Jordan Peele's "Get Out" is more than a horror movie
The story of a black man's visit to his white girlfriend's parents
gone horribly wrong is also a biting, absurdist satire
that captures something in the zeitgeist
For that reason
"Get Out" is the spiritual descendant
of two other more-than-horror classics
1968's "Rosemary's Baby"
and especially 1975's "Stepford Wives"
both adapted from the writings of Ira Levin.
I would describe this movie as a classic horror film
in the vain of The Stepford Wives or Rosemary's Baby
But whereas those films
used frightening analogies to dramatize women's issues
"Get Out" cleverly addresses today's climate concerning race
This was a movie that reflects real
fears of mine and real issues that
I've dealt with before
Let's talk about some of the film's key elements
and how it draws from Stepford and Rosemary
Watch out - there will be SPOILERS
"Get Out" is loaded with symbols and imagery
that remind us of the history of slavery and the Old South
Starting with the plantation-like Armitage Estate
and some older-looking costumes
The echoes visually remind us that our society's past
is ever interwoven into our present
The first sign of something wrong occurs
when the deer runs into the car
The gentle deer is linked to our protagonist
The accident is an omen of what's to come
The innocent creature's sacrifice
The omen is later fulfilled when
after he's tied up by Rosa's family
Chris sees the head of a deer mounted to the wall
the dead trophy that Rosa's family
would like to make of him as well
come and sit with me please
When Rose's mother Missy hypnotizes Chris
she uses a teacup as her weapon
The dainty cup and stirrer are symbols
of civility revealed to be hostile and aggressive
Drinking tea strikes us as a refined, harmless activity
but global conflicts and colonial dynamics
have long been projected onto the trade
and consumption of tea
The Boston Tea Party helped launch the American Revolutionary War
The hypnosis gives Chris the feeling of falling
The imagery suggests the family's ulterior motive
to push him down and suppress his will
Sure, you won't be gone
I'm completely a sliver of you
will still be in there somewhere
limited consciousness
You'll live in a sunken place
Within, the plot the sunken place
is a visceral state of dimmed consciousness
but it's also evocative of pushing back against forward progress
Closing his eyes here symbolizes
removing his consciousness and it makes us think
of the historical withholding of education
to disenfranchise black people
I'm happy
The family's housekeeper Georgina
is the image of a Stepford Wife
vacant, inhuman and strained
The Armitages are so good to us
Then we meet the equally robotic Walter
With these characters, Peele is explicitly updating Stepford Wives
Instead of robotic homemakers
They're robotic servants
Instead of evoking dolls
They evoke slaves
Rose's father Dean holds an auction with Chris's photo
which is disturbingly reminiscent of a slave auction
The reveal that these white people
are taking over black bodies stands in for
white people using black people as slaves
to use them for physical labor while retaining all power
despite their own physical ailments
after he's briefed on how his body
will be surgically taken over by the man
who purchased him in the auction
Chris looks at the cotton coming out of the chair
It's a visual reference to the Old South primary slave labor - picking cotton
Chris uses the cotton to plug his ears and resist the hypnosis
so the symbol of slavery is inverted
to become his tool of escape
Not unlike the deer antlers
The movie also starts to introduce imagery
concerning movie-going and audiences
The surgery prep shows bright lights staring into camera
like on a movie set
You know what?
