“So much of the Black experience in this country has been a horror, so that’s the perfect genre to show my truth, to show the story that I’ve never seen”
Jordan Peele’s Get Out borrows both from the horror and science fiction genres, while adding a dash of comedy as comic relief (see the hot debate on the movie’s classification here). One of its many strengths is that the genre of the film itself can be taken literally or metaphorically, and still read at many levels. The premise of the film rests on the neurological fantasy of transplanting an individual’s brain – and thus consciousness – into another individual’s body. This is not without recalling such pieces of fiction as Frankenstein, The Island of Dr. Moreau, or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Critics have unearthed the underlying racial subtext at stake in these Victorian era works (see for instance Halberstam’s Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters and DeVere Brody’s Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture).
Get Out manages to display very clearly its racial project starting with the opening scenes of the movie, by discussing the implications of inter-racial dating as Chris expresses his anxiety about having to visit his white girlfriend’s family for the first time (the plot recalls the 1967 classic Hollywood Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner). “Do they know… I’m Black?” he asks to an eye-rolling girlfriend who answers: “My dad would have voted for Obama a third time if he could have”. This anxiety is later confirmed for the audience as the script contains multiple examples of micro-aggressions towards its African American main character. The film reels on major cases of casual racism: the girlfriend’s overly protective brother, a father who praises Obama as the best president ever, and even the party guests’ lewd suggestions about Black males’ bodies sexual potency. Chris’ best friend Rod, who provides comic relief throughout the film, nonetheless turns out to be right, and his fears that appear overly exaggerated at first don’t even come close to the terrifying truth.
The setting of the movie at the Armitages’ mansion, a modern iteration of a plantation, subtly and less subtly shows that we are not in a post-colonial moment, even less so a post-racial society. The father himself points out to Chris that the affluent white family’s Black housekeepers may seem like an odious reminiscence of the times of slavery, but that things are not what they seem. And indeed, they are not – not exactly.
The film’s subtle message on race relations operates on yet another level. A first clue lies in the father’s remark about being able to travel, which he delivers at a rather slow pace and with a grave tone: “It’s such a privilege to be able to experience someone else’s culture… you know what I’m saying?” he tells Chris as he shows him some of his collection of art pieces from around the world. While it can be read at first as a reassuring plea by the cosmopolitan, well-travelled and cultured wealthy white man, in a truly humanist/multiculturalist (read, paternalistic, color blind, colonialist etc.) fashion, it is also an eerie hint at the family’s horrific practices of brain transplantation. I started feeling very uncomfortable at this point, despite not knowing what was about to happen – part of the suspense mechanism that makes the film a great horror movie. But it also points to the history of consumption, appropriation, exploitation really, the theft of Black culture by white individuals and societies. I think this is the main message to take from the film. The father’s “exotic” art collection contains pieces from former colonies, mostly African – a reminder of the West’s fascination for and looting of the colonized’s artifacts, then displayed in homes and museums as a sign of culture and good taste (and by extension, domination).
Today in the context of social media, people are discussing more and more the phenomenon of cultural appropriation, especially towards Black culture (see Trashye West’s tweet on Katy Perry et al.). Sylvia Obell describes the phenomenon through a critique of the whole Kardashian family (read “How Blac Chyna beat the Kardashians at their own game”). But it is, and has always been, also about the literal theft of Black bodies, from kidnapping, slavery, chattelization, forced labor, rape, exploitation, incarceration, and finally, fetishization (as Rose’s fascination for Black men implies). By transplanting the dying grandparents’ brains into the Black bodies of the family’s homekeepers, white men and women literally attain immortality. By transplanting the blind gallery owner into Chris’ body, he will own Chris’ artistic eye for photography.
On the other hand, I was drawn into a different focus and analysis of the movie’s implications, which is informed by Frantz Fanon’s masterpiece, Black Skin, White Masks, by operating a reversal of perspective of the colonial moment. The experiences of Logan, the young man abducted in the first scene by the Armitage son, and to a lesser degree Walter and Georgina the family housekeepers, illustrate Fanon’s theory with a twist. The Black body is forced to become a vessel for white consciousness. In a nutshell, it begs the question: What happens when a white person’s mind gets (literally) transplanted into a Black body? Logan/Andre’s attitude at the party is certainly caricatural in his embodiment of an older, wealthy white male’s personality, albeit in a desirable shell, for his wife’s enjoyment. Fanon theorized that the Black man in the colonies (especially in the West Indies) by the force of colonization came to internalize the white’s hate of his own skin (color), and therefore culture, and thus rejected it and strived to pass as white in order to be accepted. Get Out however puts the onus on the white man who forcibly “whitewashes” the Black body and mind by transplanting a white brain into that body. This could be an illustration of Fanon’s theory but in an even more extreme way, since the operation is made literally, forcibly.
Fanon introduced the idea of whitewashing, especially in the context of a creole society, but I believe the model is applicable even to a contemporary, US society. In this the movie’s message is powerful, showing that racism and racist colonial structures are deeply embedded in American society despite claims that this terrible past is behind us. Its strength is to play on many levels that show that history is not a thing of the past – indeed practices of slavery, segregation, exploitation are still alive today. But if Fanon focuses on the figure of the Black that has to decolonize itself, Peele writes the film at another moment, and proposes that the neurosis is even more prevalent, in fact is prevalent only in the White person; in its fetishization of and desire for the Black person. In it, the white man no longer feels superior, but really longs to be, to embody the Black person. The Black man is no longer alienated; on the other hand, it seems like the white man is tangled in his need of the black body and culture. Sure, the Black man is still an object of the gaze of the white, but subjecthood seems to exist only for the Black man (who wins in the end) and the whites are portrayed as mere zombies, waiting for the next Black victim to suck their substance and livelihood from. Chris through his tribulations manages to retain his composure throughout the film, despite being sent to “the sunken place”, and “gets out” at the end thanks to his and his best friend Rod’s wit and tenacity.
The caveat for the white man to slip into the Black man’s body is (as in the case where the gallery owner takes over Chris’ body, but also his “eye” for photography) that the white man will now see the world through the eyes of the Black man; and that is a reversal of the situation that Fanon describes, where the Antillean is made to see and judge the world (and himself) through the white man’s eyes. What would the gallery owner, a previously blind man, see now through the eyes of Chris? Was his blindness a metaphor for his own ignorance? What will the white man now see through the eyes of the Black man?
Further reading: Lott, Eric. “White Like Me: Racial Cross-Dressing and the Construction of American Whiteness”. Kaplan, Amy, and Donald E Pease, eds. Cultures of United States Imperialism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.
Morgane Flahault 