nasty smoking habit. Rose’s brother is nothing if not weird. Then there are the family “servants,” who behave like robots, until they behave even more strangely. Chris’ friend, a foul-mouthed TSA agent in San Francisco, warns him to be wary and urges him to leave.

Then we discover the true horror of the film — that the servants of Rose’s household are actually kidnapped and brain-altered black people. Chris is the next object of her white supremacist family plan to perpetuate itself by stealing the bodies of her lovers and delivering them to her neurosurgeon father, who implants the cognitive functions of his aging white friends into the younger, more physically fit, and talented bodies of his daughter’s victims.

This is the point at which the film becomes most action-oriented (in the traditional horror film genre) but also the moment at which it becomes most disturbing. These white folks don’t just want servants or slaves, they want some form of personal immortality and, even more chillingly, access to black creativity. They want to be “black” while assuring their supremacy.

Rose’s parents’ friends, like themselves, are elderly. Their welcoming comments to Chris focus on his physique and athletic potential, his (imagined) sexuality and his artistic talent — he’s an art photographer with successful gallery exhibits.

White people, this film implies, want what black people possess. They want not only to subjugate them but also to appropriate them (a more holistic and sinister form of subjugation). At this point, I remembered my long ago viewing of the sci-fi film, “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956), one of the scariest movies of my young life. In it, pods arrive from outer space to duplicate the bodies of individuals on earth and eventually to replace them. The black men (and one woman) that Rose lures to her parents’ house in the woods are inhabited and controlled by the minds of her white parents’ family and friends, not unlike the victims of the pod people in “Body Snatchers.”

Peele’s film is ironic, satiric and funny. The unlikely hero of the film, who rescues Chris from its bloody denouement, is in his own words, “Motherfucking TSA. That’s what we handle. That’s what we do.” But there is a bite to this humor.

Frederick Douglass, the former slave and eloquent voice for abolition, in his speech delivered on the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July 5, 1852, declared: “At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke.”

Peele is Douglass’ heir. He is also a comedian by profession, who knows how to combine humor, horror and satire into a potent blend that taps into our racial consciousness in a visceral way.

The end of the film is fast and furious. Chris not only escapes from his bonds (literal straps around his hands and feet) but also vanquishes his primary assailants: Rose’s father, mother and brother. Rose herself pursues him with a rifle as he escapes in her car. When he stops to rescue the housekeeper (whose brain is controlled by the family grandmother), she turns on him, allowing Rose to catch up with the car and shoot Chris. The black groundskeeper (the family grandfather) arrives and asks Rose to allow him to finish Chris off. She gives him the rifle, which he uses to shoot her and then himself — out of the vestige of his black consciousness. Chris approaches Rose, now dying, and begins to strangle her, as she pleads with him, begging for forgiveness and professing her love. For an agonizing moment, Chris hesitates. Then, in a gesture that sets him apart from his bloody assailants, he releases his grip.

This last scene was particularly powerful for me, as it reminded me of the final moments of Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello, in which the insanely jealous Othello strangles his faithful wife Desdemona, in the midst of her pleas for mercy. In “Get Out,” the roles are reversed: Rose is duplicitous and Chris innocent. He has every reason to want to end Rose’s life, as close to extinction as it is. But he steps back.

In the midst of this grim resolution, it may be easy to miss Peele’s point. Black people, who are often presumed to be less “cultured” than whites, hence more primitive in their emotional lives, are in this role-reversal proven to be more rational, more “civilized” and ultimately more compassionate. Even Shakespeare did not manage to convey this message. Rather, he suggested that his hero, as painfully deluded as he was, could not cope with his chaotic inner life, becoming a victim of his overwhelming rage. Chris acts with a restraint that defines his humanity.

Contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice tend to focus on the very earliest stages of our lives and the confusions we experience as infants and toddlers about the forces of good and evil within ourselves and in the world at large. In the best case scenario, we understand that we contain both good and evil wishes and impulses and learn not to project our fears and fantasies of destruction onto our caregivers and others who wield power over us. We learn, in other words, to become reflective, rather than simply reactive to what we perceive as external threats. Those who do not achieve the capacity to integrate these kinds of internal conflicts often then imagine that the world itself is split into good and evilˀthemselves being on the side of good.

As a child growing up in St. Louis, I understood de-facto segregation without having a language for it. I observed it as an adolescent in the construction of Interstate 70. When I witnessed the riots in Ferguson (a suburb of St. Louis) from the safety of my home in Minneapolis, I understood where they came from. My city had been divided from its inception and for as long as I could remember, relegating its black population to the margins of its civic and social life and access to power.

“Get Out” not only analyzes our nation’s history of dividing racial reality into either/or categories but also reveals the price we pay socially and culturally for doing so. When we imagine our experience and the world around us as a battle between “us” and “them,” we become less cultured, less civilized, and more importantly, less human.