Your eye, man
I want those things you see through
Hudson wants to take Chris's eyes
which symbolized through his taking pictures
are a key part of his identity
as an actively looking individual
It's significant, too, that Hudson is an art dealer
This is a person who sells his artistic tastes
without really being able to see art
He'll now be making commercial profit off
of appropriating Chris's artistic insight
The surgery will make Chris a backseat driver
or passive audience
Your existence will be as a passenger
Peele is suggesting that consuming entertainment
can be passive or hypnotic
if we allow our minds to be controlled
by whatever images we're fed
But the flash of the camera wakes us up
like the hypnotized Logan whose real name is Andre
and later Walter who's long been taken over by Rose's grandfather
Peele intends his movie to be like this flash
not hypnotic entertainment that lulls us
into submission but a jolt that wakes us up to reality
While the plot eventually escalates into a full-out race war
"Get Out"'s satire isn't really targeted
at overt or obvious racism in our society
Many have interpreted the movie as a commentary
on a certain kind of smug white liberal mindset
Rose's family appear at the start to be nice people
who believe they're forward-thinking
By the way, I would have voted for Obama for a third term if I could
Best president in my lifetime hands down
Yet they're nervous tolerance is strained
Their outlook can be oblivious and self-congratulatory
and ultimately they're uninterested in any deep understanding of inequality
or any meaningful action
All of us might have like little racist things
in us and really that's what the movie is
kind of whether they're conscious or
unconscious and that's what the movie
really brings to light
Early on we get a few dropped hints of what's to come
in small, off comments
it was up there with
always perfect Aryan race bullshit black
dude comes along proves him wrong from the entire world
Dean mentions black mold down in the basement
which will later take on a double meaning
of a mold for black people
Jeremy associated with his white signifier the lacrosse stick
brings his hate out into the open
launching quickly into discussions of genetic makeup
If you really push your body
If you really train yeah and no pussyfooting around
you'd be a fucking beast
Later the racist obsession with black people's physical strength
and equating them with animals becomes even more explicit
The movie also hints at the way that black culture
can come in and out of trend and be co-opted by white society
When Chris asks "Why black people"
People want to change
some people want to be stronger, faster, cooler
And through characters like the hypnotized Andre
It's also touching on the pressure on middle-to-upper-class black society
to assimilate into white culture
The literal plot of Rose's family attempting to sell Chris's body
symbolizes a more subtle reality
A world in which white people are still happy to benefit from their privilege
And their liberal ideals are limited by their attachment
to a status quo that makes them the dominant class
Both Stepford and Rosemary can likewise be read figuratively
as commentaries on how society traps women
In real-life, suburban wives aren't really turned into robots
and urban women aren't impregnated by Satan
But in Stepford the community pushes women to put their family's needs first
transforming them into perfectly servile homemakers
And in Rosemary, a woman's husband is also willing to use her
to get ahead in a hyper-competitive twisted society
And Get Out beautifully updates Ira Levin's tradition
The movie follows from Black Lives Matter
in the same way that Stepford Wives embodied the slogan
Sisterhood is Powerful
How long have you known that guy
Like today, why?
This is gonna sound weird but
when you came at me it felt like a new one
Get Out's Chris Washington is in many ways
an update to Stepford Wives' protagonist Joanna Eberhart
Both are sympathetic, educated characters who are aware
of the social issues at hand
Doesn't it ever bother you
that the most important organization in Stepford
is sexually archaic?
Chris admits his discomfort about whether Rose's parents
will accept their interracial relationship
Do they know I'm black?
No. Should they?
