Get Out
2017, directed by Jordan Peele
Everyone knows, by the end of Get Out, that the Armitage family has been doing something monstrous. The irony is that the movie itself is attempting to do the same thing. The Armitages make a profitable living putting white people inside black bodies, transplanting the brains of their white clients into the young athletic bodies of black persons they’ve kidnapped or deceived. The movie also aims to place white people into a black body, but in the most benign possible way, eliciting empathy and understanding in white viewers who should, by the end, appreciate the bind that black Americans find themselves in, especially in the early 21st century as white Americans congratulated themselves for living in a supposedly “post-racial” society.
Get Out does not take issue with the idealistic wish for racial harmony. The protagonist Chris Washington credits Rose with that same idealism when she knocks her parents’ seemingly quaint attitudes, their latent sense of superiority, and the way they imitate black language to appear cool. Rose plays the part well, and Chris tells her he likes her “racial flow”. If she were sincere, she and Chris could have had a good relationship. It’s not her seeming idealism that the movie targets, nor the outright hatred or contempt behind her family’s cruelty. People like them will not be swayed by watching a movie. Rather it targets the naivety that allows white people to pretend that the racism around them is less than it really is.
After a rather fantastic plot, taking liberties with conventions of horror, comedy, and science fiction, the movie brings its audience back to reality in a single moment that resonates with a chain of incidents that made national news within a few years of Get Out. At the end, after his dramatic escape from the Armitage mansion, Chris finds himself face to face with the flashing lights of a police car in the most compromised position imaginable. He’s just been on top of Rose, strangling her as she bled from the shotgun wounds inflicted by Walter, who lies freshly dead nearby. A trail of corpses lies behind him, and he knows the police will discover them soon. By now it’s irrelevant that Walter shot himself, or that Chris acted in self-defense, or that he couldn’t bring himself to tighten his hands all the way around Rose’s throat. His story is unbelievable, and there’s nobody to back up his claims. He knows that in the eyes of any police officer he’s guilty as hell.
We can safely surmise that this ending, which says so much, was thought through carefully. The initial blu-ray release includes six alternate versions of the scene, each striving (according to Jordan Peele’s commentary) for the appropriate tone as Chris gets into the car, which turns out to be a Transportation Security Administration vehicle driven by his friend Rod, the only person who would believe Chris or who could get him out of this jam. The last lines of dialogue had to give comic relief without deflating the gravity of the preceding climax when Chris saw the red and blue lights and put his hands in the air, doubtless contemplating a lifetime in prison or immediate police brutality.
In that moment of surrender, before Chris realizes that Rod has rescued him (an ending that everyone knows is too lucky to happen in real life), the whole movie comes into focus. Any viewer who has followed events in the United States can imagine the horror that must have filled the final moments of Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Laquan McDonald, Tamir Rice, or Philando Castile, all killed by police in the years leading up to Get Out, or Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, or George Floyd, who were killed by police three years later in equally high profile cases. However far-fetched the “Coagula procedure” or the secret society or the hypnosis may be, the ending of Get Out should strike a palpably familiar feeling.
Until that ending, whose sudden reality justifies all of the previous hyperbole, Chris’s experience repeatedly echoes his back story. At eleven years old he had remained fixed in a chair watching television as his mother lay dying outside, struck by a hit-and-run driver. As he tells Rose’s mother Missy, he was afraid that if he went outside the horror would turn real. This same paralysis is echoed in the stricken deer, in the “Sunken Place”, in the basement armchair, when Chris runs over Georgina, and again at the climax when Rod’s car arrives. It’s not just that traumas like Chris’s childhood memory are so common to African Americans; the insight here is that this paralysis, this sense of being caught without good options, is broadly characteristic of the black experience.
