Race to the top: Get Out and Logan
I can’t watch anything anymore without seeing it through the lens of social justice, and while that’s annoying sometimes, it’s way less annoying than, say, being a Black person in a white supremacist society, so, you know, tradeoffs. My work of late has been the work of doing it anyway, being out here saying what I feel like I can say and taking the risk that I’ll fuck it up like we all do. And it’s hard, but so far not worthy of white-tears hard. I’m trying to be better than that — but isn’t that always the story?
In any case. Recently I saw two new movies in the space of a few days: the magnificent and chilling Get Out, and the heartbreaking Logan. Now ordinarily these movies would have very little to do with one another, but seeing them in such close proximity, I couldn’t help but view them through the same lens. Or, better: Get Out gave me a more refined lens through which to view maybe every other movie from now on IDK.
Get Out does an intense and vitally important thing for film, if you’re paying attention enough to not just laugh and think, “Oh, but they’re not talking about ME / #notallwhitepeople.” It takes the horror genre — a genre of film that has historically been profoundly white — and turns it into a metaphor for black life in white America.
The taut pacing, the way the horror of it just escalates slowly until the climax careens into near-absurdity. It takes the daily microaggressions and macroaggressions and puts them into a clarifying framework. While many missed the point, I found myself thinking: wow. So that’s what it’s like. In the world of Get Out, there is no escaping from toxic whiteness: it’s just the horror movie of everyday life. The film does a phenomenal job from the first moments: it sets up multiple tropes at once and spends the film dismantling, highlighting, and sometimes exploding them. As a white person, I felt skillfully led through it: it felt as though the mythical “black friend” was taking me by the hand and saying, “See this? This is how you feel in these situations. And this? This is how that makes us feel.” Seeing the black character in the opening scene walking through the fancy white neighborhood, I knew — and here’s the brilliance, that I knew both because of horror tropes and because of who he was and where he was — he wasn’t going to survive it. Seeing the black protagonist shortly thereafter, I felt placed in his shoes: now, instead of just watching the black person always be the first to die in a movie, I’m asked to identify with the black hero, Chris, who I also now know is going to face a horror-movie world made more awful by the fact that the horrors are just magnifications of reality.
Director Jordan Peele expertly skips between the perceptions and feelings he knows his white and black audience members will experience, using white girlfriend Rose as the “woke white person.” Oh, the sinking feeling as we find out Rose hasn’t told her parents her boyfriend is black! Oh, the embarassment of recognition, as, after a car accident with a deer, a cop questions them and Rose defends her man against his prejudicial interrogation. And it’s so telling — and mortifying — that Rose attempts to use her white privilege to defend Chris in that encounter (where her rashness could actually get him arrested, hurt or killed), but doesn’t speak up when her slimy brother Jeremy highlights Chris’ “natural genetic advantages” and advises him that he could be a “beast” at martial arts. By the time Rose’s family’s incredibly white and rich party guests arrive, it’s one cringeworthy moment after another, during which white audience members should be thinking, “Oh god…is that me?”
But all of this is but a brilliant setup for the revelation that actually, this is much more about (well-founded) black anxiety than it is about white liberal anxiety. Spoiler alert: our Rose turns out not to be a slightly tone-deaf white person who’s trying hard, but a total psycho who has been using that pose to lure black people into her parents’ home for years. And here’s where everything that has up until now felt just a little wrong in the film hits the tipping point, launching into a hyperbolic exploration of the very real and justified anxiety black people have about white people.
Peele is smart here: he knows very well that for white people to fully understand this experience, it has to go all the way over the top, and it has to make use of a traditionally white genre. In the ensuing mayhem, we see the full possibility of horror that hides behind “nice white people,” and what our combined fear and fascination with black people can do with enough money and power behind it. “You wonder why we don’t trust you?” Peele seems to say. “Yeah, this gets a little silly. But seriously: here’s why.” Just try and not notice what it feels like to watch as Chris, escaping from the death of his personality if not his body, violently and creatively kills everyone in the mansion, and how hard it is not to see him as black when he does it. Notice when he has the chance to off Rose by strangling her: Peele zooms in on her white blouse, his dark hands around her pale neck, and very nearly gives us a scene from a racist propaganda film. And notice how you feel, white audience member, as the police sirens blare into the scene, that standard of horror movie endings where the day is saved by the arrival of cops. Not so comforting now, is it?
