[haunting music]
There's so much fear around Black people among whites
and these are things that all Black people are aware of,
you know, that you wanna smile and look non-threatening.
That monster on the news, you know:
"Police are looking for a Black male..."
No other description, that's useful to find the person,
it's just reinforcing,
"Oh, Black thug. Black thug. Black thug."
So white society is accustomed
to being afraid of Black people
and everyone kind of understands that,
but I think what's not as well understood
is how afraid we are, because we're the ones
who are actually outnumbered
and literally sometimes surrounded.
There has been this long history
of feeling not only that you are unwanted,
which is hard enough on human nature,
but that there's active hostility toward you;
that you and your children may not be safe.
So when I saw that opening in Get Out,
I could totally relate, I mean,
it's just like the director Ernest Dickerson said:
"We've all been there —
we've all felt that spotlight on us."
I think that it's really brilliant
that Jordan Peele used that
as a jumping off point for Get Out
because it's proclaiming his theme, you know, writ small;
everybody's taken that walk,
and luckily we're not usually abducted,
but we all understand that fear.
"Yo! What the hell!
No, hey!"
♪ Run rabbit, run rabbit ♪
[haunting music]
[Due] Well, the Sunken Place has many meanings;
Jordan Peele has addressed that he's a little disappointed —
he kind of even fed into this idea
that the Sunken Place means that you're just assimilated
and kind of an Uncle Tom,
and it's really not that, specifically.
When he came to my class at UCLA,
what he told my students was: when he came to that scene,
and he knew he had to write something big
and he had to have a big idea and a scary idea,
he was thinking about mass incarceration
and Black bodies being thrown into holes
over you know, often bogus charges.
And that's really, really powerful,
that's kind of my favourite interpretation of it.
But the Sunken Place, in a broader sense,
is any kind of subjugation, you know,
and as he has also said,
it can be internal or it can be external.
[dog barking]
[Due] When I think of that ending of Night of the Living Dead —
and that ending of course stands out —
and it would be a tragic ending,
even if it were a white protagonist;
it would still be, you've been stripped of your identity,
you've been stripped of your personhood,
reduced to, or mistaken for, one of these ghouls
and put on a pyre.
[dramatic music]
But when you make it a Black actor,
it has that much more resonance
with the black-and-white footage,
those German shepherds, that were notoriously used
against protesters at 1960s protests —
it just felt so much like a commentary
on where race relations were,
and I can understand why Jordan Peele felt
that it would be maybe even a more honest ending
at the end of Get Out to have Chris in jail,
but I'm glad he went the other way with it,
because while it's honest, and frankly
he could have completely recreated the ending
of Night of the Living Dead,
and Chris is mistaken for one of the monsters
who's shot down on the road
and I really feel like that's the most real —
I mean, you know, if a police car shows up
and sees that guy strangling a white woman on the road,
he's going down, right, he's going down.
I can see the interplay between the two films
now that he mentions it,
but I'm really glad that he decided
to turn it in a different direction
and give us a little bit more hopefulness,
give us that much needed breath of humour,
'cause it's such a tense film
and we're rooting so much for Chris,
that yeah, for him to even just end up in prison
would have been like, oh no, not another one.
"I mean, I told you not to go in the house."
[Due] People will still be talking
about Get Out 50 years from now,
just like we're still talking
about Night of the Living Dead.
"How'd you find me?"
"I'm TS—
motherf***ing A."
[light haunting music]