Get Out is a kind of taut Universal romp, as if Alfred Hitchcock had finally contemplated the existential terror of race.
Get Out is really a masterwork of
Afrofuturism, the artistic and scientific framework for understanding race as a technology across time and space. Writer-director Jordan Peele unabashedly uses classical Afrofuturist imagery in depicting the theft of the Black body when his protagonist Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) stumbles from his girlfriend's mother's hypnosis far down into the void of space— only able to look up at a two dimensional view of his own life and rendered unable to act. A recurring image in Afrofuturism is the Black body abducted by aliens as an allegory for enslavement in different eras and places.
In Peele's hands, I found my eyes looking at Chris's floating body and thinking about stolen Africans who were experimented upon (or thrown overboard), Henrietta Lacks' stolen HeLa cells, Emmett Till's little 14-year-old lynched body, music and sports stars being extracted from Black neighborhoods for white profit, the government not treating syphilis in hundreds of Black men in Tuskegee to study them—and, back to Chris, about to be lobotomized
But the dynamic is most interestingly explored when Chris tries to greet the only other Black guest he sees at what he thinks is a party (it's really his auction): a young Black man named Andrew (Lakeith Stanfield) who is the hypersexualized lover of an older white woman. Chris doesn't know then that Andrew has been lobotomized, and that a white man's brain (presumably the white woman's husband) had been implanted in his Black body
. This dramatizes what scholar Ann duCille calls the ultimate "mandingoism" fantasy of white men: to "project their own latent desire for the black male penis onto white women and punish black men for a desire that is finely their own: to fukk a black man, to fukk like a black man, to fukk white women with a black penis."
When the white woman tries to stop Chris and Andrew from speaking to each other, Get Out reveals a real truth of how Black men who date white people are rewarded in white social circles. After all, being with a white partner keeps whiteness centered, while being with (or even talking to) another Black person draws attention towards Blackness, threatening liberal whiteness. But the cost for this reward is high—as we learn when a flash reveals the fraction of Andrew's terrified self which remains, and when Chris is knocked out.
When Chris comes to and learns that his eyes will be given to a blind man (literally stealing his vision to co-opt it for a white gaze), he asks his captors a question: Why do they steal Black people's bodies?
Part of the reason is that they're seen as disposable, but it's also because the white thieves consider Black bodies physically superior when—as happens quite routinely with athletes—"Black muscle" can be useful if separated from its Black mind, emotions, and politics. But some of the brilliance of Get Out is how it explores a paradox about slavery: In a way, slavery initially had nothing to do with race, as race didn't yet exist. If you go back far enough in slavery history, you start to understand that it is the theft of bodies that were Black, captured by bodies that were white, which created the concept of race itself. Race is the theft of Black bodies, further developed as white people committed genocide against Native people, colonized Mexican people, and imported Chinese people for dangerous labor (before being excluded).
Furthermore, Peele doesn't allow white liberals to view the theft of Black bodies in a faraway frame of an Antebellum Southern plantation, nor to blame crude Trump supporters. Instead,
Get Out blames the theft on contemporary, Northern white Obamaniacs. American liberalism, not just Trumpism, continues to make race by way of bodily theft.
Whenever I would critique Hillary Clinton about race in 2016, I would be mocked by white liberals for getting out of my place. It wasn't that I wanted Trump to win, but I wanted Clinton and the Democrats to address and correct how American liberalism also instills fear of Muslims, advocates police control, decries Black children as "superpredators," does shyt to upend why white people have twelve times the wealth of Black, violently deports millions, and uses drones to kill Brown people.
When I think about all the political anger and shame voters of color were asked to subsume and swallow by wh
ite liberals in 2016, I think of Chris crying as he is told that, after his lobotomy, a part of himself will remain—a tiny sliver of his former self, which will turn him into a mere passenger in his own body. What an apt representation of the social death of Black American life, when your body becomes something for others to profit from while you, yourself, are never allowed to be fully emotive, free acting, in touch with your feelings, loved or loving.
I was 50/50 on Rose either setting brotha Chris up or she was a victim herself but that "you know I can't give you the keys" confirmed it
should really branch out and find other smart writers/directors.
But maybe find other talented writers/directors and help produce their stories.