So our first impression is that both are savvy, informed, not seemingly naive
Yet the absurdly sinister and corrupt situations both eventually fall in to
prove that neither's liberal urban outlook
is actually paranoid enough
Both are city dwellers transplanted to the suburbs
a place that makes them instinctually uncomfortable
and they're both photographers
story-wise the camera symbolizes an original perspective, a free mind
watching them look through the camera
puts us in their point of view
so we feel attacked ourselves
Rosemary's Baby's protagonist does strike us
as more naive and childlike
but she follows the same journey too
of discovering too late the horrifying betrayal around her
Here like in Stepford or Rosemary
the plot is masterminded by a white male patriarch villain
Coincidentally Get Out's Roman Armitage even shares the first name
of Rosemary's Baby's Roman Castevet
A key difference though is that
in those previous films the white women were victims
Here they're villains
Fans of Rosemary and Stepord who spotted the similarities as they're watching
will likely anticipate one of the film's major twist
as we start to suspect that Rose is Chris's betrayer
She seems to have escaped her family's issues
The rose who stands out from the thorns
But she simply understands very well how to
convincingly play the progressive young liberal
He wasn't driving
I didn't ask who was driving
I asked to see his ID
Yeah, why? That doesn't make any sense
Here. No, fuck that
You don't have to give him your ID if you
haven't done anything wrong
Rose, like the husbands in the other two movies
feels the most pernicious villainfor her cold duplicity
This gets at how political dynamics really play out on the intimate level
In Stepford and Rosemary the betrayer crucially manages
to stall the protagonists' escape
Rose does the same when Chris is first captured
And at the end, even after he's killed the rest of her family
She chases after him and continued to manipulate him
In Stepford Wives Joanna believes
she's in a loving marriage with a man who respects her
and it seems to us that she is
but when her husband gets fed up with
having to care for the children
I played Monopoly with him I didn't pass goal I
didn't collect I played backgammon
I played Scrabble with the goddamn kids
they're in the kitchen now
what do you want me to do
And annoyed by Joanna's interest in photography
he decides he really wants an obedient housekeeper
over an independent-minded wife
The scary implication is that even well-intentioned individuals
can't resist the rewards of an unequal society that favors them
Rose's true allegiance is to her class
And the privilege she's happy to enjoy
Even the eerie music reminds us of Stepford
Drawing out our fear of society's hidden monsters
Horror is an inherently potent genre
for dramatizing social issues of the day
Scary movies can build our intangible fears
into physical exaggerated monsters
Comedy likewise can exercise our demons
by talking about what's taboo in society
Horror and comedy are very similar
In one you're trying to get a laugh
and the other you're trying to get a scare
Get Out doesn't just draw from both genres
but also effectively interweaves them
Even its horror aspects have darkly comic absurdist inflections
The far-fetched plot of a girl who attracts black men
so her family can surgically turn them into robotic slaves
takes a cue from Levin's blend of sinister absurdity
Stepford also used unbelievable methods of advanced surgery
to heighten the satire
The robotics and plastic surgery are flippantly unrealistic
The over-the-top absurdity acts like a Trojan horse
that sneaks in the incisive political critique
In all three stories oppressing the other
takes the form of invading and controlling their bodies
In our society this control isn't typically through kidnapping and surgery
but via more subtle means
Such as turning other bodies into objects of desire or contempt
Much of Get Out's explicit humor
comes through Chris's best friend Rod
How can I get in trouble for patting down old lady?
It's standard procedure
Terry just think of the elderly bitchin
elderly she can't hijack no motherfuckin plane
He serves as the traditional comic relief
but he's also the movie's heart
as the only person who believes Chris
Look what I'm about to tell you don't sound crazy
This scene in which the police laugh at his fears
has a melancholy echo with the reality
that black missing-person cases
are statistically far more likely to go unsolved
Even his funny references to the TSA
build on a joking assumption that the police
won't care about helping Chris
When Rose cries out for help
The audience knows what's about to come next
if a white police officer steps out of a car
Exactly what Rose is counting on
Peele said he originally did intend that bleaker ending
to remind people who voted for Obama
that they weren't living in a post-racial world
But the director said that outrage over police shootings of black men
convinced him that the movie needed to counter public anger and pain
with an ending that "Gives us a hero
Gives us an escape
Gives us a positive feeling when we leave this movie
When Rod comes to Chris's rescue
He serves as a comic deus ex machina
I mean I told you not to go in the house
Here the comedy and hope saved the story from the defeats
which concludes Stepford or Rosemary
Chris's escape isn't exactly a happy-ever-after though
There's still a threat implied
Underneath our progress there is under the surface
that lingering prejudice and antagonism
After Get Out we might learn to be a little less naive
a little more cautiously paranoid
and open our eyes to how potently our history
still informs our present