Most of the hidden allusions to African American history, which have become widely known since the film’s release, point directly or indirectly to this sense of entrapment. The armchair in the basement evokes the electric chair, a symbol of racist injustice. Chris saves himself by picking cotton out of the upholstery, alluding to a long history of slaves picking cotton. The garden auction disguised as a bingo game is a reference to slave auctions. All the mentions and trophies of bucks recall a slavery-era slang for black men, and Missy’s name is an epithet for a plantation’s mistress.
Of all these Easter egg devices, the most telling is the white shaving cream on Chris’s face when he’s introduced. It’s a reversal of the blackface that white actors commonly wore in the early 20th century to act out black stereotypes, and it also foreshadows the Coagula procedure which turns its black victims (like Andre) white in a cultural sense; but more broadly it’s a metaphor for the ways black people find themselves compelled to conform to a white-dominated world. Each of these readings, like each of the allusions to slavery and each of the echoes of Chris’s childhood trauma, points to the pervasive sense of confinement that African Americans live under, and which even well meaning white people are often blind to. Even a passive viewer, seeking enjoyment in the movie’s horror, laughs, or suspense, should be awakened a little bit to the unfairness of this endless entrapment – at least by the time Chris looks up in resignation at the police car. A black audience will probably find recognition, and a white audience should find some enlightenment.
Get Out begins with a prologue showing Andre getting kidnapped in a white suburban neighborhood. As he jokes about the confusing street names he confesses his nervousness to a friend on the phone, and white viewers will probably take this as a comic reversal of the “scary ghetto” trope, but by the end anyone should be ready to acknowledge that the reversal isn’t as comic as it had seemed. Black people have good reason to be distrustful in a society where white people often assume that anyone should feel safe in their “civilized” company.
In keeping with all the irony and reversals that draw a vividly African American point of view, Chris’s last name is Washington, and he drives a Lincoln. Those two presidents are symbols of the United States, and the implication is that Chris represents the American experience as a whole, not merely a narrowly racial experience. The idea is logical, because with their historical roots in revolution, Americans have always defined themselves as a people striving for freedom. The torch of that struggle has passed, in a kind of natural progression, from the white colonists of the 1770s fighting royalist tyranny to the various other peoples whose freedom was not secured by national independence.
At the beginning of the 21st century this struggle for freedom was widely redefined as a struggle, not against a superior power, but against the world’s unruly elements, the “War on Terror”, to which the word “freedom” was sometimes awkwardly appropriated. Chris’s friend Rod Williams, as a TSA agent, represents the face of this new national defense. He tells the police detectives, “We might know more than y’all sometimes, you know, ’cause we dealin’ with some terrorist shit.” The irony is that the terror he’ll rescue Chris from is domestic racist violence, but this twist has proved historically accurate because since 2001, homegrown white supremacist terror has been a greater danger to the United States than foreign terrorism.
Precisely an hour into Get Out, Dean Armitage’s fist strikes his left palm, closing the auction and deciding who would take control of Chris’s body and brain stem for the rest of his life. The winning bid comes from a blind man who professes – like so many perpetrators of racism – to be uninterested in his victim’s skin color. While it’s true that this man cannot see color, he happens to be an art dealer familiar with Chris’s professional photography, which an assistant had described to him. He wishes to appropriate an African American point of view for his own advantage. “I want your eye, man. I want those things you see through.” The film turns this malevolent intent around, putting the audience inside the eyes of a black person, not for the sake of personal advantage but for the sake of better understanding.
CONNECTIONS:
Vampyr – Immobile character views the world through a small rectangular window above him
Ladies in Retirement – Single moment echoed in various forms across the whole story
I Walked with a Zombie – Black & white clothing or objects that point to insights about racism
Detour – Woman in the passenger seat turns on a male driver in sudden anger
Les bonnes femmes – Catalogue of ways that a disadvantaged class of people (women or African Americans) is confined in an adverse society
Seconds – Surgery gives old people new life in a young body
Eyes Wide Shut – Protagonist at the mercy of a secret society in an isolated house