Get Out: The Monstrous Genders
Get Out (2017) is a thriller movie relevant to lives today because of the witty play and criticism on genders and races. The movie articulates different characters as monstrous and aids the gaze to switch to characters otherwise used as fillers.
To analyze this, we analyzed the methods the movie uses to create the experience encountered. Parts of the film gendered and racialized people, putting them into a monstrous role. This article studies the use of dialogue, staging, repeated editing and framing to establish the monstrousness.
Tight Frames and staging:
While the movie prepares us for racial discrimination against Chris in the very beginning, we are reassured by a white female character, Rose, not to expect any discomfort from her family. The camera zooms in on her, comforting us with her smile, meant for Chris.
Once Chris enters her family’s house, we see signs of possible attacks. Rose’s parents greet Chris with dry humor and uncomfortable racist remarks such as how losing to Jesse Owen was difficult to accept for Rose’s grandfather. Also, we see tight frames of Rose’s mother. Missy’s expressions in each frame are controlling and a fake warmth. (when Georgina spills tea, or at the dinner table, controlling her husband and son’s crudely racist jokes).
The editing creates expectations of malicious behavior from Missy, leaving Rose as our only anchor through Chris’s gaze that helps through this! It is soon that we start seeing similar editing on Rose, tight frame shots, and odd expressions. We are no longer in a comfortable position from the young white feminist symbol we were silently hoping to be like up to this point. There’s a monstrous behavior implied before the actions were even disclosed to us.
A parallel is Creed’s article Woman as Witch, where Creed highlights women’s role as a witch, or monster, which associates the threat of women castrating the phallus. The movie shows the often “warm” roles turning stone cold is perhaps an echo to Creed’s discussion of Carrie.
Blackness versus the Black skin:
Halberstam talks about sutures as a way of a desirable world. However, the suture has had the ability to damage others and aid the character for power. It’s commonly seen that the character behaves a certain way associated with the suture (Leatherface with the chainsaw, Death Eater’s with their marks, Wolverine). In the case of any other character adopting these sutures we see indications of the behaviour passing on with it. In the scenario of Get Out, we see the suture being a black skin for its genetic makeup rather than the behavior associated with the skin. This shows that the character of the skin color is not worthy of being considered a character at all, it’s flesh, skin, perhaps some threat and maybe in some cases human.
The movie reinforces blackness by showing clips of two different behaviours in the same skin. Logan and Rod’s scenes are close together, so we can understand how there is a difference between the two.
There are instances of black objects versus blackness. For instance, when Chris was dehumanized at the “family party” and times throughout the film where the bodies of black people were referred to as objects. Some examples of when the black body was dehumanized include when the woman touches Chris commenting on his strength and black as a fashion statement showing blacks as lesser beings. Although, the audience can see the dehumanization as wrong, seeing black people as such was okay throughout the movie. The technique of Scopophilia portrays Chris as a victimized object throughout the movie, which Mulvey mentions in her reading. Mulvey indicates that scopophilia “are circumstances in which looking itself is a source of pleasure” and “there is pleasure in being looked at.”
However, the film gives off a monstrous perspective on how the characters think and how everything is happens. This alienates groups of people, which is relatable to the readings this week. The parallel here is that African Americans are portrayed as objects by the other groups of people just as women are being portrayed as witches in many other films in this genre of movies. The monster, the mother, and its object, Chris’s skin, are filmed in a way that related to Mulvey’s gaze and scopophilia, and Halberstam’s sutures to help us see the monstrous behaviour Creed discusses in Woman as the Witch.
Authors:
Charlie Cao, Faiza Uppal, Thomas Case
