Get Out (Movie)

"I resisted watching this movie for a long, long time. I’m at an age where I don’t watch horror films for the most part, but this was a film that had so much cultural currency and I was slated to talk about it at Washington National Cathedral. So my son Chandler, who is youngish and still enjoys this kind of film, sat down with me and we watched it. Then we watched it again because, as I point out in my book, this film has so many incredible narrative surprises in it that it needs to be watched more than once. The things that you expect turn out not to be true. Like Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, it is one of those stories that you have to return to with your new eyes to see every event in a new way. One of the reasons that I wanted to recommend Get Out to your readers is that, like Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman , it’s emblematic of the kind of film where filmmakers of colour are taking traditional Hollywood filmmaking techniques and genres and tropes and turning them on their heads. There are a couple of tropes that are really essential. The first one is that in an American film, usually, if there is a Black character, he or she is the first person to die. When we were prepping for a conversation about Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner at Washington National Cathedral, our moderator was Korva Coleman, who is a newscaster for our National Public Radio. She was watching it and her teenage daughter walked through the living room, glanced at the TV screen where Sidney Poitier was, and asked her mom, ‘When does he die?’ So, there is this first man out trope in horror films, and it is contrasted with what we call the white virgin trope. If you watch an American slasher film— Halloween or Friday the 13th , any of the films in that genre—it is the virginal white female who somehow manages to survive the violence and depredation. There is a virginal white female in Get Out and let’s just say that Jordan Peele rings a number of reversals on this particular horror film convention. “In an American film, usually, if there is a Black character, he or she is the first person to die” There are lots of other things as well. There is a trope in American film about the ineffectual Black friend who is played for comic relief. So Chris, who is played by Daniel Kaluuya, has a best friend who works as a security screener at an airport (presumably in New York, we’re not really told where the film takes place. Interestingly, the film was made in the very deep South, in a place called Fairhope, Alabama. It’s a very white place and I’m sure captured some of the creepy ambiance that Jordan Peele was looking for). The film is smart and funny and scary and heartbreaking, because the longer you watch, the more you begin to realize how the things that are happening in the story are mythologically deep. They’re reflective of Black experience and the ways that white people have appropriated Black culture and appropriated Black bodies. It is a story that has incredible resonance. Another interesting thing is that the movie was written and went into pre-production while Barack Obama was president. Then, when Donald Trump was elected, racial incidents in the United States skyrocketed, including a heartbreaking racial assault that took place on my own campus the day after the 2016 election. So Jordan Peele changed the ending, to offer some modicum of hope in a world that had suddenly become much more dark. It’s a brilliant ending and does everything that Jordan Peele hoped it would do. It reflects the seriousness of any Black encounter with law enforcement, but it also offers us some tiny little bit of hope moving forward. That’s another powerful thing about it. Like the rest of the films we’ve talked about today, it’s beautifully made, it’s dramatically affecting and it’s entertaining, but this film in particular pushes back not just against American history, but against all of the different ways that Hollywood has told stories about American history. That was what I found particularly brilliant about Get Out. The character of the father in the film was played by Bradley Whitford, who appeared in the American TV series The West Wing , written and produced by Aaron Sorkin. In Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner in 1967 we had Spencer Tracy, one of the greatest, most sincere, most genuinely decent human beings, in the father role. That was his persona on screen: he wasn’t dangerous, he wasn’t edgy, he was good. To see that character in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner wrestling with these racial questions allowed audiences to do the same thing. When Jordan Peele cast a parallel character in Get Out, he chose another liberal, sincere icon. One of the things that often happens in great Hollywood movies is people are invited either to inhabit their persona or to bounce off their persona. So for anybody watching Get Out whose primary experience of Brad Whitford is the character in The West Wing , the turns that the father character takes are disturbing, but they’re also indicting, because, as Bradley Whitford said in an interview, ‘I’m the kind of person who would say something like I would have voted for Obama three times.’ The film isn’t just pushing back against conservative American racism, it’s also pushing back against liberal American racism. I hope so. Going back to HBO’s decision to return Gone with the Wind to the airwaves with some context, it’s valuable simply because it allows us to have some conscious reflection on what is normally an unconscious response. In movies, the story washes over us and we enter into the lives of the characters. We’re emotionally connected to them. What I try to do every time I show or teach a film is say, ‘Okay, here are three things I want you to think about. Park them while you’re watching. Don’t not experience the film, but also hold these things in the back of your head. Then, when the film is over and the emotional response is done, you can also have a cerebral response to what you just experienced.’"