Rarely in recent years have I seen a work of art that does such an elegant job of using all the metaphorical structure available in a given genre to make such a powerful point in such an entertaining way. It’s unfortunate that so many white people seem to have missed the point.
Logan, the latest entry in the Wolverine series of films, also breaks many of the rules of its genre. Here is a superhero movie in which the superhero is slowly dying, and his mentor — a man in a wheelchair with a brain powerful enough to control minds and matter — is now a nonogenarian with a degenerative brain disease that makes him both insufferable and profoundly dangerous.
It is the future, and something awful has happened in the world of the X-Men: something only referred to, never named. All we know is that Charles Xavier has done something terrible, that many people died, and that most of the mutants are now either dead or on the run from authorities that would kill them on sight. Logan, always a punching bag for the world, but usually getting the last punch, drives a limo now, and regularly crosses the border into Mexico. Somewhere in the desert, in an abandoned factory, he is hiding his old friend Charles Xavier, who only sometimes recognizes him.
In the first few minutes, the story is already dystopian enough that the label “superhero movie” slides off it, probably into a ditch where the dirt is at least 13 percent blood and rusty nails. The tightly wrought car chases are more Mad Max than Marvel. And the child, Laura— the mutant offspring of Logan’s DNA and a Mexican teenager sold to a scientific institute — is about as cute as a box of razor blades, and thrice as deadly.
The subsequent journey — a near-hopeless midnight run to a mythical spot in North Dakota where the escaped mutant kids are meant to meet — is more remarkable for the emotions and relationships than for its plot. Patrick Stewart acts his way to his first Oscar, one hopes; Hugh Jackman does a hell of a job convincing us he’s old and failing; and Dafne Keen is one of those children who feels half-feral or half-fae. Her intensity, silence, and distrustfulness bespeak a certain kind of abused child in a way I’ve only seen done as well in Stranger Things; there’s this way about girls around that age who have enormous power and have been hardened by horrific parenting. Her journey into vulnerability and daring to love are achieved without a hint of sap, and the whole thing becomes a profound meditation on fathers, children, and loss.
That isn’t to say that I didn’t notice all the problematic racial elements in a film which, in that mainstream-white-film way, was trying to do a good job.
The first violent interlude we see is between Logan and a group of Mexican gangsters who are trying to steal parts of Logan’s car. It’s only a few minutes into the movie, and the American anxiety around the Mexican border is already making an appearance. And it’s not a pretty sight: this fight is brutal and ends with maybe four men dead. Later, we find that the horrific medical facility where the cloned offspring of mutants are being raised to be supersoldiers is also in Mexico, and of course, young Mexican girls are being impregnated for the project. (We never find out what happens to them afterward.) The excellent Elizabeth Rodriguez plays Gabriella, a nurse at the facility who has escaped with Laura and is desperately trying to get her to safety. But, naturally, she only makes it about 20 minutes into the movie.
Much later in the film, there is a blissful interlude of peace when the heroes’ car breaks down somewhere in Iowa, and a black family stops to help them. I recognized dad Eriq LaSalle from my teen years watching ER, and then enjoyed the slowdown while our three heroes shared a meal and a good night’s sleep at the family’s humble home. Laura has a brief and charming interlude with the family’s kid, a boy a little older than she is who kindly offers her his iPod to listen to music. In this long sequence, we get to watch Jackman and Stewart improvise over the dinner table, and we get a sense of the difficulty these folks face where they’re living. In typical fashion, the film seems to say: yep, even though it’s the future and there’s mutant persecution, there’s also the ordinary kind of white supremacist bullshit going on still, too.
Which is a somewhat interesting commentary, until the film does what it always does in this sort of circumstance: slaughters the minor characters you’ve come to like and sympathize with. And not at the hands of the mean hillbillies, either: naturally, this needs to be Logan’s fault, so it’s done by his clone and his handler, who are in hot pursuit of the team.
With the Mexican gangsters dismembered, the Mexican woman shot, and the nice black family handily fridged, the movie speeds along to its conclusion, which, admittedly, is extremely satisfying and introduces a pack of bilingual, multiracial mutant kids to the putative future-world of the series in the bargain.
But even as I deeply enjoyed the film, I had to wonder whether all that carnage — particularly, all that racially-charged carnage — was strictly necessary to the storytelling. It felt lazy and jarring, in a film that otherwise did an amazing job subverting the usual narratives.
