Director Jordan Peele (of Key & Peele fame) has directed the perfect horror film that taps into the American Zeitgeist of race relations and white privilege. As any dedicated fan of horror knows, a scary movie is never just a scary movie, but a commentary on culture and common cultural fears. Much has been written about women in horror movies: the slut who gets taken out in the first act for the crime of having sex, the pure (often brunette) "final girl" who lives to tell the tale, and all the shrieking bimbos and feisty women in between.
But what about race and horror movies?
Like the "slut" trope in slasher movies, plenty of horror films also feature a token black character who gets offed pretty quickly to make more screen time for the white protagonists. Get Out, however, is different. Black people are indeed the prey of the film, but not as a careless afterthought. The movie is about the everyday horror of Living as Black in the United States taken to the extreme.
Detailed plot discussion ahead. If you want to go in with a blank slate, stop reading now!
Get Out's opening sequence features a black man trying to find someone (his girlfriend's?) house in a white, wealthy suburb. A car pulls up next to him and then begins following him. He says "Not today" and turns around, eliciting knowing laughter from the audience I was watching the movie with. Sure enough, an assailant whom we can't see exits the car and attacks the man, all set to the creepy 1930's tune "Run Rabbit Run". This is only the first instance in Get Out where a black person is symbolically liked to an animal--prey--to be hunted down by white people.
The film then cuts to photographer Chris (Daniel Kaluuya, whom savvy pop culture aficionados will recognize from the Black Mirror episode "Fifteen Million Merits") who is about to take a trip to upstate New York to meet his white girlfriend, Rose's (Allison Williams of Girls in full basic bitch mode), parents. He asks her if they know he's black. She gets a little annoyed with him: "They aren't racist" she assures Chris. SUUURRRREEEEEE thinks the audience.
While Rose's parents, beautifully played with subtle condescension by Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford, are very polite, it's clear that they really don't know how to interact with black people. Whitford's character, Dean Armitage, is all too eager to tell Chris he would have voted for Obama for a third term if he could have and keeps calling Chris "my man". Keener's character, Missy Armitage, is a psychiatrist who keeps aggressively offering to hypnotize Chris to help him dump his "nasty" habit of smoking. When Rose's brother, Jeremy (Caleb Landry-Jones, the one false note in the movie), shows up, things get even weirder.But the weirdest thing to Chris are the Help: the housekeeper, Georgina, and the groundskeeper, Walter, are both black and act bizarrely robotic and, well, "white". When Chris tries to interact with them, one black person to another, they act confused and upset. As is often the case in horror movies, something is Not Right.
But the action really begins after Armitage's host a lawn party and Chris runs into another young, black male who acts so "not black" that Chris is thoroughly creeped out.
For once in a review, I won't fully blow the plot twist, but I can tell you that Get Out combines the everyday horror of black people being stared at, condescended to, and fetishized by white people with actual horror movie elements. The film makes symbolic reference to Trayvon Martin--a boy seen as a threat to white people even as he was literally stalked, hunted down, and murdered by George Zimmerman. While white people hold their bags closer and lock their car doors around young black males, those same males are treated as animals to be dispatched and controlled. Who should be afraid of whom?
Get Out also makes specific reference to Olympic winner Jesse Owens, as Dean proudly tells Chris that his own father was beaten by Owens in the qualifying races before Ownes went on to show the world--and Hitler--that black athletes can best white ones. "[My father] almost got over it" Dean jokes to Chris. In the movie, white people discuss black bodies in fetishistic terms ("Is it...better?" an old white lady asks Rose. Wink wink), referring to black men's supposed prowess in sports and sex. These conversations should be familiar to black audiences and cringe-y to white audiences. I myself have been privy to conversations from white relatives about how "blacks are naturally better athletes". And guess what, America? That's racist! Because it's reducing black people to their bodies...not an unprecedented thing in American history.
White people can be such dumb motherfuckers sometimes, I can't even.
Get Out, with a nearly perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes (the one negative review is by a black journalist for The National Review--make what you will of that!), is a genuinely creepy, suspenseful movie that is also filled with laughs (it is directed by Peele, after all). It's also deeply cathartic, especially given our bullshit political atmosphere right now. It's not perfect (the character Jeremy really just feels like he belongs in another movie), but it's really good and doesn't hesitate to make the audience stare both benevolent and malevolent racism right in the face.
Grade: A
No comments:
Post a Comment